Quebec Premier and leader of the Avenir Quebec coalition, François Legault, attends a press conference on October 4. Jacques Boissinot/The Canadian Press
When a reporter asked François Legault on Tuesday about his 2018 promise to reform Quebec’s electoral system — a promise he has since broken — the province’s premier turned the question around. He pointed out that during this year’s electoral campaign he had made the opposite promise: not to reform the electoral system.
This time, he said, he planned to “keep that promise.”
Mr. Legault made his remarks after Monday’s provincial election results reignited controversy over the fairness of Quebec’s first-past-the-post voting procedure.
His party, the Coalition Avenir Québec, won 90 seats out of 125 with just over 40 percent support. Three of the four opposition parties have cried foul after being left with crumbs in Quebec’s National Assembly, despite their respectable results in the popular vote.
Controversies about the voting system are not new. What is unusual this time is that it was the CAQ that initiated the latest round of proposed changes, said Jean-Pierre Charbonneau, former president of the National Assembly.
Mr. Charbonneau, who now heads the Mouvement démocratie nouvelle, a group seeking a more representative way of voting, said in an interview that the issue had been lying fallow for a few years until he was contacted in 2015 by the CAQ, then a new opposition party “They are the ones who relaunched the debate,” he said.
Regarding the post-election comments of Mr. Legault, added: “We suggest that he does as he did last time and does not honor his promise.”
The collapse of the CAQ was facilitated by a fragmented political landscape with five competing parties, most of which achieved remarkably similar popular vote results of around 15 percent. But Quebec’s winner-take-all system, which it shares with the rest of the country, gave each party radically different seat totals: the Liberals won 21, Quebec solidaire 11 and the Parti Québecois just three. The conservatives were left empty-handed.
“It’s a historic gap between the popular vote and the number of seats, and that’s very problematic for democracy in Quebec,” PQ leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon said. in a press conference on Tuesday.
Conservative leader Éric Duhaime agreed. During his concession speech Monday night and in subsequent interviews, he said the province is suffering from a “democratic distortion.”
Mr. Legault insisted that he had won a legitimate mandate, having received a plurality of votes.
“There is no perfect electoral system,” he added.
Mr. Charbonneau recalled that his group and the CAQ were actively involved in the efforts that brought Mr. Legault, the PQ and Quebec Solidaire to issue a joint commitment in May 2018 to reform the voting system. “It is no longer time for debate, it is time for action, it is time for this project to become a reality,” said Mr. Legault at the time.
Five months later, he won a first term with a government with a majority of 74 seats, despite receiving only 37 percent of the popular vote. Along the way, his enthusiasm for electoral reform faded.
In 2019, the Legault government introduced Bill 39, which proposed mixed proportional representation, where 80 constituencies would still be contested under the old system, while the other 45 would be decided based on the popular vote of the different regions . But, said Mr. Charbonneau, the bill included an obstacle not previously discussed: the requirement that a referendum be held to ratify the change.
The referendum could have passed where other such ballot measures had failed, including three in British Columbia alone since 2005. In Quebec, 70 percent of respondents in a 2019 poll said they wanted Legault’s government respect his promise to reform the vote.
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But after Bill 39 passed second reading, the government let it die under Standing Order. “We listened to the population, they are not interested … except for a few intellectuals,” said Mr. Legault during this year’s election campaign.
Mr. Charbonneau said the prime minister’s argument was “a crude falsehood. … He takes the population for morons.”
With a majority government, the prime minister could still strengthen his legacy by changing the system for the 2026 election, Charbonneau said. “He still has time to do it.”
The CAQ and the Liberals now have 111 of the 125 legislative seats. They have no incentive to reform the voting process that benefited them.
With no prospect of change soon, the remaining opposition leaders are now seeking to have their parties recognized as parliamentary groups, a status that grants research budgets and speaking time. in the National Assembly. But it is usually only offered to parties with at least 12 seats, or 20 percent the popular vote
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Mr. Plamondon, leader of the PQ, asked that his party receive a budget and a distribution of parliamentary questions in proportion to the PQ’s popular vote, “otherwise, it would be a deliberate violation of democracy.”
As a consolation prize, parties will continue to receive public funding based on their popular support, at $1.71 for each upvote.
Quebec’s party camp may fracture into five today, but the province had a tendency to elect majority governments with minority vote totals, even when the Liberals and the PQ ruled the province as a duopoly. The last “true” majority in the National Assembly, when one party won more than 50 percent of the seats and votes, was in 1985, noted Patrick Déry, deputy editor of Policy Options magazine in Montreal.
At the time, he said, Guy Lafleur had just retired from professional hockey for the first time.