Terrebonne, Polls, And Yet More Ignorance Of La Belle Province

On Our Most Interesting Byelection

(Liam MacKinnon swings by the Scrimshaw Show to preview the Men’s Olympic Hockey bracket, talk through Canada’s first few games, talk about the underwhelming goaltending situation, and hit the rest of the group play. Give it a listen!)

I don’t know why I allow myself to be so consistently angered by people’s complete inability to understand Quebec, and yet here I am.

Friday’s Supreme Court decision to void the Terrebonne result and force a byelection has led to people being dumb about both the state of the race in Terrebonne - a seat that is, after this week’s Abacus and the trackers, LPC +0.3% in my model - but also about the nature of why Carney won in Quebec last time. Carney’s Quebec gains last time were not solely because of Trump, but because of the Bloc’s inability to penetrate the conversation when our politics got hard. When Quebec is interested in its own fiefdoms, the Bloc is a resilient force. But when Quebec is worried about fixing its economy, the rising cost of living, health care, and other issues that matter whether you’re in Orleans or the Outaouais, the Bloc is a harder sell to the public. And that hasn’t changed.

The idea that Terrebonne is some auto Bloc gain is based on a complete and utter misunderstanding of the lay of the land in Quebec, and a frankly childish understanding of what Quebecers want from their political leadership. Quebecers are not children, and they’re not needlessly reliant on being told they’re special and amazing. They’re serious people, as all Canadians are, and are willing if not eager to hear out a viewpoint if it’s well delivered.

Carney’s slip in the polls around December and early January was because the government had let go of the reins a bit in terms of their central purpose. It felt scattershot, reactive and not proactive. The China deal and Davos changed that, albeit with an assist from Trump’s Greenland horrors, and reminded people that temporary peace in the American relationship does not mean we have George Bush or Joe Biden back in the Oval, and our problems remain the sizeable problems they’ve always been. And Quebecers, like the rest of Canada, get it.

Carney has never attempted to be a Quebecer, or to have the relationship to Quebec that even I do. Quebecers are often maligned as wanting to be pandered to, but they don’t - what they want is for leaders to be honest with them. If you have a sincere connection to Quebec, it plays well to invoke it, but faking an insincerity would be far worse. Carney’s refusal to bullshit the people of Quebec is in so many ways his greatest act of love to it - he respects them enough to not lie. In response, Quebecers are thrilled.

The math in Terrebonne, and across the province, is simple. The vote is roughly unchanged, and therefore the race for Terrebonne is basically what it was in April 2025, a tossup. The Bloc have not solved any of their fundamental problems, and the Liberals have not faceplanted. The problem for the LPC is that the Bloc may benefit from some sympathy for this, but they also get to throw their whole machine at this to win it. On the other hand, the Bloc machine is otherwise occupied trying to get PQ riding associations ready to take out CAQ incumbents this fall, and while the PQ machine has done decently in byelections, the priority will be getting that machine back functional when they can’t rely on their best and brightest staff all focusing on one seat.

The Carney government’s decisions will also help here. The government is close to landing crucial announcements on reindustrialization, and the news of the new EU-Indo-Pacific trade negotiations that Carney is spearheading can only be good news, not just for Canada but for Quebec. Carney’s massive lead on economic management will be the ballot box question in Terrebonne, and it’s a question that works well given Quebec’s current political and economic crises.

It’s also worth noting that Quebec doesn’t want a referendum. Yes, the PQ might be on the borderline of a majority of seats right now - though that’s probably going to change! - but they’d be doing so on a record low share of the vote. The idea that there is some majority, or even strong minority, for a radical realignment of interests is nonsensical. What Quebec wants is a government that will be less shit - less economically useless, that will fund schools and health care and long term properly, and that will fix the myriad of problems that Quebec faces. They liked Carney not because they’re idiots who can have keys dangled in front of them, but because he is their best shot at the kind of economic growth that Quebec desperately needs to deal with their aging population and the brain drain.

The Bloc have no answers to Quebec’s big problems, they have petty grievances and even pettier policies. They want to extract as much cash for the old as they can get, because they know their voters - boomers trying to relive their youth and bring about the utopia they failed to deliver in the 80s and 90s - will like it. They know, whether they admit it or not, that their project is dying because of the vacuous nature of it. The culture wars around language don’t work anymore, because younger French Quebecers don’t see someone speaking English while buying Fully Completely on vinyl at Cheap Thrills as a threat to them and their language. The Bloc doesn’t have an answer when the fundamental nature of their grievances goes away, or at the very least recedes.

Terrebonne hasn’t been Liberal terrain for a while, yes, but that’s because the political map of Quebec has been reoriented. The Liberals are weaker in the province’s east, losing Gaspe and Chicoutimi since 2015 despite Carney winning more seats than Trudeau’s best. Trudeau’s coalition got more Montreal based over time, as the axis of politics in Quebec moved more towards left and right and less to the old stomping grounds. The Liberals used to lose seats in French Montreal but win in the regions more, and now it’s flipped, as the Bloc has become more conservative on economics and culture wars and the Liberals have strengthened in the ring of seats around the island of Montreal that make up the swing seats in Quebec.

That trend matters. As Montreal’s economic power and housing crisis have risen in tandem, we’ve seen that outer ring - of Terrebonne and Blainville and Longueuil - trend towards the Liberals. There’s every reason to think that the voters who want economic stability, their Montreal based jobs to be protected, their kids to be able to go to good schools, and their parents to get good care, will take the PM who is quietly and effectively delivering results over the party with nothing to offer but bluster and bitching. That’s not a guarantee the Liberals will win, but anybody telling you Terrebonne will probably or definitely go Bloc plainly doesn’t understand Carney’s appeal to Quebec, or thinks so little of Quebecers that they’ll vote for petty grievance above all else.

Either way, they’re wrong.