Quebec 2026: Are The PQ Blowing This?

First Week Reactions!

Are the PQ having a bad campaign?

If you spend any time reading social media or watching Tom Mulcair’s commentary for the Gazette, it feels like the PQ campaign isn’t going very well. Their polls are soft, the seat projection is crashing, and there’s this air that this isn’t happening in the way it was supposed to.

PSPP’s latest foible - the story of his having donated to the Liberals post-AdScam, which was allegedly the moment he became a committed sovereignist - both doesn’t matter and yet deeply hurts. There’s presumably a way those two statements are true, and PSPP has the benefit of a decent personal brand on integrity and moral convictions to fall back on, but it’s another couple of days of a campaign spent on extra curricular nonsense and not the issues Quebecers care about.

But I’m less interested in what the PQ campaign has done than what has happened around it, which is that they’ve been fucked by two countervailing forces outside of their control. And with a month left to the election, it’s hard to know if they’ll get any luck in either reversing any time soon.

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“It’s counterintuitive, but the CAQ at 25%, the QLP at 22%, and the PQ at 30% is better for the goals of the Quebec Liberals than the PQ at 35%, the QLP at 30%, and the CAQ at 14%. In the latter, it’s a narrow PQ majority with a limited path to stopping it. In the former, it’s anybody’s guess how a series of three way dice rolls where the winner’s vote share will start with a 2 goes. And if you don’t want a referendum, we have to lean into the chaos.”

I wrote that in January, the day Legault resigned, and it is still one of the best things anybody has written in English about this campaign. The reality - this week’s Leger poll being 29% PQ, 24% CAQ, and 22% Liberal - is shockingly close to the numbers I pulled out of my ass 8 months ago. And we’re now in a place where despite the PQ being where they’ve spent much of the last two years - 30%, give or take a point - their position is perilous and seemingly on the verge of collapse.

The first structural problem for them is the CAQ got rid of a shit leader for a competent one. Frechette has done a great job of managing the job of Premier with the job of letting nationalists know she’s not going soft on the whole Hating Anglos thing, and between Churchill Falls and the more general sense that she knows what she’s doing, the CAQ are an incalculably more attractive proposition now than in January.

The other part of it, however, was proved on Monday night by the federal results in Chicoutimi. Federal and provincial comparisons are fraught for any number of reasons, not least of which the five party nature of Quebec politics and the 3 party nature of Federal politics outside the east end of Montreal, but they can be useful. And in Chicoutimi, as was true at the last federal election, Quebecers trusted that Carney was doing a pretty good job for the people of Quebec.

The history of the rise and fall of the separatist movement in Quebec is the history of whether Quebecers had even a basic modicum of faith that the federal government weren’t governed by idiots. The throughline of referendums, though both held during Liberal governments, can’t be pinned on ideological lines. Mulroney created the conditions for our near death experience, whereas Harper continued in Chretien’s path towards smothering the separatists with a mostly functional government that didn’t anger Quebec very much.

In 2025, the Bloc got 28% of the vote in Quebec. Last week in Chicoutimi, they got basically what they got last time, and depending on the pollster they’re roughly around that 28% of the vote again. It’s also where the PQ find themselves, because there are a sycophantic 30% of Quebecers who view independence as a good idea regardless of the merits. In a 2 party politics, that’s nowhere close to enough to get anything done, but in Quebec’s five party politics it could, depending on the splits, be enough. The PQ even managed 28% in 2007, which makes it clear there is a floor on the pro-independence vote.

But the problem for the PQ is that Carney isn’t giving them anything to run against. There’s nothing for people to be outraged by, and nothing to make anybody outside the sycophantic diehards to consider the grand experiment of independence at a time when Quebec can’t handle any of its own problems. In 1995, Quebecers nearly voted to leave because the story of post-1984 Canada was a country that was economically stagnant and unable to solve any big problem, as the dual failures of Meech Lake and Charlottetown showed.

Now, Canada is proving to be more resilient, because Carney is clearly on the ball in a way that Quebecers like. Chicoutimi was such a big win that it’s fair to say the Liberals would have won it even without any boost from the trade war, because fundamentally Quebecers think Carney is doing a good job. Not a perfect one, not an immaculate one, but he is stubbornly refusing to give the vast majority of Quebecers any reason to doubt the sense in the status quo. It is a remarkable testament to the success of Carney that he is stopping the PQ from any breathing room.

So I come back to the original question - is the PQ having a bad campaign? In some ways no, because the problems that plague them are beyond their control. But it’s also true that they’ve spent the last two years thoroughly unprepared for a world where the anti-referendum side of politics got their shit together, and they’re now suffering for it.

If the PQ want to win this election, they’re going to need to provide Quebecers an actual reason to elect them, and an actual reason they need independence, beyond vague bon mots about the greatest of Quebec. They need to articulate a reason why this Canadian government will not be good enough for Quebec, and why they need to be freed of the shackles of confederation. They haven’t, because one doesn’t exist. And the truth is, that is Mark Carney’s greatest accomplishment so far.