Jean-Sébastien Lamoureux is a Canadian lawyer, manager and former politician in the province of Quebec. He served in the National Assembly of Quebec as a Liberal from 1998 until his resignation in 2001.
Lamoureux was nominated as the Liberal candidate for Anjou in the buildup to the 1998 provincial election. The governing Parti Québécois had won the seat by a narrow margin in the previous election, and the contest was expected to be close. Lamoureux focused his campaign on opposition to another referendum on Quebec sovereignty, in the aftermath of the Canadian federalist option's narrow victory in 1995. On election day, he defeated incumbent PQ cabinet ministerPierre Bélanger by only 143 votes. The PQ won a second consecutive majority government in 1998, and Lamoureux served as a member of the official opposition. He was appointed as his party's immigration critic and supported a policy of encouraging increased settlement of new immigrants in Quebec's regions. He also spoke against growing anti-Muslim prejudice in the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Resignation
Reports surfaced in February 1999 that voter fraud had played a role in the outcome of the 1998 election in Anjou. The PQ filed an official complaint with Quebec's chief returning officer, and defeated candidate Pierre Bélanger indicated that his party had identified forty confirmed instances of voting irregularities. Lamoureux responded that he had no knowledge of voter fraud and had done nothing wrong. This notwithstanding, Liberal leader Jean Charest indicated that he would welcome an investigation from the province's electoral office, so as to provide clarity in the matter. In August 1999, Quebec election officials charged four persons with electoral fraud in relation to the Anjou vote. In May 2001, Claude Lavigne was convicted of paying poor people ten dollars every time they voted for the Liberals. In September of the same year, former Liberal Party campaign worker Alberto Berardinucci was fined ten thousand dollars for hiring people to vote several times using false names. The province's chief electoral officer concluded that the Liberal Party had not orchestrated the vote-buying scheme, and Lamoureux was not personally implicated in the scandal. He nonetheless resigned from the legislature on September 19, 2001, one day after Berardinucci's conviction, on the grounds that doubts had been cast on the validity of his election. A Montreal Gazette columnist later noted that no-one was certain if enough fraudulent votes had been cast to affect the outcome of the vote. Lamoureux was not a candidate in the by-election that followed his resignation.
