Introduction
Quebec’s general election on October 5 is being contested by five parties. Four are right-wing: the pro-independence Parti québecois (PQ), expected to replace the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) in government, and the Liberals and Conservatives. The latter three are federalist or autonomist in constitutional orientation. Challenging these parties is the left-wing and pro-independence Québec solidaire, founded in 2005, which currently holds 11 seats in Quebec’s National Assembly.
This is a difficult election for QS. Quebec politics today are dominated by the rightward trend evident throughout the hemisphere and QS is far behind the capitalist parties in public opinion polls.
The on-line weekly journal Presse-toi à gauche supports Québec solidaire and the party’s left wing, now identified as “The Party of the Streets,” which aims to build support for QS in the unions and social movements. Also supporting QS in this election campaign is an open letter signed by about 100 activists and journalists, entitled “The only shield against austerité.”
In the following article, PTàG editor Bernard Rioux makes the case for voting for QS, while pointing to serious deficiencies in its electoral platform. My translation from the French.
– Richard Fidler
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Vote for QS to block the right and open horizons
In a Quebec political landscape where the other four political parties are proposing tax cuts, partial privatizations or a disengagement of the state, Québec solidaire’s program is distinguished by an opposite orientation. This is based on the idea that contemporary social problems do not come from a state that is too present, but from a state that is insufficiently equipped and whose resources are too concentrated in the hands of the society’s wealthiest. This simple reversal of the diagnosis has a political significance that goes beyond the content of each measure taken in isolation. It keeps alive, in the public debate, the hypothesis that broader public intervention is not only possible, but desirable.
The importance for the social left of voting for Québec solidaire despite the limits of the definition of its social project
This rejection of the logic of reducing the welfare state can be seen first and foremost in taxation. The tax on large fortunes, aimed at assets of more than $25 million, reaffirms the principle of redistributing wealth at a time when the other parties are proposing instead to reduce the tax burden on the wealthiest taxpayers or corporations. While the real return on this tax will depend on the extent of tax avoidance strategies, its very existence in the electoral debate prevents the issue of wealth distribution from disappearing from the political agenda.
By proposing a 3 percent cap on rent increases, a moratorium on evictions, a fight against speculation, and the penalization of abusive landlords, as well as the acquisition of thousands of properties to offer them below the market price, among other measures, Québec solidaire is not content to mitigate the effects of a market deemed to be failing. It holds that the state can once again become a direct actor — owner, regulator, even competitor — rather than a mere arbiter. It is exactly the same logic that underlies the project of public non-profit grocery stores: by capping the margins of large chains and creating public outlets, QS proposes that the state compete directly with the private sector instead of limiting itself to regulating it from without.
In health care, the massive return to CLSCs [community health clinics], placing them in the front line, goes in the same direction: it reaffirms the principle of a universal public system at a time when the growing use of the private sector is not condemned by the CAQ, the Quebec Liberal Party, or especially by the Conservative Party of Quebec, which presents the private sector as a solution to strengthening access to the health care system. Free contraception, eye and dental care for minors, and universal school meals are part of the same philosophy: to expand, rather than contain, the scope of what the community collectively undertakes to cover.
Québec solidaire also proposes a whole series of measures aimed at fighting women’s poverty and domestic violence, and giving victims of domestic violence more means to find safety and regain their autonomy.
What distinguishes this program from a simple policy of defensive resistance, however, is that it is not limited to protecting the gains: it opens up projects that, once started, can create their own dynamics of transformation. Reform of the voting system and referendums by popular initiative are not simple administrative measures: they change the rules of the democratic game themselves, which can facilitate the adoption of more ambitious reforms than those included in the current program. Similarly, the Constituent Assembly co-constructed with the First Peoples places the independence project within a participatory approach that goes beyond the traditional electoral framework and leaves the door open to a broader refoundation of the social contract.
Mission-based funding for community organizations, the climate emergency fund, the gradual phase-out of oil and gas infrastructure, and the massive development of free public transit for young people and seniors all work together to chart a coherent trajectory: each measure, taken alone, corrects a specific inequity, but as a whole this installs an institutional infrastructure — fiscal, democratic and energy — on which more important transformations could then be supported. It is in this sense that Québec solidaire’s program can be read as a brake on the neoliberal trend in Quebec politics.
Faced with the right-wing policies defended by the other major political parties, a vote for Québec solidaire is therefore a vote in defence of the interests of the popular majority. This is all the more important for activists from the various social movements — trade-union, feminist, popular, student, etc. A joint declaration by activists from these different social movements could be an important contribution to the defence of the gains of the popular majority.
The limits of defensive demands incapable of presenting an alternative social project to capitalism
Québec solidaire’s program shifts from the dominant right-wing discourse of the other parties. It reaffirms the legitimacy of public intervention, fiscal redistribution and market regulation. But this shift, as real as it is, takes place almost entirely within the existing framework of capitalist property and economic power relations. The problem is constantly posed in terms of insufficient or unfair results produced by the market, but rarely in terms of who controls the means of production and who therefore holds the decision-making power.
This absence has concrete effects on the nature of the solutions proposed. Let’s take the most telling example: the $2 billion “Trump provision” intended to support companies affected by the tariff war. It is a transfer of public funds to the private sector to help it maintain jobs and transform production, without any quid pro quo in terms of ownership, governance or workers' control over these companies. The state thus finances the survival and restructuring of capital rather than considering, for example, the nationalization of strategic companies or the establishment of workers’ cooperatives as alternatives.
The 2035 Transition Plan constitutes, in relation to the prevailing climate inaction and the refusal of the other parties to make a clear break with the exploitation of hydrocarbons, a set of important redistributive and regulatory measures. But, if we analyse these proposals from the systemic bases of the crisis, they fall short of the necessities posed by the climate emergency and the loss of biodiversity.
The crisis is described more as a problem of governance and poor choices than as the result of a capitalist economic system hung up on growth incapable of respecting planetary boundaries. Thus the 2035 Transition Plan states: “In reality, the climate crisis is the result of poor economic choices as well as ineffective and poorly targeted policies.” The proposed climate targets fall short of the scientific urgency highlighted by the IPCC. The nationalization of renewable energies is not presented as a priority. The industrial policy relies on partnership with employers rather than on public and democratic planning. Public transit remains partially commodified, since free travel is restricted to young people and seniors. The construction of public transit infrastructure is left to the private sector. The protection of the territory is mainly based on a regulatory framework, while the exploitation of mining and forestry resources remains largely in the hands of large Canadian and American multinational companies. The plan aims to strengthen food autonomy without calling into question agro-export agriculture, a large part of which is focused on animal production.
As for the independence project, the text presents it mainly through the prism of a constituent and participatory approach, co-constructed with the First Peoples—which distinguishes it from the Parti Québécois in terms of method. But there is no sufficiently developed link between independence and a critique of Quebec’s structural dependence on foreign capital, continental value chains or international financial institutions.
Independence is therefore thought of mainly as an institutional reform and as national recognition, rather than as a break with relations of economic domination that go beyond the Canadian framework alone. For an anti-imperialist reading of sovereignty, this leaves intact the question of who would really own an independent Quebec and what its relationship would be to militarist alliances like NATO and NORAD. These questions are all the more important when confronted with the PQ project, defined in its Blue Book as a project of independence which, in this analysis, remains marked by a neocolonial orientation.
Finally, in the field of labour itself, the program remains largely within the parameters of the existing wage system: an increase in the minimum wage, an improvement in conditions in the community sector, and the hiring of staff in the public services. These are real gains for workers, but there are no measures to affect economic democracy in the strongest sense: no mention of increased representation of workers on boards of directors, union vetoes over closures and relocations, expansion of the cooperative or self-managed sector, or a plan of nationalizations democratically controlled by those who work there.
It can therefore be argued that Québec solidaire acts as a brake on the neoliberal trend by reaffirming the role of the redistributive state. This is why the mobilization to broaden its electorate is an important issue for the left. But this strategic choice should not prevent us from understanding that QS’s proposals do not, on their own, provide a strategic compass for the radical transformation needed to shift economic decision-making power out of the hands of capital.
Such a transformation is essential to confront the economic, social and ecological crises faced by the people of Quebec, like the rest of humanity.
Voting for QS can thus help block social retreat and the slippage to the right, while leaving open the need to build, beyond its current program, a real ecosocialist alternative to capitalism.
Tuesday, September 29, 2026
