Quebec’s incoming premier says a growing economy does not make ordinary citizens any richer, and that mass immigration is pushing their wages down.
Paul St-Pierre Plamondon leads the separatist Parti Québécois (PQ), which erased the governing Coalition Avenir Québec on Monday, a party that went into the vote holding 79 seats and came out with none. His roughly 59-seat haul will let him dominate Quebec’s National Assembly.
He won it campaigning against high immigration, built on a single economic point: that politicians measure prosperity the wrong way.
His argument targets the Century Initiative, the corporate-backed nonprofit pushing Canada to reach 100 million people by 2100 through far higher immigration. In a clip circulating on X, St-Pierre Plamondon dismissed the group’s core premise.
“That Century Initiative is wrong,” he said in the posted video. “It’s based on the very stupid assumption that growing the GDP makes you richer.”
A bigger population grows the overall economy, but it also grows the labour pool. When workers become more plentiful, the price of labour falls, which means lower wages. On that reading, mass immigration doesn’t lift living standards for people already here; it quietly erodes them, even as the headline GDP number climbs.
Back in November 2023, he drew rebukes from a Québec solidaire lawmaker and then-federal Immigration Minister Marc Miller, who called his comments “opportunistic,” after he questioned Ottawa’s target of 500,000 newcomers a year. He didn’t back down. “If giving Quebecers the straight story and denouncing absolutely irresponsible federal immigration policies is opportunistic, well, I’ll keep being opportunistic,” he said at the time.
The PQ’s platform calls for sharp cuts to immigration, including a moratorium on new economic immigrants, and would instead draw permanent residents from the temporary foreign workers and international students already living in the province. To deal with labour shortages, the plan leans on automation rather than new arrivals.
The PQ took close to 60 of the 127 seats in Quebec’s National Assembly, short of the 64 needed to govern alone. The party that collapsed was the governing Coalition Avenir Québec, which went into the vote with 79 seats and came out with none, leader Christine Fréchette lost her own seat in Trois-Rivières.
A day after the vote, Prime Minister Mark Carney urged Quebec to set aside talk of a referendum and focus on the economy, housing, growth, and workers hit by U.S. tariffs. That is the same economy St-Pierre Plamondon says is being measured dishonestly. Carney’s Quebec lieutenant, Joël Lightbound, insisted the win changed nothing on sovereignty. “A mandate for separation needs to go through a referendum,” he said.
St-Pierre Plamondon has promised a third independence referendum during his term, but said he would wait until U.S. President Donald Trump leaves office. Support for sovereignty sits at about 30 percent, low by historical standards.
Albertans vote Oct. 19 on whether to hold a separation referendum of their own.