The 13-Month Swing: Why Quebec Politics Is More Volatile Than You Think

Transcript generated automatically from the video and lightly corrected. It may contain errors.

On Monday in the federal Quebec riding of Chicoutimi Le Fjord, a three-way toss-up turned into a landslide overnight. And if your instinct is to read that as a verdict on a party, on a leader, on the country's mood, I want to talk to you out of that instinct because Quebec has been doing exactly this for close to 70 years, and it has never once meant what it looked like it meant in the moment.

I'm Joseph Soares. I served in the Prime Minister's office during the 2008 financial crisis, and I was a chief of staff in the Senate of Canada during the 2020 pandemic.

Here's what actually happened. In 2025, in the general election, this riding was a genuine three-way race. The Conservative incumbent won with 34.1% The Bloc Québécois came second at 31.2%, and the Liberals were the third at 31.1. 37 votes separated the second place from the third. That 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%. I wouldn't call that exactly a close race breaking one way. That's a landslide replacing a toss-up in the same riding under the same rules 13 months apart.

Now, here's what anyone reading a Quebec result needs to understand and know. And it isn't a partisan point, it's a demonstrated pattern that is older than anyone currently governing has ever 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.

In 1958, Diefenbaker's Progressive Conservatives had won government the year before with a bare plurality, 112 seats to the Liberals 105. While taking just nine of Quebec's 75 seats at the time. Nine months later, Quebec Premier Maurice Duplessis put the Union Nationale's provincial political machine behind the federal conservatives. Largest majority in Canadian history at the time. Four years later, the coalition came apart. Quebec's conservative seat count fell from 50 to 14. Most of them lost to a party that hadn't held a single seat in Quebec in 1958.

In 1984, 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 historian's own description, virtually unelectable for a century.

1993, the Bloc Québécois, 3 years old, never contested a federal election before, won 54 seats nationally, took nearly half the popular vote in Quebec, 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.

How about 2011? The NDP's orange wave. Party strategists went into that campaign hoping for maybe three or four Quebec seats. They won 59. Most of the swing happened in the campaign's final 2 weeks. One candidate was vacationing in Las Vegas when she heard that she had actually won her campaign. The Bloc, which had dominated the province for two decades, fell from 49 seats to four and lost official party status essentially overnight. So, 4 years later, those same 59 NDP Quebec seats fell to 16. The wave that remade the province's politics didn't survive two full election cycles.

And here's the one that matters most because it's recent and because it proves the swing runs in both directions inside less than a year. September 2024, a Liberal stronghold in Montreal, a seat that the party itself called must-win, lost 50 and 1/2 points of vote share in a by-election and fell to the Bloc. Every outlet covering it called it a stunning defeat for the government. 7 months later in the 2025 general election, the Liberals took the seat back.

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 70 years of Quebec own numbers say.

What's driving this particular swing isn't a mystery, either. 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 tariffs' 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.

One brief caution on that. The swing doesn't erase the 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.

The full numbers, each sourced directly from Elections Canada, are on my site, josephsoares.com. If this kind of read is useful, subscribe to the channel to get the next one by email for free. My book Leadership Under Fire is out October 6th [correction: the book is out October 20th]. Thank you for watching.