Parti Québécois leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon

Michel Venne is the editor of the web journal Dialogue et Perspectives and head of Nibi Conseil. He was a journalist at Le Devoir from 1990 to 2002 and in 2003founded the Institut du Nouveau Monde, which he led until 2017.

Canadians outside Quebec used to ask, “What does Quebec want?” They once again have good reason to wonder about the ambivalence of Quebecers who, ahead of the provincial election scheduled for October 5, appear poised to elect a government led by the sovereigntist Paul Saint-Pierre Plamondon and the Parti Québécois (PQ), while overwhelmingly rejecting its independence project.

The PQ leader – widely referred to simply as PSPP – is firmly committed to holding a third referendum, following those of 1980 and 1995, in his first term. But first he must form a government, preferably a majority one. The Parti Québécois is neck-and-neck in the polls with the Quebec Liberals, with both parties at roughly 30 per cent support.

The PQ, however, remains in first place among francophone voters, giving it an advantage because of the electoral map and the concentration of Liberal support in Montreal. Three other parties – including the governing Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ), which appears to be staging a comeback under Christine Fréchette – are competing for francophones elsewhere in Quebec who don’t want a referendum and eroding the PQ’s lead. The electorate is volatile. In this fragmented party system, victory for the PQ is far from assured. The prospect of a minority PQ government is becoming increasingly plausible, and defeat cannot be ruled out.

The sovereigntist leader’s mood swings have not helped his cause. Particularly damaging were his recent attacks on artists for accepting federal subsidies, and his repeated targeting of immigrants.

Leadership matters, certainly. But what is really dragging down the party’s popularity is the very idea of pursuing independence – in particular, the idea of pursuing independence now, in a context of geopolitical instability and economic uncertainty and at a moment when Canada’s Prime Minister, Mark Carney, appears firmly in command. Carney’s honeymoon with Quebecers continues. The Liberal victory on April 13 in the federal byelection in Terrebonne, historically fertile sovereigntist ground, illustrates the point. Quebecers appear to trust Carney to navigate an increasingly hostile world. PSPP’s arguments against the federal government are largely falling on deaf ears.

One poll suggested that the PQ would almost certainly win a majority government if it abandoned its referendum pledge. But the PQ leader rejected the idea, reaffirming his intention to hold a referendum and invoking the strength of his convictions.

Where have the sovereigntists gone?

Yet support for independence hovers around one third of the electorate, with polls ranging from 29 to 35 per cent – roughly equivalent to support among Albertans for Alberta independence, hardly a recipe for success. This stands in sharp contrast to the 49.4 per cent Yes vote obtained in the 1995 referendum, now 30 years ago. If PSPP succeeds in forming a government, he will still have to win Quebecers back to the independence cause.

To his credit, he has revived a party that garnered only 14 per cent of the vote and elected just three members out of 125 in the 2022 election. The PQ now leads in grassroots fundraising. Its organization has been rebuilt from the ground up, and party activists are fiercely motivated. The party has won the last four byelections. The 49-year-old PSPP has also succeeded in attracting younger supporters, including among visible minorities, and new candidates.

Assuming it maintains the support of 30 per cent of voters, the PQ can expect to form the next government. But it would be a narrow and somewhat accidental victory, attributable more to fatigue with the CAQ after eight years in office than to any burning desire to make Quebec a country.

When the PQ under Jacques Parizeau won the 1994 election in preparation for a referendum the following year, the party captured 44 per cent of the popular vote – 14 points higher than current polling numbers for the party. At the time, the PQ persuaded 1.7 million voters to support it. By 2022, only 600,000 remained.

Where have the sovereigntists gone? One must distinguish between cyclical factors – such as today’s geopolitical climate – and structural ones tied to demographics and shifting views.

For 15 years after the referendum, the independence idea still showed considerable vitality. In the late 1990s, support for Quebec sovereignty – combined with a partnership with Canada, as proposed in the 1995 referendum question – increased again, reaching as high as 55 per cent at one point. The sponsorship scandal, in which $100 million in federal funds meant to promote national unity in Quebec was funnelled to advertising firms friendly to the Liberal Party, contributed to this resurgence. Until 2005, support for independence remained in the range of 39 to 45 per cent.

Then things changed. Two phenomena converged to weaken the independence movement and in particular the PQ, which found itself challenged both from the left and the right. An increasingly erratic party cycled through seven different leaders.

The first shift was social in nature. One of its clearest manifestations was the Orange Wave that swept Quebec in the 2011 federal election, enabling Jack Layton’s New Democratic Party to capture 59 of Quebec’s 75 seats and reducing the Bloc Québécois to just four. Social concerns focused on federal policies had overtaken constitutional issues.

The Bloc’s collapse reflected a shift that had begun earlier. In the late 1990s, in reaction to the austerity budget measures adopted by the PQ government led by Lucien Bouchard, a new left-wing movement emerged under feminist activist Françoise David, which gave rise to the creation in 2006 of Québec Solidaire (QS). QS first broke through in 2008, when Amir Khadir won a byelection in a longtime PQ stronghold in central Montreal. Since then, QS has largely displaced the PQ in the city’s downtown ridings, capturing eight seats in 2022. QS supports independence, but conditionally – in the form of a social, environmentalist, feminist and pluralist vision of nationhood.

In 2011, the PQ itself plunged into crisis. Three influential members of the National Assembly resigned dramatically, citing the excessive authority of the leader, Pauline Marois, and the fact that they no longer recognized their own party. A fourth, Jean-Martin Aussant, founded a new left-wing independentist party the following year, Option Nationale, which would later merge with QS.

Fault lines, ideological and generational

While the PQ was losing ground on the left, it was also challenged from the right. Still in 2011, one of the party’s longtime heavyweights going back to the Bouchard era, François Legault – who had quietly broken ranks in 2009 – abandoned the independence project altogether and founded the CAQ, a nationalist party focused on economic development that would come to power in 2018.

According to Legault, independence is an outdated project that will never happen. He argues that Quebec can defend its nationhood from within Canada through a “Third Way” between federalism and sovereignty, relying on strong positions on the French language, Quebec culture and immigration.

In a 2022 book aptly titled Le schisme identitaire,¹ 25-year-old Étienne-Alexandre Beauregard, self-described as an intellectual of the new Quebec national-conservative generation and former speechwriter for Legault, analyzed the split that has emerged since the turn of the century between two broad currents of Quebec nationalism.

On one side are conservative nationalists, focused on preserving Quebec’s identity, the French language, secularism and tighter immigration control. Many of them gravitated toward the CAQ. On the other side, embodied by QS and part of the PQ at the time, are nationalists whose concept of the nation is constitutional and territorial, shaped by progressive, post-national, or multiculturalist ideas. Torn between these two movements, the PQ is still searching for its identity. But the party has aggressively courted conservative nationalists.

To voters concerned primarily with social issues, PSPP’s party argues that sovereignty would allow Quebec to repatriate taxes currently paid to Ottawa and thereby gain the resources necessary to address those problems. At the same time, it tries to persuade conservative nationalists that their identity struggle will remain futile so long as Quebec stays within a Canada in which PSPP predicts the cultural and linguistic decline of the Quebec nation.

Observers such as public-opinion specialist Pierre-Alain Cotnoir detect another fault line – this time between generations. Older Quebecers tend to hold more collective, society-oriented values, whereas younger generations are more individualistic, as well as more concerned with global issues such as climate change.

A sharp distinction exists between voters over 55 and younger Quebecers: identity concerns remain powerful among older cohorts but are far less salient among younger generations. To be sure, civil society organizations such as OUI Québec, which has a youth focus, have mobilized in support of the independence movement. Artists, including the popular singer Lou-Adriane Cassidy, winner of numerous awards at the latest Quebec music gala, have publicly endorsed the project, as have social media influencers. In the summer of 2025, two surprising polls created the impression that young people were rediscovering enthusiasm for independence.

But that impression proved illusory. Whereas 30 years ago young voters supported the Yes side in much greater numbers than their grandparents did, today there is little difference among age groups. All behave roughly the same way, with support for sovereignty hovering around one third across generations.

The “carrier group”: Dormant or resigned?

In their 2002 book Les raisons fortes,² sociologists Simon Langlois and Gilles Gagné identified what they called “le groupe porteur” (the “carrier group”) of the 1995 independence project based on a detailed analysis of polling data. In this group – consisting of francophone middle-class Quebecers, active workers or students, under 55 years of age – 70 per cent voted Yes.

At the time, older voters who had been socialized within the broader framework of French Canada were more inclined to give Canada a last chance, hoping the country might eventually evolve in Quebec’s favour. In the final days of the 1995 campaign, they proved open to Jean Chrétien’s televised appeals warning of the loss of a country, and to the demonstrations of affection staged by Canadians from other provinces in downtown Montreal and on the bridge linking Ottawa and Gatineau. Their emotional response may well have tipped the scales toward the No side. Today, those voters are over 85 or deceased.

A few years later, Simon Langlois revisited this study and found that support for independence among the “carriers” had collapsed. Quebec’s middle class had become preoccupied with entirely different concerns. As for those who voted Yes in their youth in 1995, they are now seniors, more wary of risk.

Yet one question remains. Is support for independence – the dream of a sovereign Quebec that they embraced 30 years ago – merely dormant, capable of reawakening under the right circumstances? Or has it been permanently put to rest by a clear majority, including most of the “carriers” of 1995? This aging cohort now represents a substantial share of the electorate, as the relative weight of younger generations has declined. Their vote would carry enormous weight in any future referendum.

Former Quebec Liberal Premier Daniel Johnson, Jr., who led the No camp in 1995, once described himself as a federalist “first and foremost.” Yet in an interview with Le Devoir a few months before the crucial 1994 election, he nuanced his position. For him, “sovereignty is a deep, diffuse feeling that everyone, at one time or another, experiences to some degree” – including himself:

It’s part of our fibre. That it should become a principle of action and the overriding ambition of a people, regardless of what it means for our prosperity – that’s what becomes dangerous. But there will always be a relatively small number of Quebecers who believe it is the only solution. And there will always be all Quebecers who feel, at least a little, that it might be.

In 2026, the clear impression is that most Quebecers are unwilling to answer the question the way Paul Saint-Pierre Plamondon wants them to. The polls clearly suggest as much. Yet if and when the question were actually put to them, how many would find themselves unable to resist voting Yes because, as Johnson put it, it would amount to resisting that which is “part of their fibre”?

The road to a referendum

Back in 1995, the economic and legal feasibility of Quebec sovereignty was taken for granted. Thirty years later, it’s another game.

Donald Trump’s tariff war has undermined one of the central arguments advanced by sovereigntists in 1995 to support the economic feasibility of independence: that a small country can thrive under globalization, so long as it is part of a larger market. Threats to free trade with the United States have shaken that conviction.

Legality of a referendum will also be challenged, and developments in Alberta will be closely scrutinized in that regard. A recent Alberta court decision invalidating an independence petition on the grounds of Indigenous rights has already raised new obstacles. The federal government, meanwhile, will ensure enforcement of the Clarity Act, which requires a clear question and a clear majority before provincial secession needs to be constitutionally recognized. Ottawa, however, must tread carefully. A hardline approach could backfire. The Supreme Court’s forthcoming ruling on Quebec’s secularism law, Bill 21, may also have significant repercussions.

In recent months, the PQ has progressively released chapters of what it is calling its “blue book” detailing its independence project. The goal is to demonstrate that every aspect has been carefully planned. The document addresses international relations and even the eventual creation of a Quebec currency to replace the Canadian dollar. An updated “Year One” budget for an independent Quebec has also been released.

Yet the wording of its referendum question remains a mystery. Will it refer to a partnership with Canada? Will there be negotiations with Ottawa over the wording to ensure that the question satisfies the federal Parliament’s clarity requirements, as occurred in Scotland ahead of its 2014 referendum?

The PQ has pledged to precede any referendum with a complex participatory process leading to a provisional Quebec constitution. That process would unfold over two years, pushing any referendum back to at least 2028.

Not only would constitutional debates likely generate serious internal conflicts, but a PQ government – especially one with the slimmest of majorities – would also have to contend with the day-to-day burdens of governing. It would inherit a difficult fiscal situation, including a $10 billion deficit for the current year. Inevitably, it would have to make choices that provoke dissatisfaction and clash with its own national project.

Québécois or Canadian?

In 1995, the Yes camp made extraordinary efforts to avoid framing its argument primarily around identity preservation. The first posters, draped in fleur-de-lis blue and nationalist slogans, were quickly replaced at the official launch of the campaign by colourful signs in yellow, green and red proclaiming that, with a Yes vote, “everything becomes possible.” Jobs would be created. Quebecers would embrace the world. Peace and love would prevail.

The Yes camp transformed itself into a movement for social change, backed by a broad coalition of civil society organizations – there were even nuns campaigning for Yes – in opposition to the business community, which almost unanimously lined up behind the No camp.

But according to polling conducted during the referendum campaign, the main reason cited for voting Yes was pride in being Québécois (77 per cent). Respondents also pointed to the future of their children (76 per cent) and the preservation of social gains (76 per cent). Protection of language and culture ranked fourth (70 per cent). Economic and procedural arguments trailed far behind.

According to a Léger poll conducted for the 30th anniversary of the referendum, attachment to Quebec has weakened among Quebecers, including francophones. Today, only 40 per cent of Quebecers identify more with Quebec than with Canada, compared with 65 per cent 30 years ago. Only 11 per cent identify themselves as Québécois only, and 29 per cent as more Québécois but also Canadian. On the other side, 26 per cent consider themselves as much Canadian as Québécois, 17 per cent as more Canadian than Québécois, and 15 per cent as Canadian only.

Meanwhile, Quebec’s population is now growing almost exclusively through immigration. Allophones and anglophones remain as reluctant as ever to support the sovereigntist cause.

By 1995, the original motivations behind the independence movement of the 1960s – feelings of alienation, contempt or inferiority vis-à-vis other Canadians – had already faded. But Quebecers had just been reminded of the rejection of their distinctiveness through the failure of the Meech Lake Accord and its aftermath. Nothing of that kind has been raised recently.

And one man, Lucien Bouchard – an extraordinary communicator adored by crowds – managed during the campaign to remind voters of those perceived slights while reassuring them that economic and political ties with Canada would continue through partnership. Will PSPP find his own Bouchard?

Every referendum has its own story. If there is another referendum, what will be its story?

Notes

¹ Le Schisme identitaire: Guerre culturelle et imaginaire québécois (Montreal: Boréal, 2022).

²Les raisons fortes: nature et signification de l’appui à la souveraineté du Québec (Montreal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2002).