A Parti Quebecois caucus meeting in Sainte-Hyacinthe had a surprise ending on Sunday afternoon, when leader Jean-François Lisée announced Véronique Hivon would run in tandem with him this fall as the party's deputy leader.
The party faithful were kept in the dark until the surprise announcement during the PQ’s National Council meeting in Saint-Hyacinthe, when Lisee brought Hivon onstage and told delegates the party will grow to become “greater than the sum of its parts.”
While they were competitors and opponents in 2016 to lead the PQ, Hivon says she and the man who beat her have “complimentary” visions for the party.
“As he stated, I think it was something important that we want to show – that parity and equality for us at the Parti Quebecois is something that’s very important – but it’s not the only base on which the decision was taken,” Hivon told reporters following the reveal.
If the PQ wins the upcoming provincial election this fall, Hivon could go on to become the deputy Premier of Quebec under Lisee.
Hivon, a popular party MNA for the riding of Joliette, ran against Lisee to replace Pierre Karl Peladeau at the helm of the sovereigntist party, but had to bow out of the 2016 leadership race in the home stretch due to illness.
Despite murmurs to the contrary, Lisee assured reporters the appointment was not a response to the party's slumping fortunes in the polls. A Leger-Le Devoir released this weekend places the PQ in third place in voter support, polling at 20 per cent.
The upstart Coalition Avenir Québec, which was co-founded by former PQ cabinet minister Francois Legault in 2011, is surging ahead of the rest of the pack, garnering 39 per cent support among polled voters.
The governing Liberal Party of Quebec continues to lose ground to the CAQ as well, finding itself now 10 percentage points behind the upstart coaltion.
-with files from La Presse Canadienne and CTV Montreal