Quebec 2026: Will The PQ Win?

Well this is going to be a hell of a campaign, eh?

This story should start not in 2022, or even in 2018, but on Election Night 2012, when it became clear Jean Charest would lose his Sherbrooke seat. Had he won it, the gap in seats would have been 2 - 53 for the PQ, and 51 for the Liberals - and Charest would have had the constitutional right to test the confidence of the National Assembly. With the CAQ holding the sole balance of power and basically nothing between the two parties, Francois Legault would have been forced to make a choice, and end the ambiguity that was the hallmark of the CAQ’s entire pitch.

Post 1995, the ADQ under Mario Dumont and then the CAQ under Legault were striving to be the parties of a different tendency - government for the sake of governing, not for the sake of Defending Canada or Separating From Canada. That was the pitch, that there was something above the National Question that they could achieve because they weren’t tied down to that fight. And because Charest lost Sherbrooke and resigned as Premier, Legault was never forced to show his hand. And that meant that when Pauline Marois stumbled in 2014 he could surge late in the campaign and keep the CAQ alive, before positioning himself as the only viable non-Liberal option for government in 2018. But I find myself fascinated by the question of what would have been, if the PQ hadn’t gotten their scalp in 2012.

This election is spiritually a successor to 2012 in some ways - a messy election where there’s three viable parties, plenty of chaotic three way races, and a crisis that makes the government more viable than we were as cracks show in the party that led for much of the years before. In 2012 it was the student strikes that brought Charest back in the game as the CAQ faltered over fears they weren’t ready for prime time. Now it’s Trump making everyone feeling jittery about electing a government that’s going to be even more chaotic, but the same dual propositions as at the end of 2012 loom again:

Are the PQ actually about to win, and are we sure a PQ minority isn’t the best outcome for federalists?

..

“I started something and now I’m not too sure”

Marois’ government was in office, but it was almost uniquely in modern Canadian history not really in power. It existed at the whim of Legault, whose main price was wanting the anti-corruption commission findings before an election. So the Liberals and the CAQ would leave enough members behind to not vote down confidence votes or a rather uninteresting budget in 2012, but other than that the PQ didn’t do very much. They swanned around with the titles and the offices without a way to do much of anything but complain. And it wiped them out for a decade.

Ever since 2003, Quebecers have been even more febrile in their politics than usual. 2007 saw the rise of Dumont’s ADQ, before 2008 tossed them aside. 2012 saw the end of a four year term where three parties led in polls, where Legault was leading and then came third, where the Liberals were dead and then almost alive, and then in 2014 they tossed the PQ aside immediately with a near-death experience for Legault’s CAQ included. 2018 saw a bigger CAQ wave than expected, 2022 was a massacre that saw a new party rise to double digits of vote share (though no seats), and now we have a PQ revival in 2026 (though to what extent). Federally we saw the Bloc jump back to a dominant position in 2004 before falling away, slowly then all at once. 2006 saw Harper break through in the province, 2011 saw the Orange Crush, 2015 saw TrudeauMania redux, and then 2019 saw the Bloc revival. Opinion has never been more in flux.

The reasons for this are complicated, but the quick and dirty version is that Quebec has suffered from bad governance in recent times as politicians have been more obsessed with the National Question than making sure the health and education systems work properly or attracting investment and growth. It’s a problem that the CAQ was supposed to solve, because they were supposed to be the ones who could put the National Question behind them. But the combination of COVID distracting them and their own incompetence has meant they’ve been unable to deliver results, and Legault at the end defaulted to his PQ factory settings - bashing the English and trying to culture war his way out of his death spiral. It didn’t work.

Christine Fréchette is trying to be different, and better, plainly, by understanding that the only path forward for the CAQ is to be robustly the party of the Carneyite wing of Federal politics. Carney’s appeal to Quebecers in 2025, and in winning Terrebonne, was that he was able to get things done and focus on the real crises Quebecers face. She is trying to return the CAQ to its founding principle, that this is a party and a movement designed to be better than the Federalists and the Separatists who care only about labels and titles and not the people they represent. Fréchette is trying her hardest not to be continuity with Legault’s time as Premier, but she does represent continuity with what the CAQ should be, and she is seemingly at least somewhat successful at it so far.

The problem with projecting the election - and the reason I won’t be even attempting it - is that the Quebec electoral map has completely divorced itself from an even casual relationship between seats and votes. The Liberals might win more seats at 22% of the vote than at 27%, because of how scrambled the map is. The CAQ won a massive landslide in seats on 40% of the vote last time because their support was a mile wide but only an inch deep. The Liberals, on the other hand, had support a mile deep, but in very few places. When the CAQ were down in the teens of vote share, they could crater to single digits of seats. But the difference between 18%, where they were a couple months ago, and 23%, what this week’s Leger/Le Journal/TVA polling showed, is potentially 35 seats. There are dozens of seats that could end up as three way contests where 1st and 3rd are separated by 10% or less. Battles of parties where nobody can break 30% will be common. Pretending you know how these dozens of dice rolls will go is a sophisticated game of delusion. I don’t know whether it’ll work, and neither does anybody else.

The assumption has been a PQ majority, because no matter the various pollsters or the various leads they have an annoying tendency to just get over the majority line in the various models thrown around on Twitter. But it was usually in the context of whether the Liberals could chase them down. Right now, there’s no indication they can, in part because of the campaign that they ran in 2022 and because of the uselessness of their current behaviour. Milliard may as well have abandoned the field in recent months, ceding the battleground to the PQ and the CAQ, and relegating them to a side show. Given the work he needed to do to rebuild the party after a bruising 2025, it’s understandable, even if angering. But he’s got to come out swinging with a real offer and get in the fucking game, or this will become a fight he is erased from.

The PQ mustn’t be pleased by the Liberals’ stagnation, because they wanted to run against the Liberals. It is true that that is always their preference - they feel more comfortable fighting the Liberals because fighting them ends up being about nationalism and identity and language in ways they can’t really fight a nationalist-but-anti-referendum party with. But it’s also true that the Liberals are a much better opponent because of the realities of the map. Because the Liberals were “more successful” (read: less horrendously unsuccessful) in 2022 at winning seats, their vote in the seats they didn’t win is horrendously low. The PQ, which beat them in vote share, didn’t have as many peaks in vote share, which meant their baseline vote in many currently-CAQ seats that will decide this election is above the Liberals, and if it’s a two way race, they’d beat the Liberals in. But it the CAQ return, it’s anybody’s game.

Now, that ambiguity and uncertainty cuts both ways - while a two horse race would have more or less guaranteed a PQ majority, it would have been a narrow one. There’s a ceiling on how many seats the PQ can get 35% in. A three way race changes the math, but in both directions. The CAQ surge could mean the PLQ and CAQ hold 70 combined seats, killing a referendum anytime soon. It could also mean that in seat after seat, a combined 50% of the vote for non-referendum major parties splits cleanly enough that the PQ wins the seat with 28%. The PQ’s chances at a landslide are higher now, but so are their chances of catastrophe. And I’d argue the likeliest outcome right now is the PQ’s worst case scenario.

The referendum promise came about as an act of desperation. Plamondon was so desperate to try and revive the PQ that he gambled that this could get the party back to the 20s, and it worked better than he ever could have imagined. He started something and now he’s not so sure, as his announcement that he’ll only have a referendum after Trump leaves office shows. But the entire province isn’t too sure of anything at this point, and haven’t been for two decades.

Quebec wants better, and they have no idea how to get it anymore. They are desperately looking for any port in a storm, any salvation they can get, and they’re sick and fucking tired of being sold snake oil. That’s how we’ve ended up with a polling average that looks less like a ringing endorsement of anybody and has ended up being the equivalent of everyone throwing their arms in the air in despair. And I think in the end the PQ will win - and lose everything in the process.

The PQ has no plan for government except a referendum, and a vague sense that they get that they need to govern well if they’re going to create the circumstances for a referendum to succeed. But without a majority government, they’ll just hang out in purgatory, unable to do anything while allowing the CAQ and the PLQ to rebuild and come fight again soon after. Fréchette will stay as CAQ leader in a PQ minority, correctly being seen as having saved the furniture and even potentially being primed to win again as soon as memories of Legault fade. The Liberals having a map where they knew which seats to target, and more time to build back the Liberal machine off the island, will be racing for a 2028 campaign. And the PQ will sit there, unable to do anything substantive or meaningful to convince people they deserve even more power, sitting ducks at the whims of two political parties who hate them.

Welcome to Quebec 2026. A referendum is behind one door, and the slow public humiliation of the PQ is behind another. Will the PQ win? They’ll probably be in office at the end of this. But will they win? Probably not, because like 2012, being in office isn’t being in power. And I’m increasingly convinced Quebec will start something they’re not too sure of.