Tories rise in Quebec during lockdown
A surprising new Leger poll has put Éric Duhaime’s Parti conservateur du Québec (PCQ) in third place among voters, seven months from the province’s Oct. 3 elections.
“If François Legault was expecting to be re-elected easily, it’s going to be more difficult now,” pollster Jean-Marc Léger said. “He thought the challenge would be coming from the left, but now it looks like it’s coming from the right.”
Duhaime, a well-known Quebec City radio host and columnist who became leader of the provincial Conservatives last April, has 14 per cent of voter intentions.
This puts them six points behind Dominique Anglade’s second-place Liberals, but ahead of the leftist Québec Solidaire — often seen as heir apparents in Quebec politics — and the separatist Parti Québécois.
Although Legault’s ruling Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) party still has a dominant lead with 41 per cent of voter support, that figure is down six points since October.
Duhaime and the PCQ, on the other hand, have surged nine points since December.
Downplaying the poll results, Legault claims he saw it coming. “I told you I expected the gap to close eventually. I was right,” he said.
Observers believe this shift in polling numbers, one of the most significant since Legault and the CAQ first came to power, is the result of COVID fatigue and an increasing dissatisfaction with Legault’s management of the pandemic.
Duhaime has been stridently critical of provincial health measures, including “abusive” curfews and vaccine passports. “If stricter measures were effective, Quebec would have the best track record, instead of the worst,” he said in January.
He opposed restaurant and small business closures, the renewal of the provincial state of emergency, and Legault’s proposed health tax for the unvaccinated (which was abandoned).
As such, Duhaime has managed to harness the frustration of a growing number of Quebecers who have been subjected to some of the strictest and longest lockdown measures in North America.
Despite the government announcing an end to lockdown measures by March 14, 26 per cent of the 1,017 Quebecers questioned in the February poll say that’s not fast enough.
The Conservatives have been appealing to people who are anti-system on both sides of the aisle, according to Léger — “all those who are against health measures.”
Duhaime, 52, got his start in politics as an adviser to Stockwell Day in 2001. He has worked with Lucien Bouchard, and ran for Mario Dumont’s Action démocratique du Québec in 2003.
He has been controversial as a radio personality, associated with the “radio-poubelle” or “trash radio” group of hosts in Quebec City, accused by their detractors of promoting Islamophobic and anti-immigrant sentiment.
Among other issues, he’s defended the convoy protests and has vowed to further develop Quebec’s natural gas sector while taking on environmentalists.
He also happens to be the first openly gay leader of a Conservative party in Canada.
“Something is happening,” says Léger. “You can no longer dismiss him and this is no longer a marginal party.”