by André Lecours, Daniel Béland and Shannon Dinan

André Lecours is Professor in the School of Political Studies at the University of Ottawa. Daniel Béland is Director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada and James McGill Professor of Political Science at McGill University in Montreal. Shannon Dinan is Associate Professor of Political Science at Université Laval in Quebec City.

The formation of the first Justin Trudeau government in late 2015 raised questions about what the new Prime Minister would mean for national unity and the relationship between the federal and Quebec governments. Despite a strong performance by the federal Liberals in Quebec in the 2015 election,1 their reputation as centralizers – especially as the name Trudeau still evoked for many Quebecers hostility toward the province – suggested great potential for a fractious relationship between Quebec and the federal government. The new Prime Minister’s left-of-centre agenda, which could potentially involve the creation of federal programs in areas that Quebec governments consider exclusive provincial jurisdiction, further heightened the likelihood of tension.

In reality, the tensions between the federal and Quebec governments in the Justin Trudeau era were arguably less consequential than might have been expected, even if Ottawa’s overall relationship with François Legault’s Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) government, in power after 2018, was cool at best. In our view, social policy expansion under the Justin Trudeau government did not provoke any significant backlash in Quebec because the province had already implemented some of the programs the federal government sought to create. However, federal immigration policies and positioning on Bill 21, Quebec’s secularism legislation, did considerably strain the intergovernmental relationship.

Under Justin Trudeau’s leadership as Prime Minister, two broad policy areas presented significant potential for generating tensions between the federal and Quebec governments. The first is social policy. The federal Liberals have long been keen on creating pan-Canadian social programs that Quebec (and some other provinces) view as an intrusion into their spheres of jurisdiction. As the Trudeau government made fighting poverty and reducing inequality a priority, confrontation with Quebec over federal social policy expansion seemed inevitable.

The second policy area that presented potential for straining the relationship was immigration and the integration of newcomers. Trudeau came to power with a position strongly supportive of multiculturalism and high immigration levels at a time when Quebec governments were looking to make a statement on the province’s own approach to immigration and integration, which is centred on the protection of the French language and culture as well as on secularism.

Social policy

Social policy expansion proved a major priority for the Liberals after their unexpected election victory in 2015. Soon after taking power, they created the Canada Child Benefit, cancelled the future increase in the eligibility age for Old Age Security that the Harper government had adopted a few years earlier and expanded the Canada Pension Plan (CPP). Of the three reforms, expansion of the CPP was the one that most involved intergovernmental relations. To reform this program, which covers Canadian workers outside Quebec (Quebec has operated its own earnings-based pension program, the Quebec Pension Plan, since the mid-1960s), the federal government needed to secure the consent of a minimum of seven provinces representing at least two-thirds of the country’s population. As Bruce Little has shown, this institutional logic does not necessarily prevent CPP reform and, in some circumstances, can even facilitate it.²

In 2016, the Liberals were able to reach a deal with a sufficient number of provinces to make CPP expansion possible because the provincial electoral map proved highly favourable, notably with Kathleen Wynne’s Ontario Liberal government strongly advocating reform, and the recent advent of a New Democratic Party government in Alberta. Given the asymmetrical structure of pension policy in Canada and the constructive attitude of Philippe Couillard’s Liberal Quebec government vis-à-vis CPP reform, this expansion did not foster significant tensions between Quebec and the rest of the country, even while putting pressure on the Quebec government to similarly increase the replacement rate of the Quebec Pension Plan, something it had initially objected to.³

While pension policy is shaped by an established governance arrangement, the COVID-19 pandemic was an exogenous shock that created uncertainty for intergovernmental relations regarding social policy reform and innovation. The federal government took a leadership role during the crisis. Beyond providing vaccines and healthcare guidelines and materials, the Trudeau government also assumed primary responsibility for delivering temporary financial assistance, complementing unemployment supports, which are centralized under Employment Insurance. Such complements included the Canadian Emergency Response Benefit (CERB), which provided $500 in taxable benefits weekly to workers unemployed due to the pandemic, for a maximum of 16 weeks. The Trudeau Liberals also temporarily increased cash benefits such as the Canada Child Benefit and Old Age Security. As all these programs are purely federal in nature, their emergency adjustments did not entail large-scale intergovernmental collaboration or conflict because there was no clear inconsistency with existing policies. Thus, no significant tensions emerged with provincial governments, including Quebec, but some provinces did opt to claw back social assistance payments.⁴

Health care was a different story, as intergovernmental tensions, including with the Quebec government, were twofold. First, although federal health care funding had been increased in response to the pandemic, starting in 2021, the provinces united to lobby the federal government for a permanent and massive $28-billion increase in the Canada Health Transfer (CHT). The Trudeau government resisted this call and, after lengthy discussions with the provinces, it unilaterally granted a significantly smaller increase than the provinces had requested. In 2023, as in 2017, the Liberals tied some of the extra health care money to the signing of “tailored” bilateral agreements with the provinces. In contrast to the broad conditionality of the CHT, the provinces and territories are required to meet specific federal requirements to qualify for this funding.

The Trudeau Liberals’ approach to child care was less conflictual, though far more ambitious. Initially, changes to child care policy were limited to purely federal programs that did not require intergovernmental collaboration, such as increasing and reorganizing existing tax credits into the Canada Child Benefit in 2016. The Liberals’ approach changed with bold investments in early learning and child care, a policy area closely associated with provincial responsibility. In 2017, the government established the Multilateral Early Learning and Childcare Framework to fund provincially designed and implemented early learning and childcare initiatives, provided they met federal principles and reporting guidelines.

After the 2019 federal election, when the Liberals formed a minority government, priorities shifted to better include early learning and child care, as the Trudeau government needed the support of the NDP. In 2021, the Liberal government announced the Canada-wide Early Learning and Childcare Plan (CWELCC) as well as an agreement for Indigenous early learning and child care. Although the Liberal government expressed a desire to collaborate with the provinces on the matter, the CWELCC was a unilateral decision, and the federal government did not try to reach a multilateral consensus prior to announcing it, despite having a framework in place since 2017 that could have facilitated such consensus-building.

This unilateralism did not lead to a direct conflict with Quebec for two key reasons. First, the CWELCC openly builds on child care policies in the province and gives the provinces credit for elements of the pan-Canadian policy. Thus, the objective is not to replace or interfere with existing provincial models. Second, Quebec was quickly able to unconditionally abstain from the policy, maintaining its exclusive jurisdiction over this policy while also receiving the same funding as the other provinces without being obliged to spend in this policy area.

Interestingly, when the time came to expand dental care coverage for more vulnerable segments of the population, the Trudeau government decided to forgo bilateral agreements like the ones it had previously used for both child care and health care financing,⁵ probably because this expansion was part of the supply and confidence agreement between the NDP and the Liberals that lasted from March 2022 to September 2024. In contrast, another health-related measure, the Pharmacare Act, which only covers a narrow range of medications, featured the negotiation of bilateral agreements with the provinces. On both issues, Quebec has stated it will negotiate an asymmetrical agreement to opt out and receive federal funding. Unlike other provinces, it has yet to update its dental care agreement. No agreements have been reached on pharmacare at the time of writing.

Multiculturalism, immigration and the Charter

It was the Liberals under Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau who initiated multiculturalism policy in 1971, and hence support for ethnocultural diversity is to a great extent hard-wired into the party. However, with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau came particular enthusiasm for an apparently limitless degree of such diversity.

That enthusiasm came to be symbolized by Trudeau’s statement to the New York Times Magazine that Canada could be the “first postnational state.” This statement was widely derided in Quebec, where culture and identity are viewed as fundamental components of society and nationhood. As such, the Trudeau government was philosophically at odds with the Quebec government, particularly under the CAQ, which values the French-Canadian core and roots of Quebec society especially strongly.

More importantly, perhaps, the Trudeau government’s approach to diversity translated into an immigration policy that saw a surge in immigrants, especially between 2022 and 2024 when the country received nearly half a million permanent immigrants annually. Premier Legault often publicly condemned the federal government for its immigration policies and called on the Prime Minister to substantially reduce the number of newcomers, including temporary foreign workers and foreign students. He also sought a more equitable distribution of asylum seekers across the country, arguing that Quebec’s capacity for integration had reached its maximum. In short, Premier Legault consistently criticized the Trudeau government for its immigration policy (with occasional exceptions, like the “closing” in 2023 of Roxham Road, which was used by most people coming from the United States to seek asylum in Canada), prompting Prime Minister Trudeau’s own condemnation of the Quebec government’s position on the immigration issue. This longstanding and very public spat between the two heads of government over immigration considerably strained the broader federal-provincial relationship.

On somewhat similar terrain, Quebec’s Bill 21 has also been a contentious issue between the federal and provincial governments, starting even before it came into force in 2019. For more than a decade, Quebec governments of all political stripes have proposed legislation to establish parameters for the integration of newcomers, specifically regarding the displaying of religious symbols by public sector employees.⁶ The key concept for all these proposed measures, including Bill 21, is laïcité, which has been heralded by Quebec’s provincial political class as a fundamental Quebec value.

Prime Minister Trudeau strongly disapproved of Bill 21 and its curtailment of religious freedom. Moreover, he went further, repeatedly stating that, should a constitutional challenge to this legislation end up before the Supreme Court, and despite Quebec’s use of the notwithstanding clause, the federal government would intervene. The Liberals are the party of the Charter, so it is not surprising that a federal Liberal government would want to defend the Charter before the courts. This meant that the Quebec government (as well as the Bloc Québécois on the federal scene) consistently criticized Prime Minister Trudeau for his intention to have his government intervene before the Supreme Court on Bill 21, decrying such a move as an attack on Quebec.

There was (and still is) a broader constitutional conflict of sorts between the federal and Quebec governments around Bill 21 relating to Quebec’s preemptive use of the notwithstanding clause. While the Quebec government considers such use perfectly legitimate and constitutional, the federal Liberal government, and especially Justin Trudeau, are sensitive to how the notwithstanding clause is used, considering his party’s and his own personal attachment to the Charter, a document created by his father.

The new arena of conflict: Ethnocultural diversity

Ten years of Justin Trudeau’s government produced some tensions with Quebec, but probably not to the degree that could have been expected in 2015. The fact that the expansion of social welfare undertaken by this government was largely in areas where Quebec already had programs in place explains the relatively mild nature of the tensions. What marked these tensions were the more recent concerns of Quebec nationalism: immigration and integration. In that vein, the Trudeau government’s position may reflect a shift in the conflictual terrain between the federal and Quebec governments, away from the traditional focus on pan-Canadian social programs and toward the management of ethnocultural diversity.

Notes

¹ The Liberals won 40 of the province’s 78 seats to the Bloc Québécois’s 10 in 2015 and formed a majority government. In both the 2019 and the 2021 elections, the Liberals won three more seats than the BQ in the province (35 to 32) and formed minority governments.

² Bruce Little, Fixing the Future: How Canada’s Usually Fractious Governments Worked Together to Rescue the Canada Pension Plan (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008).

³ Daniel Béland and R. Kent Weaver, “Federalism and the Politics of the Canada and Quebec Pension Plans,” Journal of International and Comparative Social Policy, Vol. 35, No. 1 (2019), pp. 25–40.

⁴ Daniel Béland, Shannon Dinan, Phil Rocco and Alex Waddan, “COVID-19, Poverty Reduction, and Partisanship in Canada and the United States,” Policy and Society, Vol. 41, No. 2 (2022), pp. 291–305.

⁵ Shannon Dinan and Daniel Béland, “Federalism and Social Policy Expansion in Canada during the Justin Trudeau Era,” Publius: The Journal of Federalism, Vol. 55, No. 2 (2025), pp. 379–398.

⁶ Daniel Béland, André Lecours and Peggy Schmeiser, “Nationalism, Secularism, and Ethno-Cultural Diversity in Quebec,” Journal of Canadian Studies, Vol. 55, No. 1 (2021), pp. 177–202.