A dangerous liaison looms in Québec
First published at Canadian Dimension.
The Parti Québécois (PQ), led by Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, a 49-year-old lawyer with an MBA from Oxford University, won the October 5 election in Québec with 28 percent of the popular vote, securing a minority government with the lowest vote share of any election in Québec history and of any provincial election in Canada for some 75 years. Taking into account the relatively low voter turnout — 66.9 percent — the PQ obtained an explicit mandate from just shy of 19 percent of eligible voters.
The PQ ran a campaign focused on scapegoating immigrants for a variety of social evils from overcrowded, under-resourced public schools to threats to the French language. As Martin Patriquin wrote in an article for The Walrus, Plamondon blames immigration “for high home prices, low birth rates, increased crime, and what he has called ‘the deconstruction of society.’” Tellingly, the PQ’s proposed “sustainable immigration model” includes relying on automation and robotization in economic sectors of the economy facing labour shortages, among a host of other measures designed to thwart the influx of newcomers to Québec.
Another prominent pledge was to downsize bureaucracy — familiar code for cuts to public services — through the creation of the disturbingly DOGE-redolent secretariat for government efficiency and regulatory relief (Secrétariat à l’efficacité gouvernementale et à l’allègement réglementaire).
The PQ also promises a balanced budget with a $6.6 billion reduction in government spending over five years and lower taxes on business (decreased by 9.5 percent over five years, which would amount to lost state revenues of $8.9 billion), all of which augurs a new round of austerity policies in the midst of an escalating affordability crisis.
Plamondon has more in common with Lucien Bouchard and his zero deficit and with Pauline Marois and her ethnonationalist charter of values than with the social democratic party founded by René Lévesque.
Referendum redux?
It was, however, the question of Québec independence and a first-term referendum, to which the PQ purports to be firmly committed, that took centre stage during much of the campaign. And in the wake of the PQ victory, corporate media and social media in English Canada were full of alarmed commentary about the two separatist parties now sitting in the Québec provincial parliament — the second being Québec Solidaire (QS), the only left-wing party in the running, which now holds nine seats.
In its platform and public interventions QS concentrated on social issues and especially affordability, proposing measures to combat the housing crisis and rising food prices, promising to protect social programs and bolster public transportation, and advocating a special tax on the super-rich: a one percent wealth tax on citizens with assets of $25 million or more. While it is a sovereigntist party, its vision of an independent Québec and how to get there is thoroughly different from that of the PQ, at least in spirit, and throughout the campaign it stressed its more inclusive and democratic approach, highlighting its trademark commitment to holding a constituent assembly — with delegates elected throughout Québec, and with the full participation of Indigenous peoples — for the purpose of drafting a new constitution to be submitted to a vote. Its manifesto on sovereignty, Nouveau Québec Libre, emphasizes that an independent Québec must be a decolonized state built jointly with Indigenous peoples, whose self-determination must also extend to choosing to maintain the status quo if that is their wish.
The other three parties — the ruling Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ), which was shut out of the National Assembly, the Québec Liberal Party, and the regrettably much-revived Québec Conservative Party — are not pro-independence and were united during the campaign in their antipathy to any plan to hold a referendum.
The reality is that there is very little appetite for a referendum among Québecers: recent polls peg it at between 27 and 31 percent. That figure would be higher among francophone leftists, who are largely favourable to independence. But in light of the generally weak support partly due to fears of a more direct form of US domination with the openly neo-colonialist aspirations of the fascist regime to the south, Plamondon himself promised that no referendum would be in the cards so long as Trump remains in the White House. This did not prevent him from choosing September 30, Truth and Reconciliation Day, to throw down the gauntlet to Indigenous people by declaring that Québec does not need their consent for the eventual adoption of a provisional constitution for an independent Québec — an unsavoury foretaste of Plamondon’s politics of sovereignty.
Another harbinger is the item on military spending in the PQ’s projected military budget for an independent Québec, with five percent of GDP set aside for defence and full participation in NATO and NORAD. In the PQ’s theoretical “Year One” budget made public in 2023, that figure came to nearly $3.6 billion, proportional to Québec’s share of federal defence spending.
At a time when the climate emergency demands a reduction in defence spending as part of a radical shift of budgetary priorities toward social well-being and the energy transition, the PQ is immediately involving an independent Québec in the US-led arms race against China and Russia, without casting doubt on the nature of the North American military-industrial complex, as veteran left activist and political analyst Bernard Rioux points out in his scathing critique of the plan.
Death knell for the CAQ — and a heftier Liberal opposition
The CAQ, the party that ruled Québec with historic majorities for the last eight years — most of those under the premiership of François Legault (a former PQ cabinet minister), who resigned as premier in January 2026 — garnered 13.3 percent of the popular vote under the leadership of Christine Fréchette. However, it did not win a single seat — testament to the vagaries of the first-past-the post electoral system (Québec Solidaire, which earned a smaller share of the popular vote, 12.42 percent, took nine seats). Yet this was a bit of poetic justice since the CAQ actually passed a bill in 2019 to introduce a mixed-member proportional system but abandoned the plan soon after.
The CAQ governed as an ethnic nationalist party in the tradition of the Union Nationale of Maurice Duplessis, meaning that it sought to achieve maximum autonomy for Québec within the Canadian federation without advocating separation. In office it enacted typical neoliberal austerity policies, especially in its later years in office. It also initiated an openly hostile stance on immigration, harping on the idea that Québec is exceeding its reception and integration capacity (capacite d’acceuil), paving the way for the PQ’s demagogy. The CAQ then took an increasingly right-wing turn in its second mandate, introducing a spate of reactionary legislation, including bills attacking the rights of unions, health care ‘reforms’ that enraged doctors by tying their pay to performance targets, additional racist secularism laws targeting Muslims in particular, and a language law designed to make life in Québec harder for new immigrants and Indigenous students.
It also tried (and failed) to ram through Bill 1, the Loi sur l’autonomie constitutionnelle du Québec, which it misleadingly peddled as a constitution. Among other things the bill would have permanently shielded the Québec parliament from legal challenges under the federal or Québec human rights charters and was widely seen as an attack on countervailing powers in Québec society. It was resoundingly opposed by more than 300 civil society organizations including the Barreau du Québec (Québec Bar Association), which, unusually, made a strong public statement against the legislation, warning of “authoritarian drift” (dérive autoritaire). Amnesty International also condemned the bill and called for its withdrawal on the grounds that it was a threat to the rule of law in Québec and a violation of international law.
Yet those various policies and legislative initiatives do not explain the CAQ’s dramatic loss of appeal with its base, which consisted mainly of white francophone suburban and rural voters. The reasons for the CAQ’s precipitous decline remain a point in question. Political observers have pointed to a variety of factors to account for the rechannelling of so much of the CAQ’s vote to the PQ and the Conservative Party on election night: a generalized desire for change, certain key policy decisions such as the scuttling of the “third link” (a new corridor for cars between Québec City and Lévis), the Northvolt fiasco (an investment gone awry in a Swedish start-up’s electric vehicle battery plant), and an ambiguous position on the national question. But it looks to have been some last-minute strategic errors that undermined the newly minted party leader Fréchette’s credibility — most notably what proved to be a false accusation of US interference in the election — which proved decisive in the party’s plunge from 23 percent in the mid-September opinion polls to 13.35 percent at the voting booths.
Meanwhile, the Parti Libéral du Québec (PLQ) is once again the official opposition, having assumed that role during both of the CAQ’s terms of office. Although a stalwart of the party, Charles Milliard only took the leadership earlier this year. A little-known businessman and a pharmacist by training, Milliard made his singular enthusiastic allegiance to federalism and his stated determination to overcome divisions the centrepiece of his campaign and there is reason to think that paid off. The PLQ’s share of the popular vote (24.23 percent) yielded 40 seats, of which 33 were in the greater Montréal area, where nearly 35 percent of the population is allophone or anglophone. For the rest, it’s a pro-business party with a long track record of austerity policies when in power. The tune is familiar: make entrepreneurs’ lives easier, boost business competitiveness, shrink the public service, and so on and so forth.
Québec Solidaire: A welcome voice in the wilderness
The election result for Québec’s only progressive party was better than expected earlier on in the campaign, when many pundits and pollsters predicted a rout for QS. In the event, it kept nine of the 12 seats it held at its high point in 2025. As with the Liberal Party, its support is concentrated in the Montréal area where its vote share increased, but it lost ground everywhere else in the province.
Led during the campaign by the party’s female co-spokesperson and the only immigrant among the contenders, Ruba Ghazal (who is of Palestinian descent), QS stood out markedly from the four other parties in its robust defence of public services, call to raise the minimum wage, opposition to privatization, and plea for progressive taxation. And indeed, since the election, it has doubled down on its pledge to serve as a bulwark against austerity. On other issues, however, its commitments were patently unequal to the challenges of the current moment.
The environment is a case in point. The ecological catastrophe was virtually absent from discussion during the campaign. The PQ for its part promised to raise the target for GHG reductions from 37.5 to 42.5 percent, relative to 1990 levels, by 2034; at the same time, it pledged to “temporarily” reduce the gas tax through various measures by a total of 0.7 cents. QS disappointingly backtracked on its previous environmental commitments, lowering its target for GHG reductions, although it did call for blocking oil and gas pipeline projects in Québec. Its most concrete environmentally-friendly measures revolve primarily around major investments in public transportation, which, however laudable and necessary, fall far short of the radical changes needed to wean Québec from dependency on fossil fuels (one of the world’s biggest per capita energy consumers, despite generating about 94 percent of its electricity with hydroelectric power, Québec still relies on fossil fuels for a little over half its energy needs).
Overall, Québec Solidaire waged a respectable campaign for a party that remains social democratic in its orientation. However, its discourse reflected a gradual shift to the centre that has occurred particularly in the last nine years, spearheaded by former party co-spokesperson Gabriel Nadeau Dubois (GND). Once a firebrand student leader, GND reversed course as the head of QS, appealing for pragmatism and positioning QS as a ‘party of government’ (he has since resigned and retired from politics for the time being). This exacerbated the internal tensions between the forces within the party seeking ‘legitimacy’ and a foothold in Québec’s political class and the party’s left-wing members, who insisted that QS should live up to its slogan of being “un parti de la rue et des urnes” (a party of the streets and the ballot box) — that is, a democratic party whose political orientations are rooted in the social movements working for fundamental social change. Some of these party members came together to form what was initially an informal internal dissident sub-group calling itself the Parti de la rue, which has lately evolved into a more formal organization operating within and outside QS.
What, if any, effect the controversy over QS’s centrist drift — which has gone hand in hand with greater centralization and professionalization — had on the party’s underwhelming showing at the polls, notwithstanding its success in cutting its losses (sauver les meubles is the evocatively apt French phrase) is debatable.
In a post-election column, well-known La Presse journalist and commentator Patrick Lagacé sneeringly pinned the decline in QS’s vote share (it lost approximately 100,000 votes compared to 2022) on the “big gang of loud-mouthed activists who think the party isn’t far enough to the left and is still too colonialist.”
More seriously, for a number of analysts on the left the election was a lost opportunity for QS, which has seen its once robust youth vote (18-34-year-olds) halved over the last three years. Whether the party’s slide toward the centre was actually part of the reason for that is hard to say. Left-wing activist and writer Marc Bonhomme argues that, even in face of the surge of the far-right, QS failed to turn things around, which it might have done with “a hard-hitting platform and a major mobilization of progressive youth,” and he invokes the left-wing of the US Democratic Party and Germany’s Die Linke as instructive examples of the road not taken.
The former chief of staff to GND thinks otherwise. In conversation with Le Devoir, Renaud Poirier-St-Pierre said that the environment had taken a back seat to the cost of living as the main preoccupation of young voters, and that the sense of financial insecurity had prompted them to turn their backs on QS despite the party’s longstanding commitment to affordable housing. He continued, “On the issue of the cost of living, the left has not been able to put forward an approach as persuasive as the one proposed by the conservative parties.” Other commentators in the same Le Devoir article mention youth disaffection leading to relatively higher rates of electoral abstention in addition to polarization as factors contributing to the atrophy of QS’s youth constituency.
The direction QS will take now is also unclear. Canadian Dimension readers are painfully aware that social democratic parties, when they are holding or seeking power, have a virtually unbroken track record of succumbing to the siren song of political power and selling out to the established order. And QS is not immune to this tendency. While the party has played, and could continue to play, a very useful role as a critical opposition in the now majority right-wing national assembly, pressing the case for decency and social justice, the danger is ever-present that the leadership and the caucus will covet a role as a junior partner to the minority PQ government while conducting a public relations exercise to persuade its members and electorate that it is not betraying its principles.
Indeed, rather than ruling out collaboration with the PQ on the grounds of the xenophobic and antisocial character of its program and discourse, QS co-spokesperson Ghazal opened the door to cooperation with Plamondon even before the election, at least on the single issue of an eventual referendum on sovereignty (a prospect firmly opposed by the two other parties now represented in the Assemblée nationale), specifying that QS’s support would not be without conditions. In the wake of the election she clarified some of those conditions, such as a moratorium on winter evictions by landlords, and declared that QS would never support austerity measures and would be “uncompromising” on cuts to public services. There is no chance, however, that the PQ will desist from imposing some form(s) of austerity so the question now arises of what concessions the PQ could conceivably make that would render concertation with the unabashedly ethnonationalist right-wing party palatable to QS.
A right-wing alliance?
But the natural ally of today’s Parti Québécois is not QS: it is the newly resurrected Parti Conservateur du Québec (PCQ). On October 5, the PCQ went from zero to 19 MNAs (Members of the National Assembly) with 20.67 percent of the vote, much of it concentrated in the Québec City area, which has become a hard-right stronghold in recent years, as well as in a rural region that is historically conservative called Chaudières Appalaches in the eastern part of the province.
The contemporary iteration of Québec’s Conservative Party, originally founded in 1850, emerged in 2009, and got little traction until Éric Duhaime took the reins in 2021. One year later, it garnered 12.9 percent of the popular vote. Under Duhaime’s leadership the PCQ’s popularity grew, especially during the pandemic when it attracted an assortment of people, including conspiracy theorists, who opposed vaccines and other COVID-19-related precautions, such as curfews and masks. Marie-Josée Hélie, one of the MNAs the party elected on October 5, once described mandatory vaccination as a genocidal plan motivated by financial gain. Unsurprisingly, the PCQ stands out in Québec’s new parliament for its anti-science leanings — a cause for concern that has been aired in the media before and since the election.
Duhaime himself is a 57-year-old right-wing media personality, writer, and politician. A gay man (as is Liberal leader Charles Milliard), he came out publicly in 2017 and simultaneously denounced LBGTQ+ rights organizations for perpetuating a victim mentality when the struggle for equality was already won. His trajectory suggests he never encountered a reactionary idea he didn’t like.
During the campaign Duhaime repeatedly called for dismantling the “Québec model,” by which he means the interventionist state which he castigates as spendthrift, mired in red tape, inefficient, and an obstacle to prosperity. The PCQ menu features the usual fare, including a balanced budget, lower taxes, promotion of private health care, cutting 20,000 civil service jobs, and axing the special fund to promote electrification and fight climate change, among other measures.
On the matter of Québec sovereignty, Duhaime is closer to the CAQ’s autonomist position than to the PQ’s aspiration to formal independence, and he staunchly opposes any plans for a referendum—not out of any federalist conviction but for fear a lost referendum would weaken Québec, allowing the federal government to encroach on Québec jurisdiction. Better, he believes, to strengthen Québec’s position within Canada by allying with other provinces like Alberta. He went into the campaign urging voters to give the PCQ the balance of power precisely so it can block a referendum.
Yet despite this divergence, Duhaime is Plamondon’s likeliest political bedfellow. The two both want to restrict immigration, rivalling each other in ethnonationalist demagogy, although Plamondon wants more extensive cuts and the two differ on specifics. They are both in favour of creating incentives to increase Québec’s birth rate, such as financial rewards for larger families — a throwback to the revanche du berceau (“revenge of the cradle,” a phrase coined in reference to the strategy, promoted particularly by the Catholic Church after the British conquest and up until the Quiet Revolution, of encouraging very high birth rates among French Canadian women as a way of preserving the French language and culture and create a rampart against English immigration). They also already agree on the thrust of many economic policies. The nature of the conditions Duhaime will impose for propping up the PQ remains to be seen, but looming on the horizon is the most right-wing government in Québec since Maurice Duplessis’ Union Nationale.
The challenges ahead for QS and the left
In this context it’s unlikely that QS can have much influence on government policy, and the party will have to decide how to conduct itself in opposition in a way that allows it to win back some of the support it lost and make inroads with constituencies who are bound to suffer from the austerity policies in the offing. As the only remotely progressive political formation, it will have little competition in any efforts to defend democratic rights, preserve hard-won social gains for workers, fight for affordable housing and groceries, promote a decent and generous approach to immigration, and advocate for a planet in peril. But to succeed, it will need to look to the party’s roots and adopt a broader perspective.
For the left, parliamentary work has to contribute to creating a platform to bring together activist groups fighting on various fronts; doing the grassroots work needed to unite social movements is essential. And insofar as QS is a sovereigntist party, it must distinguish itself from the PQ by elaborating a conception of independence as a far-reaching left project aimed at taking society in a radically different direction from that envisaged by any of the other parties now represented at the National Assembly.
Andrea Levy and André Frappier are both long-time coordinating editors at Canadian Dimension. Both authors are members of Québec Solidaire and the Parti de la rue. All quotations from French-language media have been translated into English by Canadian Dimension.