Quebec Conservatives Hit 20% as Liberals Reach 25% and PQ Holds Lead at 29% in Final Léger Poll

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Quebec’s final campaign weekend is delivering a clearer picture of party support, but not a guaranteed winner. The October 3 Léger/Le Journal/TVA poll puts the Parti Québécois at 29%, the Quebec Liberals at 25% and the Quebec Conservatives at 20%, ahead of the October 5, 2026, provincial election. The Coalition Avenir Québec trails at 14%, while Québec solidaire stands at 11%.

For Conservative Leader Éric Duhaime, a two-point gain creates a late opening with potential parliamentary consequences. For Liberal Leader Charles Milliard, second place comes with a qualification: his party has slipped from 26%, rather than gained ground in the latest reading. The PQ remains ahead, but the distribution of votes—and the decisions still being made before Monday—will determine whether that lead becomes governing power.

For the Conservatives, 20% Has Parliamentary Significance

Duhaime’s Conservatives have moved from 18% in Léger’s September 28 release to 20% in the final campaign poll, a gain of two percentage points. That leaves the party five points behind the Liberals and six ahead of the governing CAQ. On Saturday, Duhaime acknowledged that reaching one-fifth of the provincial vote now looked attainable, after previously concentrating his public ambitions on electing at least 12 members of the National Assembly.

Those two targets are connected. Assembly rules provide for parliamentary-group recognition when a party elects at least 12 members or wins at least 20% of the vote in the latest general election. Recognition brings procedural advantages, including speaking time in the chamber and committees. For an elected Conservative caucus, that could mean greater influence over daily parliamentary debate. However, the threshold concerns actual election results, not polling estimates. A rounded 20% reading does not itself confer recognition, guarantee seats or establish how many Conservative candidates will ultimately win.

The Liberals Remain Second as the Conservatives Narrow the Gap

The Liberals’ 25% puts them four percentage points behind the PQ, exactly the same gap recorded in Léger’s September 28 release. At that point, the parties stood at 26% and 30%, respectively. Both have lost one point in the latest comparison. For the Liberals, the final reading interrupts an earlier improvement: the party had climbed from 23% in the September 21 release to 26% a week later. It now enters the closing weekend ahead of the Conservatives, but without another increase to advertise.

The contest for second place is tightening: the Conservatives are now five points behind the Liberals, compared with eight previously. Milliard nevertheless rejected suggestions that the outcome was settled, telling supporters in Trois-Rivières on Saturday that the race remained open. His challenge is twofold: overtake the PQ while protecting the Liberals’ position against a rising competitor. A narrow provincewide gap offers a political opportunity, but it does not identify which local seats would deliver it.

The PQ’s Francophone Lead Remains Its Central Advantage

Paul St-Pierre Plamondon’s PQ has an advantage that the provincewide ranking alone does not fully explain. Among francophone respondents, Léger puts the party at 35%, compared with 19% for the Conservatives, its closest competitor in that group. That 16-point separation is substantially wider than the four-point PQ–Liberal gap overall. It gives the PQ a distinct source of strength, even though its own headline result has edged down from 30% to 29%.

Nevertheless, pollster Jean-Marc Léger cautioned against treating the seat outcome as settled. In comments reported by Le Journal and TVA, he assessed the immediate picture as pointing toward a minority government, while emphasizing how three-way and four-way contests complicate prediction. That was an assessment of the campaign snapshot, not an election result. His warning captures the central tension for the PQ: leading a fragmented field can create a path to power, but small changes across competitive ridings can determine whether that path ends in majority or minority government.

The CAQ Faces a Broad Demand for Change

Christine Fréchette’s CAQ has fallen to 14%, down from 16% in the previous Léger release. Le Journal and TVA report that this represents a ten-point decline since the campaign began. Another finding helps explain the difficult atmosphere surrounding the governing party: 77% of respondents want a change of government and a different party in power, compared with 74% in the September 28 release. That measures dissatisfaction with the incumbent government, not agreement on its replacement.

Fréchette responded on Saturday by defending the CAQ’s position between federalism and sovereignty, presenting it as an alternative to reviving that longstanding divide. Individual candidates may still have local strengths that the provincial total cannot capture. Jean-Marc Léger pointed to Lévis and Trois-Rivières as examples where the party might hold on. Such victories would offer the CAQ something the headline percentage cannot: elected representatives from whom it could rebuild. Its final challenge is therefore also local—whether established candidates can withstand a much less favourable provincial mood.

Québec Solidaire’s Recovery Adds Another Contender

Québec solidaire has also improved in the latest comparison, moving from 9% to 11%. Its two-point increase matches the Conservatives’ gain, although the parties remain at different levels of support. The result leaves five major parties in double digits, rather than reducing the election to a straightforward contest between the PQ and the Liberals. For Québec solidaire, the immediate question is how much of that support can be concentrated in constituencies where its candidates are competitive.

Ruba Ghazal’s closing campaign message has emphasized protecting public services and challenged Duhaime’s growing influence. On Saturday, she warned about the direction a stronger Conservative presence could push Quebec politics, including its potential influence on a PQ government. Those are partisan arguments, not conclusions established by the poll. They nevertheless show why Québec solidaire’s campaign cannot be understood solely through its fifth-place ranking. The party is also contesting what kind of opposition—and what pressures on the next government—voters might send to the Assembly.

Quebec City and Montreal Tell Different Electoral Stories

The regional breakdown reveals why the same provincial result can produce very different expectations across Quebec. In the Quebec City census metropolitan area, the Conservatives register 37%, ahead of the PQ at 28%. In the Montreal metropolitan area, the Liberals lead with 34%, followed by the PQ at 26%. Outside those two metropolitan areas, the PQ stands at 33%, with the Conservatives second at 22%. Three broad regions therefore show three different parties in first place.

These figures describe metropolitan regions, not simply municipal boundaries, and the rest-of-Quebec category combines many distinct communities. Still, the contrast is important: a Conservative candidate around the capital and one in metropolitan Montreal are not facing identical political conditions. Nor can Liberal or PQ candidates assume their provincewide standing describes their own contest. The regional samples are smaller than the overall poll, so the percentages should not be mistaken for precise riding forecasts. Their value is in showing the uneven geography beneath a single provincial ranking.

The 2022 Election Shows Why Vote Share Is Not Enough

The Conservatives have a particularly vivid reason to focus on seats rather than percentages. In the 2022 provincial election, they received 530,786 votes—12.91% of the valid ballots—but elected no members. More than half a million supporters therefore produced no Conservative victory in an individual riding. That experience gives the current 20% estimate a practical context: the party is seeking not only a larger audience, but a different electoral outcome from the one its supporters experienced four years ago.

The same election produced another striking contrast. The PQ won 14.61% of the vote and three seats, while the Liberals took a slightly smaller 14.37% and secured 21. The CAQ, meanwhile, won 90 of the Assembly’s then-125 seats with 40.98% of the vote. Those results do not predict what will happen in 2026. They demonstrate why provincewide popularity and legislative representation are different measurements. Where support is located—and whether it is sufficient to finish first locally—can matter as much as the total number of votes.

The Referendum Question Returns to the Closing Campaign

The PQ’s promise to hold a sovereignty referendum in 2029 has brought Quebec’s constitutional future into the final campaign exchanges. In Lachute on Saturday, Milliard warned about the consequences of separation and invoked Brexit as a comparison. That was the Liberal leader’s argument against the PQ’s agenda, not an economic outcome demonstrated by the polling. St-Pierre Plamondon, meanwhile, appealed for a majority, arguing that a minority government would face greater difficulty implementing its programme.

The distinction between party support and support for a particular policy remains essential. A 29% voting-intention result measures preference for the PQ in this election; it does not establish how those respondents would answer a referendum question. Nor does backing another party reveal every voter’s reasoning. For households weighing public services, affordability and Quebec’s future, those considerations can overlap rather than fit into a single category. The closing debate therefore involves both who should govern and what mandate the eventual government can reasonably claim.

A Larger Assembly Makes 64 Seats the Majority Target

Quebec is electing 127 members this year, rather than the 125 chosen in 2022, under the new electoral map. That makes 64 seats the threshold for a majority. The distinction is important when comparing this campaign with older elections or reading commentary that still assumes the former size of the Assembly. The provincewide percentages do not translate directly into a fixed share of those seats.

Quebec uses a single-member plurality system: the candidate with the most votes in each riding wins, even without an absolute majority. Consider a purely illustrative four-candidate contest with shares of 35%, 30%, 20% and 15%. The candidate at 35% takes the seat; the other votes do not generate proportional representation elsewhere. In a fragmented election, repeated local finishes of that kind can produce a legislative advantage much larger than a party’s provincewide lead. For the PQ and its rivals, the decisive question is therefore how often their candidates finish first, not merely how many respondents name the party overall.

What the Poll Measures—and What Its Method Cannot Promise

Léger conducted the poll online from September 30 to October 1 among 1,000 eligible Quebec voters aged 18 and older. The published voting-intention breakdown uses 892 decided respondents, including people who identified a preference after a follow-up question. Participants came from Léger’s LEO panel, and the results were weighted using demographic characteristics. This is a campaign snapshot collected before the final weekend, rather than a continuous measurement of every development through election day.

The methodology also requires care when discussing precision. Léger provides a comparison with a probability sample of the same size, which would have a maximum margin of error of approximately 3.1 percentage points, 19 times out of 20. That is not a conventional margin of error for this non-probability online panel. It would therefore be misleading to use that comparison to declare a statistical tie or a guaranteed lead. One- and two-point movements describe differences between published estimates; they do not, by themselves, prove that an equivalent share of the electorate has changed its mind.

The Final Test Is the Vote, Not the Last Poll

By October 2, approximately 1.6 million Quebecers had already voted in advance, representing 25.59% of eligible electors, according to Élections Québec. That compares with 24.8% in 2022. The figures show that a substantial portion of the electorate had made its decision before the final campaign exchanges. They do not reveal which parties those voters supported, and higher advance participation does not automatically establish higher overall turnout or an advantage for any particular campaign.

Election-day polling stations are scheduled to open on Monday, October 5, from 9:30 a.m. to 8 p.m. Élections Québec says approximately 60,000 people are working across the election, with preliminary results to be released after polls close and official confirmation later. Their work will turn competing campaign claims into counted ballots and riding victories. The final Léger numbers give the PQ the lead, the Liberals second place and the Conservatives an important opening. What remains unresolved is the question that matters most: which combination of local results will shape Quebec’s next government and opposition.

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