The leader of the Parti Québecois (PQ), Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, gave a one-hour interview last month to Rebel News, a far-right media outlet with close connections to Trump’s MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement and fascist forces in Europe.

The interview was conducted by Alexa Lavoie, a far-right agitator who calls herself a “journalist.” During the interview, the PQ leader pretended not to know exactly who he was dealing with. But he said he was impressed by Lavoie’s “intellectual honesty,” particularly in her Islamophobic-laced reports denouncing “street prayers” during protests against the genocide in Gaza. He also sought to downplay the true nature of Rebel News, which has a long record of staging far-right provocations, describing it merely as a “more right-wing” media outlet.

Like Pierre Poilièvre, the far-right leader of the federal Conservative Party, St-Pierre Plamondon systematically accuses mainstream media outlets that criticize him of spreading “disinformation” and of being in the pay of the federal Liberal Party and other proponents of multiculturalism, and “wokism.”

The Rebel News interview is just the latest episode in the PQ’s lurch toward the far right, which has accelerated since St-Pierre Plamondon took the helm of the separatist party in 2020. The PQ is now the most virulent promoter of anti-immigrant ethno-chauvinism in official Quebec politics. In recent months, St-Pierre Plamondon has courted the far right more aggressively, notably by expressing admiration for and meeting with leaders of the Alberta separatist movement, which openly boasts of its ties to America’s fascist, would-be dictator president Donald Trump and his MAGA movement.

The PQ strongly denounced the trade agreement signed last January between Mark Carney’s Liberal government and China, employing Trump-type, anti-communist rhetoric. It denounced China as a “totalitarian communist regime that already poses a threat to our national security.” St-Pierre Plamondon used the agreement to argue in favor of Quebec independence, emphasizing that an independent Quebec would align with American imperialism under Trump.

As for Rebel News, St-Pierre Plamondon knows full well who he is dealing with. This xenophobic propaganda outlet has close ideological affinities with Breitbart News and maintains ties with the MAGA movement and the alt-right on an international scale. Even the Quebec Press Council has ruled that Rebel News “does not constitute a news media outlet” but rather an “activist organization with ties to far-right circles.”

Aligned with the far-right faction of the Conservative Party of Canada, Rebel News is also a supporter of the People’s Party of Canada, which was founded in 2018 by former Conservative cabinet minister Maxime Bernier after he narrowly lost the Conservative Party‘s leadership race.

Rebel News served as the mouthpiece for anti-vaxxers during the pandemic and for the fascist-led Freedom Convoy that menacingly occupied downtown Ottawa for three weeks in early 2022 to demand an end to all remaining anti-COVID public health measures.

Rebel News and its founder, Ezra Levant, promote the British fascist demagogue Tommy Robinson, who agitates for “remigration,” i.e. the mass expulsion of immigrants, and uses violent rhetoric to threaten and intimidate Muslims and other ethnic minorities. Robinson is so closely associated with racism and incitement that even Nigel Farage, the leader of the far-right Reform UK party, has publicly distanced himself from him.

The topics covered in the Rebel News interview with the PQ leader leave no doubt as to the outlet’s ultra-reactionary character or St-Pierre Plamondon’s sympathy for many of its views: health care privatization, laws ostensibly promoting state “secularism” as a means to counter the “dangers” of immigration, the elimination of state “bureaucracy,” anti-immigrant referendums called by Alberta’s far-right government, the preservation of Quebec’s Christian heritage, opposition to gun control, etc.

The interview essentially served as a platform for the PQ leader to promote the Quebec version of the fascist “Great Replacement” theory. Originally formulated by French far-right writer Renaud Camus, it holds that white European-Christian populations are being deliberately replaced by non-white immigrants through elite manipulation. It has inspired multiple mass shootings internationally, including the 2019 Christchurch, New Zealand, massacre.

In St-Pierre Plamondon’s version, the Canadian federal government seeks to “drown” the French-speaking (and “native” white) people of Quebec in a sea of immigrants to annihilate the Quebec nation and its French-speaking character. St-Pierre Plamondon presented himself as the defender of “social peace” and Quebec culture, which he claims are threatened by the federal government and mass immigration—themes he has developed in recent years in collaboration with the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ), the province’s current governing party, former Quebec Premier François Legault, and a stable of Quebec ethno-chauvinist columnists at the Journal de Montréal.

St-Pierre Plamondon and Lavoie touted “state secularism” as a means of preventing religion from encroaching on public life. However, the secularism law (Bill 21), introduced by the “Quebec First,” nationalist-autonomist CAQ and supported by the PQ, is actually a right-wing chauvinist law that violates democratic rights and targets religious minorities, particularly Muslim women. Under its discriminatory provisions, dozens, if not hundreds, of public sector workers who wear the hijab or other “ostentatious” religious symbols have lost their jobs and many more have been denied employment.

While claiming to uphold secularism, St-Pierre Plamondon, like Legault, fiercely defends the importance of preserving Catholic religious symbols, such as crucifixes, in public places, claiming they are “emblematic” of “who we are.” This is one of the key elements of Bill 21 that highlights its hypocritical and anti-democratic nature.

Lavoie and St-Pierre Plamondon jointly denounced the “street prayers” that have occasionally occurred during protests against Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, claiming that they threaten secularism and “security.” St-Pierre Plamondon praised Lavoie for being the only one to have addressed this “issue,” when, in reality, it is a pro-imperialist and anti-Muslim campaign fabricated by the Journal de Montreal—a tabloid owned by the media-telecommunications billionaire and former PQ leader Pierre-Karl Péladeau—and Rebel News and other shadowy fascist forces. This agitation is part of an attack by the entire Quebec and Canadian ruling class against pro-Palestinian demonstrations that denounce Netanyahu’s Zionist regime and Canadian imperialism’s complicity in the genocide.

The PQ leader then praised the “courage” of the Alberta separatists who “stand up” to the federal government based on a far-right platform. This includes denouncing public services, taxation (especially higher or progressive rates of taxation for the rich and super-rich) and equalization—a constitutionally-mandated scheme under which federal tax revenue from wealthier regions are used to support minimum national standards in public services—as “confiscatory,” “socialist” or even “communist” measures.

Like the Alberta separatists, St-Pierre Plamondon wants a sovereign Quebec to take a much tougher stance on temporary immigration, which he claims is “out of control.” He argues that this is the result of a “post-national ideological drift” by the federal Liberals, where “borders no longer exist.”

The PQ leader asserted that a “normal country” would limit universal access to public services and require temporary immigrants to make a financial contribution, as Alberta’s United Conservative Party government is proposing and several European countries already do.

A significant portion of the interview focused on the state of public services. Once again, St-Pierre Plamondon blamed the lack of access to healthcare in Quebec on the 600,000 temporary immigrants supposedly overburdening the system. He claimed that only Quebec’s independence could resolve the public services crisis by giving Quebec full control over immigration and eliminating the federal tier of government, which he says “duplicates functions” and “wastes money.”

To tackle Quebec’s debt, St-Pierre Plamondon proposed slashing “bureaucracy” and opening the door to the private sector—measures that actually signal a major attack on the working class and public services.

After decades of alternating in power with the Quebec Liberal Party, the PQ hemorrhaged popular support due to its austerity policies and anti-immigrant chauvinism. The party nearly vanished from the political map in the 2022 elections, winning only three seats.

If the big business PQ has since been able to rise from the ashes and is now, according to the opinion polls, poised to win the provincial election slated for this coming October, it is not due to a resurgence of popular support for the nationalism and right-wing chauvinism the PQ advocates.

Rather the PQ has been able to exploit the CAQ’s growing unpopularity thanks to the active support of a section of the ruling elite and, above all, the treacherous role played by the unions. They have systematically sabotaged the class struggle and prevented the working class from advancing its own solution to the growing socio-economic crisis.

In Quebec, as in the rest of Canada, there was a massive wave of strikes between 2022 and 2025. The union bureaucracy smothered this strike wave, isolating one group of workers from another, and advocating for “social dialogue” with Quebec’s CAQ government, while supporting the federal Liberal government of Trudeau-Carney, which criminalized workers’ struggles with anti-democratic strike bans.

Now with the Quebec provincial elections approaching, the unions are seeking to channel workers behind the election of an alternate right-wing, pro-austerity government, with many promoting the PQ, some explicitly, others tacitly.

The Quebec union bureaucracy is attempting to revive its historic, anti-worker corporatist alliance ties with the PQ, even as it openly adopts far-right positions and engages in anti-immigrant incitement. Magali Picard, the president of the Quebec Federation of Labor, Quebec’s largest union federation with over 600,000 members, attended the PQ’s most recent convention as a guest of honor. She applauded the party’s passing of a resolution reaffirming its supposed “pro-worker bias”—a demagogic ploy no better than the “pro-worker” posturing of the fascist Trump or the far-right Conservative leader Poilièvre.

This is a serious warning to the entire working class. Despite all its denunciations of the federal government, the PQ is a capitalist, pro-austerity, pro-imperialist party that supports rearmament to participate in the wars of Canadian and American imperialism. Its program for a “sovereign” Quebec calls for an “independent” capitalist state that will be a third imperialist power on the North American continent, and a loyal member of NATO and NORAD.

Workers must oppose the PQ’s chauvinism and far-right policies, just as they must oppose the austerity program and anti-immigrant campaign of the Canadian bourgeoisie as a whole. All these policies serve to divide the working class along ethnic and cultural lines in order to prevent a unified struggle of workers across Canada and North America against a capitalist system mired in systemic crisis and hurtling toward disaster. To counter the slide toward war and fascism, the working class must systematically unify its struggles on the basis of a socialist and internationalist program, taking as its watch-word the great socialist battle-cry “Workers of the World Unite.”