Incumbent Legault’s center-right CAQ party projected to win majority in Quebec -CBC News
Quebec #Quebec
By Allison Lampert and Ismail Shakil
MONTREAL/OTTAWA (Reuters) -The ruling Coalition Avenir Quebec (CAQ) is set to boost its majority in the mostly French-speaking Canadian province of Quebec, CBC News projected on Monday, after leader Francois Legault campaigned on protecting the French language and the economy.
The center-right CAQ, which was founded in 2011, was leading in 93 of the 125 seats in Quebec’s legislature, according to CBC projections. The party won 74 seats in their first term in 2018. Polls closed at 8 p.m. local time (0000 GMT).
Preliminary data from Elections Quebec showed the CAQ was leading in 94 seats just after 9 p.m..
“People put their confidence in us for a second mandate,” Eric Caire, a CAQ member of Quebec’s national assembly, told CBC. “For the first time in his (Legault’s) career he had to face a mandate and defend the way he managed the outbreak, the government … I think people tonight tell him that he did great.”
CAQ was widely expected to win re-election in the face of a fractured opposition. Quebec Liberal Party, which is poised to win 20 seats, will be official opposition, CBC projected.
In the recent campaign, Legault, 65, promised to cut middle-class taxes to blunt the impact of high inflation on Quebec’s 8.5 million people and vowed to protect the status of the province’s official French language.
Legault’s projected win follows a controversial campaign centered on identity, immigration and a rise in inflation, and marked by several gaffes. He apologized last month for awkwardly linking newcomers to Quebec with extremism and warned last week that bringing in immigrants who did not speak French would be “suicidal.”
Quebec’s labor minister also apologized on Twitter last week for saying that most immigrants “go to Montreal, don’t work, don’t speak French, and don’t adhere to the values of Quebec.”
Legault, who was a minister for the separatist Parti Quebecois (PQ) government from 1998 to 2003, has proposed capping immigration at 50,000 people a year, just a quarter of neighboring Ontario’s annual figure. Quebec accounts for a fifth of Canada’s overall GDP and is the country’s second most populous province.
(Reporting by Allison Lampert in Montreal and Ismail Shakil in Ottawa; Editing by Leslie Adler and Richard Pullin)