Quebec Premier François Legault at a press conference in Montreal in February, 2025. He announced his resignation as premier on Wednesday.Christinne Muschi/The Canadian Press
François Legault is stepping down as Quebec Premier after a seven-year run, shaking up the province’s political landscape at a time of deep distress for many businesses and fears for the future as the United States squeezes Canada ever tighter on trade.
In a brief declaration in Quebec City on Wednesday, Mr. Legault said people in his province want a change in political leadership, and that he would resign once his ruling Coalition Avenir Québec party picks a successor. A provincial election is scheduled in October with polls currently showing the separatist Parti Québécois in the lead.
Mr. Legault “probably would have liked to exit in a more auspicious way,” said Jimmy Jean, chief economist for Desjardins Group. Some recent events have tarnished the Premier’s reputation as a good steward of the economy at a time when the province needs sharp leadership most, he said.
Quebec Premier François Legault to resign ahead of fall election
Quebec has a diversified economy with global strength in aluminum production, aerospace and forestry, among other industries. But Canada’s trade war with the U.S. threatens those economic pillars, even as voters face cost-of-living pressures. Meanwhile, the government struggles to engineer policies that will attract business while managing immigration and labour, building its energy resources and protecting the French language.
“It’s really a messy situation,” Mr. Jean said, citing “major structural headwinds,” such as negative population growth, happening at the same time as trade and geopolitical tensions. Quebec’s population is expected to decline by about 80,000 people by 2030, mostly because of an expected reduction in temporary immigration, according to the Institut de la statistique du Québec.
Mr. Legault vaulted into power with his first majority government in 2018, winning over voters with a mandate to narrow the wealth gap between Quebec and Ontario and bury the federalist-separatist debate that had dominated the province’s politics for decades. His early momentum was positive and his government pushed through a number of significant reforms, including widening the mandate of its investment arm, Investissement Québec.
The Premier’s popularity held fast during the COVID-19 pandemic, a crisis his government was seen to have managed more effectively than most. And even when some business leaders voiced concerns over CAQ policies such as tougher language laws, voters appeared supportive of the province’s general direction as wages increased and the unemployment rate compared favourably with the rest of the country.
But somewhere along the way, political observers say, the Legault government lost focus. An effort to overhaul Quebec’s forestry regulations failed. New labour legislation sparked outrage from unions. And it started making big bets, notably on an electric-vehicle battery industry that eventually crashed.
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Last September, Quebec pulled the plug on its support for a battery cell megafactory championed by Sweden’s Northvolt AB, crushing hopes for what was supposed to be the biggest private-sector project in the province’s history.
The project was a key element in Mr. Legault’s industrial strategy to make the province a global hub for electric-vehicle battery production and development. But Northvolt went bankrupt, and Quebec lost $270-million in the venture.
Despite some successes, the Premier’s methods of stimulating economic development – including the use of Quebec’s vast hydroelectric resources to back government-approved winners – had begun to unwind in recent months, said David Boudeweel, a government and public relations specialist. That’s partly because the province is dealing with lower energy supplies.
Whether it continues is “going to depend on his successor, but I think this heavy-handed approach has run its course a little bit,” Mr. Boudeweel said. “I think it’s going to diminish, probably not vanish. But there’s definitely part of his economic legacy that’s still up for grabs.”
One key question is whether Quebec can cement a new energy deal with Newfoundland and Labrador after the political landscape shifts in both provinces. Mr. Legault said Wednesday he was confident a final agreement will be reached, but the fate of the tentative pact has been unclear since Premier Tony Wakeham’s Progressive Conservatives won Newfoundland’s provincial election last October, ending a decade of Liberal Party rule.
How Quebec will fare against an increasingly nationalistic U.S. regime also remains to be seen. The province’s big aluminum producers and forestry businesses are already grappling with hefty U.S. tariffs that are reshaping their operations. A renegotiation of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement on free trade could further change the game significantly.
The effective U.S. customs duty on the Quebec economy, factoring in all exports, is about 6.3 per cent, Desjardins economists calculated in December. That’s higher than the Canadian average, estimated to be 3.8 per cent. Roughly 86 per cent of Canadian exports are exempt from U.S. tariffs because they comply with USMCA.
“This leadership change just adds to the uncertainty,” said Véronique Proulx, president of the Federation of Quebec Chambers of Commerce, adding that labour availability remains the top issue for her members.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s actions over the past several weeks, including repeated declarations that his country wants Greenland, have further raised the stakes for Quebec leaders, Ms. Proulx said. “This government in transition and the next government have to give businesses as much predictability as possible on matters that they control.”