Paul St-Pierre Plamondon led the Parti Québécois (PQ) to victory in Québec’s October 5 election, securing a minority government with just 28 percent of the popular vote. Photo by André Querry.

Both authors are members of Québec Solidaire and the Parti de la rue. All quotations from French-language media have been translated into English by Canadian Dimension.

The Parti Québécois (PQ), led by Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, a 49-year-old lawyer with an MBA from Oxford University, won the October 5 election in Québec with 28 percent of the popular vote, securing a minority government with the lowest vote share of any election in Québec history and of any provincial election in Canada for some 75 years. Taking into account the relatively low voter turnout—66.9 percent—the PQ obtained an explicit mandate from just shy of 19 percent of eligible voters.

The PQ ran a campaign focused on scapegoating immigrants for a variety of social evils from overcrowded, under-resourced public schools to threats to the French language. As Martin Patriquin wrote in an article for The Walrus, Plamondon blames immigration “for high home prices, low birth rates, increased crime, and what he has called ‘the deconstruction of society.’” Tellingly, the PQ’s proposed “sustainable immigration model” includes relying on automation and robotization in economic sectors of the economy facing labour shortages, among a host of other measures designed to thwart the influx of newcomers to Québec.

Another prominent pledge was to downsize bureaucracy—familiar code for cuts to public services—through the creation of the disturbingly DOGE-redolent secretariat for government efficiency and regulatory relief (Secrétariat à l’efficacité gouvernementale et à l’allègement réglementaire).

The PQ also promises a balanced budget with a $6.6 billion reduction in government spending over five years and lower taxes on business (decreased by 9.5 percent over five years, which would amount to lost state revenues of $8.9 billion), all of which augurs a new round of austerity policies in the midst of an escalating affordability crisis.

Plamondon has more in common with Lucien Bouchard and his zero deficit and with Pauline Marois and her ethnonationalist charter of values than with the social democratic party founded by René Lévesque.

It was, however, the question of Québec independence and a first-term referendum, to which the PQ purports to be firmly committed, that took centre stage during much of the campaign. And in the wake of the PQ victory, corporate media and social media in English Canada were full of alarmed commentary about the two separatist parties now sitting in the Québec provincial parliament—the second being Québec Solidaire (QS), the only left-wing party in the running, which now holds nine seats.

In its platform and public interventions QS concentrated on social issues and especially affordability, proposing measures to combat the housing crisis and rising food prices, promising to protect social programs and bolster public transportation, and advocating a special tax on the super-rich: a one percent wealth tax on citizens with assets of $25 million or more. While it is a sovereigntist party, its vision of an independent Québec and how to get there is thoroughly different from that of the PQ, at least in spirit, and throughout the campaign it stressed its more inclusive and democratic approach, highlighting its trademark commitment to holding a constituent assembly—with delegates elected throughout Québec, and with the full participation of Indigenous peoples—for the purpose of drafting a new constitution to be submitted to a vote. Its manifesto on sovereignty, Nouveau Québec Libre, emphasizes that an independent Québec must be a decolonized state built jointly with Indigenous peoples, whose self-determination must also extend to choosing to maintain the status quo if that is their wish.

The other three parties—the ruling Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ), which was shut out of the National Assembly, the Québec Liberal Party, and the regrettably much-revived Québec Conservative Party—are not pro-independence and were united during the campaign in their antipathy to any plan to hold a referendum.

The reality is that there is very little appetite for a referendum among Québecers: recent polls peg it at between 27 and 31 percent. That figure would be higher among francophone leftists, who are largely favourable to independence. But in light of the generally weak support partly due to fears of a more direct form of US domination with the openly neo-colonialist aspirations of the fascist regime to the south, Plamondon himself promised that no referendum would be in the cards so long as Trump remains in the White House. This did not prevent him from choosing September 30, Truth and Reconciliation Day, to throw down the gauntlet to Indigenous people by declaring that Québec does not need their consent for the eventual adoption of a provisional constitution for an independent Québec—an unsavoury foretaste of Plamondon’s politics of sovereignty.

Another harbinger is the item on military spending in the PQ’s projected military budget for an independent Québec, with five percent of GDP set aside for defence and full participation in NATO and NORAD. In the PQ’s theoretical “Year One” budget made public in 2023, that figure came to nearly $3.6 billion, proportional to Québec’s share of federal defence spending.

At a time when the climate emergency demands a reduction in defence spending as part of a radical shift of budgetary priorities toward social well-being and the energy transition, the PQ is immediately involving an independent Québec in the US-led arms race against China and Russia, without casting doubt on the nature of the North American military-industrial complex, as........

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