Marc-Olivier Fortin: The CAQ’s fear-of-Trump campaign starts to crumble

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For the first time in a generation, Quebec voters were presented this week with fundamentally different visions of the province’s future.

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The framing for two televised election debates on Tuesday and Wednesday was a good environment for Parti Québécois leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon (PSPP) and Quebec Conservative leader Eric Duhaime, who both want to fracture the status quo: the former wants to separate from Canada, while the latter wants to break away from the Quebec model. And both of them offer a clear change and a real contrast to eight years under the Coalition Avenir Québec.

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Before the debates, the Qc125.com polling average had the PQ at 28 per cent, the CAQ at 23 per cent, the Liberals at 22 per cent and the Conservatives at 16 per cent. The PQ looked like the favourite to win a minority government.

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In recent weeks, CAQ leader Christine Fréchette was successful in using the tariff war and the constant presence of U.S. President Donald Trump in the news cycle to make stability the central issue of this campaign. She was able to recover from the disastrous poll numbers under her predecessor, former premier François Legault, especially among older voters. The debates were an opportunity for her to transform this momentum into durable gains.

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Instead, the debates gave opposition leaders a chance to finally remind voters why the CAQ fell behind in the first place, exposing its damaging record. While Fréchette tried to borrow Prime Minister Mark Carney’s playbook and present herself as a fresh political figure, her opponents were quick to highlight that she held key positions in Legault’s government as immigration minister, where the province recorded historically high migration levels and later as economy minister, where she was left managing the fallout from the Northvolt fiasco.

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The opposition did more than attack the CAQ’s record. They almost framed her as being responsible for leaving Quebec vulnerable to the economic uncertainty created by the tariff war. While it was cacophonous at times, Fréchette, for the first time in the campaign, had to face the music.

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Fréchette’s other problem was that she sounded scripted and out of context on multiple occasions, clearly trying to create clips to be used online afterwards. Viewers could see the strategy unravel in real time. For example, during a cost-of-living exchange during the TVA debate on Tuesday, while Duhaime was talking about tax cuts and putting more money back into people’s pockets, she awkwardly forced a play on his campaign slogan and claimed that financial autonomy under Duhaime would end with women. Rather than creating a memorable moment, the exchange highlighted how scripted parts of her performance felt.

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The second debate gave Fréchette a chance to recover. After a difficult first night, she acknowledged, at the earliest occasion, the CAQ government’s mistakes before pivoting to the need to move forward and avoid a referendum. It was a better performance, but unfortunately for her, the Noovo/Crave debate was not her target audience considering it skews younger.