CAQ falls to third place, behind PQ and Liberals: survey

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

Paul St-Pierre Plamondon’s PQ has a clear lead in the poll conducted over the weekend by Pallas Data for Qc125 and L’actualité magazine.

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The latest poll comes as St-Pierre Plamondon steps up talks about a referendum, promising to hold a vote on Quebec’s separation from Canada by 2030.

Here’s how determined and inclined voters said they would have cast their votes, compared to a Pallas poll from February:

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

The next elections are scheduled for October 2026.

The poll suggests Montreal and Quebec City would be battlegrounds if elections were called now, and much of the rest of the province says firmly they would vote PQ.

Here’s the breakdown:

Montreal Region: The Liberals (32 percent) and the PQ (30 percent) are tied, far behind the CAQ (18 percent). In that scenario, Legault would win only a few seats in the Montreal area.

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

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The rest of Quebec: The PQ is well ahead with 38 percent, the CAQ with 24 percent and Québec Solidaire and the Conservatives tied with 13 percent. The Liberals have 11 percent.

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

Québec Solidaire, a left-wing sovereigntist party, is also losing votes to the PQ: 30 percent of people who previously supported the QS now plan to vote for St-Pierre Plamondon’s party.

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

Writing in L’ActualitéPhilippe J. Fournier, the polling analyst behind the Qc125 websiteHe said it’s too early to say 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 affirms his referendum intentions, has somehow awakened a more federalist segment of the electorate, whose motivation and commitment had latent 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.”

Joseph Angolano, executive director of Pallas, said: “If federalist Quebecers are now taking the question of sovereignty seriously, it is not surprising that they are coming ‘home’ to the Liberals.”

However, the Liberals risk stagnating unless the party can increase support among Quebec’s French-speaking majority. Only 10 percent of French speakers favor the Liberals, according to the Pallas poll.

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