This Week in Canada: The Separatist Revival in Quebec

Welcome back to This Week in Canada, where breaking up is still hard to do despite Quebec’s election results; we are worrying way too much about Trump’s machinations; and more. Let’s jump right in!

After Monday’s provincial election results in Quebec, the political party that wants to take Quebec out of Canada is back in power. That could lead to another confrontation over independence, even though support for Quebec actually dumping Canada is low.

Vote results as of late Monday showed that the Parti Québécois (PQ) won 59 of the 127 seats in the provincial legislature, ahead of four other parties.The governing Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ), the nationalist but non-separatist party that has governed Quebec for the past eight years, was wiped out.

In 2022, the PQ won only three seats in the National Assembly of Quebec and looked close to irrelevant. Now that party leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon has brought the party back, so is the question Canada largely left behind in 1995, when Quebec came within a whisker of leaving the country. In a referendum that year, Québécois who wanted sovereignty were defeated by just 54,288 votes out of nearly 4.8 million.

St-Pierre Plamondon voted yes on sovereignty when he was 18 years old, then worked as an Air Canada flight attendant, graduated from McGill and Oxford, became a corporate lawyer, moved in federalist circles, and donated to the federal Liberal Party before finding his way back to sovereignty.