Quebec 2026: Welcome To The Campaign From Hell

So, that’s a hell of an admission.

PQ Leader and favourite (but by no means guaranteed!) to be next Premier of Quebec Paul St-Pierre Plamondon has announced that Quebec will have a referendum in the first term of a PQ government … but after Donald Trump leaves the White House. So, in effect, the referendum promise is now a promise of a 2029 or 2030 referendum.

On the surface it’s a reasonable decision by PSPP - any referendum held in 2027 or 2028 will be lost, and the best, and frankly only, way to even get close to a majority for independence by 2030 would be to hit the ground running on a provincial policy agenda around healthcare, education, and jobs, such that people are so happy with Plamondon and the PQ that they allow themselves to be swept into a wave of believing that independence would be a good idea. But that won’t happen, and today’s announcement is a good reason why.

The best way to create the circumstances for independence is to govern Quebec well enough that it becomes the shining city on the hill of Confederation. If Quebec was sustainably well-governed, with a consistent pattern of above-trend growth, with increased and improved hospital and long term care capacity, with a booming, bilingual tech sector that was leading on AI and creating opportunities not just in Montreal but also in Montmorency, then sure, maybe some greater number of Quebecers would see Confederation as a cost and a burden. But the PQ will never deliver that, because their fundamental premise makes all of that impossible.

Plamondon wants Quebecers, and the rest of the country, to think that Trump is the aberration, and the source of Quebec’s ills. He is, for some people, in the same way as he is to many Ontarians and Albertans and everybody else in the nation. The problem is he’s not Quebec’s bigger problem, which is that the last fifty years have seen Quebec well governed for maybe 10 years. Charest was fine for most of his time in office, there was like a semi-decent year of Legault pre-COVID if I squint, and maybe you can say the final days of Bouchard once he gave up on a third referendum were fine - though, to be clear, it was a modern economic boom and Quebec was just riding the rising tide of a Federal balanced budget and tax cuts.

The problem for Quebec’s sovereignist party is that this fall is the 50th anniversary of their first win, and that win has condemned Quebec to a never-ending war on the National Question so intense that nobody has the capacity to handle its harder problems. PSPP just admitted that those harder problems have to be handled first in order to earn the trust of Quebecers with an independent country.

But if he thinks delaying the referendum and hoping things are better after Trump’s the solution, he’s going to be in for a shock.

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“Maybe you’re gonna be the one to save me”

The history of Quebec is a history of saviours, self-proclaimed or real. From Duplessis and Lesage to Bourassa and Levesque, from Bouchard and Charest to Layton and Legault, from both Trudeaus to PSPP and Dumont. Hell, I haven’t even said Duceppe or Peladeau or Mulroney yet. The history of post-1960 Quebec politics is of political titans with huge successes and even more spectacular failures, of massive rises and even steeper collapses. As politics across much of the rest of the country has contracted into functionally two party politics, Quebec has embraced the idea of a likely next National Assembly with 5 parties holding seats. More bluntly, Quebecers have been begging for a saviour.

It’s understandable why - the state of pre-Quiet Revolution Quebec was such that they needed a revolution, but 6 years of Lesage wasn’t enough to undo decades of damage. Levesque leaving the Liberals over independence, making the national question the dominant political fight instead of good governance, ends up sinking Bourassa when Quebecers were desperate for better. And from that moment on, Quebec hasn’t been able to flourish, wasting decades on Anglo alienation and constitutional wars instead of the hard yards of attracting growth and prosperity to pay for the standard of living Quebecers expect. Even the best government of this era was good at best, because while Charest managed the province decently and handed off an election loss where the PQ only won 4 more seats than the Liberals and could easily win the next election, it’s not like Charest managed to radically improve Quebec’s fortunes. He stopped the bleeding for a decade. That Quebec is in such a bad place that we have to call that best of the bunch is the problem.

Every new iteration of Quebec Saviour has a distinct flavour to it, but there are echoes to the past. Charest was a combination of experience but freshness, a motif that Legault stole and perfected by running as a Charest-style “experienced outsider” who was so fresh he made a new party. Layton and Dumont rose as charismatic personal figures who wanted to eschew the national question to get their bigger priorities done, though obvious Layton and Dumont didn’t come from the same ideological traditions. And Plamondon and Levesque both rose out of political vacuums - Levesque in the absence of a nationalist option that wasn’t the dying Union Nationale, and PSPP as the only real opposition when the wheels fell off the Legault government in 2023 and 2024.

The problem for PSPP is that in 1976, the PQ were the new kids on the block, and Levesque had done a big job very well in being the Minister who nationalized energy and created Hydro-Quebec in its modern form. When Levesque said he could make Quebec its best, Quebecers had some reason to believe him. What’s Plamondon’s best argument that he can get Quebec out of its decades of darkness? He doesn’t have one, which is the core truth of everything happening in Quebec right now, and why I keep coming back to that Oasis line earlier in this piece.

Quebec is crying out for anybody to fucking save them. They have been failed by decades of political leadership of all parties, tinkering around the edges and buying off voters with promises of brighter tomorrows that never come, either in the guise of a new party crashing through who will do politics differently, the Liberals promising that removing the referendum threat for a while will fix everything, and the PQ pinning all their hopes on the fantastical dream of independence being a solution to all ills. Quebecers need a government that will get on with the job of running their province and making it better, not focused on timings of referendums in the vain hope that once Trump’s gone and we can rest our elbows, suddenly 50%+1 will see reason and vote for independence. It’s as laughable as it is nonsensical.

Plamondon is locked into a referendum promise he needed to make to save the PQ from irrelevance. In the absence of an actual plan for Quebec, it is gone from a part of his pitch to his entire identity, at a time when independence has hardly ever been less popular. Quebec is begging for somebody to save them from their decades of decay, but they’re also begging for someone to stop them from having to stumble ass backwards into a referendum just because the other options can’t get their heads out of their asses. The CAQ took a step towards removal with their Churchill Falls deal, which is a start. But it’s time for the Liberals to fucking go.

The PQ are doing everything in their power to give this election away, and nobody wants to take it. Welcome to the campaign from hell - the stakes couldn’t be higher, and my confidence anybody will meet the moment couldn’t be lower.

Mon dieu.