Chris Selley: Quebec’s doomed new premier can at least save her party from chauvinism

MONTREAL, QUE.: April 12, 2026 -- Christine Fréchette smiles after being named the new leader of the Coalition Avenir Québec in Drummondville, east of Montreal Sunday April 12, 2026. Photo by John Mahoney /Montreal Gazette

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You never know in Quebec. The Parti Québécois under Paul St-Pierre Plamondon (nicknamed PSPP) looks like the safe bet to win the next election, which has to occur by October. But his quixotic insistence on holding a third sovereignty referendum, when there is no realistic prospect of a “Yes” vote, is almost certainly more of a bug than a feature for the majority of voters. Indeed, PSPP has recently been accused of going a bit squishy on the timing of such a vote, as well he should, because it would be an appalling waste of time and resources, and the overwhelming “No” vote would make him look like a fool.

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Regardless, Fréchette can do a few useful things during the months she has in office. She can try to drag the party back to concerning itself with things that matter.

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For those who wish Quebec politics could turn back the clock to before it became obsessed with religious observance, and an even more contrived crisis in the use of the French language — a crisis that even the Office Québécois de la Langue Française (OQLF) couldn’t find existed in a 2024 report — her CAQ leadership-race victory over Bernard Drainville, author of the PQ’s infamous religious attire-restricting “values charter,” is relatively good news. (Both Fréchette and Drainville are former Péquistes.)

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On social issues, Fréchette is more like Legault than unlike. She supported Bill 21, for example, the CAQ’s slightly less odious version of the values charter (only slightly less so because it didn’t come with creepily authoritarian pictographic representations of which attire was acceptable for public servants). Fréchette also supports even more restrictions on speaking anything other than French in Quebec. But she at least acknowledges Quebec anglophones and other linguistic minorities as worthy of respect, which is more than Legault’s record or past statements can attest.

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“I hate them as much as you do,” former Official Languages Commissioner Graham Fraser recalled Legault saying of anglophones in 1998, when Legault was running for the PQ. (Legault denied saying it, but Fraser isn’t what you would call a loose cannon.)

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“Hating Canada is not a blueprint for a society,” Fréchette said at her February leadership-campaign launch in Trois-Rivières. (Someone, please, put that on a T-shirt!) “In 2018 (when the CAQ was elected), Quebec decided: The (federalism-versus-sovereignty) feuding of the past is behind us. Quebecers want to move forward.”