BY Ryan Pyke & Félix Laliberté
Eric Simard was born in Brazil and feels a strong connection to Quebec’s national identity. He has been involved in social movements since he was in CEGEP.
“There was this key moment when I realized I was Québécois,” Simard says. “I was left-leaning, I fought for certain things, but it all came together when I realized that we were just very, extremely different from English Canadians.”
Eric Simard talking with a friend at a sovereignty event on March 21 at the Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste de Montréal. Photo by Ryan Pyke.
Only around 29 per cent of Quebecers would vote “yes” in a referendum today, according to a Léger report from January 2026. A report from December 2025 puts this number at 33 per cent previously.
This could be part of a trend that found Canadians were more patriotic to the country as a whole in response to threats from Donald Trump.
According to a different Léger report from March 2025, 70 per cent of Canadians reduced their purchases of American goods in stores and 74 per cent increased their purchases of Canadian-made goods.
The numbers came from a poll tracking Trump’s tariffs, showing the impact of his policies on Canadian mindsets.
Despite this, Simard says that Quebecers’ perception of citizen responsibility and Canadian history is different from the rest of Canada’s.
“I don’t think that can change in our current framework,” Simard says. “I still think there’s a lot of injustices in the Canadian system in general that need to be addressed.”
He is currently the president of the youth council at the Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste de Montréal. He also participated in the creation of the Mouvement étudiant indépendantiste, an umbrella organization encompassing several student sovereignty committees at universities and CEGEPs across Quebec.
Simard is not the only young person dedicated to independence.
Literature offered at the sovereignty event on March 21 at the Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste. Photo by Ryan Pyke.
Dónal Gill is a political scientist working at Concordia University. He says that there has always been a minority of Quebecers who will strongly support sovereignty. He says there are a variety of arguments for sovereignty.
“The most, sort of, basic, emotional argument is that Quebec is a nation distinct and separate from Canada and that the purpose of all nation-states is to achieve self-determination, to be entirely self-governing,” Gill says.
On the other hand, the current federalist argument, as Gill outlines it, relates very much to the instability of current politics. This is an argument sovereigntists recognize.
Bloc Québécois president Mario Beaulieu says that the current political moment is complicating the fight for independence. This fear is especially pressing considering the military prowess of the United States.
“It scares people,” Beaulieu says.
He says many people think that being part of a larger country like Canada will offer more protection and a stronger economy, but he cites the economic strength of small Nordic countries like Denmark and Sweden as a counterexample.
“With a smaller economy, we can better adapt to circumstances,” he says.
Despite Beaulieu’s optimism, his party’s percentage of the popular vote has been trending downward since 1993, with a slight uptick in 2019 and 2021.
The Bloc Québécois’s percentage of the popular vote in Canadian federal elections. Infographic by Ryan Pyke.
The Léger survey shows that only around 29 per cent of Quebecers would vote yes if a referendum were held today. This is the lowest this number has been since the 1995 referendum.
“It seems as though public opinion polls show that Quebecers are not necessarily tattooing a maple leaf on their heart or anything, but they’re sort of lurching toward the safety of the federal government,” Gill says.
However, he points out that this moment could be fleeting. Gill also distinguishes between nationalism and sovereignty in Quebec.
“You can be a nationalist without wanting Quebec to be an independent country,” Gill says. “That’s what the C.A.Q. government is, for example.”
The back wall of Club Pays, a café which aims to promote sovereignty. Photo by Ryan Pyke.
Gill says that the C.A.Q., as a nationalist party, is trying to carve out a political ideology that can win votes from the Quebec Liberal Party, the traditional federalist party in Quebec. The C.A.Q’s lack of interest in a referendum comes from the idea that it would not be worth the trouble it would incur, according to Gill, and that it’s better to assertively pursue Quebec’s national interests.
Andrew Caddell is the president of the Task Force on Linguistic Policy, a non-partisan, grassroots, not-for-profit organization that claims to give a voice to English-speaking Quebecers, as described on the organization’s website.
They are taking Bill 96 to court. In 2023, they filed a lawsuit against the attorney generals of Quebec and Canada, calling the bill “unconstitutional” on their website.
Bill 96 was passed in May of 2022, according to the government of Quebec’s website. The act establishes French as the only common language of Quebec and amends several pieces of legislation to this effect, including the Civil Code of Quebec, the Charter of the French language, and the Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms, among other legislation.
The task force’s lawsuit alleges that Bill 96 prioritizes the rights of Quebec’s francophone majority while deprioritizing the individual identity, language and culture of Quebec’s non-francophone minority population.
Caddell says that there will always be a portion of Quebecers who lean towards independence. That leaves a certain number who are either federalists or who are willing to be convinced either way.
He and his organization are pursuing knowledge from average citizens at the grassroots level.
The outside of the Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste de Montréal. Photo by Ryan Pyke.
He points out that a lot of anglophones in Quebec are bilingual, and a minority only speaks English. Of that minority, many of them are elderly, visible minorities, or live in isolated communities.
“I can easily live in French, and I have, but when I think about those people and then the way the law discriminates openly, I have a problem with that,” Caddell says.
Caddell also brought up the case of those who learned French outside Quebec and could integrate into the province if incentivized.
“There’s so many people that we could be bringing from other parts of the country if we encourage them,” he says.
Gill says that the outcome of a referendum today would depend greatly on the exact question. What a yes vote would mean is also tricky to decipher.
“The implications are kind of mired in the optimism of the yes side and the pessimism of the no side,” Gill says.
