Ready to soften positions, says Quebec Conservative Leader Duhaime as he makes National Assembly debut
Posted October 7, 2026 1:05 pm.
To keep the National Assembly functioning, Conservative leader Éric Duhaime says he is ready to soften his positions.
For example, he no longer insists on shale gas wells in the St. Lawrence Valley.
“On this issue, there are all kinds of possibilities,” he said Wednesday during his very first post-election press conference at the National Assembly.
“Can we conduct pilot projects? Explore without necessarily extracting? There are various factors to consider regarding what is feasible.”
According to him, the Conservatives—who were previously in “opposition”—will now have to advocate for “constructive positions.”
“When you come to the negotiating table (…) with demands, and you’re as hard as a rock, that doesn’t make for good negotiations,” he argued.
Duhaime appeared at the press conference with his La Peltrie representative, former CAQ member Maïté Blanchette Vézina, whom he appointed as parliamentary leader.
He did not rule out continuing to draw from the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) team to fill positions on his political staff.
Yet Duhaime was among those who had most harshly criticized the CAQ government in recent years.
“There have been (…) plenty of mistakes, (…) but that said, there are elements of this that are already among us, and there could be others in the coming days,” he announced.
–This report by La Presse Canadienne was translated by CityNews
