MONTREAL — Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC) is limiting its list of issues in this provincial election to just one item: the economy.

Liberal MLA Lawrence Bergman is running for re-election in D’Arcy McGee.

Given the brevity of the campaign, Quebec region president Victor Goldbloom said the economic downturn will be the focus of the meetings that CJC hopes to have individually with the three party leaders, as well as with candidates in ridings with significant Jewish populations.

“We share everyone’s concern over the economic situation, and it is a particular preoccupation for us, because nearly 20 per cent of the Jewish community lives below the poverty line, including many seniors on fixed incomes who represent more than 20 per cent of the community,” he said.

But the economic crisis also has special ramifications for a community whose institutions and services rely so heavily on private philanthropy, he said. Many individual donors are being hard-hit, and foundations are seeing the value of their holdings erode, and, consequently, what they are able to contribute to charity is being adversely affected.

“We want to feel confident that the incoming government will give priority to doing whatever it can to stabilize and restore the financial situation,” Goldbloom said.

“Of course, whatever government is elected, we will continue to communicate with the premier and cabinet.”

Elsewhere, Liberal Lawrence Bergman, who has held D’Arcy McGee since 1994, now knows who most of the people are who have taken on the thankless task of challenging him. His majority in the March 2007 election was 84 per cent, and the riding has gone Liberal since it was created in 1966, except for the Equality Party upset in 1989, in the wake of anglophones’ anger over the Liberals’ overriding of the Canadian constitution to uphold sections of Bill 101.

The Parti Québécois named Marie-Aude Ardizzon as its candidate in D’Arcy McGee, a riding that has given the party its lowest support in Quebec over the years. Another youthful candidate, Mathieu Lacombe, is being fielded by the Action démocratique du Québec (ADQ), which has not fared much better in the riding, which has the province’s highest proportion of Jewish voters.

Quebec Solidaire, the left-wing separatist party formed in 2006, has for a second time nominated Abraham Weizfeld, co-founder of the Alliance of Concerned Jewish Canadians, since renamed Independent Jewish Voices (Canada), a group highly critical of Israeli government policy. Weizfeld is the author of The End of Zionism and the Liberation of the Jewish people.

At the end of last week, the Green Party, whose candidate, Robert Leibner, finished a very distant second in D’Arcy McGee in the March 2007 election, had not named a candidate.

Allen Nutik, founder and leader of the minority-rights party Affiliation Quebec, will not be running in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce after all, nor will the party be running any other candidates. Nutik announced he would seek the seat right after Liberal Russell Copeman resigned last month after 14 years in the National Assembly.

Nutik conceded the party had no chance of winning a seat, and had not even attracted enough people or money to make the effort to run. However, Affiliation Quebec is not being disbanded, because he believes it is needed to “represent the authentic Canadian views” of anglophones and allophones.

Meanwhile, the Canadian Jewish Political Affairs Committee (CJPAC) is trying to get as many Jewish Quebecers as possible involved with the campaigns of the party of their choice.

Steeve Azoulay, its Quebec region director, said the CJPAC was able to mobilize more than 100 people to work during the recent federal elections on the campaigns of Conservative, Liberal, New Democrat and Bloc Québécois candidates.

He described CJPAC as an independent, grassroots organization that encourages Jews across the country to become directly engaged in the political process to advance Jewish community interests, including strengthening Canada’s relations with Israel.

Finally, ADQ and opposition leader Mario Dumont last week called for a moratorium on the ethics and religious culture course that became compulsory in all elementary and high schools this September.

The course seeks to give all students an understanding of the religions that are said to be part of Quebec’s heritage: Catholicism, Protestantism, Judaism and native beliefs, as well as an introduction to other world religions and secularism.

Dumont said he thinks the course is an experiment imposed by bureaucrats and another attempt to diminish the Christian character of Quebec society.

“The people who thought up that course are the same people who fight through all kinds of roundabout ways for there not to be Christmas trees in classes,” he said. “They are the same people who fight to make words like Easter disappear from classes.”