‘It’s a cloud’: Sovereignty questions loom over Quebec firms as PQ leads the polls

MONTREAL — Quebec’s business community is on alert as polls show the separatist Parti Québécois with a firm lead heading into Monday’s election day, with some sensing early jitters over the prospect of sovereignty — but “no panic” in the offing.

PQ Leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon has pledged to hold a referendum within his first mandate, though not before U.S. President Donald Trump leaves office in 2029.

“It’s a cloud. We have uncertainty on tariffs, we have uncertainty on counter-tariffs,” said Sébastien Lachaine, Quebec director at lobbying firm Sussex Strategy.

“The uncertainty of a referendum, even if the PQ is a minority, will add a cloud in the business community.”

Concerns over the possibility of independence could dampen investment, discourage immigration and trigger a rise in interest rates on government bonds, Lachaine said.

However, the PQ platform promises to lower corporate tax rates, an apparent boon for businesses in the province and part of a perceived rightward shift in the party’s policies.

For investors, a lot hinges on whether the would-be government emerges as a minority or a majority. The latter would increase the odds of a vote on separation, said Louis Hébert, a management professor at Montreal’s HEC business school.

“That will make a big difference,” he said. “If it’s a minority government, the likelihood of a new election within two years is pretty high, if you look at the past history.”

Investors outside the province have already factored a potential separatist regime into their calculations, with secession a farther-off risk compared to the clear and present crises of the U.S.-Canada trade war and artificial intelligence, he said.

Moreover, sovereigntist sentiment is nothing new in la belle province.

“In French we say something: better the devil you know than the devil you don’t know. And I think that the sovereignty risk in Quebec is a known devil,” Hébert said.

“People are taking it seriously, but no panic.”

Worries over referendum rumblings’ effect on Quebec businesses would not be unprecedented.

In the four years between Parti Québécois founder René Lévesque’s election in 1976 and the 1980 referendum on sovereignty-association, about 350 companies left the province and many more gutted their Montreal head offices. Some 200,000 residents also pulled up stakes, according to Statistics Canada.

In 1995, the narrow margin of a referendum vote — a 50.6 to 49.4 per cent split — left executives uneasy about the consequences for the provincial economy.

Recent polls show that support for independence — and for the PQ — hovers at around 30 per cent. In a fractured election battle with five major parties potentially poised to win seats, that threshold is still likely to translate to a win for the Parti Québécois, if not a yes on sovereignty.

Millions of voters across Quebec are casting their ballots on Monday.

Eric Girard, Quebec’s outgoing finance minister, warned last week that an “independent, sovereign Quebec would be poorer” and could lose up to $65 billion in economic activity in the first five years after leaving. He cited a University of Calgary study that pegged the cost of Alberta separation at between $50 billion and $170 billion over five years.

As a cautionary tale, Girard also pointed to the United Kingdom, where economic output wound up six to eight per cent below where it would have been had the country decided to stay in the European Union, according to a 2025 study from the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.

For its part, the PQ states that independence would yield between $13 billion and $16 billion in administrative savings by scrapping or merging most of the roughly 230 federal agencies now operating in Quebec, according to the party’s costed platform. However, the cost of creating a stand-alone military, border services and other potential expenses are not covered in the document.

Given the relatively low support for secession, many entrepreneurs are focusing on more immediate concerns.

Some are fed up with the tangle of red tape they feel the province sticks them with and want more tax cuts and, for big companies, fewer cash injections, said François Vincent, vice-president for Quebec at the Canadian Federation of Independent Business.

A September survey from the federation found that four in five respondents want the provincial government to balance the budget before launching new programs.

On Friday, a group of prominent Quebec business leaders called on the future government to “regain” the province’s economic ambition and foster the conditions for entrepreneurship to flourish.

“Today, Quebec finds itself ‘uninvestable,’ or much less attractive than other markets around the world,” said billionaire Andrew Lutfy, chairman and CEO of fashion retailer Groupe Dynamite Inc.

Others in the group included Alimentation Couche-Tard Inc. founder and executive chairman Alain Bouchard, Laurent Beaudoin — widely credited with turning Bombardier Inc. into a transportation giant in the late 20th century — and Paul Desmarais III, senior vice-president of Power Corp. of Canada.

The event where two of the four business luminaries delivered their message to hundreds of executives and entrepreneurs last week was a “non-partisan, non-political gathering.” But the timing, days ahead of an election where the PQ is poised to win, was hard to miss.

“Businesses need to have clarity,” Lachaine said. “They are waiting to be reassured.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 5, 2026.

Companies in this story: (TSX:GRGD, TSX:ATD, TSX:BBD.B, TSX:POW)

Christopher Reynolds, The Canadian Press