28% of the Vote, 59 Seats: How First-Past-the-Post Built Quebec's PQ Win

In Vachon, a riding in the Montreal area, the Liberals' Affine Lwalalika collected 10,063 votes on Monday. The Parti Québécois's Stephan Fogaing collected 10,053. That is a gap of ten votes, according to Élections Québec as reported by CBC, and on Wednesday, Oct. 7 the PQ officially asked for a judicial recount.

Here is the contradiction. Even if a judge flipped Vachon, the PQ would have 60 seats, four short of the 64 a 127-seat Assembly needs. Ten votes can decide one seat. They cannot explain how the counting rules did so much of the work in this election, in both directions.

Led by Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, the PQ won 59 of the National Assembly's 127 seats on Monday, Oct. 5, with 28.02% of the vote. It will govern as a minority, five seats short. CBC and the Globe and Mail both call that the lowest vote share for a governing party in Quebec history. The Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ), which held 79 seats and governed for eight years, was shut out with about 13%.

One winner per riding, and everyone else's vote vanishes

Quebec elects its members one riding at a time, and the candidate with the most votes wins, majority or not. That is first-past-the-post: every ballot cast for anyone else elects nobody. Across the province, only 41.73% of valid votes went to a candidate who won; 58.27% elected no one.

What matters is where a party's votes fall. The PQ's were efficient: spread across many ridings, each enough for a modest plurality. Of its 59 wins, 41 came with under 40% of the local vote, and only four topped 50%. The median winning share was 38.6%. Québec solidaire (QS) was the opposite case, stacking votes in Montreal, where four of its nine wins cleared half the vote. The CAQ's ballots were spread everywhere and won nowhere.

Preliminary results, not yet official: totals as published by Élections Québec and compiled by Wikipedia, and may change after judicial recounts; proportional seats and votes per seat are Daybreak Wire calculations (straight share of 127 seats, no threshold or regional lists).

Read the last column first. The PQ needed 20,346 votes for each seat; QS needed 59,122, so a PQ vote bought almost three times the seat. The CAQ's 572,037 votes elected no one, though it beat QS on votes, 13.35% to 12.42%.

The column before it is a benchmark, not a forecast: a real mixed-member design would differ. Against that line the PQ holds 23.4 seats too many and the Liberals 9.2. The CAQ is short 17.0, the Conservatives 7.2 and QS 6.8.

A record for the winner, not for the distortion

Is 28.02% a record? For the winner's share, yes: Élections Québec's summary, which starts in 1973, puts the previous lowest at the PQ's 31.95% in 2012 and the Liberals' 33.08% in 2007.

But a record-low share is not a record gap between votes and seats. The standard yardstick is the Gallagher index, which sums the squared gaps between each party's vote share and seat share. Zero is perfectly proportional, and Wikipedia calls 20 or more "very disproportionate." The 2026 election scores 17.8. The 2022 election scored 25.79.

That year the CAQ won 90 of 125 seats, or 72.0%, on 40.98% of the vote. André Lamoureux, a political scientist at the Université du Québec à Montréal, reached further back in Le Devoir, which reported that in 1973 the Liberals won about 54% of the vote (54.65% per Élections Québec) and 92.7% of the seats.

"Overall there are distortions, but they are not the worst to have occurred in the history of Quebec elections... There was much worse... This year, it wasn't so bad."

André Lamoureux, political scientist, Université du Québec à Montréal (Le Devoir, translated from French)

The 1998 election shows the same machine running in reverse. On Nov. 30, 1998, the Liberals led the popular vote by 27,618 votes, yet the PQ won 76 of 125 seats to their 48, because, as Wikipedia's account of Jean Charest's career puts it, the Liberal vote was concentrated in fewer ridings. It was the last election before this one in which sovereigntist parties held a majority of seats, nearly 28 years ago.

Geography drives the pattern. The PQ won two seats in Montreal and none in Laval or Quebec City, CBC reported. Fair Vote Canada, an advocacy group, says the Liberals took 70% of Island of Montreal seats with 44% of the vote, and the Conservatives 62% of National Capital Region seats with 37%, where the PQ, with 23%, won none. The blog Fruits and Votes calls the mismatch "one of the outcomes we can expect from FPTP in a context of regional differences."

The system's defenders have a real case. It let voters remove an eight-year government in one stroke, with more than 90 of 127 seats changing hands, the Globe reported. It also produced a minority that forces co-operation. Proportional representation's best evidence is the zero-seat results at about 13% for the Conservatives in 2022 and the CAQ now.

How close was the PQ to governing alone? Closer than 28% suggests. Fifteen ridings were decided by 1,000 votes or fewer. The PQ's five narrowest losses were Vachon (10 votes, to the Liberals), Champlain (191, to the Conservatives), Montarville (336), La Prairie (651) and Jean-Talon (907), the last three to the Liberals.

The PQ finished 2,095 votes behind in those five ridings combined. Winning all five would have taken it to 64, a majority, though Vachon is under recount. The Globe wrote that Mr. St-Pierre Plamondon was "thwarted in his quest for a majority by late surges from the Quebec Liberal Party and the Quebec Conservatives."

Reform has to pass through the people it would cost

The PQ, QS and the Conservatives, CBC reported, "promised to replace the current system with a proportional method of voting." Together they hold 87 seats, 23 more than a bill needs, though their designs and views on a referendum may differ. Mr. St-Pierre Plamondon, pressed in a debate by QS co-spokesperson Ruba Ghazal, answered a short "yes," Le Devoir reported. CBC does not list the Liberals among the parties promising it. On election night, in French, he said the Quebec his supporters want to build "will be among the most exemplary democracies on the planet," in the Globe's translation.

Promises of this kind have a history here. On May 9, 2018, the PQ, CAQ, QS and Green leaders announced a joint agreement to table a mixed-member proportional bill by Oct. 1, 2019. François Legault, then the CAQ leader, said: "It's no longer time for debate, it's time for action." That October the CAQ won a 74-seat majority on 37.42% of the vote.

Bill 39, tabled in September 2019, would have created 125 seats, 45 of them filled from regional lists, and required a referendum to ratify it alongside the 2022 election. On April 28, 2021, minister Sonia LeBel dropped the plan for a 2022 referendum, blaming the pandemic, and the bill was left to die. In the 2022 campaign Mr. Legault said: "We listened to the population, it doesn't interest them ... except a few intellectuals." Afterward, with 90 seats, he said: "There's no electoral system that's perfect."

The referendum condition mattered because reform has often lost at the ballot box: British Columbia's single transferable vote won 57.69% in 2005, short of the required 60%, Policy Options reported. Justin Trudeau, like Mr. Legault, campaigned on reform and abandoned it, CBC noted.

Julien Verville, a political science professor at Collège Ahuntsic, says five Quebec governments promised reform and later backed down. He explained the incentive in Le Devoir.

"In our parliamentary system, the political gold medal is to be a majority government. And which voting system produces majority governments from minorities of the vote? Ours."

Julien Verville, political science professor, Collège Ahuntsic (Le Devoir, translated from French)

That is the problem in a sentence. The parties that gained most from the old rules were the PQ and the Liberals, and the reform promise sits with the first of them. Ted Cragg of Fair Vote Canada says his group takes "any kind of promise with a grain of salt." Lamoureux said "this is not the best context to undertake a reform of the voting system," and Verville that voters' sense of "injustice" will fade fairly quickly (Le Devoir, in French).

Then there is the clock. In a May 2019 letter, Élections Québec's chief electoral officer told the minister that a mixed-member system would take 42 months to implement, Fair Vote Canada's timeline says. The fixed-date law puts the next scheduled election on Monday, Oct. 7, 2030, 48 months after Thursday, Oct. 8. A 42-month build would need a law by about April 2027.

CBC notes that minority governments in Quebec typically last less than two years.

Seats are not a mandate for either side

The same arithmetic applies to independence. The PQ and QS together hold 68 of 127 seats, or 53.5%, on 40.44% of the vote. The other parties took 59.56% and 59 seats. Bloc Québécois leader Yves-François Blanchet noted that their seats add up to a majority, CBC reported.

And those 59 seats belong to the Liberals and Conservatives, who can block a referendum. Liberal leader Charles Milliard said: "there is no way we will collaborate on a potential referendum." Ms. Ghazal wants an extensive public consultation before any vote on independence.

Mr. St-Pierre Plamondon promises a referendum in a first term but not before Donald Trump leaves office in January 2029. Lamoureux told the Globe a referendum would be a "dead end" for a PQ minority: "There are too many obstacles."

Neither seat count is a poll on independence. A Léger survey in March found 71% against and 29% for, the lowest yes since the 1995 referendum. A party can win 59 seats on 28.02% without any of that changing.

In Alberta, voters decide on Oct. 19, 11 days from now, whether to remain in Canada or hold a second, binding vote on leaving. Jeffrey Rath of the Alberta Prosperity Project said: "For the first time in Canadian history, we have a government in Quebec that supports Alberta independence. That's huge."

Check your riding on Élections Québec's results page. Until a judge rules on the recount, Vachon belongs to the Liberals by ten votes, and the PQ's 59 or 60 seats still stop four or five short of 64.