CAQ falls to third place, behind PQ, Liberals: poll

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Support for Premier François Legault continues to crumble, with his Coalition Avenir Québec slipping into third place, behind the Parti Québécois and the Liberals, a new poll suggests.

Paul St-Pierre Plamondon’s PQ has a commanding lead in the poll, conducted over the weekend by Pallas Data for Qc124 and L’actualité magazine.

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Previous surveys have found the PQ may have enough support for a majority government.

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The latest poll comes as St-Pierre Plamondon ramps up referendum talk, promising to hold a vote on Quebec separating from Canada by 2030.

Here’s how decided and leaning voters would have cast ballots, compared to a February Pallas poll:

• Parti Québécois: 33 per cent, up two points
• Liberals: 23 per cent, up eight points
• CAQ: 20 per cent, down three points
• Québec solidaire: 13 per cent, down four points
• Conservative Party of Quebec: 11 per cent, down two points

Pallas surveyed 1,256 adults on April 20 and 21. The margin of error is plus or minus three percentage points 19 times out of 20.

The next election is scheduled to take place in October 2026.

The poll suggests Montreal and Quebec City would be battlegrounds if an election were called now, with much of the rest of the province solidly saying it would vote PQ.

Here’s the breakdown:

Montreal region: The Liberals (32 per cent) and PQ (30 per cent) are in a dead heat with the CAQ far behind (18 per cent). Under that scenario, Legault would win only a few seats in the Montreal area.

Quebec City region: The PQ dominates (38 per cent), with the Conservative Party of Quebec in second place (30 per cent) and the CAQ again third (16 per cent).

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The rest of Quebec: The PQ is far in front at 38 per cent, with the CAQ at 24 per cent and Québec solidaire and the Conservatives tied at 13 per cent. The Liberals are third at 11 per cent.

The poll suggests that 35 per cent of people who voted CAQ in the last election now support the PQ.

The Liberals’ results are the party’s best since November 2020. The party does not have a permanent leader. A leadership convention is set for June 2025.

Writing in L’Actualité, Philippe J. Fournier, the poll analyst behind the Qc125 website, said it’s too early to tell whether the Liberal jump is a statistical blip or a real trend.

“Still, it is not impossible that the recent rise of the sovereignists, combined with the insistence with which the PQ leader asserts his referendum intentions, has in some way awakened a more federalist segment of the electorate, whose motivation and engagement had been dormant for several years,” Fournier wrote.

“Furthermore, the hypothesis according to which a fraction of the federalist flank of the CAQ could be tempted to return to the fold (as many sovereignist voters did towards the PQ in the last year) seems entirely plausible.”

However, he said, support for the Liberals risk plateauing unless the party can boost support among Quebec’s francophone majority. Only 10 per cent of French speakers favour the Liberals, the Pallas survey found.

ariga@postmedia.com

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