Peter Black
Local Journalism Initiative reporter
Peterblack@qctonline.com
Pascal Paradis will be the new MNA for the Jean-Talon riding following a crushing victory in the Oct. 2 byelection, the first time the Parti Québécois has won the seat since its creation in the 1960s.
Paradis, 52, a lawyer and co-founder of the Lawyers Without Borders organization, won 44 per cent of the 25,664 votes cast, nearly doubling the 5,474 tally for Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) candidate Marie-Anik Shoiry.
The results were also a blow for Québec Solidaire candidate Olivier Bolduc, making his third bid for the seat after coming a close second in the 2022 general election to the CAQ’s Joëlle Boutin. It was Boutin’s abrupt resignation in July for what she said were family reasons that sparked the byelection.
Liberal candidate Élise Avard Bernier failed to revive the party’s vanishing vote in a riding that used to be a fortress. She got 8.85 per cent of the vote, down from the 13.5 per cent the Liberal party candidate got in the 2022 election.
Conservative Jesse Robitalle came fourth with 6.0 per cent and Climat Québec candidate Martine Ouellet earned 308 votes.
For the PQ, the win in the riding was a triumph, although not a surprise, according to Paradis. He said he had a team of 728 volunteers who worked hard to get out the vote. With a voter turnout of 55.2 per cent, clearly the PQ’s work on the ground had an impact on the results. The turnout for the general election a year ago was 73.2 per cent.
Paradis said the result was “electrifying.” In a post-election interview with CBC Radio, Paradis said, “the PQ is really back not only in Jean-Talon, but in the region, here and nationally.”
The party has not held a seat in the Quebec City region since Québec Solidaire’s Catherine Dorion succeeded the retiring Agnès Maltais in 2018 in Taschereau. Paradis said voters in Jean-Talon responded to his “positive message” and “people wanted the government to know that things must change in the way Quebec is governed and in the way things were managed here in Jean-Talon.”
Paradis also said he benefited from the changing demographics of the riding, with an influx of immigrants and young families. “We did connect with the newly arrived persons in Jean-Talon because I’m the former head of Lawyers Without Borders. I’ve been travelling in many of the countries where they come from.”
He said he also connected with the university community, entrepreneurs and seniors, noting that his parents live in the riding. “They are facing the same problems that other seniors in the riding were telling me about. So we really connected, I think, with many of the different profiles that we see in the riding.”
Paradis, a graduate of Université Laval law school and the London School of Economics, will be the fourth PQ MNA in the National Assembly; the party suffered its worst result ever in the 2022 election. The newly elected MNA said he and the PQ will focus on the cost of living in the coming months.
The CAQ is now down one seat from its 2022 total of 90. Premier François Legault said at Shoiry’s post-election gathering at an Ave. Maguire restaurant, “I think the people of Jean-Talon were the spokespeople for all the citizens of the greater Quebec [City] region to tell us: you must examine your conscience. This is what we are going to do, because I have every intention in the coming months of rebuilding this bond of trust with the people of Quebec.”
The CAQ first won the riding in a 2019 byelection, ending a long Liberal reign, a result which reflected the traditional party’s waning fortunes outside Montreal. Some commentators see the PQ’s win in Jean-Talon as a harbinger of the party’s emergence as a potential challenger to Legault’s CAQ in the next election, expected in 2026.