The province of Quebec will have a minority government led by the Parti Quebecois (PQ) following the results of the 2026 Quebec elections. There were several analyses of parties’ platforms with regard to postsecondary education, and the verdict is in: Quebec’s political leaders are just not that interested in advancing postsecondary education in the province. But not all is hopeless. The multi-year campaign led by the Quebec Student Union (QSU) to provide compensation for student internships seems to be bearing fruit, as three parties—Parti Quebecois, Quebec Solidaire (QS), and the Quebec Liberal Party (PLQ)—have promised to provide financing for interns’ salaries in certain sectors. The PQ also promised $10 million for improvements to students’ mental health, and PLQ made a vague promise to reform the province’s student financial aid system. QS, who are unlikely to form a government in the lifetime of this article’s readers, promised to reduce tuition fees. Other than that, there’s nothing notable in the platforms related to postsecondary students.
It is understandable why postsecondary education gets very little attention from provincial political parties, when political leaders are more interested in catering to the reliable voter block of senior citizens. Check for yourself: how much spending is promised under études post-secondaires, and how much is promised in any paragraph that mentions seniors? Spending on seniors isn’t bad in itself, it is a priority of a society where the elderly will reach 26% of population by 2041. In this context, student unions are not on the agenda of the day, which is burdened with issues of housing, affordability, and healthcare. But it is not guaranteed to stay that way.
In Canada, student unions are generally left out of governments’ purviews, leaving them to incorporate as non-profits and be subsequently recognized by educational institutions as a student government representing students at the said institution. There are a couple of exceptions though. In Quebec, student associations are regulated through the Act respecting the accreditation and financing of students’ associations (Act), which makes Quebec one of the two provinces where provincial legislation provides for creation of student associations, with the other one being Alberta with its Post-Secondary Learning Act that governs the creation and regulation of student unions, but as part of a larger post-secondary education legislation. There’s also a very weird exception of the University of Manitoba Students’ Union that was created via unique legislation specifically for it by the Manitoba Legislative Assembly. The difference with Quebec’s Act is that it is only legislation in Canada that applies specifically to student unions and the process of their recognition by universities.
Quebec’s Act was put into effect in 1983 by a PQ government. In the debates leading up to the adoption of the law, then-education minister Camille Laurent specifically mentioned Quebec’s Labour Code as inspiration for the Act. In fact, the Act goes further than the Labour Code in matters of representation. Section 47 of the Labour Code provides for the compulsory payment of union dues by employees in a certified bargaining unit, but it does not require those employees to become union members, whereas Article 26 of the Act deems all students represented by an accredited student union, referred to in the Act as a student association (association étudiante as traditionally used in Quebec French to refer to a student union), to be members of that association, although students may refuse membership. In line with the Labour Code, leaving the association does not exempt students from the obligation to pay association fees (unless an individual association permits opting out of fees).
It was no coincidence that when the Labour Code was being amended in 2025 amid labour union strikes, a suggestion was proposed by the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs to amend the Act to introduce a notion of “voluntary contributions”. The idea wasn’t new, as a similar suggestion was adopted by the youth wing of Coalition Avenir Quebec, the party in power prior to the 2026 Quebec election, earlier that year. These ideas appeared in the context of strikes organized by grassroots students through the mechanism of general assemblies of Quebec student unions amid the Gaza war. Since then, the campus protests and strikes have calmed down, and so did the conversation about how student unions are financed. But the fact that such conversations took place in public discussion, following a similar debate in Ontario, shows that the status quo is not guaranteed.
Quebec’s 2026 premier-elect Paul St-Pierre Plamondon co-founded Génération d’idées in 2007, a think tank to engage young Quebecers in a public discourse. As part of his work at the think tank, Plamondon published an idea in Le Devoir as the Maple Spring protests began to unfold was an immediate increase of tuition fees by 10% and a subsequent annual indexation to inflation. The reasoning behind this proposal was that although students shouldn’t solve a fiscal problem they didn’t create, they can still contribute their fair share to the state’s coffers. Back then, Plamondon’s position was already not aligned with Quebec student unions that at the time demanded a full tuition fee freeze.
Given the historical connections between the labour laws and student union legislation in Quebec, student unions may return to the public agenda in the next several years, if labour relations were once again to become a major political issue. Given the difficulties Paul St-Pierre Plamondon’s government would face in holding a referendum on Quebec’s independence, the government may just try to find low-hanging fruits that do not require large societal reforms. Creating an enemy out of student associations is not implausible for the PQ party whose pivot to the right has been extensively documented in recent years. Passing laws with the aid of Conservative Party of Quebec (CPQ) is likely to be PQ’s modus operandi in the coming term. CPQ leader Éric Duhaime promised to reform Quebec trade unions by prohibiting the funding of political or ideological activities from union dues, requiring secret ballots at union meetings, and making it easier to file complaints against unions. Getting Éric Duhaime to agree that Quebec student unions are too powerful could probably be accomplished over a single cinq à sept.
The likely response of Quebec student unions to a bill that introduces making their membership fees voluntary isn’t a mystery. There will be press releases and mémoires by the QSU submitted to parliamentary committees, opinion letters to the media, social media posts, and perhaps some street protests. The biggest test is whether the Quebec student movement will have the capacity to mobilize as it did in 2012. Because if not, we may witness the beginning of the end of student unions in Quebec as they have been known since the Quiet Revolution in the 1960s.
