Weekly Writ 5/21: Can Fréchette pull off a Carney?
The CAQ's change of leadership has suddenly put the party on the upswing — and just maybe back in the race?
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It’s not yet at a Carney-level of turnaround, but Christine Fréchette has given the Coalition Avenir Québec new life and, just maybe, new hope that the October provincial election won’t be an unmitigated disaster for the governing party.
Last week in this newsletter, I highlighted two new Quebec polls from Pallas Data and Liaison Strategies that put the Parti Québécois and Quebec Liberals (PLQ) in a tie, with the CAQ rising to either 18% or 19%.
This week, we have a new poll from Léger for Québecor — and it suggests that the trends picked up by Pallas and Liaison are continuing to boost the CAQ from potential spoiler status to long-shot contender.
The poll still puts the PQ in first place with 30% support, down one point from when Léger was in the field a month ago. And it shows the PLQ unchanged at 28%. But it has the CAQ up five percentage points to 22%, a statistically-significant shift. The Quebec Conservatives have fallen three points to 11%, while Québec Solidaire is unchanged at 8%.
While that is a lot of movement for the CAQ in just four weeks, there has been even more movement if we look back to a late-March poll from Léger that was done before Fréchette won the party’s leadership race. Compared with that poll conducted only two months ago, the CAQ has catapulted forward by 13 points, with losses suffered by the PQ (three points), the Conservatives (four points) and the PLQ (five points).
The CAQ’s gains since the previous Léger poll in April have been concentrated in the greater Montreal and Quebec City regions, while the Conservatives have fallen back outside the two major centres. The CAQ’s biggest increase among the various demographic groups is a gain of eight points among the 55 and older crowd, which is now a three-way race between the CAQ, PQ and PLQ.
The Parti Québécois still holds the advantages, however, thanks to its 11-point lead among francophones. But that is smaller than the 13- and 15-point leads picked up by the earlier Pallas and Liaison polls. It’s starting to put a majority government out of reach of the PQ.
With these regional numbers (and using a simple swing model), the PQ would likely win around 58 seats, with the PLQ taking 33 seats and the CAQ surviving with 21 seats. Québec Solidaire (seven) and the Conservatives (six) would split the rest.
The PQ would still be heavily favoured to win the most seats with these kinds of numbers, but it is not implausible that the National Assembly could look a lot like the minority legislatures of 2007-08 or 2012-14 (with the parties somewhat re-arranged). Quebec’s experience with minority government has been relatively brief — both of those governments went back to the polls within two years.
But there is a tremendous amount of uncertainty heading into this pre-election campaign. Léger finds that 42% of PQ voters say their choice isn’t definitive, while 50% of Liberal and 60% of CAQ voters say the same thing. The potential for more significant movement between now and October is huge.
And though the PQ’s Paul St-Pierre Plamondon and the PLQ’s Charles Milliard haven’t had the best few weeks, this shift does seem to be because of Fréchette.
On who Quebecers prefer to be premier, Fréchette is up four points since last month to 20%, putting her just two points behind St-Pierre Plamondon. That’s the best score for a CAQ leader in a year, while St-Pierre Plamondon has slipped eight points on this question since September.
Most remarkable of all, the number of Quebecers who say they are satisfied with the government’s performance has surged 18 points since January to 47%, with dissatisfaction plummeting by half to 33%. This is the same sort of remarkable turnaround in government satisfaction numbers that we saw when Mark Carney replaced Justin Trudeau in March 2025.
These aren’t the firmest held views — nearly all of those who say they are satisfied chose the “mostly satisfied” instead of the “very satisfied” option. But even the intensity of opposition has fallen, with only 16% of Quebecers polled saying they are very dissatisfied.
More to the point, Léger found that 39% think Fréchette is doing an excellent or good job, while just 15% say she is doing a bad or very bad job. It’s been only a couple of months since two-thirds (or more) of Quebecers were upset with François Legault’s government.
Léger found that 35% of the CAQ’s current supporters are voters who left but have since returned to the party, while 22% say they are new supporters to the CAQ. That’s an interesting development. While not a huge portion of the total electorate, this suggests that about four or five percent of all Quebecers are now saying they’ll vote for the CAQ after having not supported them in the past.
There was another poll published this week that also looks good for the CAQ, but it comes with some big question marks. The poll by Mainstreet Research had the Liberals leading with 31%, followed by the CAQ at 25% and the PQ at just 23%, a score that is quite out of step with where every other pollster has put the PQ in recent months (and years).
Adding to the question marks was the very poorly-translated poll report originally published with a methodological statement that had either not been updated since the 2021 census or suggests that Mainstreet weighed the poll according to the 2016 census. More concerning was that the total sample of 1,225 “l’habitant” [sic] included only 21 respondents under the age of 35 and just 120 under the age of 50. Those were weighted up significantly (which adds to the potential for error), but even the weighting was unusual as 66% of the weighted sample was over the age of 50, while the percentage of Quebec adults actually over that age is closer to 50%.
Regardless of what this particular poll showed, the broader trend picked up by the Pallas and Liaison surveys, and now corroborated in the more recent Léger poll, suggests that the next election in Quebec is very far from a foregone conclusion. And, contrary to what might have been expected, the shift might not be simply because the Parti Québécois has put an unpopular referendum on the table. Instead, a change of leadership has entirely changed the game. Sound familiar?
Now, to what is in this week’s instalment of the Weekly Writ:
News out of British Columbia on a recall petition that just might have a chance (but probably doesn’t) and some cabinet resignations in Alberta.
The latest tracking polls suggest Mark Carney’s Liberals could be sliding a little. Is there something to the numbers, or is it noise? Plus, another poll shows Doug Ford’s Ontario PCs sliding, while Ottawa mayor Mark Sutcliffe holds a narrow lead in a divided field.
#EveryElectionProject: The 1972 B.C. Liberal leadership race.