Regardless of political affiliation, a strong majority of voters agree on one thing: Quebec’s next government should require the province’s largest polluters to pay for the damage caused by climate change.
That is the finding of a Léger poll commissioned by the David Suzuki Foundation and obtained exclusively by Le Devoir. The survey was conducted among 1,033 Quebec adults in late August. Its margin of error is 3 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.
Overall, 79 per cent of respondents want major polluters to pay the bill for climate-related damage. The measure is backed by a strong majority of those who say they intend to vote for each of the five major parties: Québec solidaire (QS, 90 per cent), the Quebec Liberal Party (QLP, 88 per cent), the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ, 85 per cent), the Parti Québécois (PQ, 84 per cent) and the Conservative Party of Quebec (PCQ, 57 per cent).
“Quebecers have just given the next government a clear mandate, regardless of its political stripe: polluters must be the ones to pay for the climate crisis,” says Andréanne Brazeau, an analyst with the David Suzuki Foundation.
Wildfires, floods and droughts
Climate change is having serious repercussions in Quebec. It is dangerously intensifying and increasing the frequency of wildfires, droughts, torrential rainfall and coastal storms. Across Canada, insurers are finding that extreme weather events are causing increasingly severe damage.
For example, storms that hit Quebec and Ontario around July 1 caused a total of $439 million in insured damage, according to the Insurance Bureau of Canada. As for the 2023 wildfires, the cost to Quebec exceeded $8 billion, according to an economic analysis.
The Léger poll also reveals another view shared by an overwhelming majority of Quebecers: 75 per cent of respondents believe the next government should “reduce household transportation and heating costs by making solutions such as electric vehicles and heat pumps more accessible.”
More than three-quarters of PQ, CAQ, QLP and QS voters agree. Even among those who intend to vote Conservative — a party opposed to mandatory measures aimed at encouraging the adoption of electric vehicles — the proposal enjoys solid majority support, at 55 per cent.
In light of the poll’s findings, Brazeau is calling on political parties to propose policies that address both the climate crisis and the rising cost of living. “The results show that people understand that, increasingly, there is a connection between the climate crisis and their wallets,” she argues.
A climate cost-recovery mechanism
To make major polluters pay, the David Suzuki Foundation is proposing that the next government introduce a “Quebec Climate Cost Recovery Act,” which would create a “compensation fund” requiring fossil fuel industry giants doing business in the province to contribute billions of dollars.
The proposal is directly inspired by the “climate superfunds” that several US states, including New York and Vermont, have been seeking to establish since 2024. These initiatives enjoy strong public support, but, unsurprisingly, they have faced vigorous opposition from the industries they target.
A significant development came last week, when a federal judge struck down New York State’s climate superfund law, which requires major fossil fuel companies to pay US$75 billion over 25 years. The initiative exceeds the limits of state law, the judge ruled.
In Canada, the legal and constitutional context would obviously be different. At the request of the David Suzuki Foundation, two lawyers examined the proposal for a climate cost-recovery mechanism in Quebec. In a report published in June, Christopher Campbell-Duruflé and Lisa Say concluded that such a law would be legally “possible,” despite the “political complexity” of the matter.
Unlike the carbon market, which covers current and future emissions, the proposed mechanism would seek to recover funds for past emissions. In some ways, it resembles Quebec’s laws on tobacco and opioids. The tobacco law will allow the Quebec government to recover $6.7 billion from cigarette manufacturers.
September 10th 2026
