Majority Eludes PQ at the Ballot Box

OTTAWA—After nine years or three consecutive terms under Premier Jean Charest and his Liberal party, Quebecers chose Pauline Marois and the Parti Québécois as their new leader in an election that ended with deadly gunfire.

While Marois was giving her victory speech at the Metropolis theatre in Montreal on Tuesday night, a man entered by the back door and opened fire, killing one person and wounding another. He then tried to start a fire in the vestibule. A 62-year-old suspect is in police custody.

Ahead of Election Day, the latest polls predicted that Marois and the PQ, a party whose cornerstone is Quebec independence, would land a comfortable majority government.

But the results show much more mitigated support for the PQ. In winning 54 seats, the PQ fell considerably short of the magic number to form a majority government in Quebec’s British-style legislative system: 63. Quebec’s provincial legislature has 125 seats.

The Liberals snagged 50 seats, leaving the PQ 9 seats short of a majority. The new Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) holds the balance of power with 19 seats. Québec Solidaire, a party with a staunch socialist platform like free education from preschool to university in all public or semi-public institutions, holds 2 seats.

PQ support dropped slightly from its tally at the last elections in 2008, from 35.2 percent to less than 31.9 percent.

The only party leader not to return to the legislative assembly is Charest, who lost his seat in Sherbrooke, a riding he represented from 1984 onward—first in federal politics, and since 1998 at provincial level.

During the campaign, Marois spelled out an agenda that was strongly left-of-centre with positions like a freeze on hikes to electricity, daycare, and tuition fees, despite Quebec’s public debt sitting at 55 percent of the province’s nominal GDP.

She plans to tackle the debt with a tax increase on Quebecers earning more than $130,000 a year and raising royalties in the mining industry.

The PQ also said if elected it would exercise so-called “sovereigntist governance,” a strategy to claim as many executive and legislative powers as possible from Ottawa until Quebec reaches sovereignty from the Canadian federation.

But Marois’ agenda might prove hard to accomplish, as the PQ faces strong opposition in both the Liberals and the CAQ.

These two parties sit right-of-centre, and in the campaign said their focus was stimulating the economy and opposing a pro-sovereignty push. Together, they represent 58.3 percent of the electorate.

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