The Quebec election is a triumph of neoliberalism

A little less than two weeks before election day, the leader of the Conservative Party of Quebec (PCQ), Eric Duhaime, asserted in an interview for Midi info, Radio-Canada’s flagship midday radio show “I don’t know who’s going to win come October 5, but this campaign, as it stands – we have won it. […] If we’re talking about asylum seekers, natural gas, the reduction of public function employees, and the elimination of bureaucracy, it is because of Conservatives.” 

In his signature irreverent style, Eric Duhaime’s comments aimed at highlighting the outsized influence that his party’s brand of libertarian right-wing politics has had on the electoral campaign. Though it would be an overstatement of the PCQ’s power (despite their growing popularity) to credit them entirely with the general framing of this campaign, Duhaime’s comment does highlight a noticeable rightward shift in the political landscape of Quebec. 

This shift has articulated itself in the policy propositions of most of the main parties. Indeed, the alignment between the financial frameworks presented by the Parti Québécois (PQ), the Liberal Party of Quebec (PLQ), the ruling Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ), and the PCQ has been remarkable yet unusual in their shared commitment to reducing public spending, albeit to varying levels. Only Quebec Solidaire (QS) has proposed a financial framework which maintains the size of the state and its spending costs. 

This should be understood in the context of thirty years of neoliberalism in the province, following the adoption of the 1996 “Zero Deficit” bill, which legally binds the government to limit its public spending and has guided Quebec governments—regardless of party—through cycles of austerity that have severely undermined public institutions. This has understandably bred frustration among voters who have felt the effects of diminished services. 

It is not surprising then that we have found ourselves in a campaign which increasingly feels like a referendum on the future of Quebec’s battered social democracy. Four main issues have been key battlegrounds for this debate: the rising cost of living, the size of the state, immigration, and Quebec’s independence.

Cost of living

The rising cost of life has been the flagship issue of this campaign, with 38 percent of voters wanting it to be the main priority of the next government. There is, however, a generational divide in the electorate—with nearly half of 18-34 year-old voters naming this issue as their main priority, compared to a little less than a third of 65 + year-old voters. It is worth noting that these same young voters also tend to be mostly drawn to QS, the PQ, and the PCQ, three parties representing greater vision for change, albeit highly different visions.  

This generational divide is also reflected in the parties’ proposals to address this cost-of-living crisis. 

On housing, the largest expense item for Canadian households, QS is the only party which has announced any measures to help renters—they propose to index annual rent increases to inflation, to create a national rent registry, and to ban evictions when  the inoccupation rate is below three per cent. That party also happens to be holding the most voting intentions among 18-34 year-old voters (27 per cent), the demographic most likely to be renters. 

The other parties have focused their housing platforms around facilitating access to property and supporting the conversion of existing properties into intergenerational homes. The PQ and the CAQ have both proposed increasing tax credits for first-time homeowners, while the PLQ would support these buyers by waiving the welcome tax. The PCQ,  on the other hand, proposes simplifying the provincial building code and reducing renter protections to create a friendlier environment for landlords and housing developers.

On inflation and grocery prices, QS distinguishes itself through more experimental projects like a plan to create 15 publicly owned grocery stores.  Most other parties focus their efforts on reducing the sales tax on key items. The PCQ offers little to support households other than the temporary suspension of the provincial gas tax. 

The PQ manages to stand out on the issue of family supports. Having made the province’s low birth rate a campaign issue, the party has vowed to encourage Quebecers to have more kids by increasing the government’s child allowance for the 3^rd and 4^th child, and creating 10,000 additional subsidized daycare spots. The party has framed these measures around the goal of bringing the province’s birth rate up to 1.9 from its current 1.36—a goal which has led some to qualify the PQ as natalist, a label the party rejects.

Size of the state

The influence of the PCQ is most notable on the topic of the size of the state. While the PCQ has always been upfront with its desire to drastically reduce the size of the state by eliminating 20,000 full-time civil service jobs, they are far from alone in this initiative. 

Following suit, the PLQ has proposed cutting 12,000 full-time civil service jobs, while the CAQ and the PQ respectively propose cutting 2,900 and roughly 2,000 (or 2.5 per cent of the total) full-time positions. All four parties have promised that these cuts would not negatively affect services and thus would not be felt by the population—which has left economic experts perplexed given the strain under which public services already operate. 

Quebec’s Public and Parapublic Service Union (SFPQ) has expressed concerns about the civil service sector, which has already shrunk in the last few years. Using hospital wait times as an example, the union warns that “they always say they’ll cut on bureaucracy and regulation, and that it won’t affect services for citizens but that’s not true. For several years now, there have been long wait times.” Those wait times have increased over the past decade. 

Both the PCQ and the CAQ have also proposed more privatization in the health care system. Those parties have proposed hybridization measures (programs which would see the state commission services from the private sector), despite governmental data itself showing that medical interventions like surgeries commissioned to private clinics end up being more expensive to the state than those done in public hospitals. 

Immigration

Immigration has been a polarizing issue in this campaign. The PCQ has led the anti-immigration charge—proposing a change in the selection process that would  prioritize immigration from “democratic” countries (without defining criteria for declaring a country democratic), and a 33 per cent reduction to social assistance benefits for asylum seekers despite the current monthly allowance already not being enough to cover basic needs. PCQ leader Eric Duhaime has routinely demonised asylum seekers, depicting them as a privileged class in Quebec with outsized access to free services, and as “fake refugees” by falsely claiming that over a third of asylum claims were fraudulent when data from the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada shows that only 2.3 per cent of claims were considered fraudulent in the last year. 

Aligning themselves with this alarmist vision, the PQ has promised to bring down the annual number of permanent immigrants by 10,000 and halve the number of temporary immigrants. The party would also increase linguistic requirements for admitted immigrants as a measure to address what it describes as the “worst backsliding of the French language” in a generation. The PQ also sees a correlation between French decline and immigration in public schools in Montreal and Laval, where they say immigrant students no longer use French as the common language because they “tend to group together according to their origins.” The party is promising a public inquiry into the “language of socialization” in schools. This rhetoric makes an allusion to communitarianism, a concept popularized in France which accuses immigrants of refusing to integrate, while dismissing the social structures that might hinder that process. 

While the CAQ and PLQ’s discourse on immigration have been much milder this campaign, they have both presented a market driven vision of immigration, which prioritizes  newcomers based on their ability to fill sectoral labor shortages. Those parties would both maintain the current permanent immigration thresholds, though the CAQ would still require them to pass a Quebec values test and would reduce the number of temporary workers. 

On this issue, again, QS operates in its own lane by proposing an increased number of permanent immigrants and a further regionalization of that immigration by creating incentives for newcomers to settle outside of urban centres. 

Independence

For months, the PQ has been unequivocal on their intention to hold a referendum on Quebec’s independence during their first term in power. The recent tariff war with the United States and the economic instability created by it has led the party to somewhat moderate its stance by promising to wait until the end of Donald Trump’s presidency before holding a referendum. 

Though there has been a clear resurgence of the independence movement, most notably among the youth, the idea remains fairly unpopular, with 70 per cent of voters saying they would vote “No” if a referendum were to be held today. Nonetheless, the PQ still leads in polling intentions—a contradiction that points to relative apathy of the electorate about this question. Only 55 per cent of self-identified PQ voters—the voters most likely to support independence—say they would even vote in favour of independence in an eventual referendum. 

The PLQ has positioned itself as the only openly federalist party running, but given the aforementioned voter apathy on the question, it does not seem to have resulted in increased support. 

What’s been forgotten?

Among all these issues, a number of other key issues have received very little air time in this election campaign. 

Chief among them seems to be the environment, which has seemed to only ever come up in response to the PCQ’s proposition to overturn the current ban on natural gas extraction (via fracking). Though every party has included measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, it has not seemed to be a particularly salient issue for any of the parties. 

Another noticeably absent issue has been education—despite the campaign taking place barely a month into the school year which, like most years, began with over 3,000 missing teachers. Finally, the culture industry has also been absent from conversations in this campaign. This is particularly concerning given the industry’s reliance on public funding which makes it especially vulnerable to the effects of the austerity measures. Moreover, in a campaign where themes of sovereignty and linguistic preservation have been so prevalent, the lack of conversations about the vitalization of the province’s cultural industry begs the question of what this call to protect Quebec’s rich and distinct culture really means for the political class. 

Neoliberalism has been the lingua franca of Quebec governments since the late 1990s, but this election is highlighting the lack of meaningful alternatives. For the most part, what the parties are putting to voters on October 5 are different degrees of departures from what made the Quebec model so unique in North America. Quebecers would do well, then, to consider what would be lost in that departure.

About the author

Geneviève Vande Wiele Nobert

Geneviève Vande Wiele Nobert is an associate researcher at l’Institut de recherche et d’informations socioéconomiques (IRIS) and a PhD student at the University of Toronto’s Women and Gender Studies Institute. Her work attends to processes of othering, racial capitalism, and collective memory.