The October 3rd Quebec election mattered on a number of fronts, not the least of which as a boosted mandate for Premier François Legault’s challenges to the status quo federal-provincial division of power, notably through the use of the notwithstanding clause of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. McGill Institute for the Study of Canada Director Daniel Béland breaks down the implications. 

Daniel Béland

On the evening of October 3rd, just before 8:00 pm, the time when official results of the 2022 Quebec elections would start trickling in, I was discussing the anticipated victory of the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) with several journalists gathered at the stunning Théâtre Capitole in Quebec City. This is where the party had organized its election night victory bash, a fitting location for what was widely expected to be a celebratory evening for the incumbent government. The question we discussed was not whether the CAQ would return to power with a majority but how long it would take for the major networks to announce this foregone conclusion. In the end, not long after 8:00 pm, it took barely 10 minutes for one of the networks to predict that François Legault’s party was heading towards a majority government. 

When the dust had settled, we realized the true scope of the CAQ’s victory: with 41 percent of the votes, the party had won 90 seats out of 125, an impressive score indeed. Remaining in power after winning 16 more seats than it won in the 2018 Quebec elections, the CAQ still faces a fragmented opposition led by a much- weakened Liberal Party of Quebec (PLQ), which won 14.4 percent of the votes and 21 seats in total, 10 fewer than in 2018. Finishing in third place, the left-wing Québec Solidaire (QS) party got 15.4 percent of the popular vote but only 11 seats, one more than they had won four years ago. As for the Parti Québécois (PQ), it received 14.6 percent of the votes and only three seats, Finally, the Conservative Party of Quebec got nearly 13 percent of the votes but failed to elect a single MNA.

Clearly, the current electoral system advantages the CAQ, which is why Premier Legault, who had supported electoral reform back in 2018, when his party was in the opposition, is now supporting the first-past-the-post status quo. 

Having won so many seats and facing such a fragmented opposition, the CAQ under Legault is absolutely dominant in all the regions of Quebec, except in the big cities, especially Montreal, where the LPQ and QS won most of the seats, beating the CAQ and the PQ, which ended up with respectively two and one seats out of 27 on the island of Montreal. This situation reflects the fact that the CAQ is especially popular among older francophone voters, who are underrepresented in Montreal compared to other parts of the province. 

Paradoxically, due to the prominence of the debate over immigration and its perceived link to the future of French language, Montreal is a major political issue for the CAQ, something that became clear during the campaign when then-Minister of Immigration, Francization and Integration Jean Boulet uttered controversial remarks about immigration, stating that “80 percent of immigrants go to Montreal, do not work, do not speak French or do not adhere to the values of Quebec society.” Although Legault condemned this statement from Boulet and said that he had “disqualified” himself as an immigration minister, the Premier himself made controversial remarks about immigration during the campaign, for instance saying that increasing the number of immigrants admitted to Quebec right now would be “suicidal” for the French-speaking majority in the province. 

These controversies point to the perceived link between immigration, which remains concentrated in the Montreal area, and the future of the French language, which is seen as facing an existential threat by many francophones in the province. In this context, Quebec nationalists are now prioritizing what is known as the francisation des immigrants, something clearly stressed by the current name of the department in charge of immigration policy in the province: the Ministry of Immigration, Francization and Integration. Beyond language, in Quebec immigration is also tied to the ongoing debate over systemic racism, a term Premier Legault has long rejected, arguing that, although there are racists in Quebec, there is no system of racism in the province, a controversial and problematic view that has strained relationships between the CAQ government and both racialized minorities and Indigenous peoples.  

If immigration is a major issue within Quebec domestic politics, it is also an issue that has major implications for intergovernmental relations between the province and the federal government. This is the case because, in the name of the protection of the French language, the CAQ is advocating for gaining more powers from Ottawa in the field of immigration policy. Since the signing, in 1991, of the Canada-Québec Accord relating to Immigration and Temporary Admission of Aliens, the province has gained major powers over immigration and the integration of newcomers, something that has paved the way to a regionalization of immigration policy across the country, documented by Mireille Paquet in her book “Province Building and the Federalization of Immigration in Canada”. 

Yet, although Quebec has more autonomy in the field of immigration than any other province, the 2022 CAQ platform states that, “The time has come for Ottawa to accept that Quebec has all the necessary powers welcoming and integrating its immigrants while giving them the means to learn the French language if they do not already master it.” More specifically, beyond the provincial selection of economic immigrants currently in place, the Legault government seeks control over the selection of both temporary foreign workers and immigrants admitted in the name of family reunification.

On the day after the CAQ’s victory, however, both Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and federal Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez did not express support for these demands, the latter claiming that the province “has the tools in hand right now to select the vast majority of its immigrants” and that the Quebec government should simply do more to use the power it already has in this contested policy area. Typically defiant when dealing with the Trudeau government and claiming to have a strong electoral mandate to move forward with his immigration demands, Legault declared that “If Quebecers want the Quebec government to have more powers over immigration, nobody will be able to resist this.”

In this context, we can expect more intergovernmental clashes between Ottawa and Quebec City over immigration in the months and perhaps the years to come. The CAQ won big on October 3rd but Premier Legault knows that his electoral success is grounded in an autonomist form of nationalism that stops short of sovereignty but seeks to protect and increase provincial powers. Stopping short of promoting sovereignty and rejecting the idea of a new referendum on the topic, to keep his electoral coalition together, he needs to make bold immigration demands vis-à-vis the Trudeau government partly because he needs to demonstrate a strong commitment to both provincial autonomy and the protection of the French language.

Ultimately, from a political standpoint, it is irrelevant whether Rodriguez and others are right about the fact that Quebec already has all the immigration power it needs to protect and promote French in the province because Legault’s stance in immigration is highly charged both electorally and symbolically, which probably means it is unlikely to go away anytime soon, and may indeed play out more for political than for substantive purposes. 

In the context of immigration policy and well beyond, the re-election of the strongly nationalistic and autonomist CAQ poses a direct intergovernmental challenge to the Trudeau government, who will need as many seats as possible in Quebec to remain in power when the time comes for the next federal elections. While the installation of Danielle Smith as the new premier of Alberta portends a whole other source of intergovernmental tension, electorally speaking, the Belle Province is much more important for the federal Liberals than Alberta.

Handling Premier Legault without alienating francophone Quebec voters could prove very challenging. In immigration policy and beyond, Legault has identified more provincial autonomy as a core priority. That the Trudeau government is likely to struggle with his demands may be a political premium of that strategy.   

Policy Contributor Daniel Béland is Director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada and James McGill Professor in the Department of Political Science at McGill University.