Quebec elects: the unexpected rise of left-wing Quebec Solidaire

EVEN though 37 per cent of voters made the anti-immigrant Coalition Avenir Quebec, the party in power at last Monday’s election in Quebec, the unexpected success of Quebec Solidaire, which got 16 per cent could give a boost to the international movement against austerity and the carbon economy and affect the forthcoming US elections from an unexpected quarter.

Until recently, Quebec Solidaire (QS) had been in fourth place in Canada’s French-speaking province (population eight million of Canada’s 36 million).

It is now third and, to all intents and purposes, the real opposition.
Successful campaigning by Native and non-Native people to stop the Energie-Est pipeline project last year and marches of “The planet enters the [electoral] campaign” have pushed climate change to the top of the QS political agenda.

For the first time, on September 21, a tornado hit the Quebec south-west region in a further wake-up call.

The economic programme of QS has phasing out fossil fuels — oil, gas and coal — as its centre, while the Liberal Party, which lost power, has been promoting the exact opposite.

In 2016, it forced parliament to adopt a law giving oil companies — largely subsidiaries of US or British transnationals — the power to expropriate lands for exploitation, including fracking. The Coalition Avenir Quebec’s programme is merely a carbon copy of the Liberals’.