The Munk Debates Podcast - Munk Dialogue with Andrew Coyne: Canada’s separatist moment

Episode Date: October 6, 2026

Rudyard and Andrew focus today’s show on the separatist movements gaining traction across Canada. Quebec voters appear poised to elect a separatist government, potentially setting the stage for another referendum in the coming years. What do we know about PQ leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon? And how might Mark Carney’s popularity in Quebec affect Plamondon’s separatist ambitions?They then turn to Alberta’s upcoming referendum and ask how strong the separatist movement is without Justin Trudeau in office. National unity, they argue, is closely tied to a sense of national purpose, drive and ambition. If major projects continue to move forward in Alberta, could they help strengthen the case for a united Canada? And what should we make of reports that separatist leaders have been meeting with members of the GOP in Washington? Andrew remains optimistic that Canadians’ commitment to the rule of law will ultimately favour the federalist position and help hold the country together.Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The election results are guaranteed to be extraordinary, are guaranteed to be unusual, if not unprecedented, not just in Canada, but in any advanced democracy. So that is, just those results are going to be interesting. And it will be a contest for interpretation. Welcome to the Monk Dialogues. I'm Rudyard Griffiths, chair of the Monk Debates, joined by our regular contributor, global mail journalist, Andrew Coyne.

Andrew, great to be in conversation with you. Good to talk to you. Yeah, the last few weeks, tens of thousands of downloads on our conversations with you on YouTube and over on our podcast channel, lots of interest in Canadian politics. I'm glad for once we're not talking about Donald Trump. I'm sure we'll have lots of time to do that in the run up to the midterms. But what I want to talk with you today about Andrew is a consequential election in Quebec that is unfolding as we speak and likely as people listen to this podcast and watch this video

today. And then the upcoming Alberta referendum and the potential fallout and consequences of that vote. But let's stay with Quebec today. What are you going to be looking for coming out of the vote in Canada's Belle Provence to try to figure out where this federation is headed next? Well, I think the most immediate thing is, I mean, it seems to be a fairly foregone conclusion that the PQ will win the most seats, although there is a lot of movement in the last few days, and you can't really say anything for certain. But let's say that that's the most likely result. Then the question becomes, do they get a majority or not? Until fairly recently, people might have given them a good shot at that, even though they were only at 29, 30 percent in the polls. and it's entirely possible they still could, but right now it's looking less likely.

But let's supposing they do. First of all, the election is highly unusual in that you've got five parties with more than 10% or more of the vote. The vote is split extraordinarily. It's very, very rare you would see that. There's only two elections in Canadian history in which you've had that result. Five parties is more than 10% of the vote. The one was the last Quebec election. the other was in the 1997 federal election.

But what was different about those two elections was there was a clear front run. The liberals federally in 97, the CAQ in 2022 that was 15, 20 points ahead of its nearest rival. And though they got a very disproportionate result, they wound up getting majorities with only 30-odd percent of the vote. It was still clearly they were the winning party. In this election, not only do you have the vote split, five ways, but the leading party is likely to come in under 30%. You cannot find an example of that of a party winning the popular vote with less than 30% of the vote. That's usually a bad loss.

And to on top of that, because the vote is so split, for them to even be close to winning a majority, among other things, just shows you what a distorted and crazy electoral system we have. but in this case it would deliver the majority that would give them a mandate, at least as they claim, to hold a referendum sometime during their first government on whether Quebec should succeed from Canada, which is a whole other can of worms. But the election results are guaranteed to be extraordinary, are guaranteed to be unusual, if not unprecedented, not just in Canada, but in any advanced democracy.

So that is just those results are going to be. interesting and it will be a contest for for interpretation. I mean, I think a lot of the PQ vote, remember the PQ did very poorly last election. I think a lot of the PQ vote was, first of all, people looking for who could who could toss out the CAQ. The public had grown well and truly disentranted with with them. Even after Francoiseu Lago left, Christine Farshad had a little bit of a boomlet as the new leader, but was not able to sustain it through the campaign. But as people focused on the election and sort of the realization dawned that not only will this party knock out the CAQ but might plunge Quebec into a referendum, then you started seeing a lot of the anti-referendum

votes shifting back and forth between the CAQ, between the reborn conservative party in Quebec and between the traditional federalists standard bears, the liberals, to see who could beat the PQ, who could hold the PQ at least to a minority if not beat them. And I think as you've seen the closing days of the campaign, the liberals who started very poorly have come on, as have the conservatives. They're both basically feasting on the carcass of the CAQ, which has done very poorly in the last few weeks, and we'll be lucky to hold on to more than a handful of seats, I think. Yeah, so much to talk about here, but let's go to the big question. If there is a PQ government, And as you said, they have indicated a referendum vote in the next period of time before their mandate ends.

What does that look like, Andrew? In some ways, doesn't it seem counterintuitive? What we've been told is that the Trump effect is a hurting effect in Canada and in many other countries in the world, that the threat of the Trump administration is a unified. It is a risk-on event that leads us to behave in risk-off ways. So it's remarkable to think that Quebec voters are on the verge, albeit with a very low percentage of the total vote, actually awarding their ballot to the PQ,

but nonetheless, pushing the province in what should be a risk-off moment into a risk-on position, which is a referendum commitment in the next few years. Yeah, well, the two are both capable of being true, that people would vote for the PQ and also not want a referendum. There has been a hurting effect. If you look at support for sovereignty, for example, it's dropped by about 10 percentage points in Quebec over the last couple of years. It used to be at around 40. It's now down to about 30. And that's the sort of broad, would you like to be independent, never mind, you know, what would be the actual result when you actually got close to the event.

but it's dropped to that extent. And probably even some who want sovereignty don't want a referendum. So I think the PQ is facing the problem that they've got about 70% of the public against them on this. But, you know, again, the way that the electoral system works is when you've got to the vote split five ways,

30% is enough to win yourself close to a majority, if not a majority. They may finish under 30%. So I wouldn't want to overread that, that I do think that hurting effect has been. You've seen, for example, that Paul St. Pierre-Plamandandant, the PQ leader, has had to promise that he wouldn't hold the referendum while Donald Trump was the president. So he's put it off at least for two years. Well, maybe, Andrew, he doesn't want to hold the referendum while Donald Trump is in office so that his voters are not on a risk-off mood, that they're willing to consider him more radical. He's had to make that concession to this generally anti-referendum mood.

And, you know, he's certainly pledged the party very, very firmly to holding a referendum sometime in its first government. But we've seen other governments come to power in this country, federally and provincially, making extremely firm signed in blood promises on central planks of their platform, only to do the exact opposite when they got into. power. Justin Trudeau in the voting system. We were supposed to have a fundamental change away from first past the post. Among many examples. Back to Quebec, there was an all-party consensus a few years ago in Quebec to change the electoral system. As soon as the CAQ got in, they reneged on that. So it would not be inconceivable that he could renege on this. He would certainly pay a price with his most ardent supporters who were bound and determined to hold the referendum come what may. but stranger things have happened.

And certainly, Paul St. Pierre Plamantan himself has a history of flip-flopping on this issue particularly. It wasn't so long ago he was excoriating the PQ leadership for their quote-unquote obsession with holding a third referendum. So the one constant in his career is it's always about what's best for San Pierre Plamondon. What do we know about Plamondon? He, as you say, is an interesting background. It kind of started out as you might consider a kind of somewhat traditional federalist, you know, started a youth-oriented research institute with Melanie Jean-Lie of all people, the current federal liberal cabinet minister, spent some time in the law, big law in Quebec,

and then had, I guess, a damascene conversion. leapt into the party of Quebecois, where he had a somewhat checkered and controversial set of losses of his own electoral and then, you know, struggles within the party. But now he's out the other side and looking like the next first minister of Quebec. If you looked at his background and sort of personality and everything, you could just as easily imagine him as a leader of the Quebec Liberal Party. This is not, you know, a sovereign just warhorse who's been through the back. and, you know, has a long memory of insults and slights that he brings to the,

this is somebody is a technocratic, you know, highly educated, very fluid, very slippery. My personal theory is he looked around and this was his best avenue to personal success. And so, and we've seen that type many times before. And I don't necessarily blame them. It's a tough road to hoe for the Quebec Liberal Party these days because they just have a really tough time with the Francovone vote in Quebec. So there's always a slight disadvantage in any of these elections. So if you were a career-minded person who was just looking for the avenue to the top,

you might well choose the PQ if you could be fluid enough around their option. But of course, in Quebec, this is what's happened over the years is people go back and forth across this divide or they try to find hemie, as Eugene Forces used to call them, hemidemi-demi-Semi-Semitism. There's all these shades of nationalist, autonomous, separatists, separatists, but against the referendum,

all these different shades. And it's possible for people to inhabit these crevices in the political firmament and move back and forth across them if you're just not prepared to be too hung up, hung up about principle. The thing the federalists have got going for them, the federalism has got going for them, is San Pierre Plemelon is not a particularly a droid politician

in the word play and rough housing sense. He may be good at spotting the main chance. He's not very good at putting his foot right where he has a chance to put it wrong. Even when he's given gifts, you know, politically, he can mess them up. There was common consensus, for example, in the Quebec political class

that Mark Carney had made a mistake when he gave a speech on the side of the plains of Abraham. I'm not so sure it was all that terrible move. Personally, the Quebec political class oftentimes cements itself on these consensus that don't turn out to be true, but let's supposing it were, Pesampere Plamador Plamandol

then so overreacted to it, you know, invoking Mahatma Gandhi, etc, that he just came off looking like a fool. So people are worried, for example, that he's going to be a very disruptive force, will be looking for every opportunity to cause discord and division. And I don't doubt that he will be looking for those opportunities, but he may not be terribly good at exploiting them. And even a separatist premier, maybe especially a separatist premier,

people in Quebec expect them to work with others, even if their ultimate goal is to separate the province from the rest of the country, until unless that happens, people want them to work with others, maybe especially so. And if you're seen to be too eager to be trying to cause a fight, and if you don't fight in that fight in a way that sounds constructive, if you're not able to make the other guy look like the recalcitrant one, then he will pay a price for that. And I'm fully confident that he will make his share of mistakes on that front.

Andrew, we're going to move on to Alberta in just a second, but let's just quickly bounce this vote today and its consequences to more to the federal government. It would suggest to me, Andrew, that as long as you have a PQ Premier, there is no eastern pipeline to tidewater, you know, somewhere east. of the province of Ontario. You know, it's partly tongue-in-cheek, but it's partly, I think, a cold, hard fact. And I guess what does a PQ victory in Quebec do to the federal government? It would suggest there would be a renewed focus, federal focus on the province. There's aspects of Mark Carney's current agenda, his kind of embrace of Canada as an energy superpower, or at least so far with a heavy emphasis on petroleum, oil and gas,

that seems kind of out of step with Quebec voters. It has been historically and maybe now a Quebec Premier standing a thwart of some of those ambitions. Maybe. I wouldn't be 100% certain of that. There's a couple of things I think you have to add to that. One is the Trump factor. People in Quebec are just as spooked, if not more so, as the rest of the country. Quebec is particularly exposed on some files and some industries. And Quebecers don't want to be dominated by or annexed by Donald Trump any more than the rest of the country do.

Again, maybe even more averse to it. So that is a significant factor in Quebec politics. It's not enough, as Christine Fischett found, to just say the words Donald Trump, I'm running against Donald Trump, and people instantly hand you the keys to the Premier's office. but it is nevertheless a factor. Point one. Point two is Mark Carney is significantly more popular in Quebec than any of the Quebec political leaders.

You know, his party is 20 points ahead of the BQ, the Black Quebecois in the opinion polls, and he himself is very personally popular in Quebec, notwithstanding being an Anglophone from, ultimately from Alberta. So these are different. times. And again, if the PQ is trying to show that they're constructive in the common defense against Donald Trump's craziness, who knows? We didn't think there could be a pipeline to the West Coast

not so long ago either. And political calculations and political alignments can change over time. I'm not saying it's necessarily going to happen. I'm just saying some of the certainties that one might have had about the shape of Canadian politics, a lot of them have been overturned in the current climate. Thank you for listening to the first half of our monk dialogue with Andrew Coyne. To get access to the full episode right now, consider becoming a monk donor. For just $50 a year, less than a dollar a week, you will get 72-hour advanced access to all of our premium podcasts, including Friday Focus with Janice Gross Stein.

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