Bloc Québécois leader Yves-François Blanchet expects voters to see some close battles in Quebec on election night on Monday, but in his opinion, his party won’t be “en manger une.”
“Get out the popcorn tomorrow night because yes, it’s going to be close in a lot of places. It’s going to be a very interesting evening for people who like politics as much as others like golf or football,” he predicted on Sunday during one of his last campaign stops.
He chose to begin his final day of campaigning in the riding of Québec-Centre, where he visited several times during his electoral tour. The seat, which was held by former minister Jean-Yves Duclos at the start of the election campaign, is hotly contested.
According to a Pallas poll commissioned by the Bloc, the sovereignist party has 42 per cent of voting intentions in the riding, putting it virtually neck and neck with the Liberals, who have 43 per cent support.
Elections Canada’s rejection of the Conservative candidacy in Québec-Centre seems to have helped the Bloc, according to this poll, which has a margin of error of plus or minus 5.4 percentage points.
The Liberals also feel that the Conservatives’ absence from the race made it particularly close. However, it is argued that the internal figures do not point to a battle as hotly contested as the Pallas poll shared by the Bloc suggests.
The Liberals would not release their own statistics to back up their claim.
Blanchet suggested that the figures could be even better. He noted that the Pallas poll, which was conducted a few days ago, may not have taken the full measure of the wind in his party’s favour that he said he felt at the end of the day.
The Québec-Centre riding has been in the sights of the Bloc Québécois since the start of the campaign. Bloc Québec-Centre candidate Simon Bérubé noted that he was the very first candidate invested in the Bloc ranks.
“Every day, new people call us, tell us they support us,” he said. “So yes, there is a wind, I think there really is a big movement in Québec-Centre to win this campaign.”
According to Blanchet, this wind that the Bloc says it feels is blowing in many other places in Quebec.
“We started out with people saying ‘the Bloc is going to eat one of these’. Then, once again, we’re losing our appetite because we didn’t eat a thing. We had a good campaign,” he maintained.
A little later on Sunday, during a campaign stop in Drummondville, Blanchet went further, saying that his political party had felt “a headwind” in recent weeks.
“I suspect we’re better in the face of adversity. We’ll all find out on Monday,” he said, alongside outgoing Drummond MP Martin Champoux.
Once again, Blanchet invited voters who are reluctant to exercise their right to vote to come out and trust the Bloc to defend Quebec’s specific characteristics in the House of Commons.
“We’ve adapted to the reality of this campaign. We heard what Quebecers wanted and, when we reflected what Quebecers wanted, we felt, from the ground and then from the doors (...) that something very positive was happening for us,” he said.
Recent polls show that the Bloc Québécois has indeed managed to climb several percentage points in voting intentions. Although they have narrowed the gap with the Liberals, Mark Carney’s troops are still considerably ahead across Quebec.
But Blanchet has argued in recent days that too much attention has been paid throughout the campaign to the “scoreboard” of the polls rather than to the “game.”
He believes that the poll aggregators could be wrong “in many Quebec ridings.”
One thing is certain, Bloc volunteers and campaign managers were busy in their constituency offices on Sunday, making numerous phone calls to consolidate support for the political party.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published in French on April 27, 2025.
