By Claudia Ottaviano-Maheux, Executive Committee Member, Canadian Party of Quebec
On the morning of September 14, 1994, Quebec woke up to a new government. The numbers from the night before told a story most people missed.
The popular vote: Liberals 44.4%, PQ 44.75%. A difference of less than one third of one percent. The seat count: Liberals 47, PQ 77. Thirty seats, from a third of a percentage point. That is not a distortion at the margins. That is first-past-the-post doing exactly what it always does — converting a razor-thin popular advantage into a commanding legislative majority.
Here is the part that should still haunt us. Twelve months later, Quebec held a referendum on separation from Canada. The No side won by 50,000 votes out of nearly five million cast — less than one percentage point. Canada came within a breath of breaking apart. Strategic voting had been the watchword of the 1994 election. Federalist voters had been told to consolidate, hold their noses, and vote Liberal. They did. And it delivered the government that made the referendum possible.
The lesson was not learned then. It has not been learned since.
Every election cycle, federalist and rights-respecting voters are told to suppress their real preferences and consolidate behind a party that takes them for granted. And every cycle, that party drifts a little further toward nationalism — precisely because it knows those voters have nowhere else to go. Strategic voting was supposed to prevent the worst outcomes. Instead, it has produced the conditions for them, election after election, while the Liberals absorb safe-seat votes that change nothing and claim a mandate they haven’t earned.
Piling up extra Liberal votes in ridings they already hold doesn’t prevent a CAQ or PQ government. It just confirms that anglophone and federalist Quebec can be managed rather than represented.
The Canadian Party of Quebec was founded on a different premise. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is not a bargaining chip. Bilingualism is a national value, not a provocation. Bills 21, 96, and 1 — including the proposed Quebec Constitution designed to wall off the National Assembly from Charter review permanently — are not facts of life to be grudgingly accommodated. They are violations of rights that Canada is obligated, in law and in conscience, to protect. The CaPQ is fully bilingual, led by Joseph Cianflone, a Harvard & Oxford graduate, and running candidates across Quebec on the conviction that federalist voters deserve representation that doesn’t begin with an apology.
For Eastern Townships voters, this is not an abstraction. This region has a deep tradition of anglophone and bilingual civic life, of communities that have navigated thirty years of language politics while remaining proudly Canadian. That tradition deserves a political voice in October 2026 — not merely another defensive vote cast in the hope that the least-bad option holds the line one more time.
Will the CaPQ win a majority? No — and we say so honestly. But small parties still move the needle. They shift the debate. They send an unmistakable signal to every other party about what voters will and won’t accept. They build the foundation that makes the next election different from this one. Every vote for the CaPQ in 2026 says clearly: rights are not negotiable, and communities with nothing left to gain from strategic voting have decided to stop playing a losing game.
The conversation about vote-splitting — the math, the history, the stakes — deserves to happen in the open. The Canadian Party of Quebec is hosting a free online Town Hall on Tuesday, April 29th to do exactly that. We’ll walk through how first-past-the-post has shaped Quebec politics, what the 1994 numbers actually meant, and what a genuine federalist alternative looks like heading into 2026. All are welcome.
Register here.
Thirty years of the same script ends with the same line: next time will be different. The numbers from 1994 say otherwise.
Vote scared? Vote smart.
Correction: The CaPQ is no longer led by constitutional lawyer Colin Standish, but by Joseph Cianflone.
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