MONTRÉAL — When he was just 12 or 13 years old, Éric Duhaime had a poster of former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher hanging on his bedroom wall.

Whether behind the microphone, through his writing, or in politics, the Conservative leader has spent his career defending the idea of reducing the size of government — a cause dear to the Iron Lady.

But in Quebec, where political debate centred around the sovereigntist-federalist dichotomy, “I thought that in Quebec, it wasn’t possible to hold those kinds of views,” he once said in a radio interview.

Now the former radio shock-jock, 57, believes the time has come for Quebec to elect Conservative party candidates in a provincial election for the first time since 1935.

“This year is our year,” he said in August as he launched his party’s provincial election campaign. “2026 is the year of the Conservatives.”

Throughout the campaign, Duhaime has worked to draw a distinction between his party and the others, relentlessly hammering his rivals for being too bureaucratic and wasteful, while promising to address Quebecers’ cost of living through large tax cuts and slashing the size and cost of government.

If his party has the balance of power in a legislature led by a Parti Québécois minority, he has also promised to use his power to stop a referendum on sovereignty.

“We’re going to make sure that the ‘Yes’ bus and the ‘No’ bus remain nothing more than a fantasy of (Liberal Leader) Charles Milliard and (Parti Québécois Leader) Paul St-Pierre Plamondon and that they certainly don’t become a nightmare for Quebecers over the next four years,” he said Friday at a campaign stop.

The promise represents a shift for Duhaime, who took his first steps in activist politics as part of the sovereigntist movement.

At 16, while still too young to vote, the teenager was appointed president of a Parti Québécois chapter in Laval. In the 1990s, he worked for Bloc Québécois leader Gilles Duceppe.

He later went on to work as an adviser for then-Canadian Alliance leader Stockwell Day, before running for the provincial Action démocratique du Québec party in 2003, finishing third.

He has also worked for the National Democratic Institute, a United States-based non-governmental organization that promotes democratic institutions.

Duhaime spent the 2010s promoting libertarian ideas in Quebec as a radio host and columnist, where his comments on immigration, feminism, environmentalists, and labour unions regularly sparked controversy.

In 2016, when a pig’s head was left at the door of a Quebec City mosque, Duhaime described the Islamophobic act as a “silly joke.”

That same year, after a wave of sexual assaults occurred in the dormitories at Laval University, Duhaime once against triggered backlash by comparing the assaults to car theft and suggesting that the victims who had not locked their doors were partly to blame. He later apologized.

In 2017, he came out as gay in sensational manner, in a book in which he criticized the “gay lobby.”

“What I realize — and still do today, given the reaction from the gay lobby — is that for activists, homosexuality is an ideology; it’s no longer a matter of sexual orientation,” he argued in a 2017 interview with the LGBTQ magazine Fugues.

While Duhaime had said in 2017 that he didn’t have political ambitions, he appeared to change his mind during the COVID-19 lockdowns.

Duhaime, who took the reins of the Conservative Party of Quebec in 2021, tapped into frustration over pandemic health restrictions to lead his party’s steady rise from obscurity to one of the main five parties, bringing him increased media attention and a space on the debate stage.

In 2018, the party had finished sixth with about 1.46 per cent of the vote. Under Duhaime’s leadership, the Conservatives garnered the support of just over 530,000 voters in 2022, or 12.91 per cent.

The result wasn’t enough to get any Conservatives elected, although his share of the popular vote wasn’t far behind that of the three opposition parties that secured seats.

During the campaign, Duhaime has repeatedly presented his party as the only one offering something different. He’s promised to slash gas taxes by withdrawing Quebec from the carbon market with California, to lift the province’s ban on oil and gas extraction, to open the door to more private health care, and cutting $47 billion in state spending over five years.

He’s also had to repeatedly defend candidates who have made controversial statements, including some who have advocated joining the United States.

If polling is to be believed, his message is resonating, with poll aggregator Qc125 suggesting his party could be positioned to win more than 10 seats for the first time in modern history.

Duhaime recently appeared alongside the other leaders on well-known Quebec talk show Tout le monde en parle, where host Guy A. Lepage asked him what his best quality was.

“I’m perseverant,” he replied. “You can say that again,” the host replied, prompting laughs of agreement from the room.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 4, 2026.

Stéphane Rolland and Morgan Lowrie, The Canadian Press