As Alberta seemed poised on Tuesday to overwhelmingly reject holding a referendum on that province’s sovereignty, fear of a referendum in Quebec cost the Parti Québécois the chance to become a majority government, a new survey suggests.
The Léger online poll, published by the TVA news network and conducted a few days after the Oct. 5 general election, suggests that a pledge by party leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon that the PQ would hold a referendum on Quebec sovereignty in a first term confined it to minority status.
The survey found that worry over the prospect of a sovereignty referendum was a close second behind concerns over affordability for Quebec voters. The poll suggests that had the referendum plan been dropped, support for the PQ would have stood at 35 per cent — seven percentage points over what it won on Oct. 5 and well into majority territory.
The survey found also that even were the PQ to honour its pledge to wait until the departure of U.S. President Donald Trump from the White House before holding a referendum, more than two-thirds of Quebecers would oppose holding a vote on sovereignty.
The online survey was conducted Oct. 9-12 and questioned 1,014 Quebec adults drawn at random from Léger’s online pool of respondents. Online polls do not carry a margin of error.
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