Quebec sovereigntists are on a roll. Could Canada be facing another unity crisis?

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There is something Dickensian about the diverging political fates of Doug Ford and François Legault. In this tale of two Premiers first elected in 2018, one leader seems to possess a Teflon-like ability to rebound from any setback or scandal, while the other seems to have become an accident-prone serial scorer of own-goals.

Ontario’s Premier, buoyed by his party’s gravity-defying poll numbers, appears poised to call an early election. His Quebec counterpart, whose popularity has been sinking like a stone, has been holding off calling a by-election that his party seems sure to lose.

A Léger poll released this week found support for Mr. Legault’s Coalition Avenir Québec falling to an eight-year low of 21 per cent among decided voters, as the sovereigntist Parti Québécois continues its recent roll. At 35 per cent, PQ support is at its highest level since it won a minority government in 2012.

More important, the PQ has the backing of 44 per cent of francophone voters, giving it a gaping 20-percentage-point lead over the CAQ among the voters who decide the outcome in most of Quebec’s 125 ridings. (The Léger survey drew on an online panel and did not have a margin of error. A comparably sized random sample of voters would be accurate within three percentage points.)

The PQ’s federal cousin, the Bloc Québécois, is also at 35-per-cent support among decided voters in the province – and at 45 per cent among francophones only. The Conservatives are at 24 per cent, while Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberals have sunk to 22 per cent overall – and to just 16 per cent among francophones.

With more than 60 per cent of Quebeckers saying they are dissatisfied with the CAQ government, the next provincial election could end up being a two-way race between the PQ and Liberals. Léger found that the Liberals would move into second place, with 26-per-cent support, under former Trudeau cabinet minster Pablo Rodriguez, who is the current front runner in the party’s leadership race.

The PQ’s rise from the ashes – it won only three seats in 2022 – has some federalists warning that the country could be sleepwalking toward another unity crisis if Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives win power in the next federal election with only a sprinkling of Quebec seats. As a non-Francophone and a non-Quebecker, the theory goes, Mr. Poilievre could be at a disadvantage in defending the federalist cause in a future referendum on Quebec sovereignty.

The PQ vows to hold such a plebiscite if it wins the next election, even though support for sovereignty hovers in the mid-30s and Quebeckers have shown little appetite for another divisive referendum. PQ Leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon’s pledge to hold one may delight his party’s base, but it might also scare off the nationalist-but-non-sovereigntist voters the PQ is counting on to win the next election.

Besides, for all his happy-warrior charm, Mr. St-Pierre Plamondon is no René Lévesque or Lucien Bouchard. And he has yet to face tough media scrutiny. That will come as the next election approaches.

The PQ’s recent expulsion of a member of the party’s executive committee who publicly criticized the leader may be a sign of deeper internal strife. After all, the PQ is notorious for infighting between hard-liners and moderates. Not all Péquistes are thrilled with Mr. St-Pierre Plamondon’s anti-immigrant opportunism. Urban progressives are appalled by it.

Still, recent cases of Quebec teachers refusing to dispense the sex-education and science curriculum that conflicts with their religious beliefs has played into the hands of the PQ, which accuses the CAQ government of laxity in countering “Islamist infiltration” in public schools. On Thursday, CAQ Education Minister Bernard Drainville (a former PQ cabinet minister) expanded his department’s investigation into 17 public schools where violations of the province’s secularism law and/or secularist principle are alleged to have occurred.

The CAQ government’s failure to win full control over immigration from Ottawa – a core objective it made in its 2022 election platform – is also buoying PQ support as the province experiences a housing shortage driven by a surge in temporary residents. The PQ is vowing to slash permanent and temporary immigration levels by half if it takes power.

“Canada condemns Quebec into a dead end where it must choose between preserving its political weight [in the federation] or its societal model,” Mr. St-Pierre Plamondon said last month. “That demonstrates that the only way Quebeckers can strengthen their political weight and protect their language and culture is independence.”

The CAQ or the provincial Liberals will need to come up with a counterargument soon. Or else the rest of Canada may need to start preparing for a PQ win.