While the Parti Québécois wound up with 14.6 per cent of the vote in Monday's election, the Quebec Liberals have become the official opposition with 21 seats despite winning 14.3 per cent.
Author of the article:
La Presse Canadienne
Stéphane Rolland
The parties sitting in the National Assembly must agree to provide budget funding and question period time to the Parti Québécois despite the fact it won only three of the 125 seats in the provincial legislature, PQ Leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon said on Tuesday.
To do otherwise would be to ignore that the party garnered nearly 15 per cent of the popular vote in Monday’s general election, he said.
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St-Pierre Plamondon’s comments come as a growing number of Quebecers are becoming aware of the “electoral distortion” created by Quebec’s (and Canada’s) first-past-the-post voting system. The PQ wound up with three seats while winning 14.6 per cent of the vote, while the Quebec Liberals have become the official opposition with 21 seats despite winning 14.3 per cent. The apparent anomaly is explained by the vote for the PQ being spread out, while that of the Liberals is concentrated in the Montreal area.
St-Pierre Plamondon said that while he disagreed with virtually every element of the platform for Éric Duhaime’s Conservative Party of Quebec, it, too, deserves to be heard in the National Assembly, having won nearly 13 per cent of the vote but not a single seat.
The PQ leader noted that the electoral reform necessary to transform the system into one of proportional representation has in the past been favoured neither by the Coalition Avenir Québec, which won 90 seats with a little under 41 per cent of the popular vote, nor the Liberals. But, he added, such change is wanted by the public and to continue to avoid the issue would be an “attack on democracy.”
“A party that received more than 10 per cent support must be heard in the National Assembly,” he said.
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Complete Quebec election coverage
