The Parti Québécois won power in Quebec this week with 59 seats on 28 per cent of the popular vote. The last time it governed, in 2012, 32 per cent of the vote bought it only 54 seats — first-past-the-post arithmetic converting a smaller share of ballots into a larger majority. The difference that matters, as Aaron Wherry lays out in an analysis for CBC, is what the party campaigned on: this time, an explicit commitment to hold a referendum on separation.
The result lands on Prime Minister Mark Carney alongside a referendum campaign already under way in Alberta. Justin Trudeau got through nine years in office without confronting either a separatist government in Quebec or a secession referendum anywhere in the country; Carney now has both at once. It has been 30 years since a prime minister last had to plan around an actual Quebec referendum, and more than a decade since one last faced a sovereignist government in Quebec City.
Poilievre’s timeline, and the poll that breaks it
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre argued in the House of Commons on Tuesday that the confluence could be blamed on more than a decade of Liberal government. “Ten years ago there were no referendums in any part of the country to separate,” he said. “There was no separatist movement in Alberta whatsoever, the PQ was defeated, the Bloc [Québécois] did not even have party status [in Parliament].”
The record is less tidy. A survey conducted in July 2014 — the year before Trudeau took office — found 23 per cent of Albertans believed their province would be better off as its own country, the same share a recent poll found in favour of holding a referendum on separation. Support for secession in Quebec was broadly unchanged across the Trudeau years. And the last PQ government sat from 2012 to 2014, when Stephen Harper was prime minister.
The referendum clock, and what the polls show
Harper’s response in 2012 is directly reusable: “The people of Quebec voted for change, a pretty strong desire for change … they were denying any kind of a mandate to pursue the separation of Quebec or the division of the country.” The 2016-era numbers support the reading applied to 2026: when the polling firm Léger asked Quebecers in September to name their most important issues, only nine per cent said “making Quebec a country.” Incoming premier Paul St-Pierre Plamondon has also said no referendum will be called while Donald Trump is president of the United States, which pushes any possible vote to 2029 at the earliest — and Quebec could hold another election before then.
Support for secession in Quebec is low by historical standards but not zero, and the phenomenon is not unique to Canada. André Pratte, the journalist and former senator who chaired the Quebec Liberal Party’s policy commission this year, points to a YouGov poll conducted earlier this year in which 18 per cent of Americans supported their state seceding from the United States — including 27 per cent of Californians and 24 per cent of Texans. “The standard for success in a large federation like Canada is not the absence of tensions because you see it in all large federation,” Pratte says. On Quebec and Alberta alike, he adds, “there’s no reason for panic, but we should not be under any illusion that those things will simply go away if we just do nothing and hope that things will get better.”
What Ottawa is being advised to do
Pratte notes that Carney, though well regarded in Quebec, would be the first non-Quebecer to contend as prime minister with a referendum in the province, and that the government needs to be organized to react “quickly and intelligently” as developments arise. Writing in the National Post this week, he argued one challenge will be distinguishing issues on which Quebec has legitimate concerns — immigration, he suggests, is one where Ottawa could offer reasonable responses — from situations where the PQ is “merely picking a fight for tactical reasons.” Likely friction points between now and 2029 include federal high-speed rail plans and the monarchy. Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Dominic LeBlanc, speaking on Power & Politics, said the two governments can collaborate on housing and homelessness, and that right now Quebecers “don’t want governments to be hassling about some theoretical scenario in two or three years from now.”
Stéphane Dion, the former intergovernmental affairs minister who spearheaded the Clarity Act after the 1995 referendum, warns against reading current polling as safety. Pratte recalls that in 1995 the sovereignists were not given much chance of winning when the vote was called; the federalist side survived by a razor-thin margin, because referendums, once called, take on a life of their own. “I will never take Canada for granted,” Dion says. He has written that the Carney government should present itself as a “committed ally” in protecting the French language — and that in Alberta, where Carney has let a series of energy and climate agreements with the province speak for themselves, intent must be clear: “I think it must be clearer that what he has done on the pipeline and oil and energy is because he believes in it. He believes that Canada should be [an energy] superpower … If it’s convincing some people in Alberta to believe in Canada, so be it. But it’s not the main reason.”
Dion made the larger case in 1999, introducing Straight Talk, a collection of his writings on the subject: “In reality, we are facing an issue that may very well be the most crucial issue of the next century: how to maintain the unity of states made up of different populations.” The next numbers to watch are the result of Alberta’s referendum, which remains unknown, and Quebec’s 2029 calendar — whether St-Pierre Plamondon gets a second mandate before he gets to ask his first question.