Quebec: PSPP Started Something He Can’t Finish

On The PQ’s Increasingly Fragile Position

I suspect if Paul St-Pierre Plamondon was being honest with himself, he’s not particularly pleased with how events have transpired. From the Quebec Liberal scandals of December 2025 and the resignation of Francois Legault, PSPP had been riding a high for years. And now? The PQ position is crumbling, and whether he admits it or not, his position is best summed up by Manchester’s greatest band.

“I started something, I forced you to a zone

And you were clearly never meant to go”

The true irony of Quebec politics since 2022 is that the PQ’s referendum pledge was both the catalyst of the party’s revival, and the thing that will likely kill its chances of winning majority government again. The referendum promise saved the PQ in many ways - it gave it a zeal and a drive, to paraphrase another Strangeways classic - but it will fundamentally be the PQ’s undoing. And two new polls Wednesday prove it.

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We’ll start with Leger, which has the CAQ at 22% and up 5% poll on poll. That represents their best CAQ reading since March 2025, and the first time (outside yesterday’s Mainstreet) the CAQ had broken 20 with any pollster since May 2025. The discourse is about Christine Fréchette and whether the CAQ’s rise is a honeymoon about to collapse or a rising tide that could win; in reality, it’s likely in between.

Fréchette has not immediately done anything to make me believe the CAQ is suddenly going to shift the tides enough to win again. Her style of governing is best described as lowkey, and there’s no sudden change in the key issues that face Quebec that would cause a complete reversal of fortunes. But before Quebec gave up completely on Legault, there was a core base around the low 20s that the CAQ was holding at - the same rough base the CAQ got in 2012 and 2014. Obviously some of that 2012/14 vote is now parked with the Quebec Conservatives, but the Liberal brand isn’t as strong in the Eastern Townships and the south shore as it was when the party was led by Sherbrooke’s favourite son.

It’s also worth noting that Quebecers aren’t morons. In a lot of places, the CAQ are a better bet at stopping the PQ than the Liberals or the Conservatives, so a slight clawback of votes to prop up the best anti-PQ candidate is absolutely in play. As I wrote when Legault resigned, “the CAQ’s mile wide but inch deep support gives them a substantially lower floor, but also a higher ceiling - especially east of the Townships and north of Laval - to recover and blunt the PQ’s rise.” That remains incredibly true, and Fréchette’s rise makes a chaos hung parliament where the PQ have to govern but can’t do anything arguably the most likely outcome now.

If you believe Mainstreet, the Fréchette rise is even more prominent, with the CAQ in second in votes to the Liberals and probably there or there abouts on the seat total too. The PQ have been driven to third on Mainstreet’s numbers, though there’s a reason I’m not leading with it. PJ Fournier has said he won’t include Mainstreet’s data in his modelling due to “glaring weighting errors”, though Mainstreet’s claiming it was merely a coding error and not a methods one. Whatever the truth, it’s still a data point that suggests significant room for the CAQ to grow. But, I led this piece with the PQ, and it’s where this story actually gets interesting.

The referendum promise was an act of desperation. The PQ had nothing else going for it and was at risk of being permanently discarded as a relic of another time. They came third in vote share, fourth in seats, and got beaten in both categories by Quebec Solidaire. They were, plainly, out of gas, a dying party and a dying movement. The referendum pledge was an attempt to get a bit of core support back behind them and go from winning ~50% of the third of the province that wants independence to winning more of it. It worked spectacularly, especially as the CAQ collapsed under the weight of their own stupidity. Reiterating the promise in 2024 and declaring there will be a referendum “by the end of the decade” similarly worked to activate a core vote. In a 5 party politics, 30% can be a win number, and certainly nobody would have been mad with doubling their vote share when this pledge was originally made in 2023. It made a certain amount of sense when you remember that they didn’t actually think they could go fourth to first in seats. But now they’re here, and the thing that made them rise is now the anchor around their neck

Plamandon’s 2024 speech to the PQ National Council elevated the referendum promise from an aspiration to a matter of personal conviction. It has become his defining moment, his personal responsibility. He staked not just a political promise on independence, but something deeper and fundamental. “One thing is certain. Our moment will arrive sooner than we think, meaning not at some long-term idealized date, but in a few years — before the end of the decade.” Push that back at all, and it isn’t a sin equivalent to Carney flip flopping on carbon pricing, but something more fundamental.

It’s also true he has no plan for Quebec outside of a fight about independence. He’s bet so much on independence as an emotional issue that he doesn’t have to do the work on health care and education and jobs and cost of living. He thinks Quebecers are stupid enough to vote for him because he calls Ottawa a vague “existential threat” and blames all the indignities of modern economics and an aging population on Ottawa, when the blame squarely falls on decades of mismanagement and the brain drain that the PQ caused by running productive Anglos out of Montreal. His problems all come back to the same source - Quebecers are not as stupid as he thinks they are.

Quehecers are not going to allow themselves to elect a PQ majority by accident. They are not going to elect someone as reckless and as unprepared for the actual job of governing as Plamandon is to run Quebec just because he can give a good speech. Plamandon’s facing a much stiffer test in Fréchette and Milliard than Legault and Pablo represented, and now faces an electorate that has real problems and wants real solutions. There’s a reason none of Legault’s pathetic attempts to distract from his problems worked, and that should scare PSPP shitless. Quebecers want a plan to fix their health care and education systems, want a path to greater prosperity, and solutions on cost of living. A referendum in 2029 doesn’t make it easier for the bills to get paid in Chambly or easier to get seen by a doctor in Chicoutimi. And that’s why Plamandon and the PQ are where they are, forced to a zone where they were clearly never meant to go by their own stupidity.

Let’s not let them get out of it.