3 hours ago
6
Quebec’s premier, François Legault, has announced his resignation as leader of the province, in an abrupt departure for the polarizing figure whose embattled government faces the prospects of an electoral wipeout in the coming months.
Speaking at a hastily arranged press conference in Quebec City on Wednesday, Legault said he was proud to have founded the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) party and won consecutive majority governments beginning in 2018.
“Serving as premier was the greatest honour of my life,” he said to applause.
Legault will remain as premier until his party has chosen a new leader – a process that could take months – and leaves the CAQ with little time to prepare for a November provincial election.
The surprise resignation of the businessman turned politician follows months of chaos that has rocked the governing CAQ. Key ministers and allies have stepped down and polling suggests his government faced long odds of re-election in the fall. Some polls suggested the party, which won majority governments in 2018 and 2022, could lose all seats in the upcoming election.
Within the province, the CAQ has faced intense backlash over a law changing how doctors in the province are paid, an uproar that cost Legault his health minister, Christian Dubé. And a snowballing scandal over the province’s attempts to modernize an online portal for license renewals and vehicle registration has been plagued with cost overruns in the hundreds of millions of dollars, prompting a public inquiry. The cybersecurity minister, Éric Caire, resigned in February 2025.
More broadly, the government has courted controversy by pursuing secularism as a key legislative priority.
In August, the CAQ said it would ban public prayer, a move that civil rights groups said was “alarming” and targets religious minority groups, infringing on their “basic democratic freedoms”. Years before, in 2019, the government passed Bill 21, which bars judges, police officers, prison guards and teachers from wearing religious symbols while at work. Other public workers such as bus drivers, doctors and social workers must only keep their faces uncovered. That law runs afoul of both Quebec’s charter of human rights and freedoms and Canada’s charter of rights and freedoms.
The CAQ has also gone to war over the creep of the anglophone culture in the province, passing sweeping French language protections that reshaped key aspects of public life in the province. In 2022, Legault said he was “proud to be a francophone nation in North America”, adding it was his government’s “duty to protect our common language”.
Legault also clashed with the federal government over immigration and refugee resettlement. In April, Quebec’s immigration minister, Jean-François Roberge, said that Quebec cannot “welcome all the world’s misery” amid an influx of asylum seekers, many of whom came from Haiti.
“The problem isn’t the Haitians, it’s not the immigrants, it’s the number,” Legault said at the time. During his resignation, the outgoing premier said Quebecers “must not be embarrassed about protecting our values”.
Legault’s departure is the second in many months, after the resignation of the Quebec Liberal leader, Pablo Rodriguez. The former federal cabinet minister stepped down only half a year into the job following allegations of vote-buying by party members during his leadership race. Rodriguez has denied any wrongdoing.
With both the CAQ and the Liberals in search of a new leader, the nationalist Parti Québécois currently leads the province’s polling. Leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon has pledged to bring a third referendum on separation from Canada if the party wins in November.
