In English Canada, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre enjoys such a lead that it is hard to imagine him not winning a landslide victory over the Liberals, especially if Justin Trudeau decides to cling to power until the October 2025 election.
In Quebec, he so repels the majority of voters that he finds himself in third place in voting intentions, with 23% in the most recent Léger poll, down three points.
For Canada as a whole, the polls give him more than 40% of the vote, which puts him clearly in majority government territory and even, probably, with a large majority.
In Quebec, his current score probably indicates the status quo: around ten MPs, mainly in the Quebec region. A situation quite comparable to that of Stephen Harper’s governments.
In the rest of Canada, however, Mr. Poilievre appears able to rally voters who traditionally did not vote for the Conservative Party. Including among younger voters and union members, who rarely vote for the Blues.
In Quebec, not only does Mr. Poilievre not attract much more people than his traditional (and fairly limited) clientele, but he does not even succeed in becoming a real option for a substantial number of voters.
The Léger poll had the good idea of asking voters if they had a second choice and only 9% of Quebec respondents would be prepared to consider the Conservatives (compared to 16% for the NDP and 15% each for the Bloc Québécois and the Liberals).
Another interesting fact is that Mr. Poilievre would only obtain the vote of 15% of Quebec women, which is less than the NDP!
All this only demonstrates how limited the Conservatives’ growth potential is in Quebec. It’s not that Quebecers remain to be convinced. Rather, for them, the cause is already heard.
Yet Mr. Poilievre has advantages that most of his predecessors did not have: he is fluently bilingual and his wife is a trilingual Montrealer with political savvy who should therefore be seen often in Quebec during the election campaign.
Similarly, the issues Mr. Poilievre raises about mass immigration, housing shortages, inflation and the inability of younger generations to access homeownership affect Quebecers as much as the rest of Canadians. Yet Quebec voters do not want to make the Conservative leader the spokesperson for their grievances.
It’s not hard to guess the reason: Quebecers are allergic to Poilievre’s style, that of intimidation, insults, and a feeling that he has never encountered a quarrel in which he did not want to get involved.
So, not content with insulting federal politicians from other parties, he angrily attacked the mayor of Quebec and the mayoress of Montreal, calling them incompetent because they did not identify with his housing construction policies.
You can think what you want about Bruno Marchand or Valérie Plante, but their constituents don’t appreciate a federal party leader telling them how they should deal with the housing crisis in their municipality, especially when he has no interest in local issues.
Similarly, there are not many Quebecers who appreciate that an aspiring Prime Minister decides in advance that the transportation problems in Quebec must go through a third link and especially not through the construction of a tramway for which he “will not invest a cent.”
Because if the vast majority of Quebecers feel rather uncomfortable with the “Trump-style” adopted by the Conservative leader, they are just as, if not more, allergic to seeing a politician from Ottawa barge into debates that are not his responsibility and unilaterally decree what must be done in Quebec, whether Quebecers like it or not.
Traditionally, it was the Liberals who came with big boots in provincial debates and it was the Conservatives – from Mulroney to Harper – who had the reputation of respecting areas of jurisdiction.
With Mr. Poilievre, we have a politician who is looking for arguments and who has a way of doing things that we don’t like much in Quebec. Voters here have a hard time recognizing themselves in a politician who says he has all the solutions and who has no intention of discussing them with Quebec officials when he has decided that it will “go that way.”
No, Quebecers probably don’t like his way of doing politics, especially since it comes with a lot of insults and mockery.
Much more than the “Poilievre style”, it is his intransigence that Quebecers will be wary of.
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