‘Child of Bill 101’ to aspiring premier: QS launches campaign with Ruba Ghazal at helm
Posted August 27, 2026 12:01 pm.
Last Updated August 27, 2026 12:00 pm.
Ruba Ghazal helped found Québec solidaire (QS) in 2006. Twenty years later, she is leading the party’s ranks into the Oct. 5 election, at a time when the left-wing party is trailing in the polls.
Ghazal knows QS like the back of her hand. “My party is tattooed on my heart,” the 48-year-old politician once said.
Alongside Françoise David and Amir Khadir, she was one of the founding members of the political party, which took off in February 2006 at a convention held in a hall at the Université de Montréal.
The year after the party’s founding, she ran for office under the party’s banner in the Montreal riding of Laurier-Dorion. She finished fourth. In 2008, she again failed to unseat the Liberal candidate but improved her showing by coming in third.
It was in the 2018 general election that Ghazal made her debut in the National Assembly, after succeeding Amir Khadir as the QS candidate in Mercier, also on the Island of Montreal. She was re-elected in 2022.
It also took her two attempts to become the party’s female co-spokesperson. In 2023, Ghazal was narrowly defeated by Émilise Lessard-Therrien in the second round of the race to succeed Manon Massé.
Following Lessard-Therrien’s dramatic resignation, shortly after her election as co-spokesperson, Ghazal was the only one left in the running to take up the torch.
Ghazal’s appointment as party leader was confirmed in the fall of 2024. The Montreal assemblywoman was then chosen as QS’s candidate for premier. She was thus given the mandate to represent the party in the leaders’ debate during the election campaign.
Inspired by Françoise David
Ghazal says she comes from the same school of thought as MNAs Massé and David. The latter, in fact, has been a source of inspiration for Ghazal.
“In the 1990s (…), I would listen to Françoise David, a feminist who led the Fédération des femmes du Québec, and I’d think to myself: ‘My God, that speech inspires me. Then I’d think, ‘If Françoise ever goes into politics, well, I’m going to follow her.’ And in the end, that’s exactly what happened,” Ghazal recounted at a press conference last May.
Born in Lebanon to a family of Palestinian refugees in 1977, she arrived in Quebec at the age of 10 and grew up between Montreal and Laval. Ghazal recalls that her parents, at the time, hated politics. They associated that world with fear, violence, and war.
Before becoming a member of the National Assembly, Ghazal worked in several industries, notably as a health, safety, and environmental advisor.
She holds a bachelor’s degree in business administration and a master’s degree in environmental studies and has worked at O-I Canada, Church & Dwight Canada, L-3 Communications, and Bombardier Aerospace, among others.
Rejecting the notion that QS isn’t interested in entrepreneurs, Ghazal notes that her father was a shopkeeper. For nearly 20 years, he ran a “dollar store” on Plaza Saint-Hubert in Montreal. Ghazal, her brother, and her sisters worked there in the evenings and on weekends.
She says she understands the realities of entrepreneurship after seeing her father make many sacrifices.
As a “child of Bill 101,” Ghazal published an essay in the fall of 2025 titled “Les gens du pays viennent aussi d’ailleurs” (The people of the country also come from elsewhere), in which she recounts her story of immigration and integration in Quebec, as well as her interest in independence.
–This report by La Presse Canadienne was translated by CityNews
