COLUMN: The Last Item on the Program

They wrote it down, and they said it out loud

Before I start hitting, I am going to give Québec solidaire what it has earned, because if I open with a caricature you will be right to close the page.

On July 3, 2026, the party released a manifesto of roughly twenty pages titled Nouveau Québec libre. On September 24, mid-campaign, Ruba Ghazal restated it as a commitment: "Quebec must be sovereign", and "we must take ourselves in hand and be fully masters of our own future." The plan has three steps. A constituent assembly elected by universal suffrage, co-built with the First Nations and the Inuit. A constitution submitted to a referendum, with a financial portrait of an independent Quebec produced by the Finance Ministry. A declaration of independence the day after a winning referendum. All of it to be completed within a single four-year mandate.

That is not ambiguous. Anyone who claims QS is not a sovereigntist party has not read the document.

So the problem is not there. The problem is the clause that comes right after.

The eight-word sentence

In the party's program there is a line that Denis Monière flagged in L'Action nationale, and it changes everything: "one must not presume the outcome of the debates." Promoting the sovereigntist option is assigned to the party, not to the government. The constituent assembly is open to every option, including a status inside Canada.

Monière pulls out Amir Khadir's old formula on this: "Independence if necessary, but not necessarily independence." That is Mackenzie King turned back against the left, and it stings because it lands.

You have a party committed to holding the process, not to winning it.

2006, and what the merger cost

To understand the constituent assembly you have to go back to the founding. The Union des forces progressistes, in 2002, was plainly sovereigntist. Option citoyenne, the movement Françoise David launched in 2004 on leaving the Fédération des femmes du Québec, was feminist and social first, and its position on the national question was deliberately left open.

In February 2006 the two merged. Québec solidaire was born out of that. And when you glue together a party for which independence is article one and a movement that refuses to make it a condition of membership, you need a mechanism that lets both sign without either one surrendering.

That mechanism is the constituent assembly.

What is presented to us as a strategy for achieving independence is first of all an internal peace treaty.

Why they cannot drop it

And that is exactly why it is still there twenty years later. Abandoning it means choosing one of the two halves of its own birth.

Look at the 2023 quarrel. Christine Labrie called the constituent assembly a "way out" for avoiding having to define a vision of an independent Quebec. Manon Massé shut that down flatly: "Christine's opinion is Christine's opinion." And Massé defended the process with the most honest argument I have heard from their side: "I am old enough to have lost two referendums and there is no question of my losing a third."

I respect that sentence. 1980 and 1995 left marks on an entire generation. But there is a difference between not wanting to lose and not wanting to play.

A boxer who refuses to climb back into the ring because he has already lost twice, we understand. But we stop billing him as the next champion.

Two peoples, two mechanics

Here I want to be exact, because the easy version of this argument is everywhere and it is bad.

On May 29, 2024, Québec solidaire tabled a motion in the National Assembly asking the Quebec government to officially recognize the State of Palestine. The CAQ and the Liberals refused to support it. In September 2025, Ghazal announced she would table another. The party's case invokes "the inalienable right of peoples to self-determination."

No constituent assembly. No referendum on a draft constitution. No prior financial portrait. No clause stating that one must not presume the outcome of the debates. Recognition, immediately, unconditionally.

For Quebec: a three-step process whose outcome must not be presumed.

The right of peoples to self-determination is inalienable six thousand kilometres away. Here, it is procedural.

What that proves, and what it does not

Let's be rigorous about what this asymmetry demonstrates and what it does not.

It does not demonstrate that QS loves Palestine more than Quebec. The situations are not comparable: you need a constitutional process to leave a federation, not to end a military occupation. The means differ because the obstacles differ. That objection is serious and it has to be taken.

But here is what it demonstrates anyway, and it is enough. QS is maximalist about the sovereignty it will never have to deliver, and cautious about the one it would be accountable for. It is easy to demand the unconditional recognition of a state when it costs you nothing and you will never have to negotiate the division of the debt, the currency and the borders. It is when sovereignty becomes your administrative responsibility that you suddenly discover the virtues of consultation.

Clarity is free when it concerns somebody else's country.

The facts, since nobody is checking them

On Tuesday, October 20, 2026, at the swearing-in of the Québec solidaire members, Ghazal brandished a keffiyeh. A petition launched by Éric Béland demanding her resignation was approaching 70,000 signatures by Thursday. Béland said he was "deeply concerned" and called the gesture "inappropriate and out of place at an official ceremony." Ghazal refused to resign, explained that the scarf was worn by her great-grandfathers before 1948, compared it to Quebec's own ceinture fléchée, and described it as a "message of love to Quebec."

Now here is the detail the 70,000 signatories probably do not know. The keffiyeh was not hers. It was on Manon Massé's shoulders. Le Soleil's columnist watched the footage: Ghazal "was pulling from the neck of former member Manon Massé the keffiyeh she was wearing," after stepping away from the microphone.

The person wearing a keffiyeh in the National Assembly that day was a Québécoise from Windsor, in the Eastern Townships.

Massé, and fifteen years of continuity

And Massé is no last-minute convert. In 2011 she was aboard the Canadian Boat for Gaza, part of Freedom Flotilla II, as Québec solidaire's representative. Fifteen years before October 7, 2023. In April 2019 she testified before Spain's Supreme Court as an international observer of the 2017 Catalan independence referendum. Member for Sainte-Marie–Saint-Jacques from 2014 until August 27, 2026, co-spokesperson from 2017 to 2023, her party's candidate for premier in 2018.

So the story about the "immigrant who prefers her country of origin" does not survive thirty seconds. The keffiyeh was on a Quebec activist who has been wearing it longer than it has been fashionable.

And that is precisely why I find this fight harmful. While we sign petitions about a scarf, nobody is asking Québec solidaire to explain why the inalienable right of peoples applies unconditionally in Ramallah and in stages in Quebec City. The first question is answered with one emotional press conference. The second one has no answer.

We handed them a controversy they could win, and they won it.

The hardliners finally got the pen

I would be dishonest to pretend nothing has moved. In 2017, Option nationale, the party founded by Jean-Martin Aussant, voted to merge into Québec solidaire. Its last leader was named Sol Zanetti. He was elected in Jean-Lesage in 2018.

And guess who drove the July 2026 manifesto. Zanetti. He is the one who wrote the commitment to complete the process in a single mandate. He is the one attacking the Parti québécois by calling a referendum on a provisional constitution "very risky." He is the one setting an "equal to equal" partnership with the First Peoples as a condition.

In other words: the wing that used to accuse QS of parking independence at the bottom of the program is now the wing writing the constitutional program. Anyone who wants to hit QS in 2026 has to account for that, otherwise they are hitting the QS of 2010.

The hardening is real. What remains to be seen is whether it is sincere or decorative.

The test, and it is measurable

Here is how we will know, and it requires no opinion. Just a stopwatch.

On September 24, 2026, QS announced its three-step independence plan. The headline that emerged from that day in the press: Ruba Ghazal presents QS as the bulwark against austerity. The release was about the country. The coverage was about the budget.

Two readings are available, and I am not picking one, because I do not have the full transcript of the press conference. Either independence was not at the top in her own mouth that day, or it was and the newsroom took the other piece. If it is the second, QS has a legitimate complaint to make.

But there is one number that is not up for debate. At the moment the party was launching its Nouveau Québec campaign to recruit young voters, polls indicated that roughly one third of Québec solidaire's own voters would vote yes in a referendum. The same proportion as in the general population.

A sovereigntist party whose own supporters are no more sovereigntist than the neighbour has a product problem, not a marketing problem.

The number that settles the argument

On October 5, 2026, Québec solidaire elected nine members. Eleven in 2022. Ghazal re-elected in Mercier, Zanetti in Jean-Lesage. Her comment that evening: "Québec solidaire has not said its last word."

So we have a nine-seat party promising to make Quebec independent in a single mandate, through a constituent assembly elected by universal suffrage whose outcome it swears must not be presumed.

In December, former Option nationale members published an open letter calling on their ex-colleagues to leave the party. Mathieu Lebel, one of the signatories, summed it up better than I can: "Fine words are all very well, but it is actions that define political parties."

We will judge. But to judge the actions you first have to be in power, and to be in power you need more than nine seats and a manifesto.

What I am asking them, and it is not hostile

I will finish with an honest question rather than a kick, because the sovereigntist left is not my enemy.

You are right about austerity. You are right about the First Nations, and the July manifesto is the most serious text any sovereigntist party has written on that subject. You are right that the country has to be built with newcomers and not against them.

But if the right of peoples to self-determination is inalienable, why does ours require a process whose outcome must not be presumed? Why do we get the procedure while others get the principle?

Answer that one and I will leave the scarf alone for good. But is anyone going to ask it?

By Maxime Marquette, columnist

Editorial stance

I am not a journalist but a columnist and analyst. My expertise lies in observing and analysing the geopolitical, economic and strategic dynamics that shape our world. My work is to take political strategies apart, to understand global economic movements, to put the decisions of international actors in context and to offer analytical perspectives on the changes that are redefining our societies.

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