Bloc Québécois

1. Bloc Québécois

Mensykh Irina, 21-EG

2.

Bloc Québécois,
English Quebec
Bloc, regional
political party in
Canada, supporting
the independence of
predominantly
French-speaking
Quebec. The Bloc
Québécois has
informal ties with the
Parti Québécois,
which has controlled
Quebec’s provincial
assembly for much of
the period since the
mid-1970s, and it
represents the
interests of Frenchspeaking Quebecers
at the federal level.

3.

Lucien Bouchard, a
Progressive
Conservative minister
and Canada’s former
ambassador to
France, organized the
Bloc Québécois to
contest federal
elections in 1990,
soon after the defeat
of the Meech Lake
Accord, which would
have formally
recognized Quebec as
a distinct society and
would have given it
veto power over most
constitutional
changes.

4.

Although the party
did not run
candidates outside
Quebec, it won 54
seats in the federal
House of Commons
in 1993, which
enabled it to become
the official opposition
to the Liberal Party
of Canada. In 1995
Quebec held a
referendum on
separatism, and,
though the measure
narrowly failed,
Bouchard was
credited with leading
the campaign for its
approval.

5.

The party’s support in
federal elections
subsequently began to
decline after Bouchard left
federal politics to become
premier of Quebec and the
intensity of support for
separatism waned.
In March 1997 Gilles
Duceppe took over as leader
of the party, and in that
year’s federal election the
party relinquished its status
as the official opposition,
winning only 44 seats in the
House of Commons; its
federal representation
dropped again in 2000, to
38 seats. In 2004 and 2006
the party’s support
rebounded, however, with
the Bloc Québécois winning
more than 50 seats in the
House of Commons at each
election.

6.

In the minority
Conservative
government of
Stephen Harper, the
Bloc was courted as a
coalition partner,
most notably with the
2006 motion that
recognized the people
of Quebec as a nation
“within a united
Canada.”
Bloc Québécois
leader Gilles
Duceppe campaigning
in Quebec city, Que.,
April 15, 2011.

7.

After capturing 49 seats
in the 2008 election, the
party struggled at the
next federal election, in
2011, as many of its
supporters turned to the
surging New
Democratic Party
(NDP), whose sweeping
win was dubbed the
“Orange Crush.”
The Bloc won only 4
seats and was stripped of
its official party status.
Duceppe subsequently
resigned as party leader
but returned to lead the
Bloc into the 2015
federal election.

8.

Despite rebounding to
capture 10 seats, the
Bloc still fell two seats
short of reattaining
official party status in
the Canadian
Parliament. That
situation was
dramatically reversed by
the results of the 2019
federal election, in
which the Bloc, under
the leadership of YvesFrançois Blanchet,
returned as a force to be
reckoned with by
capturing more than 30
seats and supplanting the
NDP as the second
opposition party
nationally.

9.

Thank you for attention!