0.1% of Quebec elected the province’s new premier

The announcement came yesterday: Christine Fréchette will be Quebec’s next premier, following François Legault‘s departure last January. She won the CAQ leadership race against Bernard Drainville, in which 15,833 party members voted. Barely 0.1% of Quebec’s population will have chosen the province’s new boss.

Fréchette will be sworn in Wednesday as the second woman premier in Quebec history. She takes over a party in freefall in the polls: the CAQ is one of the most unpopular governments in Quebec history. Three parties are polling ahead of it, and according to expert projections, she risks losing every one of her seats.

Who is Christine Fréchette?

Christine Fréchette comes from a world of managers and executives. Her friends include, among others, Dominique Anglade, former leader of the Quebec Liberal Party. Her husband, Guy Nadeau, is well established in finance: he is vice-president of Desjardins Entreprise Montréal.

Fréchette began her political career at Forces Jeunesse, which she helped found with her ex-husband, former Parti Québécois MNA François Rebello. Forces Jeunesse is a lobbying association that promotes “the place of young people in decision-making spheres,” with a board of directors filled with young people looking to make their way into the ruling class.

The organization has trained several waves of Quebec politicians and executives, including Martin Koskinen (close to François Legault), François Rebello, Jean-François Roberge, and several other CAQ MNAs.

But that’s not the only place Fréchette built strong ties. She knows Paul Saint-Pierre Plamondon, the current PQ leader, very well. She worked alongside him for several years after serving as chief of staff to Jean-François Lisée at the PQ, between 2012 and 2014. She had left the party following a deep disagreement with Bernard Drainville, whom she is now calling on to play an important role in her government.

Fréchette is also close friends with Soraya Martinez Ferrada, who became mayor of Montreal after serving as a federal Liberal MP. On top of that, she was president of the Chamber of Commerce of Eastern Montreal from 2016 to 2021, while Charles Milliard was president of the Federation of Quebec Chambers of Commerce between 2020 and 2024.

The new premier has deep connections in Quebec’s small economic, political and managerial elite, especially in Montreal, and she knows her opponents well. That won’t make it any easier for ordinary Quebecers to find their bearings in this political jumble of figures who proclaim their differences but all seem to come from the same place.

What can we expect from her policies?

In recent days, Christine Fréchette has received very positive coverage in the newspapers, particularly in La Presse, which devoted an entire feature to her in which several of her friends sing her praises. This is typically the welcome reserved for candidates favoured by the economic elites that own these papers, as was the case with Mark Carney, Justin Trudeau, and Emmanuel Macron in their time.

But what are her concrete promises? For the working class, they look fairly thin. She promises, among other things, to remove taxes from a few products and refund some taxes to win over Quebecers’ wallets.

Most of her commitments point toward privatization, distancing services from the population, or aid to businesses: virtual waiting rooms for emergency rooms, construction of public schools whose infrastructure would be privately owned, reduction of state economic intervention, facilitation of business transfers, reopening of shale gas exploration, and so on.

Facing a catastrophic legacy, Fréchette will have to do a great deal to win back public opinion. That seems unlikely, as long as she avoids the rupture that Quebec’s population seems to be demanding.