Parti Québécois wins a minority and puts a referendum back on the table

The Parti Québécois won Monday's Quebec election and will form a minority government, the first time the sovereigntist party has held power since 2014. Leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, 49, fell short of the 64 seats he needed for a majority in the 127-seat National Assembly. Late counts put the party near 59 seats.

The seat total hides the vote. The Montreal Gazette reported that the PQ took 46 percent of the seats with 28 percent of the vote. That split is the first constraint on the result. A party that did not win a plurality of ballots in the province as a whole will need other parties to pass a budget, survive a confidence vote, and do anything that looks like a referendum law.

St-Pierre Plamondon said from party headquarters in Montreal that a new political cycle was beginning. He also said he had heard the voters. In the Associated Press account he put it this way: Quebecers elected the Parti Québécois asking it to work with the other parties. The referendum promise is still there. He has said the vote on independence would wait until US President Donald Trump leaves office in 2029. A minority government can fall before that date. Another election is a live risk, not a hypothetical.

The Coalition Avenir Québec, which entered the campaign with 79 seats, was shut out. Leader Christine Fréchette conceded, took responsibility for what she called a difficult result, and lost her own seat in Trois-Rivières. She said governing Quebec was the greatest honour she had had, and that she had Quebec tattooed on her heart. The wipeout ends a run that began when François Legault took the CAQ into office in 2018 on a platform that treated sovereignty as settled and sold itself as a manager of immigration, language and the economy.

The Quebec Liberal Party will form the official opposition with 40 seats, nearly double the 21 it won in 2022, then the worst result in its history. The Liberals had campaigned as the federalist alternative to the PQ. The Quebec Conservative Party elected members to the National Assembly for the first time in this cycle. Between them, the opposition benches have the numbers to block a referendum bill if they choose to vote together.

The PQ's path back was steep. The party was reduced to three seats in the 2022 general election. It is now on course for something close to 59. That recovery does not settle the independence question. Quebec has already held referendums, in 1980 and 1995. The 1995 vote failed by a thin margin. BBC reporting on this election cited polls putting support for leaving Canada at about 30 percent. A government elected on 28 percent of the vote does not, by itself, carry a mandate to reopen that question. St-Pierre Plamondon has treated the referendum as a first-mandate promise anyway, with the Trump timetable as the delay.

Prime Minister Mark Carney now has a sovereigntist premier in Quebec while Alberta is running its own argument about whether to hold a referendum. The files are not the same. Quebec's independence debate is older, and the National Assembly can set a provincial vote without Ottawa's blessing, as it did in 1980 and 1995. Carney's Liberals remain the federal party with the strongest Quebec bench, but an August tariff fight with Washington had already pulled his numbers down in the province before Monday's count.

The practical fights will come first. Immigration powers, the place of the monarchy in provincial oaths, and the language rules Legault tightened are all items St-Pierre Plamondon has flagged. None of them requires a referendum. All of them require a partner in a house where his party is short of 64. He said Quebec will never change its geographical position, and that the province has an interest in working with its neighbours. The seat math says the same thing in a colder form. The PQ can name a premier. It cannot pass a defining bill alone.