Wins, losses and a recount: What happened in Quebec in the federal election
Terrebonne riding east of Montreal flips to Liberals by just 35 votes, triggering recount
The Liberal party rode a wave of Quebec support to a minority government victory after a night of close races across the country.
The party won 44 seats in the province, even more than in 2015, when they won 40 en route to a sweeping majority under leader Justin Trudeau.
It was a significant gain for the party, which won 35 seats in Quebec in the 2021 federal election. The seats helped the Liberals secure a minority government in Ottawa, CBC News projected Tuesday afternoon.
In his victory speech, Prime Minister Mark Carney said his government would work toward uniting Canadians, and he mentioned Quebec specifically.
"We will ensure that Quebec will continue to prosper in a strong Canada," Carney said in French.
Quebec Premier François Legault congratulated Carney in a post to X, Tuesday morning, adding that he'll have more to say in the afternoon.
Many of the Liberals' Quebec seat gains came in the greater Montreal area, which turned a deep shade of red as election results began to pour in Monday evening.
It's a region that normally favours the Liberals; many Montreal ridings consistently support the party, but Monday's federal election brought a more significant wave of support in the formerly Bloc Québécois ridings on the South Shore, among other areas.
La Prairie-Atateken, formerly held by the Bloc, swung Liberal, as did Longueuil-Saint-Hubert. The Liberals held on to their other South Shore ridings, Châteauguay-Les Jardins-de-Napierville and Longueuil-Charles-LeMoyne.
On the island of Montreal, the electoral map looked largely unchanged from the 2021 election: a sea of Liberal seats punctuated by one orange NDP seat belonging to the party's sole Quebec representative, Alexandre Boulerice, and one light-blue Bloc seat on the eastern tip of the island in the La Pointe-de-l'Île riding.
There was one change: LaSalle-Émard-Verdun, a riding in Montreal's Sud-Ouest borough that swung Bloc in a recent byelection, oscillated decisively the other direction. Claude Guay, the Liberal candidate, won the riding with more than 50 per cent of the vote.
And the Mount-Royal riding, traditionally a Liberal stronghold, broke for incumbent Anthony Housefather after initial results showed Conservative challenger Neil Oberman ahead.
Elsewhere in the greater Montreal area, in Laval, Que., all four ridings stayed Liberal. Just north of that, the Thérèse-De Blainville riding, which had previously gone Bloc, was another Liberal flip.
The Liberals also picked up the seat in Trois-Rivières, which had previously been held by the Bloc.
They also picked up the Les Pays-d'en-Haut seat, which was created as part of redistribution of ridings in 2023, and Mandy Gull-Masty, former grand chief of the Cree Nation Government in Quebec, won in her riding of Abitibi-Baie-James-Nunavik-Eeyou, a Bloc stronghold, though some people in the riding had reported voting problems.
The riding of Terrebonne, east of Montreal, was the closest race in the country with only 28 votes separating Bloc incumbent Nathalie Sinclair-Desgagné from her closest challenger, Liberal Tatiane Auguste Monday night.
By Tuesday afternoon, Auguste came out on top with just 35 more votes than the Bloc. The narrow win will trigger an automatic judicial recount.
Two Bloc seats were also flipped by Tuesday afternoon after two close races. The Conservatives picked up a seat in the riding of Montmorency-Charlevoix — the only Conservative flip in the province — and the Liberals won in Longueuil-Saint-Hubert.
But the Bloc was able to hold on to its Shefford riding after a tight race with the Liberals.
In 2021, electors in Quebec sent 35 Liberal MPs, 32 Bloc Québécois MPs, 10 Conservative MPs and one NDP MP to Ottawa.
The Conservatives won in ridings that have recently voted for the party, including in the Beauce riding and ridings on the outskirts of Quebec City and in the southeastern corner of the province.
Elsewhere in the province, it was not all positive for the Liberals. The Bloc managed to unseat former Liberal minister Diane Lebouthillier in Gaspésie-Les Îles-de-la-Madeleine-Listuguj.
How will Ottawa work with Quebec?
Speaking a little after midnight to supporters at Le National, an event venue in downtown Montreal, Bloc Leader Yves-François Blanchet said that despite losing seats, his party ran its campaign with "heart" and "passion."
He said his party constantly highlighted issues that matter to Quebecers, like supply management for dairy farmers and the province's aluminum industry.
And he alluded to the Bloc playing a major role in how the next Parliament will function.
"It's possible that in Quebec and Canada's near future, the issues that we have identified become resolutely unavoidable," he said.
On Tuesday, the day after the election, Blanchet acknowledged that his party will need to work with the Liberal government — assuming they form a minority government — while protecting the interests of Quebecers.
For his part, Legault said he'll also work with Carney "to assert Quebec's interests by protecting our identity and our economy against Donald Trump's tariffs," in his social media post Tuesday.
There were a lot of big issues that were put aside this election with so much focus being on US President Donald Trump, according to Stéphanie Chouinard, an associate professor in the department of political science at Royal Military College.
During the campaign, Carney proved to be fluent in economics, but when it came to other topics, he was a lot less comfortable, she said.
"He is not going to govern on Trump tariffs forever. There will be other issues. And culture is definitely going to be one of them. Language as well," she said.
Carney will face significant challenges in day-to-day government from these other topics and that's going to come sooner than he'd like, she said.
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With files from Isaac Olson