Quebec Conservative Leader Éric Duhaime greets supporters as he arrives at an election debate in Montreal last month.Christopher Katsarov/The Canadian Press
Quebec politics have moved. You wouldn’t know it from Pierre Poilievre’s current poll numbers, but it has shifted rightward.
In truth, that’s a trend that started decades ago, gradually becoming more visible as the old separatist-federalist cleavage softened and successive centre-right parties – the Action Démocratique then the Coalition Avenir Québec – won sizable numbers of seats in provincial elections.
Now, the Parti Québecois is back in power and separatism is back on the governing agenda. But the increasing conservatism of Quebec politics is still noticeable.
Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, who will become Premier next week, has promised to create a government efficiency secretariat, a cost-control office that raises recollections of Elon Musk’s DOGE. Mr. St-Pierre Plamondon also promised to freeze the salaries of members of the National Assembly, cabinet ministers and senior public servants until the Quebec budget is balanced.
Leader of the Parti Québecois (PQ) Paul St-Pierre Plamondon makes a speech after winning his election to become the next premier of Quebec, in Montreal earlier this month.ANDREJ IVANOV/AFP/Getty Images
His PQ platform promised to cut gas taxes and corporate taxes, lower immigration levels and to dismantle the provincial health agency, Santé Québec, ostensibly to reduce layers of bureaucracy.
It’s enough to make you think that the party taking power is a conservative party. But there is now also a party in the National Assembly called the Quebec Conservative Party, which won 19 seats and about a fifth of the votes up for grabs.
The Conservative Leader who got them there from zero seats, Éric Duhaime, is a former talk-show host who brought a likeable, down-to-earth style to the campaign trail, talking mostly about affordability and tax cuts, opposing a future referendum, and winning over voters.
But Mr. Duhaime is also a lifelong ideological conservative activist who was once an adviser to then-Canadian Alliance leader Stockwell Day and promised during the campaign to slash the state by cutting a massive $47-billion from the provincial budget over five years, and cutting 20,000 civil servants.
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“When we’ve reached the point where there is a bidding war to see which party will cut the most civil servants, it’s not because the campaign is pulling to the left,” Mr. Duhaime told a Radio-Canada interviewer two weeks before the election.
Quebec’s Overton window – the range of mainstream political ideas that are accepted as reasonable by the public – has shifted rightward.
Carl Vallée, a former press secretary to then-prime minister Stephen Harper, argues that Mr. Duhaime’s big contribution could come in “normalizing” the Conservative brand in Quebec, and giving that brand an authentic Quebec identity. Most Quebeckers identify their own political affiliation first and foremost through provincial politics, he noted.
The question for federal Conservatives is whether that will change things for them.
Somehow, many federal Conservatives still see Quebec as a land of limited political opportunity. Occasionally, a Conservative commentator will suggest that the party should ignore Quebec because its path to power doesn’t require the province.
It’s hardly good times for federal Conservatives in Quebec right now. Mark Carney and the Liberals are way ahead in polls, and Mr. Poilievre’s party had the support of just 12.1 per cent of Quebeckers in the latest Nanos Research tracking, released Oct. 9.
Still, you’d think the federal Conservatives’ medium-term ambitions would include building support on that small-government, small-c conservative sentiment in Quebec.
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In last year’s election, Mr. Poilievre actually led Conservatives to their largest number of Quebec seats, 11, since the days when Brian Mulroney was in power. They won roughly the same territory that Mr. Duhaime’s provincial Conservatives won, in the ridings around Quebec City and a swath of eastern Quebec. The Coalition Avenir Québec, won power twice, in 2018 and 2022, when it was widely seen as centre-right.
Mr. Vallée said Quebec’s conservatism, including Mr. Duhaime’s newly ascendant brand, is tied to nationalism and conserving Quebec’s culture and language, and federal Conservatives have struggled to fit that together with conservatism in the rest of Canada.
“It expresses itself in a different way from elsewhere in the country, whether that’s the Tory tradition of Ontario or the more populist traditions of the West,” Mr. Vallée said.
Maybe that’s something Mr. Duhaime can teach the federal Conservatives. He has known Mr. Poilievre and many of English Canada’s leading conservative figures for a long time, and he has apparently found a new formula for translating Conservative to Quebec.
Perhaps he can give the federal party lessons in how it’s done.