For much of the past decade, Quebec’s political scene has been defined by a crowded centre, with the Coalition Avenir Québec occupying the nationalist ground and leaving little oxygen for parties at the ideological edges. That changed decisively on election night this week, when the Parti Québécois under Paul St-Pierre Plamondon — widely known as PSPP — won enough seats to form a minority government, reshaping the balance of power at the National Assembly in ways that will reverberate well beyond Quebec City.
The road to this result began long before the campaign itself. PSPP spent years rebuilding a party that had been left for political dead after a string of punishing electoral defeats, and he did so by staking out positions that broke sharply with the liberal consensus that has dominated Canadian politics. He denounced what he called the federal Liberals’ “open borders” approach to immigration, declared multiculturalism a policy failure rather than a national virtue, and publicly led campaigns against what he termed “wokisme” — a catch-all critique of progressive social and cultural politics that has become a defining rhetorical feature of right-nationalist movements across the Western world. These were not offhand remarks. They were the foundation of a deliberate political project.
By the time the campaign formally began, the PQ had released a list of seven governing priorities it intended to pursue if elected. Those priorities included pledges to reduce administrative red tape, lower gasoline taxes, and — most consequentially — “retake control of our immigration system.” That last commitment was paired with something rarer in mainstream Canadian politics: an explicit policy push to increase Quebec’s fertility rate as an alternative to relying on immigration for demographic growth. The combination of restrictionist immigration policy and pronatalist rhetoric placed the PQ in territory that few governing parties in Canada have occupied in the modern era.
The election result, however, did not hand PSPP a free hand. Quebec voters delivered a minority, which means the new premier designate will need to negotiate his legislative agenda with other parties in the National Assembly. The most immediately significant of those parties is the newly emergent Quebec Conservative Party, led by former radio personality Eric Duhaime, whose 19-member caucus now holds what could prove to be the balance of power. That caucus is historically notable in its own right: it represents the first time a party carrying the name “conservative” has held seats in the National Assembly since the 1930s, a gap of nearly a century that speaks to how thoroughly Quebec’s political culture diverged from the rest of Canada’s after the Second World War.
Duhaime’s Conservatives drew support from a coalition that included a striking proportion of young voters — a pattern that has repeated itself across several Canadian provinces in recent electoral cycles, as younger cohorts increasingly break from the assumption that they will vote centre-left as a matter of generational identity. The new Conservative caucus includes Éloïse Coulombe, 23 years old and now the youngest member of the National Assembly in the province’s history, a detail that complicates any simple narrative about which direction Quebec’s youth are moving politically.
What emerges from this election is a government whose policy agenda, particularly on immigration and identity, will test the boundaries of Quebec’s existing constitutional arrangements with the federal government. Quebec already exercises distinct powers over the selection of economic immigrants under the Canada-Quebec Accord, but PSPP has signalled ambitions that go further, framing immigration control as an existential matter of linguistic and cultural survival for a francophone society surrounded by an anglophone continent. Whether a minority legislature can translate that ambition into durable policy remains to be seen — but the political ground in Quebec has shifted, and the rest of the country is only beginning to take the measure of what that means.
