Frustration over COVID-19 rules boosts Quebec Conservatives ahead of fall election

In a province where opposition parties have generally backed the government's COVID-19 restrictions, Éric Duhaime has built support through his opposition to lockdown measures.

As Quebec Conservative Leader Éric Duhaime arrived at a rally last Tuesday, he wore a mask, unlike most of the supporters he was greeting.

In a province where opposition parties have generally backed the government’s COVID-19 restrictions, Duhaime has built support through his opposition to lockdown measures. His party, which received less than two per cent of the vote in Quebec’s 2018 provincial election when it was led by Adrien Pouliot, is now regularly polling in second or third place.

“There’s a lot of people currently in Quebec who are upset, and I think we’re becoming the voice of those people,” Duhaime said in an interview last week. “For the last two years, with the management of the crisis, the government sacrificed a lot of people and those people have suffered a lot.”

But while Duhaime is tapping into people’s anger over pandemic restrictions, the mask he wore last week is a sign of the fine line he walks as he tries to turn his party into a genuine political force in the province ahead of an election this fall.

“Even if many of the people who support him are angry, he doesn’t look that angry and that radical in some of his positions,” said Daniel Béland, director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada. “Some of the people who support him have more radical views, what he presents is a more palatable image.”

Christian Bourque, executive vice-president of polling firm Leger, said the Quebec Conservative Party, which has no official connection to the federal Conservatives, has become a home for people who feel that they’ve been talked down to, or dismissed as conspiracy theorists, during the pandemic.

“He was able to give them a place, give them a platform that they did not have before and a form of legitimacy,” Bourque said in a recent interview.

In a Leger poll released on March 11, the Conservatives were tied with left-wing party Quebec solidaire in third place, with 14 per cent of respondents saying they plan to vote for the party. The governing Coalition Avenir Québec was at 41 per cent, while the Liberals had 18 per cent.