Sylvie Trottier said she jumped for joy when she learned Poilievre on Sept. 10 won the leadership race with a resounding 68 percent in the first ballot. Trottier, a Quebec Conservative party supporter who was at a recent campaign event in Montreal with party leader Eric Duhaime, said Poilievre won her over when he went to Ottawa last winter to visit the “Freedom Convoy” – – the mass protest against the COVID-19 restrictions that blocked the streets around Parliament Hill. Poilievre “has a lot of Duhaime-like ideas,” said Trottier, 66. “He wants to take care of people and he’s pro-freedom of expression and pro-individual freedom … He’s going to make a wave for the Conservatives here.” Louise Poudrier, the Quebec Conservative candidate in Montreal’s Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, said her party — which has no formal ties to the Conservative Party of Canada — shares values with Poilievre such as freedom of expression and smaller government. “For people who are part of the Conservative coalition, the fact that Mr. Poilievre was elected leader of the federal Conservative party is a good sign; it’s encouraging for us,” Poudrier said in an interview. “It tells us that we are not alone in sharing these values.” Frederic Boily, a University of Alberta professor who studies Canadian and Quebec politics, said the federal Tory leadership race is “good news for Eric Duhaime in the sense that it reinforces his message, which has similarities with that of Pierre Poilievre’. Boily said Duhaime and Poilievre capitalized on discontent with public health measures introduced during the COVID-19 pandemic. And while almost all of those measures have now been lifted, public resentment remains, he said. “It creates the conditions for a certain kind of political message, one that finds that the state is going too far, that the state is spending too much, that the state is in debt,” he said in a recent interview, adding that inflation has contributed to this the indignation against the government. The Russian invasion of Ukraine also allowed Poilievre and Duhaime to talk about their support for an LNG plant and pipeline in Quebec’s Saguenay region. The day after Poilievre’s victory, Duhaime highlighted their shared support for the gas project, describing Poilievre as a longtime friend who volunteered in his failed 2003 provincial election campaign. “We have a common understanding on many issues,” Duhaime told reporters, adding that, like many of his party’s supporters, he is also a member of the federal Conservative party. Poilievre won nearly all of Canada’s 338 leading race ridings, including 72 of Quebec’s 78 ridings. Frederick Guillaume Dufour, a professor at the Universite du Quebec a Montreal who studies political sociology, said Poilievre’s performance in Quebec was surprising because the province has not traditionally supported politicians like Poilievre who have a caustic style and libertarian leanings. “I think it shows that there is a market for ideas that are more populist, more libertarian in Quebec, and right now, it’s Eric Duhaime who occupies that political territory,” Dufour said in a recent interview. Support for smaller government is not entirely foreign to the province. The Action democratique du Quebec — the party Duhaime supported in 2003 — advocated reducing the role of the state in Quebec society. This party merged into the Coalition Avenir Quebec in 2012. Since taking office in 2018, the CAQ has moved to the center-right, and the pandemic-related health measures introduced by the CAQ government have been accompanied by significant state intervention in the economy. CAQ’s move to the center created space for a more fiscally conservative party on the right, Dufour said. Also, CAQ leader Francois Legault sees the state as a tool for his nationalist economic policies, Dufour said, adding that Duhaime is a supporter of more free markets. Despite Poilievre’s impressive success in Quebec during his leadership campaign, Boily and Dufour say it’s not clear the new Conservative leader is well-known among Quebecers who aren’t members of the federal Tory party. And with recent polls putting support for the CAQ at more than 40 per cent — compared to just under 20 per cent for the provincial Conservatives — Legault’s party appears to remain the choice of conservative Quebecers, Boily said. . “Most of the Quebec right remains embodied by the Coalition Avenir Quebec.” Quebecers go to the polls on October 3. This report by The Canadian Press was first published on September 17, 2022.
