Do we like François Legault?
Our score: 4 out of 10. Contested secularism laws and one apologised-for immigration remark, with no verified anti-LGBTQ+ words, and little hard evidence of good to set against them.
François Legault is the man who built the CAQ from scratch. He founded the party in 2011 as a third option to the old sovereigntist-versus-federalist fight, promising greater provincial autonomy within Canada. It took him from the outer to a long run in the premier's office, more than seven years of it by the time he announced he was leaving.
The end came fast. On 14 January 2026 he called a hastily arranged news conference and said he was going “for the good of my party and especially for the good of Quebec”. The CAQ was running third in the polls behind the Parti Québécois and the Liberals, and six members of his caucus had walked, five of them now sitting as independents.
The mess behind it was a pile of expensive failures. Coverage lists the SAAQclic car-registry platform, which blew out by hundreds of millions of dollars, the collapse of the heavily subsidised Northvolt battery venture, and the doctors' pay law, Bill 2, passed under closure. Reporting also notes he didn't shrink the bureaucracy, which grew under his government.
On the harm test, it's mostly a story about identity politics. His government's secularism law, Bill 21, bans some public workers from wearing religious symbols, and in 2025 it moved to extend similar rules across all public schools. Both are fighting constitutional challenges, with Bill 21 before the Supreme Court in March 2026. In 2022 he apologised after linking immigrants to “violence” and “extremists”. Defenders say the laws are about secularism and protecting French; critics call them discriminatory. I found nothing from him on trans people either way.
The recent chapter is the political funeral. In his April farewell speech his voice broke as he said “I am saying goodbye as leader” and “I don't want the next election to be about me”. It didn't save the CAQ: Fréchette won the leadership, then on 6 October the Parti Québécois won a minority government and she resigned as CAQ leader.
The good stuff is the hard bit to pin down. In his farewell remarks he argued the CAQ was the best party to balance the economy with protecting French, and that's the case his supporters make for him. I couldn't verify charity work or acts of personal kindness from the reporting I read, so that column is thin rather than empty.