The Parti Quebecois, a party whose entire reason for existing is to take Quebec out of Canada, won the most seats in the province’s election on Monday and will form the next government, according to media reports. The result revives the question of whether the predominantly French-speaking province should leave Canada, and it directly tests Prime Minister Mark Carney’s message of national unity.
The scale of the comeback is striking. The PQ last governed Quebec from 2012 to 2014, and it won just three seats in the 2022 provincial election. Whether it now has the 64 seats needed for a majority in the 127-seat National Assembly was not immediately clear; incomplete results reported by the New York Times put it at 59, which would leave leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon heading a minority government that needs opposition votes to pass major legislation, or even to survive confidence votes.
Here is the awkward part, and it is worth sitting with. Polls cited by the Globe and Mail show only about 30 per cent of Quebeckers support independence, a historically low level. Quebec has actually voted on this twice: 40 per cent backed sovereignty in 1980, and in 1995 the Yes side got 49.42 per cent against 50.58 per cent for No, on turnout above 93 per cent. The margin that night was about 54,000 votes, and nothing in the polling since suggests the province has grown more eager. Voters hungry for change appear to have elected the secessionists without especially wanting secession, a result vote-splitting among the other parties may well have delivered.
St-Pierre Plamondon’s plan threads this needle by being patient: he has promised a third referendum only after President Trump leaves office in 2029 and the economy stabilizes, a timetable a minority government may struggle to keep anyway. The PQ has estimated a referendum would cost $130 million to organize. That is a real price tag for a vote the polls say he would lose tomorrow.
There is a structural tension in running a single-issue party whose single issue sits at 30 per cent: you can win the government without winning the argument. The PQ now gets to govern Quebec. Whether it gets to keep the referendum promise is a different conversation, with math that does not currently exist.