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How St-Pierre Plamondon Learned to Stop Worrying and Blame Immigrants

The Parti Québécois leader built his comeback on the bigotry he once condemned

Parti Québécois leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon has a dim view of the province he wishes to make a country. Quebec, he says, is at once threatened by creeping Islamism and a radical leftist cabal bent on prosecuting the nation-to-be for an array of purported crimes, racism chief among them. Aping internet trolls and MAGA Republicans, he has taken to labelling his critics as wokeist doctrinaires who see microaggressions, white privilege, and cultural appropriation around every corner.

St-Pierre Plamondon has a ready scapegoat in immigrants, whom he blames for high home prices, low birth rates, increased crime, and what he has called “the deconstruction of society.” During a campaign stop at the end of August, St-Pierre Plamondon and a gaggle of PQ candidates posed in front of a Quebec City–area high school. “It is overflowing because of too many new immigrant students,” St-Pierre Plamondon said, pointing at the school. The solution: a referendum on sovereignty tout de suite, in the first mandate of a PQ government. “We need to get out of the status quo, because the status quo is hurting Quebec,” he said.

Follow St-Pierre Plamondon enough, and you’ll recognize a dexterity with sound bites, delivered with a vigour that teeters on self-righteousness. Combined with his relative youth—at forty-nine, he is two decades younger than former premier and long-time sparring partner François Legault—that fireball intensity has made him the most popular politician in the province for the last three years. If polls are correct, St-Pierre Plamondon will be Quebec’s next premier after the election on October 5.

And if his political trajectory is any indication, he will be one of the most extreme leaders ever to head the PQ, having won the job by betraying nearly every ideal he once held.

Today’s St-Pierre Plamondon is a Bizarro World version of the PQ leadership contender who launched his first bid in 2016. On a sunny June day, a decade younger but sporting a familiar open-necked shirt and jacket, St-Pierre Plamondon declared himself a “progressive and democrat” in Place Émilie-Gamelin in downtown Montreal. With a Benetton-esque display of nationalities standing behind him, he said the PQ was a declining political force because it was too intolerant to appeal to the multicultural reality of modern-day Quebec. His racialized friends, “allergic” to the PQ of the day, were horrified that he would want to lead the party, St-Pierre Plamondon said.

He pledged to be the antidote to the PQ’s bigotry—“The leader in preventing racism and all forms of discrimination,” as he put it—in order to reverse this decline. As for a referendum, he pledged there would be no such thing in the first mandate of a PQ government. In the months following his bid, he publicly clashed with Mathieu Bock-Côté, telling the columnist and venomously conservative sovereigntist that systemic racism was in fact real and a long-time problem in Quebec.

The obvious question: What happened to St-Pierre Plamondon? How does one go from genial Gen X liberal who touts his non-white friends in speeches to scorched-earth nationalist who trades in linguistic boogeymen and vilified ethnicities?

The answer lies in the political whiplash of the last ten years. St-Pierre Plamondon’s coming coincided with a burst of progressive energy. Two years before, in the 2014 elections, the PQ suffered its second-lowest support in its history, thanks in large part to a collapse of the youth vote. St-Pierre Plamondon was astute enough to see in the PQ a distressed brand—solid name recognition, diminishing demographic returns—and couple it with the Sunny Ways of summer 2016, with Justin Trudeau in Ottawa and Hillary Clinton in the midst of stomping a race-baiting buffoon named Donald Trump on the United States campaign trail.

St-Pierre Plamondon ultimately failed, losing........

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