Parti Quebecois declared winner of Quebec election.
Sonja Puzic, CTVNews.ca
Published Tuesday, Sep. 4, 2012 6:29AM EDT
Last Updated Tuesday, Sep. 4, 2012 9:22PM EDT
The Parti Quebecois has been declared the winner of the Quebec election by CTV News and will form a minority government.
By 9:30 p.m., the sovereigntist party had won or was leading in 59 ridings, just short of 63 seats needed in the legislature to form a majority government.
Quebec Election Results
Voter turnout was strong, with more than 52 per cent of eligible voters casting their ballots by 5:30 p.m. Tuesday. In the last provincial election, only 57 per cent of Quebecers cast their ballots.
As his Liberal government was ousted after nearly a decade at the helm, Jean Charest’s political future hung in the balance. An hour after the polls closed, it appeared that he could lose his seat in the riding of Sherbrooke to PQ candidate Serge Cardin.
Charest’s Liberal party has tried to dodge corruption allegations, stemming from questionable practices in the province’s construction industry.
A recently launched public inquiry will look at allegations of corruption involving construction firms, municipal and provincial governments and organized crime. It is alleged that a number of election officials received kickbacks from shady construction projects.
Charest also drew the ire of Quebec’s post-secondary students this year when he announced a tuition fee increase, sparking a months-long student uprising that resulted in violent clashes with police on the streets on Montreal and Quebec City.
Now, for the first time since 2003, Quebec has a sovereigntist government that’s poised to revive tensions with Ottawa and other provinces.
Marois, who will become Quebec’s first female premier, has said that she will contact Prime Minister Stephen Harper shortly after taking office to discuss the transfer of powers in areas like immigration, language and employment insurance from Ottawa to Quebec. If Harper refuses, Marois said that will only boost her case for an independent Quebec.
But although the push for sovereignty is the foundation of the PQ’s platform, Marois has said that she will only call another referendum under the “right conditions.”
Both Charest, a staunch federalist, and François Legault, the leader of the Coalition Avenir Québec, have tried to use the prospect of a sovereignty referendum as a way to lure votes away from Marois.
But many analysts say it’s unlikely that Quebecers will be asked to vote in a referendum until late in the PQ’s term.
A recent CROP survey placed voter support for sovereignty at just 28 per cent. The survey suggests support for independence has dropped eight percentage points during the election campaign.
Before Charest was elected to the first of three consecutive terms in 2003, PQ governments under Bernard Landry and his predecessor, Lucien Bouchard, had both promised to call a referendum when winning conditions were in place.
Neither held independence votes.
Referendum talk sparks concerns
It remains to be seen how Quebec’s federalists and anglophones will react to a PQ government. Some realtors in Ontario and Quebec have already noted an increase in calls from English-speaking Quebecers who are mulling a move to Ontario or other parts of Canada.
Marois’s promise to extend Bill 101, the law which enshrines French as the province’s official language, to small businesses and colleges, has many non-French speakers worried about their education and employment prospects.
When the first Parti Quebecois government was elected in 1976, under Rene Levesque’s leadership, the rest of Canada panicked at the prospect of Quebec’s secession. The province’s anglophones left in droves and the country’s stock and bond markets reacted negatively, lowering the value of the Canadian dollar.
The PQ’s referendums on Quebec sovereignty in 1980 and 1995 both failed, although the latter one was defeated by a very narrow margin.
