In 2022, the Conservative Party of Quebec obtained 530,786 votes, or 12.91% of the valid votes.
And exactly zero members of parliament.
The PCQ's problem was therefore not only to convince Quebecers of its ideas. It also had to answer a much more down-to-earth question:
Did Éric Duhaime have a party capable of providing something other than Éric Duhaime?
Four years later, the question deserves to be asked again.
This time, the problem is certainly not filling out the ballots. After the nomination period closed, Elections Quebec accepted 127 nominations from the Conservative Party, one in each riding.
But having 127 candidates does not mean having 127 potential ministers.
And that's where things get interesting.
So we searched the Conservative team to answer a fairly simple question: Behind the election biographies and press releases, are there people with relevant experience in the main issues facing the state?
Because the party biographies have an admirable quality: everyone in them is extraordinary.
So we looked elsewhere.
Professional records, public institutions, employers, municipal archives, universities, local media and other traces that can confirm career paths.
The resulting portrait is more nuanced than expected.
A minister is not the CEO of his ministry
We must begin by correcting an idea that we ourselves introduced in an earlier version of this analysis.
We placed great importance on experience in large-scale management: having led thousands of employees, administered huge budgets, or been responsible for a complex organization.
This experience can certainly be useful.
But we made him play the bad guy.
In the Quebec government apparatus, the distinction between political leadership and administration is enshrined in the constituent laws of several ministries. The wording is repeated almost verbatim: Under the direction of the minister, the deputy minister administers the ministry.
The minister sets political directions, arbitrates between options, makes government decisions, defends his budget, presents bills and is politically accountable for his portfolio.
The deputy minister heads the permanent administration responsible for implementing these guidelines.
This significantly changes the way a potential minister is evaluated.
You don't need to have previously managed 10,000 employees to possess the knowledge required for the political leadership of a ministry. Rather, you need to understand your sector, be able to assess the recommendations of senior civil servants, make decisions, arbitrate between competing interests, communicate those decisions, and be accountable for them.
Management experience then becomes an asset.
Not a prerequisite.
The Trudeau test
Justin Trudeau offers a rather useful example.
When he became prime minister of Canada On November 4, 2015, he had been a Member of Parliament since 2008 and leader of the Liberal Party since April 2013. He therefore already possessed substantial parliamentary and political experience.
But he had never been a minister before. His first ministerial duties began the very day he became prime minister.
This comparison deserves to be used with precision.
It does not allow us to conclude that one career path is better than another, nor to predict what a candidate would do once in government.
However, it demonstrates one thing quite clearly: Prior ministerial experience is not a necessary condition for accessing the highest political responsibilities.
Based on the different criterion of professional or sectoral experience directly related to certain government files, several Conservative candidates we examined come with specialized backgrounds.
Trudeau, in 2015, had more parliamentary experience and political leadership than many of them.
That's precisely the point.
There is no magic CV for becoming a minister.
Adrien Pouliot: a verifiable economic experiment
The most obvious case in the Conservative team is that of Adrien D. Pouliot.
Former leader of the PCQ, lawyer and businessman, Pouliot has returned to the political arena with a professional background that can be independently verified.
After his law studies, he practiced business law and finance. McGill University archives show that he subsequently held various management positions at CFCF before becoming its president and CEO.
He therefore possesses documented experience in senior management, finance and corporate governance directly relevant to several economic issues.
That does not automatically make him a finance minister.
Running a business and exercising political leadership in a ministry remain two different professions.
But it becomes difficult to argue that there is no economic expertise behind the Conservative leader.
Maïté Blanchette Vézina: she already knows the machine
The case of Maïté Blanchette Vézina is even simpler.
She has already been a minister.
Elected Member of the National Assembly for Rimouski in 2022, she served as Minister of Natural Resources and Forests from October 20, 2022, to September 10, 2025. She also sat on the Standing Committee on Legislation and the Ministerial Committee on the Economy and the Environment. She now sits under the banner of the Conservative Party of Quebec.
Before entering the National Assembly, she had notably been a lawyer, president and CEO of a company and mayor of Sainte-Luce.
This is not about evaluating his record as a minister.
That's another question.
But she possesses something that cannot be simulated with an electoral biography: she has already politically led a ministry and worked within the government apparatus.
This experience was virtually absent from the 2022 PCQ.
She is no longer.
Health: three perspectives rather than one
The most interesting issue probably remains health.
Dr. Karim Elayoubi is the PCQ's health spokesperson. A general practitioner, he has experience in family medicine and emergency medicine and presented the party's health platform with Éric Duhaime on September 8.
But the team doesn't rely solely on him.
Dr. Guillaume Langlois is a candidate in Nicolet-Bécancour. A dedicated family physician in the region, his involvement in community healthcare and the Sainte-Gertrude Health Cooperative has been documented for several years.
Myriam Laroche, for her part, brings a nursing perspective.
The PCQ presents her as a nurse practitioner specializing in frontline care with nearly twenty years of experience in the network, including in intensive care, emergency, pediatric palliative care and telemedicine.
This biography is biased and should be treated as such. However, an important part of her career finds institutional confirmation: a document from the CISSS de Laval identifies Myriam Laroche, IPSPL, in the development of a mobile clinic intended in particular for people experiencing homelessness, immigrants, refugees or undocumented immigrants.
We therefore get three quite different perspectives on the network: medicine and health policy with Elayoubi, regional front line with Langlois, advanced nursing practice and vulnerable populations with Laroche.
And our methodological correction takes on its full importance here.
None of the three need to have previously administered the Ministry of Health to possess expertise relevant to its political direction.
The real question mark lies elsewhere.
How would they react when faced with a choice between several bad options? How would they work with a deputy minister who has known the system for twenty years? How far would they go in questioning bureaucratic recommendations without ignoring its expertise? How would they defend their decisions before the Assembly?
No curriculum vitae can answer that.
Behind the well-known names
Some less publicized profiles also present an interesting experience.
Renaud Labrecque is the Director General and Secretary-Treasurer of the Municipality of Parisville. The municipality confirms that the Director General oversees, among other things, the various municipal departments, human resources, communications, and civil security coordination.
Parisville is obviously not the Quebec government.
The municipal budget does not include a few tens of billions forgotten behind a pile of orange cones.
But the interest of his career lies elsewhere: he has concrete knowledge of public administration, the relationship between elected officials and civil servants, infrastructure and accountability.
Pier-Luc Chayer offers another example.
A graduate in accounting from UQTR, he received an Excella Award from the Quebec CPA Order in 2026 in the "Leader of Tomorrow" category. UQTR also presents him as the Director of Finance at Excavation JPM and describes his work in structuring the finance function, budgeting, financing, and investments.
Again, this is not a ministerial certification.
The goal is not to create an imaginary Council of Ministers with a spreadsheet and a few LinkedIn biographies.
The question is whether, behind the leader, the party has a second line of people whose professional skills are real and verifiable.
This is the case in several sectors.
Holes count too
It would be easy to stop there and conclude that all portfolios are covered.
They are not.
Some sectors have spokespeople, but our research has not been able to document specialized professional experience as clearly as in economic or health matters.
A partisan title does not in itself constitute expertise.
The distinction is important.
Our job is to verify what can be verified, not to automatically turn every spokesperson into a specialist.
Intergovernmental relations still represent a weakness in our mapping.
We did not identify in the core group studied any significant and clearly documented experience in federal-provincial negotiations or intergovernmental relations.
Again, absence of evidence does not mean absence of competence.
That means exactly what it means: We did not find enough evidence to confirm this.
It's much less spectacular.
It's also much more useful.
The real change since 2022
This is ultimately the most interesting finding of the entire research.
In 2022, it was reasonable to ask what was left of the Conservative Party behind Éric Duhaime.
The question is much less simple in 2026.
The group now has 127 accepted applications. In the sample we studied, we find in particular a former minister, a former party leader who headed a major company, several health professionals, a municipal director general, accountants and lawyers.
This does not allow us to predict how these people would exercise power.
A CV does not measure political judgment, the ability to resist pressure, the aptitude to arbitrate conflicting interests, or the relationship a person will maintain with the senior civil service.
But the Trudeau precedent puts one thing into perspective.
When he became prime minister in 2015, he had no prior ministerial experience. This did not prevent him from going directly to the position of prime minister.
If this lack of prior ministerial experience was not enough to disqualify a future prime minister, it cannot, on its own, serve to exclude PCQ candidates from consideration of the possible composition of a cabinet.
Our research also establishes that several of them possess professional, administrative or sectoral experience directly related to certain major government issues.
This in no way guarantees what they would do once appointed.
But that changes the question.
"Besides Duhaime, who else do they have?"
We can now begin to answer them with verifiable names, professions, and experiences.
The real question has become much more difficult:
How would these individual skills translate into the concrete exercise of political power?
No CV can tell us that.
You have to exercise power to know it.
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