SAINT-LAMBERT, QUE — Alexandra Mendès didn’t know she had cancer when she was trying to oust former prime minister Justin Trudeau.
The bleeding started early last summer. She wasn’t really bothered with it. It didn’t hurt, she felt fine, she thought it was normal women stuff.
At the time, dozens, if not hundreds, of the Quebec Liberal MP’s constituents in Brossard—Saint-Lambert wanted her boss out. Personally, she didn’t want Trudeau to leave. But she had a mission: to convince someone to leave who wanted to stay.
“It was a total collapse,” she said of her party and her prime minister. “So, I was part of all the meetings, all the efforts, including the famous letter that we read to the prime minister (to ask him to leave).”
And yet, she had blood in her urine. As the days went by, she didn’t worry about it. The caucus revolt was in full swing, and she was in the front row.
On Parliament Hill, chaos reigned in a tumultuous fall session. The NDP withdrew its support for the Liberals. Americans elected Donald Trump as U.S. president. The Conservatives called for an election. The Bloc Québécois threatened to join the Conservatives, and the Liberal caucus was desperate.
Then the real drama occurred on Dec. 16, when finance minister
Chrystia Freeland resigned
, blaming Justin Trudeau and his “costly political gimmicks” for her decision.
Meanwhile, Mendès’s bleeding wouldn’t stop. She drove back home after the Freeland bombshell and when she went to the bathroom, she couldn’t pee. When she finally did, there were blood clots.
Four days later, she underwent surgery to stop the bleeding, and a biopsy was performed.
“I didn’t have a very difficult recovery. Not difficult at all. On (Dec. 23), I cooked all day,” she said in a long interview at her campaign headquarters in Saint-Lambert.
There was a tumour in her bladder. Was it cancer?
Four weeks after her surgery, she hadn’t heard anything, so she tracked down the doctor who told her the diagnosis: it was bladder cancer.
“I was surprised. I was very surprised,” she said, rubbing her face with a tissue.
At almost the same time, three other members of Parliament from Quebec were getting almost the same devastating diagnosis. Conservative MPs Jacques Gourde and Luc Berthold were both diagnosed with prostate cancer, and Bloc Québécois MP René Villemure with kidney cancer.
All of them are running to keep their seats in the
2025 federal election
on April 28, mere weeks or months after their diagnoses. They are not the first candidates to run in a federal election with cancer. NDP leader Jack Layton did so in 2011, although most Canadians were not aware until
he succumbed to the disease
weeks after his party had its most successful election in history. And these Quebec candidates certainly won’t be the last, at least statistically. According to the
Canadian Cancer Society
, 675 people are diagnosed with cancer every day in Canada.
Running in a six-week federal election campaign is a sprint that can feel like a marathon. But these four brave MPs are also fighting for their lives, literally, undergoing exhausting chemotherapy, radiation treatment and surgery.
Not one of them considered abandoning their race.
The diagnosis
In December, Villemure was with colleagues in Montreal for a training session. He was tired, it had been a busy time in Ottawa. But that morning he was so exhausted he fell on the ground. He thought he had pneumonia and went to see his doctor. After a series of tests, he was told on the phone that he had kidney cancer.
That was in February. He faced imminent surgery to remove a kidney.
“It’s like a shovel hits you in the face,” said Villemure, who is running for re-election in Trois-Rivières. “When you see the word ‘cancer,’ you see death. It’s as simple as that.”
Luc Berthold, 59, knows that feeling well. The MP for Mégantic—L’Érable—Lotbinière
is a prominent member of the Conservative Party, appointed deputy leader in 2022 (a role now held by Melissa Lantsman and Tim Uppal), and formerly served as shadow minister of health. Berthold learned he had prostate cancer after regular medical monitoring and some additional screening. His oncologist recommended surgery.
“Prostate cancer is an invisible cancer. I was not sick and I just kept going … But you always have (the diagnosis) on your mind. You’re always wondering when they’re going to remove it, and if the cancer has spread,” said Berthold.
According to the Canadian Cancer Society, surgery for prostate cancer may have side-effects such as swelling in the genital area, urinary incontinence and erectile dysfunction.
“What would have been more difficult was to have continued living with cancer. I didn’t even question the consequences for a moment. Let’s go!” Berthold said in an interview with National Post.
On Feb. 10, as Berthold was preparing for surgery scheduled for two days later, he received the worst news of his life: his son had committed suicide. “I asked to postpone the operation,” he said. But after discussing it with his wife, Caro, they decided to go ahead with the procedure.
“Since then, my emotions have been mixed. I haven’t been able to cope with the cancer, even though I live with the consequences of the operation every day,” he said in an emotional phone conversation in the early days of the election campaign that officially began on March 23.
“It’s very difficult to combine the pain of losing a son with all that,” he added.
What he does know is that if he hadn’t seen a doctor last year and had all those tests, he would not have learned he had cancer. The disease was detected early and the risk of spread reduced.
His Conservative colleague, Jacques Gourde, 61, from the riding of Lévis—Lotbinière, is in the same boat. Last year, he finally went to see his family doctor for a battery of tests. “I’ve been a little neglectful about my health. Political life means we work for others, but we often forget ourselves,” said Gourde.
First elected in 2006, Gourde is well known in Ottawa for his frequent, colourful and intense speeches in the House of Commons. In February 2022, during the Freedom Convoy protests in Ottawa, as tensions were on the rise in Parliament, Gourde took the floor to ask then-employment minister Carla Qualtrough about the 1,610 people with addresses outside Canada who had received the Canada Emergency Response Benefit during the pandemic, at a cost of $11.9 million.
“Is there a vaccine for Liberal incompetence?”
Gourde screamed
in French. Everyone in the House laughed, including Qualtrough. That’s who Gourde is — a passionate man with a sense of humour who loves his work.
His cancer diagnosis came in early January. He’s glad he took those screening tests, which led to further examinations and the diagnosis.
What would voters think?
All four of these candidates with cancer struggled with how to tell their constituents. How many details would they divulge? Would they even be able to run for office again?
“You have to keep it very close because you can’t have people start speculating. And you need to be able to keep that message tightly controlled so that it doesn’t spin in a bad way,” said Karl Bélanger, who was press secretary for former NPD leader Jack Layton.
Bélanger was one of Layton’s closest advisers during his 2011 election campaign. Layton had prostate cancer and died in August of that year. Bélanger recalls the difficulty when his boss had to break the news.
“It’s a very personal (matter), and each individual deals with this differently … Sometimes they go on a sick leave and then they come back. So, you know, timing is also part of the equation. You don’t choose when you get sick,” Bélanger said.
The four Quebec candidates said they did not want to hide their news from their voters.
While Mendès posted a video announcement on social media, Villemure decided on a written statement. They revealed they had cancer, that they would have to undergo treatment, and that they would still run for re-election. Their illness doesn’t prevent them from working, they said.
In Villemure’s case, rehabilitation from kidney surgery would take weeks, even months. But he knew he had to tell the public and his colleagues.
“The population has a certain right to know,” said Villemure, who is an ethicist by profession.
After a speech at a winter caucus retreat, Bloc Leader Yves-François Blanchet told his colleagues: “René has something to tell you.”
Villemure explained his cancer to them. There was an immense wave of love and support. “There, I shed a tear,” he said at his Trois-Rivières constituency office.
The other MPs received similar reactions. The Conservative party assured Gourde and Berthold they would help them every step of the way. The Liberals did the same with Mendès. Colleagues even offered to campaign for them. A few Bloc candidates, including the leader’s caravan, did exactly that for Villemure.
All of them say they received hundreds, if not thousands, of messages, calls and kind words in the street. The outpouring of support helped with their decision to stay in politics.
They have been reassured by their doctors that their lives are not in danger. The cancer risk is omnipresent, yet they swear they can represent their constituents.
“Was I afraid of dying? Yes. Less so today, but I don’t like it,” said Villemure.
“I love what I do. I’ve always loved this riding and this job,” said Mendès. “I tell myself that staying home, staring at my four walls and thinking about death would probably be the worst thing I could do.”
Berthold said he would have liked the election to have been called earlier. “If it had been in the fall as requested, I would have been so happy,” he said with a laugh. Back then, he hadn’t yet received his diagnosis, the Conservatives were leading by a wide margin in the polls and were expected to form a majority government.
But here they are, on the eve of the election, running to win.
“Nobody’s running for office thinking they’re going to die,” said Bélanger. That wasn’t what Jack Layton was thinking, he said, and it came as a shock to everyone when things took a turn for the worse after the election. “Not only for the people working with (Jack), obviously, but for all Canadians.”
Campaigning with cancer
Each weekday of the campaign, Gourde sets aside two hours for his radiation therapy treatment. He has 28 sessions in total. “Every day, I go to Lévis to have my radiology treatment. It lasts three minutes. My last day is on May 1, so even on election day, (April) 28, I have to go for my treatment,” he said.
Gourde was present at Pierre Poilievre’s rally in Quebec City early in the campaign, where the Conservative leader announced his Quebec platform. Gourde looked tired. The treatment had clearly been draining.
He has changed his strategy for this campaign. The candidate has had the same team since 2006, and they know the riding inside out. The real race is for second place.
But he’s still campaigning. He’s doing less door-to-door canvassing than usual and is focusing on larger events.
Mendès is tired, too. Her first oncologist told her that her cancer was so aggressive she would have to undergo three months of intensive chemotherapy, have her bladder removed and wear a urinary bag for life.
She got a second opinion. She is currently participating in a clinical trial combining immunotherapy and chemotherapy. Mendès has her treatments every Friday, with a break every three weeks. This treatment plan will last six months.
About two days after treatment, she said she feels better. “My brain is still there,” she said.
In late March at her campaign headquarters in Brossard, across the St. Lawrence River from Montreal, Mendès had forgotten her mask and couldn’t shake hands. Her doctor advised her to limit contact and to frequently wash her hands.
Around her, volunteers were everywhere, looking for tie wraps to install campaign signs. At the entrance sits five chairs — two of them are green Adirondack chairs — and a small table to put your coffee.
“This is where I meet voters. I invite them to come over here,” she said. Mendès doesn’t canvass herself, and she cannot be in a crowd.
“I am someone who hugs a lot of people and shakes a lot of hands. So, it’s interesting,” she said with a smile.
Berthold is often on television to debate other candidates, but is taking more time to rest.
For these candidates with cancer, schedules are based on doctors’ recommendations. Villemure’s doctor has advised him to avoid stress — of any kind. An election campaign is stressful, even for people like him who aren’t usually stressed.
He isn’t personally campaigning — he had a kidney removed on April 4. Villemure’s team is campaigning in Trois-Rivières, where the race is too close to call between the Bloc, the Liberals and the Conservatives.
He’s shot a few videos and is active on social media. But there won’t be any debates. And he won’t be at his election night party.
Mendès’s doctor assured her she could do another two or three mandates. But she knows this election is probably her last. “I’m 61 years old,” she said with a laugh. “I don’t intend on seeking two or three other mandates.”
First, she must get re-elected. “By talking about it, I wanted to reassure, but at the same time be frank. To put that on the table and tell voters that if you are going to choose me again, you will do so knowing that I have this Damocles sword hanging over my head.”
Yet even when she was sick, she fought for her constituents and carried out her political responsibilities. Moreover, she helped achieve what most Canadians wanted: to get rid of Justin Trudeau.
