The Parti Québécois has won the election again. But I increasingly feel that the kind of Quebec independence it stands for has lost the pull it once had.

I think Quebecers have the right to decide their own future, and that is not what this piece is about. The question went to voters in 1980 and again in 1995, and in its 1998 reference opinion the Supreme Court of Canada recognized that a clear majority on a clear question would give rise to a duty to negotiate.

A party can return to power, hold another referendum and keep rallying its supporters around the same flag. But to found a country worth founding, sovereignists still have to explain what, apart from leaving Canada, they intend to build together.

The sovereignist case, at its strongest

Most of what worries sovereignists has a real basis.

French speakers make up about 2 percent of North America’s population. The 2021 census found that the share of Quebecers who mainly speak French at home fell from 79 percent in 2016 to 77.5 percent, and the shift was sharper in Montreal.

The constitutional wound is real too. The 1982 Constitution was adopted without the consent of Quebec’s National Assembly, and Quebec has still not signed it. The Meech Lake Accord (1990) and the Charlottetown Accord (1992) both tried to repair the breach, and both failed. In 1995 the No side won by 50.58 percent to 49.42. Many sovereignists take all this as proof that the federation cannot accommodate Quebec as an equal.

Seen this way, much of what today’s PQ proposes, such as lower immigration, a stronger Bill 101 and a wary eye on Ottawa, has roots. It grows out of a minority’s long-standing fear about whether it can survive in North America, and the history and numbers above show that the fear is well founded.

A business plan that is all defence

In 2020, according to The Canadian Press, Paul St-Pierre Plamondon (PSPP) called himself an “entrepreneur en pays,” a founder whose startup is a country, and added that the joke said something about the mood of the moment. Likening the founding of a country to launching a business is an appealing image. But a startup rarely survives by guarding against the incumbent platform and listing its rivals’ faults. Investors and customers want to know what it can offer that nobody else can.

Today’s PQ has become very good at explaining what it wants to guard against: interference from Ottawa, the influence of English, and the strain immigration puts on public services. Each of these deserves debate. Put together, though, they still do not describe a new society that would be livelier, more open or more appealing than staying in Canada. That is not enough to persuade millions of undecided voters to give up the room Canada offers and take on the risk of building a country.

The Quiet Revolution, more than half a century ago, was a high point of modern Quebec history, and the people who led it were willing to build. Jean Lesage, René Lévesque and Georges-Émile Lapalme campaigned on Maîtres chez nous (“masters in our own house”), and then they got to work.

They brought the private power companies into Hydro-Québec, which put French-speaking engineers and technicians at the centre of a modern industry for the first time. They founded the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec to give the province its own pool of capital. They created the CEGEP system in 1967 and the Université du Québec network in 1968, ending the Church’s hold on education and giving young francophones from every class and region a way up.

That generation protected French by making it the language of engineering, finance and the university.

Neither the CAQ, just voted out, nor the returning PQ has shown anything like that ambition. Many of the institutions that broke new ground back then have since become shelters for vested interests and bureaucratic habit.

The Quebec model is showing its age

Statistics Canada data put Quebec’s labour productivity below Ontario’s and the Canadian average in every year since 1997: in 2024 an hour of work in Quebec produced about $59 of output, against about $62 in Ontario (in 2017 dollars). The per capita GDP gap with Ontario shrank from 12.2 percent in 2015 to 8.6 percent in 2023, but HEC Montréal’s productivity centre puts that down mostly to Ontario’s own weak performance, not to any leap forward by Quebec.

To pay for its large public services, Quebec carries one of the highest personal tax burdens in North America. Even so, its tax base and output are not big enough, and it still relies on more than $13 billion a year in federal equalization payments to balance the books. With independence, that money would be gone. How to close the gap, with productivity lagging and taxes already high, is the first question the PQ’s plan for independence has to answer.

In 2025, Quebec’s auditor general looked at CASA, the IT project behind SAAQclic, and found it had cost nearly $500 million more than planned, with the total expected to pass $1 billion. Accountability has been slow to follow. Back in 2005, former PQ premier Lucien Bouchard argued in the manifesto Pour un Québec lucide that whatever constitutional path Quebec chose, it would not prosper unless it dealt with productivity, debt and the efficiency of government.

The Quebec model has its achievements. Affordable, universal child care and relatively low income inequality are real successes, and the child care program was created by a PQ government in 1997. But a system that has trouble holding its own institutions to account, and whose productivity keeps lagging, will not become a more prosperous country by raising a new flag. If the PQ cannot offer an economic plan that improves on the status quo, its “business plan” for a country will look thin to people adding up their monthly bills.

Referendum night

If I had to pick one moment that marks the turn, it would be October 30, 1995.

On the night of the defeat, Jacques Parizeau blamed the result on “money and some ethnic votes.” In the same speech he used “we” to mean the francophones who had voted Yes, and suggested that a bigger share of the francophone vote would be enough next time.

A movement that said it was founding a country for everyone who lived there responded to defeat by sorting people by origin into “us” and those in the way. The people who voted No lived in Quebec too, paid the same taxes and carried the same civic duties. Putting them in a separate category amounted to taking back the promise of a country built together.

Many sovereignists later distanced themselves from those words, and Parizeau announced his resignation the next day.

Indigenous nations: the PQ used to do better

On Indigenous nations, today’s PQ is especially disappointing, because its own record used to be better.

In 1985, under René Lévesque’s PQ government, the National Assembly passed a motion recognizing the Indigenous peoples of Quebec as “nations.” In 2002 another PQ premier, Bernard Landry, signed the Paix des Braves with the Grand Council of the Crees, an agreement that dealt with the two sides as nation to nation.

Compare that with September 30, 2026, when PSPP said that under the interim constitution planned for the transition to independence, First Nations and Inuit would be consulted but would not have a veto. His reasoning was that an interim constitution and a permanent one have different approval thresholds. That distinction can be argued on procedural grounds. But a movement whose central cause is national self-determination will have a hard time explaining why other nations, whose ties to the land go back much further, should only be “consulted” when a new country is founded.

Indigenous peoples are nations, as the PQ’s own government recognized in 1985. If one side has already set the framework for the new country on its own, it is hard to see how consultation would be more than a formality. The PQ platform does promise support for Indigenous language and cultural education, which is to its credit. But cultural support is no substitute for making decisions together. A new country that began by repeating the pattern of the majority deciding for the minority would end up on the very side Quebecers have long opposed.

Québec solidaire, which is also part of the sovereignist camp, has tried something different. In its plans for a constituent process, it has at least explored writing a constitution on an equal footing with First Nations and Inuit. How that would work is still disputed, but it shows that the sovereignty movement can take a more open approach on this question.

Where newcomers fit

On immigration, the PQ’s story is just as defensive.

Housing shortages, a health system with limited capacity and the resources needed for francization are all legitimate reasons to talk about immigration levels, and wanting to change them is not xenophobic in itself. The trouble is that in the PQ’s immigration plan, newcomers come up mainly as a strain on capacity and a risk to French. The party explains in detail how it would set limits and test people, but says little about how they would take part as equals in designing the new country’s institutions, or share in its opportunities. If a common future asks those who arrive later to quietly fit into an identity that has already been decided for them, it will be hard to get people of every origin behind the project of building a country.

Language and the CEGEPs

Protecting French in North America, so that people can work, study and live in French with dignity, is a legitimate goal, and I don’t dispute it. Bill 101 sent the children of immigrants to French-language schools and changed the linguistic make-up of Montreal, and that contribution should be acknowledged.

The PQ’s plan to extend Bill 101 to the CEGEPs has its own logic. Many young people from francophone and immigrant families switch to the English system at the CEGEP level, and their working and social lives then tilt toward English as well. Bill 96 already caps enrolment at English CEGEPs; the PQ says that is not enough.

I still think it is the wrong direction. The previous government sharply raised tuition for students from other provinces and clawed back most of the tuition paid by international students, and the English universities took the brunt. McGill estimated in 2023 that the two measures, along with the expected drop in enrolment, would cost it $42 million to $94 million a year; Concordia attributes its run of deficits mainly to the new funding formula for international students and to immigration restrictions. On page 40 of its 2026 platform, PSPP’s PQ promises to extend Bill 101 to the CEGEPs, as well as to secondary-level vocational training and adult education. That would mean young people, just as they become adults and choose a CEGEP or a trade, would lose the option of studying in English.

Fluent English matters today for anyone who wants to take part in research, the global exchange of ideas or international trade. Figures cited in a House of Commons science committee report show English’s share of scholarly publishing worldwide rising from 64 percent in 1995 to more than 90 percent in 2019. A French-speaking society that is confident in its own culture can treat its young people’s bilingualism, or multilingualism, as an advantage in the wider world. The voluntary agreements on French that the Quebec government signed with the English universities in June 2026 show that French can be promoted without bans. Restricting choice by decree costs more, and is less likely to win young people over.

Conclusion

The openness and drive the PQ once had are getting harder to find in today’s party. A movement that can say clearly what it wants to hold on to, but not what it wants to create, is running out of ideals, even if the swing of the electoral pendulum has put it back in office.

Quebecers’ worry about their survival is real. But people of every background who live in Quebec should not have to pay for a national project built mainly on defence. If the PQ wants people to believe in independence, it will have to do what the Quiet Revolution generation did and say clearly what it intends to build.