Quebec’s right-wing incumbent party projected to win new term

Quebec on Monday re-elected its right-wing governing party, Canadian media projected, after a heated campaign in which the party leadership pushed claims that immigration threatened the French-speaking province’s unique culture.

More than six million people were eligible to cast a ballot, and shortly after polls closed at 8:00 pm (0000 GMT), initial estimates indicated that the Coalition Avenir Quebec (CAQ), a motley right-wing Quebec nationalist party led by current Premier Francois Legault, was projected to win more than 50 percent of the vote, allowing it to form a majority government.

The nationalist party, in office for the past four years, had made sensational declarations blaming immigrants in part for the decline of the French language in the province.

Initial results showed the party, founded in 2011, could do even better than in 2018 when it won 74 out of 125 seats with just over 37 percent of the vote.

Trailing a distant second was the center-left Liberal Party of Quebec (PLQ) poised to win less than 15 percent of the vote, which would constitute the worst-ever result for the formation which led Quebec for nearly fifteen years before 2018.

Legault, a multimillionaire ex-businessman, came to power in 2018 promising a “third way”. Neither separatist nor federalist, the founder of the country’s third largest airline, Air Transat, pitched to Quebecers a “business” approach to politics coupled with nationalist values.

“I’m thrilled to see my friend, Premier @francoislegault, receive another strong mandate from the people of #Quebec,” tweeted Doug Ford, premier of neighboring Ontario.

“Let’s keep building deeper ties between our two provinces and strengthen the economic bonds between us that create good-paying jobs,” he said.

Quebec’s Deputy Premier Genevieve Guilbault celebrated the initial results. “People thought we managed the pandemic well,” she said, noting that the virus had overshadowed the party’s first term.

“They want to give us a chance, a full four-year term to continue,” she said.

Legault was expected to speak later in a theater in Quebec city, where hundreds of supporters were waiting for him, holding up blue placards with the party’s slogan “Let’s continue.”

Earlier in the day, voter Alain Gravel, 55, told AFP his ballot choice was swayed mostly by concerns about the economy and asylum seekers slipping into Canada from the United States — a trend which surged in 2017 during Donald Trump’s presidency, sparking an outcry, and peaked this year at more than 23,000 to date.

Nearly all of those migrants were intercepted by police in Quebec.

“We need to clean up public spending,” Gravel said. “Also we absolutely have to find a way to plug breaches in the border as we know that many migrants are exploiting those.”

The political discourse in Quebec has shifted in recent years away from the notion that once dominated, that of splitting the province from the rest of Canada — which was twice rejected in referendums in 1980 and 1995 — making way for fresh ideas.

Legault, who had previously linked violence and immigration, said before the election that it would be “a bit suicidal” to take in more newcomers given the language situation.

Such fears are based on the latest census data which found that the proportion of Quebec’s population that speaks French most often at home has been on the decline since 2001, falling from 81.1 percent to 77.5 percent last year.

Experts, however, argue that the data does not take into account people who speak French fluently, but it’s not their mother tongue.