In Quebec, lifelong sovereigntists hold their noses to vote Liberal

MONTREAL — Richard Lacas made a tough decision last month. A staunch sovereigntist, he’s always supported the Bloc Québécois. He’s never once voted Liberal — until now.

In a recent interview, he said he still “absolutely” supports an independent Quebec. “But I think it’s pointless to be a sovereigntist if we become the 51st state,” he added.

For the first time, the 55-year-old real-estate broker is planning to cast his ballot for the red team.

“It really wasn’t a pleasant choice to make,” he said. “But for lack of a better option, I’m going for the Liberals to try to get someone who I hope will be in the best position to stand up for Canada and for Quebec.”

It’s not exactly a ringing endorsement of Liberal Leader Mark Carney. But many Quebecers seem to be making a similar calculation in the face of U.S. President Donald Trump’s threats of tariffs and annexation. In a province that has remained cool to Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre’s overtures, a critical mass of voters seems ready to choose Carney — and Canada — at least for now.

A Léger survey last week showed the Liberals polling at 42 per cent in Quebec, while the Bloc was tied with the Conservatives at a distant 23 per cent.

Those numbers could spell disaster for the sovereigntist party, which at the start of this year seemed to have a shot at forming the Official Opposition. The Bloc is now at risk of winning fewer than the 12 seats it will need to keep official party status after the April 28 election.

The Liberals, meanwhile, could be headed for their best showing in decades in Quebec. But while their support appears to be widespread, it may not run very deep.

Lacas, at least, expects this will be the only time he ever votes Liberal. “Honestly, I hope so,” he said. “I will definitely come back to the Bloc.”

Lacas has lived for 30 years in Terrebonne, an off-island suburb north of Montreal that has voted almost exclusively for the Bloc Québécois since the party’s founding in 1991. This time, poll aggregator 338Canada has the federal riding as a toss-up between the Bloc and the Liberals.

Other Bloc-held ridings around Montreal also seem to be within the Liberals’ grasp. Even Bloc Leader Yves-François Blanchet’s own South Shore riding is not a sure thing.

“All these seats could be in danger, because usually when one flips, they all flip,” said Philippe J. Fournier, 338Canada’s creator.

That would be a dramatic shift in a province that has seen the Bloc rival the Liberals in the last two elections, winning 32 seats to the Liberals’ 35, out of 78 in total. While the Island of Montreal is a Liberal bastion, the surrounding suburbs and other regions are fertile ground for the Bloc.

The Conservatives reliably win a handful of seats around Quebec City, while the NDP has been reduced to a single Montreal riding since 2019.

But dramatic shifts are Quebecers’ specialty, said Fournier. “They really are swing voters,” he said. “They really can turn on a dime.”

Not so long ago, those swings worked against the Liberals. In September, the Bloc flipped the Liberal stronghold of LaSalle-Émard-Verdun during a byelection in Montreal, reaping the rewards of discontent with then-prime minister Justin Trudeau.

Seven months later, the Liberals seem poised to take it back. In a recent interview, Liberal candidate Claude Guay said Trump’s tariff threats are the main concern he’s hearing from people in the riding. He said Carney is a “steady hand” at the wheel in a time of crisis.

Low voter turnout likely contributed to the Liberals’ loss last fall, said Guay, former president of IBM Canada. He wasn’t a candidate in that byelection and said he’s not sure he would have run for the Liberals under Trudeau.

Louis-Philippe Sauvé, the Bloc incumbent who has spent just a few weeks in Parliament, acknowledged that dissatisfaction with the former prime minister worked to his advantage last fall. “There are a lot of people who voted for me to get a message across,” he said.

He knows the context is different now. “I have no control over that,” he conceded.

The message Blanchet is trying to sell, with less than two weeks until the vote, is that the fog of uncertainty created by the Trump administration will only last until Canada and the U.S. negotiate a new free trade agreement. He has said Quebecers won’t be well-served over the long term if they throw in with a Liberal prime minister who “does not give a damn” about them.

“He doesn’t like us so much,” Blanchet recently said of Carney. “He will never say that he does not like us, but I don’t feel the love.”

Blanchet’s strategy in this campaign seems to be pinned on two rather tenuous predictions. One is that Trump will stop threatening chaos long enough for other issues to gain some traction.

The other is that if Quebecers become convinced the country is headed toward a majority Liberal government, they’ll get spooked and return to the Bloc.

“They will start saying, ‘Is that really what we want? Do we really want a majority Liberal government for four years with a guy we do not really know?'” Blanchet told reporters.

But that argument doesn’t hold sway with Fabienne Elliott, a longtime Bloc Québécois voter and former organizer for the party. Like Lacas, she’s planning to vote Liberal for the first time.

“Normally, I would totally agree,” she said. But she said she sees Trump’s apparent desire to make Canada a U.S. state as “an existential threat” and she fears he will seize on any internal divisions to destabilize the country.

She said she wants the Liberals to win a majority of the seats and the popular vote. “We need a united front,” she said.

Elliott, a 50-year-old civil servant, said she is not overly troubled by Carney’s imperfect knowledge of Quebec. And she said she thinks his sometimes hesitant French is getting better. “It’s not an insurmountable obstacle,” she said.

There’s still time for Carney’s Quebec honeymoon to end, of course. When the French-language debate takes place in Montreal on Wednesday, the Liberal leader will find himself squaring off for the first time against Blanchet and Poilievre, two leaders whose French is considerably better than his own. But it seems that it will take more than a few language flubs to slow the Liberal train.

If the Bloc vote collapses on April 28, it won’t be the first time. During the “orange wave” in 2011 that saw the NDP sweep the majority of Quebec ridings, the sovereigntist party was reduced to just four seats.

It was a dismal showing but the party recovered after Blanchet took over in 2019. Elliott said she believes that can happen again.

“I really hope this is the first and last time I vote for the Liberals,” she said. “As a sovereigntist, the sine qua non condition for sovereignty is that we still exist. Quebec will never be able to reach its full potential if it no longer exists.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 15, 2025.

Maura Forrest, The Canadian Press