Montreal, August twenty-two — The trade war Washington opened against its northern neighbor has done something decades of Canadian federalism could not: it has quieted Quebec’s separatist impulse. With a provincial election due by October fifth, polling puts backing for an independent Quebec near thirty percent, the weakest reading in generations, and even committed sovereigntists concede the moment is wrong.
The economic damage is real and local. When the White House slapped fifty percent duties on Canadian steel in June of last year, a fastener plant in the province lost roughly a third of its bolt orders inside a week. Its owner, the Heico Companies, froze hiring, shuttered a site in the region, and cut one hundred forty jobs overall, most of them in Quebec. “As long as Trump will be in his chair, I don’t feel that we even need to talk about that,” David Jeannotte, an operations director there, told RTE, alluding to independence. His own brother was among those laid off.
Historically, hard times in the province fed the breakup cause. This round has produced the opposite: an outpouring of Canadian patriotism, spurred by annexation talk about making the country the fifty-first state and by the whiplash of tariff policy. The sovereigntist Parti Quebecois still narrowly leads election polls and would return to power after a dozen years out, yet analysts read that as punishment for the governing Liberals rather than an embrace of the PQ platform. Party leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, though committed to a third referendum should he win, has vowed not to hold one while Donald Trump occupies the presidency. On Tuesday he posted on X that Quebec’s political fate “must not be hijacked by the upheaval of American politics, the outbursts of an unpredictable president or by a campaign of fear.”
The retreat echoes a wider pattern. From Scotland to Catalonia, separatist projects have been complicated by the unpredictability of the American president’s trade threats and his skepticism toward NATO. A delayed Quebec vote also removes one headache for Prime Minister Mark Carney, who won last year’s national election promising toughness toward Washington and faces a separate separatist referendum in oil-rich Alberta in mid-October.
Why the chill? Quebec is arguably Canada’s most progressive province, and its dislike of the U.S. president is the country’s deepest: August figures from pollster Angus Reid put his favorable rating there at just ten percent. “Trump represents everything that Quebec has fought against for the last 60 years in terms of creating a modern, progressive society,” said Jonathan Kalles, who once advised ex-prime minister Justin Trudeau on Quebec affairs. Conservative policies and Washington’s dismissal of the province’s French-language rules as a “trade irritant” grate equally. The Bank of Montreal reckoned in March that the provincial economy will grow only about one percent this year, half the pace expected in Alberta and Saskatchewan.
Some separatists press on regardless. Marie-Anne Alepin, who heads the Societe Saint-Jean-Baptiste de Montreal, argued that Ottawa’s plan to scrap a tax financing Canadian programming shows the province must go alone: “Canada is not capable of defending Quebec’s interests,” she said. “(Quebec) has to be at the negotiating table and to do that, we have to be a country.” Dairy farmer Vincent Rainville, who milks more than two hundred fifty cows on a fourth-generation operation, pushed back. “It’s not just Quebec, it’s all of Canada and all our industries that have been affected,” he said, insisting the threat demands a national answer. A nineteen ninety-five referendum kept Quebec in Canada by the narrowest of margins; on present trends, a third vote will wait for a very different political season.
