“The Parti Québécois is back,” PQ Leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon told an ecstatic crowd of supporters who gathered Monday to celebrate the sovereigntist party’s stunning by-election victory in a hotly contested Quebec City riding.
A year to the day after finishing in fourth place in the 2022 general election, prompting the obituary writers to prepare their pens, the PQ indeed showed that it is back from the dead by steamrolling over the competition in the Jean-Talon riding. PQ candidate Pascal Paradis won 44 per cent of the vote, double that of his Coalition Avenir Québec rival. The race saw 55 per cent of registered voters cast a ballot – an exceptionally high turnout for a by-election – and drew province-wide attention.
The seat was left vacant by the sudden resignation of the sitting CAQ MNA, forcing CAQ Premier François Legault to face voters still smarting over his move to renege on a 2022 election promise to build a multibillion-dollar tunnel under the St. Lawrence River to relieve traffic congestion in the Quebec City region.
For Pierre Trudeau, the ends justified the means in combatting Quebec separatism
On Tuesday, Mr. Legault suggested he could revive his original plan for an underwater “Third Link” for vehicular traffic between the provincial capital and its south shore suburbs. The Premier had scrapped the plan in April, saying that a permanent move toward remote work had rendered the project redundant. Instead, he said the CAQ would set its sights on building a tunnel for public-transit vehicles only.
His postby-election change of heart suggests a Premier in panic mode as he scrambles to halt the PQ’s momentum in both the Quebec City region, where it has pulled ahead of the CAQ in recent polls, and across the province, as Mr. Plamondon’s party moves solidly into second place.
François Legault’s broken election promise will not soon be forgotten
Voters in the Quebec City region are themselves divided over the Third Link, which could cost a whopping $10-billion and encourage urban sprawl. But there is widespread agreement that Mr. Legault was less than forthcoming during the 2022 campaign in insisting then that his promise was airtight.
Mr. Paradis, who almost ran for the CAQ in 2022, alleged Mr. Legault’s chief of staff told him before last year’s campaign that the Third Link was dead in the water. Mr. Legault strongly denied the allegation. But the incident left a chink in the Premier’s armour.
What remains to be seen is whether Mr. Plamondon can capitalize on his own rising favourability ratings and the growing dissatisfaction toward the CAQ government to make the PQ a true contender in 2026, when the next election is set to be held.
Holding only four of the legislature’s 125 seats, the PQ has far fewer resources than the Liberals, who form the official opposition with 19 seats, or Québec Solidaire, with 12 seats. But the Liberals have no permanent leader and are polling at historic lows. The party’s candidate won only 9 per cent of the vote Monday in Jean-Talon, a riding that the Liberals dominated for more than five decades until losing to the CAQ there in 2019. QS’s support, meanwhile, has been stuck in the mid-teens for years as it pursues a far-left agenda that places it too far out of the mainstream for average Quebeckers.
Even after Monday’s defeat, the CAQ still holds 89 seats. But Mr. Plamondon, a 46-year-old Oxford-educated lawyer, is winning over voters with his happy-warrior demeanour and uncommon (for a politician) candour. Some nationalist voters who had previously dropped the PQ for the CAQ are returning to the fold, suggesting the next election could be a two-way race between the two parties.
A late September Léger poll showed the CAQ’s support provincewide sliding to 34 per cent, from 41 per cent in the 2022 election, and the PQ’s rising seven percentage points to 22 per cent. (The online poll did not come with a margin of error.) Among francophone voters, who decide the winner in more than 100 ridings, the PQ stood at 27 per cent, miles ahead of the Liberals and QS, but trailing the CAQ by 12 points.
To be sure, Monday’s by-election win was not an endorsement by Jean-Talon voters of the PQ’s sovereigntist platform. Mr. Plamondon even postponed the release of a proposed budget for a sovereign Quebec until after the vote to avoid making separation a campaign issue.
Still, Mr. Plamondon has successfully burst the CAQ’s bubble and proved that it is vulnerable. For Mr. Legault, that must sting. He quit the PQ in 2009 to create the CAQ and spent the following years trying to hammer nails in his former party’s coffin. His coalition of former Péquistes and ex-Liberals is now itself bleeding support to the PQ, and he does not know how to stop it.
Reviving the Third Link plan just makes him look desperate.