Night of solid gains puts supporters in a celebratory mood
Québec solidaire’s Manon Massé got a hero’s welcome from a standing-room-only crowd of ecstatic supporters at the Olympia night club Monday night, as she told them their “historic” performance in this election is only a beginning.
“The political landscape in Quebec has changed for good; a new generation is taking its proper place,” said Massé, the party’s candidate for premier and co-spokesperson. “We will not form a government tomorrow, but we just won our first battle for the hope of our people.”
Massé congratulated premierdesignate François Legault on his successful campaign, but she warned him that her 10 newlyelected members will hold him to his promise to reform Quebec’s electoral system. And she told PQ Leader Jean-François Lisée that she and her party intend to take over the sovereignty project and make it “once again synonymous with openness and solidarity.”
It was a night of remarkable gains for a young party that held only three seats in Quebec’s last legislature.
“Nobody can say that Québec solidaire is not in the big leagues anymore,” said QS co-spokesperson Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois in his victory speech, after he was declared elected in Gouin, winning 59 per cent of votes cast.
Nadeau-Dubois said QS’s success is “not an accident. It is the incarnation of something new on our political scene. It is a warning to the old political parties ... a warning that Québec solidaire is coming.”
Massé handily took her Sainte-Marie–Saint-Jacques riding for a second time. In the other QS stronghold of Mercier, Ruba Ghazal firmly held onto the seat that the retiring Amir Khadir has held for the past decade.
QS doubled its seat count in Montreal: Andrés Fontecilla in Laurier-Dorion, Vincent Marissal in Rosemont, and Alexandre Leduc in Hochelaga-Maisonneuve were also elected. But the party also made a breakthrough winning its first seats off the island. QS picked up two seats in Quebec City, former Option nationale candidates Sol Zanetti in Jean-Lesage and Catherine Dorion in Taschereau. In western Quebec, Émilise Lessard-Therrien won a surprise narrow victory in Rouyn-Noranda-Témiscamingue, and Christine Labrie picked up the student-heavy Sherbrooke riding.
QS was the only party that made consistent gains in the polls throughout the campaign. Massé and Nadeau-Dubois made fighting climate change the focus of their campaign, an issue they hoped would resonate with younger voters, who will be most affected by inaction on greenhouse gas emissions. QS promised to stop all fossil fuel exploration and exploitation in Quebec and pledged to pass a law banning future projects that exploit hydrocarbons.
QS was founded in 2006 and Massé was the party’s first ever candidate that year, but the first QS candidate to be elected to the legislature was Khadir in Mercier in 2008. Khadir won a second term in 2012, along with Françoise David, and the two were joined by Massé in 2014 when she finally won her seat in Sainte-Marie–Saint-Jacques. David retired in 2017 and was replaced by Nadeau-Dubois in a byelection. Khadir chose not to run again this time.
Massé tried to sell her plan to take the province through an “economic transition” that would create 300,000 “green” jobs by 2030.
As part of that economic transition, QS had said it would have cancelled the Liberal plan to invest $12.5 billion over the next four years into a fund created to pay down the provincial debt. A QS government would have used that money to fund new projects to create jobs and fight climate change, such as an expansion of public transit systems across the province. Its $25-billion mobility plan for Montreal would have included Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante’s Pink Line, and extensions to the Blue, Orange and Yellow lines, as well as construction of a tramtrain to the east end of Montreal.
The party also promised to raise the minimum wage from $12 to $15 an hour, offer free dental care for kids and seniors, free schooling from daycare through graduate school, and CLSCs open 24/7. While critics often claimed QS had no way to finance what some dismissed as “pie in the sky ” promises, the party did offer a detailed, albeit unorthodox, financial framework.