With less than eight months to go before the general election, the Parti Québécois (PQ) won a fourth consecutive by-election on Monday night at the expense of the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) since 2023, this time in Chicoutimi.
The PQ thus regains a stronghold that was taken from it in 2018 by the CAQ, in a region, Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean, which had always been a fertile ground for Quebec nationalism.
At 8:44 p.m., with 48 polling stations counted out of 142, PQ candidate Marie-Karlynn Laflamme received 2,760 votes, 1,210 votes ahead of the Conservative Party of Quebec (PCQ) candidate, Catherine Morissette, CAQ member Francis Tremblay, Liberal Tricia Murray, while Jeanne Palardy, of Québec solidaire (QS), brought up the rear.
About sixty PQ activists gathered in a hotel cheered their new elected official by chanting “Marie! Marie!” as soon as a television network declared Laflamme’s victory, barely 20 minutes after the polls closed.
This is quite a reversal in Chicoutimi compared to the 2022 election, when CAQ MNA and minister Andrée Laforest was re-elected with a majority of 14,930 votes, the largest lead obtained by the CAQ in this general election.
It was the resignation last September of Ms. Laforest that made this complementary insurance necessary, when she made the leap into municipal politics.
With this new victory, the PQ will now have seven elected members in the House, while there were only three survivors the day after the 2022 general election.
A poll commissioned by the PCQ had suggested a two-way fight between the party and the PQ, as the CAQ government enters its eighth and final year in office and dissatisfaction is growing.
There were 45,778 electors on the list of electors.
The turnout rate in by-elections is almost always lower than in a general election and party machines work hard to encourage voters to vote.
Both the PCQ and the PQ assured that the activists had struggled until the very end, to meet with citizens and make phone calls.
In fact, on Monday, the day of the vote, PQ MNA Pascal Paradis was spotted with two activists going door-to-door in the Notre-Dame-du-Saguenay district near the university.
With this victory, the PQ maintains the momentum it has gained since the victory in Jean-Talon’s complementary election in 2023. He has a perfect record, four wins in four complementary games since 2023.
After Jean-Talon, there was Terrebonne in 2024, then Arthabaska in August 2025. Paul St-Pierre Plamondon’s party, which had only managed to elect three MNAs in the 2022 general election, had so far managed to double its parliamentary group.
–This report by La Presse Canadienne was translated by CityNews
