Liberals aim for gains in Quebec as Bloc hopes for minority government

MONTREAL — Voters are heading to the polls in Quebec, where the Liberals are trying to gain enough seats to clinch a majority government and the Bloc Québécois is hoping an eleventh-hour bump in support will be enough to claim the balance of power.

The campaign in Quebec has been a tough slog for Bloc Leader Yves-François Blanchet, who has watched his party lose ground to the Liberals as U.S. President Donald Trump’s threats of tariffs and annexation dominated headlines.

Blanchet told reporters Monday after a casting a ballot in Beloeil, Que. that from his vantage point, the election has evolved from Trump occupying all the space, to worries about Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, to doubts about Liberal Leader Mark Carney’s sincerity after he failed to disclose that Trump brought up the 51st state idea with him during a call.

Blanchet said now that the campaign is wrapping up, he will be waiting impatiently for the results to see if his party’s objectives were met.

“I will invite you humbly to ask me that question tomorrow,” Blanchet said, declining to divulge exactly what those objectives are.

Partway through the campaign, the Bloc appeared to be at risk of keeping fewer than the 12 seats it will need to maintain official party status. The Liberals seemed poised to win close to 50 of the province’s 78 seats, despite leader Carney’s imperfect French, which would have been the party’s best showing in decades.

“In the first two weeks, there really wasn’t much space for issues specific to Quebec,” said political analyst Antonine Yaccarini. “We saw that the Bloc Québécois, in particular, was having a lot of difficulty attracting attention because we were only talking about Trump.”

But Yaccarini said the two leaders’ debates helped to bring other issues to the fore, and the Bloc seems to have narrowed the gap a little in the latter stage of the campaign. “Things have calmed down a bit,” Blanchet told reporters last week.

A Liberal government is the most likely outcome Monday night, Yaccarini said, but a small Bloc resurgence could help make the difference between a majority and a minority.

Yaccarini said she’ll be watching many of the Bloc-held seats around the Island of Montreal, which the Liberals are hoping to flip. “Early in the evening, if we see that there are Liberal breakthroughs around Montreal, it could mean that the red wave is very significant,” she said.

She added that the Bloc needs to win at least 20 seats — down from the 33 they currently hold — to be able to say it was a “decent campaign.”

The Liberals also hold 33 seats in Quebec. Poll aggregator 338Canada projects they’re on track to win about 40 ridings in the province, compared to roughly 24 for the Bloc.

Yaccarini said the Conservatives could also pick up a few more seats around Quebec City or in the Saguenay region, up from the nine they held at the dissolution of Parliament.

The NDP, which has been reduced to a single Montreal seat since 2019, is not projected to make gains in Quebec.

Polls are open Monday between 9:30 a.m. and 9:30 p.m. eastern time.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 28, 2025.

Maura Forrest, The Canadian Press