First Reading is a Canadian politics newsletter curated by the National Post’s own Tristin Hopper. To get an early version sent directly to your inbox, sign up here.
TOP STORY
With Monday’s election results in Quebec, the province may be in for one of the more “anti-woke” programs in the country, particularly on the issue of immigration.
The province’s premier designate, Parti Québécois Leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, has denounced the “open borders” policies of the federal Liberals, declared multiculturalism a failure and he’s even led campaigns against “wokisme” in politics.
And PSPP, as he is known, is set to head up a minority government with the breakthrough Quebec Conservative party potentially holding the balance of power.
Led by former radio jockey Eric Duhaime, the 19-member Quebec Conservative caucus will be the first representatives of a named “conservative” party to sit in the Quebec National Assembly since the 1930s.
And in a trend repeating itself across the country in recent years, Duhaime’s Conservatives are receiving outsized levels of support from youth voters.
An Oct. 3 Pallas Data poll found that the Quebec Conservative party was the single most popular option for Quebec voters aged 18 to 34. The new caucus will also include 23-year-old Éloïse Coulombe, the youngest MNA in the province’s history.
One of the more immediate policy implications of the new government is likely to be tighter restrictions on immigration, and an explicit push toward increasing the fertility rate as an alternative to accepting immigrants.
On Oct. 3, the Parti Québécois released a list of seven priorities it would pursue if elected. Among them were pledges to cut red tape, reduce gasoline taxes and “retake control of our immigration system.”
For months, PSPP has explicitly cited high immigration as a driver of housing unaffordability, health care backlogs and even decreased public safety. Rising crime rates in Quebec were “linked to demographic changes, we can’t ignore that,” he told the Journal de Québec last year.
Specifically, the Parti Québécois has pledged to limit permanent immigration to 35,000 per year.
For context, the last year Quebec accepted fewer than 35,000 permanent immigrants per year was in 2000, when they brought in 32,502.
Last year, 60,132 permanent immigrants settled in the province, and 59,440 the year before that.
The party’s official immigration platform calls the issue an “urgent situation” that has been imposed on Quebecers “without our consent” – and even includes a clause about using “automation” and “robotics” to reduce dependence on foreign workers.
When Prime Minister Mark Carney hinted in a New York Times interview last month that his government was planning a “controlled increase” to immigration, PSPP responded with a statement accusing Ottawa of attempting to subvert “Quebec democracy.”
“A PQ government would oppose from day one any immigration increase imposed by the federal government,” he said.
Quebec, just like the rest of Canada, was hit by an unprecedented surge in temporary migration greenlit in the immediate aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic.
As recently as 2015, the number of non-permanent residents entering the province was about 3,600 per year. In 2023, the peak of the post-COVID migration surge, that number swelled to 125,092.
Quebec has also been particularly hard hit by a wave of asylum seekers who began entering Canada at elevated rates beginning in 2017. Until it was closed in 2023, the Roxham Road illegal border crossing into southern Quebec was the primary conduit for such migrants.
In 2023 alone, an estimated 60,000 asylum seekers registered in Quebec, resulting in “overflowing” homeless shelters, according to then Premier François Legault.
An estimated 190,000 asylum seekers are still in Quebec, representing more than a third of the Canadian total of 500,000.
Duhaime, for his part, made the issue a recurring theme of his campaign, stating that at least one third of asylum seekers had come to “profit off our social benefits” and pledging to cut their social benefits.
He also proposed sweeping incentives to drive up the Quebec birthrate, which is at a historic low of 1.36 children per woman, even if it’s above the Canadian average of 1.25.
The Parti Quebecois similarly rolled out a campaign promise to “slow the falling birth rate.”
“Every Quebecer who wants children should be able to start a family,” PSPP said in a statement.
For both Duhaime and PSPP, the issue hasn’t just been the raw numbers of immigration, but the risk of cultural dilution.
In an April press conference, the PQ leader accused the federal government of succumbing to a “doctrine of postnationalism” that had caused it to embrace “open borders.”
Canada, he said, was unwilling to acknowledge that this had caused a crisis of foreign interference, be it from China, India or the Muslim Brotherhood. “I think this idea of a postnational Canada is dysfunctional,” he said.
Last week, as the PQ cruised toward victory, the Quebec conservative columnist Mathieu Bock-Côté said that it augured a Quebec “really turning the page on multiculturalism and unchecked immigration.”
Although Quebec generally tracks left on issues such as assisted suicide, the province routinely features open discussions of topics that are still largely treated as untouchable by mainstream politicians in the rest of the country.
Representatives of several mainstream Quebec political parties, for instance, are on record as saying that “multiculturalism” is a failure, including the province’s most recent immigration minister, Jean-François Roberge.
“We think ghettoization does not serve social cohesion,” Roberge said last year.
Quebec was also largely immune to an early 2020s phenomenon of Canadian institutions issuing reports and statements declaring themselves guilty of “systemic racism,” mandating land acknowledgements and implementing identity-based quotas in official hiring.
In 2024, the Quebec National Assembly unanimously passed a motion endorsing merit-based hiring over EDI-style hiring based on identity quotas.
IN OTHER NEWS
Quebec’s election on Monday night also marked the complete electoral destruction of the Coalition Avenir Quebec, the party that has governed the province through two consecutive majority governments.
It’s one of only a very few instances in the history of Westminster parliaments of a party instantaneously going from a majority to complete collapse. For Canada, the last time was New Brunswick in 1987, when the incumbent Progressive Conservatives lost an election so badly that their Liberal opponent ended up winning every single seat in the province’s legislative assembly.
It’s also been a particularly wild ride for a party that is only 14 years old. The CAQ first came into being as a registered political party in November, 2011.
First Reading is a Canadian politics newsletter curated by the National Post’s own Tristin Hopper. To get an early version sent directly to your inbox, sign up here.
