There's a whiff of panic in a recent memo urging Liberals to head to Montreal on Monday to help the party win a byelection in what should be a slam-dunk riding for them.

But the reality is that all parties have something big to gain — and lose — in three Quebec byelections that have potentially significant implications for federal politics.

The results will hardly affect the composition of the minority Parliament, but could change the different parties' desire to trigger an election.

With Quebec's electoral landscape having been bulldozed in the 2006 federal campaign and recent provincial vote, all are eagerly eyeing pieces of new political real estate.

The Tories are seeking signs that they've gained enough strength in Quebec to sustain their hope of a majority government.

The NDP has its best chance in two decades to finally break through in a province that has traditionally shunned the party and stacked the odds against it ever winning power.

The Bloc Québécois, meanwhile, will be fighting to demonstrate its continued vitality by holding on to at least one of its two strongholds up for grabs.

And the Liberals are hoping to avoid leader Stéphane Dion's nightmare scenario: losing Montreal's Outremont riding. Only once in the last century have the Grits allowed the tony francophone, multiethnic riding to slip into enemy hands — but they're now feeling threatened by the NDP.

NDP running star candidate

While usually a non-factor, the NDP have a new star candidate in former provincial environment minister Tom Mulcair, and party leader Jack Layton has practically set up a permanent address in the riding as he campaigns constantly.

The Liberals understand the stakes.

Party executive Denise Brunsdon sent an e-mail to party members this week calling on reinforcements to head to Montreal from Ottawa to help with organizational duties like car-pooling.

"[This] is going to be a tough fight," she told colleagues. "The NDP is throwing in all the resources they can to win a Quebec seat, and we need to call on as many Liberals as we can to band together and keep this riding red."

If they lose, Dion himself could come under fire. One senior Liberal said he wouldn't expect calls for a leadership change, but thinks some party members would publicly voice concerns only uttered in private to date.

He said those concerns include the party's anemic fundraising, and its communications strategy. Dion has had ample material with which to paste the Tories throughout the byelections, the source said, but failed to use it.

For example, unelected Senator Michael Fortier has been sitting in cabinet for 20 months now — and he's not running in the byelections, even though he lives in Outremont. The Tories are waiting to run him in a safer, semi-rural area in the next election.

"Why did we allow this thing to be defined as a test of Dion's leadership? This should have been about Fortier," said the Liberal.

Tories on lookout for seats

The Tories are seeking signs that they could pick up the dozen or more seats they would likely need in Quebec to even hope for a majority government in the next election.

They have high hopes of winning Roberval-Lac-Saint-Jean — a fortress in the heart of Quebec's sovereigntist, francophone Saguenay region.

Bloc Québécois stalwart Michel Gauthier won by a crushing 12,000-vote majority in 2004, then saw that majority slip to 3,000 votes in 2006, and retired from politics afterward.

With their sovereigntist cousins in Quebec  — the Parti Québécois  —reduced to third place and having temporarily shelved plans for independence, the Bloc could be headed for an existential crisis like the one it faced before being being rescued by the Liberal sponsorship scandal in 2004.

The Tories are hoping to fuel doubts about the Bloc's raison-d'être by taking Roberval, and perhaps even St-Hyacinthe-Bagot.

The latter was held by the Bloc with whopping majorities  — 15,000 votes last time  — but was a traditional Tory riding before the sovereigntist party came into being.

Mulcair quit Jean Charest's Liberal government over differences with the premier.

Before that, he was an opposition MP when Mario Dumont began to chip away at the province's political model that pitted sovereigntists against federalists.

Dumont had been his ADQ's only elected member for almost a decade but then, in 2002, it won a surprise byelection and within days had become the most popular party in the province.

Mulcair fancies his party in that role today.

"This is ground zero for the orange revolution," he said of the Outremont vote.

"The job for me starting Tuesday morning, is to perform and to work to implement a better vision for Canada. I'll let Liberals worry about what to do with Stéphane Dion."