On Monday, August 31, 2026, in the federal Quebec riding of Chicoutimi–Le Fjord, a three-way toss-up turned into a landslide overnight. If the instinct is to read that as a verdict on a party, a leader, or the country's mood, the record says otherwise: Quebec has been doing exactly this for close to seventy years, and it has never once meant what it looked like it meant in the moment.
I served in the Prime Minister's Office during the 2008 financial crisis and was Chief of Staff in the Senate of Canada during the 2020 pandemic. I also carry my own Conservative political history — which is exactly why I want to be careful here, and to stick to the numbers rather than the story that would suit me.
What actually happened
In the 2025 general election, this riding was a genuine three-way race. The Conservative incumbent won with 34.1% of the vote. The Bloc Québécois came second at 31.2%. The Liberals were third at 31.1% — thirty-seven votes separated second place from third [EC 2025]. The seat opened up when the Conservative MP accepted an appointment to the Senate.
On Monday, in the by-election to replace him, the Liberal candidate took 51.6% of the vote. The Conservative vote fell to 12.6% [EC 2026]. That is not a close race breaking one way — it is a landslide replacing a toss-up, in the same riding, under the same rules, thirteen months apart.
| Candidate | 2025 General Election | 2026 By-election |
|---|---|---|
| Liberal | 31.1% | 51.6% |
| Bloc Québécois | 31.2% | 32.8% |
| Conservative | 34.1% | 12.6% |
A Pattern Older Than Anyone Currently Governing
Here is what anyone reading a Quebec result needs to understand, and it is not a partisan point: it is a demonstrated pattern older than anyone currently in government has been in politics. Quebec swings hard in both directions on a schedule nobody can predict, and it has done this to every party that has ever governed federally.
1958 — The Union Nationale Swing
In 1957, Diefenbaker's Progressive Conservatives had won government with a bare plurality — 112 seats to the Liberals' 105 — while taking just 9 of Quebec's 75 seats [Diefenbaker Canada Centre]. Nine months later, Quebec Premier Maurice Duplessis put the Union Nationale's provincial political machine behind the federal Conservatives [Canadian Encyclopedia]. Quebec's Conservative seat count jumped from 9 to 50, and the federal government grew to 208 of 265 seats — the largest majority in Canadian history to that point [1958 election] [Brookings]. Four years later the coalition came apart: Quebec's Conservative seats fell from 50 to 14, most of them lost to a party that hadn't held a single seat in the province in 1958.
1984 — The Mulroney Sweep
The Progressive Conservatives held one of Quebec's 75 seats. That same election, they won 58 of them. Brian Mulroney became prime minister substantially because of that swing, in a province where his party had been, in historians' own description, virtually unelectable for a century.
1993 — The Bloc's Debut, and the Governing Party's Collapse
The Bloc Québécois, three years old and having never contested a federal election before, won 54 seats nationally and became the official opposition despite finishing fourth in the national popular vote. In that same election, the governing Progressive Conservatives collapsed from 169 seats to two nationally — the worst defeat of a governing party in the history of the Westminster system — and Quebec is where it started.
2011 — The Orange Wave
NDP strategists went into that campaign hoping for maybe three or four Quebec seats. They won fifty-nine, most of the swing landing in the campaign's final two weeks. The Bloc, which had dominated the province for two decades, fell from forty-nine seats to four and lost official party status essentially overnight. Four years later, those same fifty-nine NDP Quebec seats fell to sixteen — the wave didn't survive two full election cycles.
2024–25 — The Proof It Runs Both Ways in Under a Year
This is the one that matters most, because it is recent and because it proves the swing runs in both directions inside less than a year. In September 2024, a Liberal stronghold in Montreal — a seat the party itself called must-win — lost roughly fifteen points of vote share in a by-election and fell to the Bloc [LEV by-election]. Every outlet covering it called it a stunning defeat for the government. Seven months later, in the 2025 general election, the Liberals took the seat back.
Why This Swing, Why Now
What's driving this particular swing isn't a mystery. Of all Canadians, Quebecers appear the most averse to what's coming out of Washington right now, and the government's posture in that fight is what showed up in Monday's vote — in a riding whose aluminum and forestry sectors sit directly in the tariff's path. That's a real, specific reason for this swing, which is exactly why it's tied to this moment and not to anything permanent.
There's a provincial backdrop worth noting too. Quebec returns to the polls provincially on October 5, 2026, and the Parti Québécois has won four straight provincial by-elections, including one in the Chicoutimi provincial riding itself this past February. That's a different riding, with different boundaries, and an entirely different party than the one discussed above — but the region's political climate is clearly moving on both sides of the provincial-federal line right now. It deserves its own dispatch before October 5.
The Pattern, Not a Prediction
That's the pattern: not a Conservative problem, not a Liberal opportunity — a Quebec pattern, and every governing party of the modern era has been on both ends of it. No prime minister, this one or any other, gets to assume a result like Monday's is durable. That's not a prediction against anyone. It's just what seventy years of Quebec's own numbers say.
One brief caution: the swing doesn't erase the underlying exposure. No amount of Quebec goodwill changes the arithmetic of a country still doing the large majority of its trade with one partner. That's its own conversation, for another day.
Scope of evidence. All Chicoutimi–Le Fjord riding-level and 2025/2026 election figures are sourced directly to Elections Canada's official results. Figures predating Elections Canada's online riding-level tools (1958, 1962) are drawn from the Diefenbaker Canada Centre at the University of Saskatchewan, the Canadian Encyclopedia, and compiled election records, cross-checked across at least two independent institutional or academic sources in every case — never a single outlet. Modern-era national seat counts (1984, 1993, 2011, 2015) are well-documented public record. This is an analytical description of an electoral pattern; it passes judgment on no party and no individual officeholder.
