The Parti conservateur du Québec (in English: Conservative Party of Quebec) was a political party in Quebec, Canada.
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The party originated as the Parti bleu which was formed around 1850 by the followers of Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine. The parti bleu opposed the anti-clericalism and radicalism of its rival, the parti rouge of Louis-Joseph Papineau.
The parti bleu supported the role of the clergy in Quebec society. Members of the parti bleu, led by George-Étienne Cartier from Canada East, joined with the followers of Sir John A. Macdonald in Canada West to form a coalition government with Cartier as co-premier from 1857 to 1862. It was out of this coalition that the Conservative Party was formed (then known as Liberal-Conservative), laying the basis for Confederation in 1867.
With Confederation and Quebec's entry as a province, what had been the parti bleu became the Quebec wing of Macdonald's Conservative Party. It formed the government in the province, with Pierre-Joseph-Olivier Chauveau as Quebec's first premier. Cartier acted as Macdonald's Quebec lieutenant in the federal House of Commons. The Conservatives dominated Quebec politics at both the federal and provincial level for the next 30 years. The Conservatives held power in Quebec City for 25 out of 30 years, providing eight of the province's ten premiers in that period.
However, the party became increasingly divided between a moderate wing and an Ultramontane wing of Catholic fundamentalists. As well, the party's links with the federal Conservatives harmed the party as the Tories in English Canada became increasingly identified as hostile to French Canadians and Quebec. The execution of Louis Riel in 1885 outraged French Canadians and hurt the Macdonald Conservatives at the polls.
After Macdonald's death in 1891, the coalition that formed the national Conservatives unravelled, particularly around the Manitoba Schools Question that pitted English-Canadian Protestants against French-Canadian Catholics. This issue essentially ended the possibility of a significant French-Canadian presence in western Canada.
The federal Conservatives lost the 1896 federal election, largely due to the collapse of their support in Quebec. The provincial Conservative government of Edmund James Flynn lost the 1897 Quebec election.
With the defeats of 1896 and 1897, the Conservatives became a minority party in Quebec at both levels of government. The Conservative Party of Quebec never formed another provincial government. The Quebec Liberal Party held power without interruption for the next 38 years.
Conservative fortunes were further hurt by the Conscription Crisis of 1917 when the federal Conservative government of Sir Robert Borden invoked conscription against the opposition of Quebec. This led to riots in the province.
In 1933, Maurice Duplessis became leader of the Quebec Conservatives. The next year, the ruling Liberal party split when a group of nationalist Liberals dissatisfied with the government of Louis-Alexandre Taschereau bolted from the party to form the Action libérale nationale or ALN. Duplessis wooed the dissident party and, two weeks before the 1935 election, the Conservatives and ALN formed a "Union Nationale" alliance to contest the election. The alliance was later formalized as a merger into a single political party, the Union Nationale.
The UN took power in the 1936 election, were unexpectedly defeated in 1939, but went on to dominate Quebec politics from 1944 until Duplessis died in 1959. In the 1958 federal election, Duplessis lent the UN's electoral machine to John Diefenbaker's Progressive Conservatives, helping them to win the majority of ridings there.
The Union Nationale formed the government again from 1966-1970 and afterwards went into rapid decline, being supplanted by the Parti Québécois as the main opposition to the Liberals.
Since the late 1960s, separatism/federalism became the main divide for the next few decades where national unity was a major issue, rather than the traditional conservatism/liberalism. Federalists, whether conservative or liberal, generally supported the Liberals led by Robert Bourassa. In the 1970s, Bourassa had a strained relationship with the federal Liberals of Pierre Trudeau, who were staunch federalists.
Claude Wagner, a judge and a prominent Quebec Liberal cabinet minister who departed provincial politics in 1970, ran successfully as a Progressive Conservative in the 1972 federal election, and was the front-runner in the party leadership convention in 1976 before losing on the final ballot to Joe Clark. When Bourassa returned to politics in the 1980s, he worked closely with the federal Progressive Conservatives led by Brian Mulroney. During that decade, the Liberals won the majority of Quebec's seats in 1985 and 1989, while the PCs did so at the federal level in 1984 and 1988.
In 1998, federal PC leader Jean Charest moved to provincial politics as the leader of the Quebec Liberals.
A new Parti conservateur du Québec (sometimes referred to as the Parti progressiste conservateur du Québec) was formed in 1982 with Denis Carignan as leader but was rebuffed by federal Progressive Conservative leader Joe Clark who told them to keep their distance.
The party was dormant until January 1985 when he stepped aside to allow André Asselin, a lawyer, mayor of the small town of Ste-Émilie-de-l'Énergie, and president of the Quebec Union of Regional Municipal Councils, to become party leader. However, Brian Mulroney told the press following a meeting with Liberal leader Robert Bourassa that he did not support the creation of a provincial Conservative Party at the time. By the 1980s, the Union Nationale was no longer a contender for office and in terminal decline - though it rebuffed an offer by Asselin for a merger with his Conservative Party. After making an impression in a June 1985 by-election in which Asselin placed second with 30% of the vote in L'Assomption, the party nominated 48 candidates for the December 1985 provincial election but failed to make a major impact, receiving 1.03% popular vote. Asselin blamed the party's poor showing on what he called deliberate sabotage by federal Tory officials who discouraged Conservatives from giving money or otherwise becoming identified with the provincial group.
Asselin resigned as party leader in 1989 leaving Robert Coppenrath to lead the party into the 1989 election where it ran 12 candidates and received 0.14% of the vote. Hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, the party disbanded shortly afterward.
In 2009, former Union Nationale MNAs Serge Fontaine and Bertrand Goulet announced the formation of a new Conservative Party of Quebec.[1] Fontaine had offered Éric Caire of the ADQ to join the party and become its leader, with a view to attract disaffected ADQ supporters, but this did not materialise and Caire now sits as an independent.[2]
| General election | # of candidates | # of seats won | % of popular vote |
| 1867 | 69 | 51 | 59.90% |
| 1871 | 67 | 46 | 56.81% |
| 1875 | 68 | 44 | 56.53% |
| 1878 | 66 | 32 | 51.50% |
| 1881 | 62 | 48 | 54.12% |
| 1886 | 63 | 26 | 48.09% |
| 1890 | 62 | 24 | 46.47% |
| 1892 | 71 | 51 | 53.39% |
| 1897 | 67 | 23 | 43.82% |
| 1900 | 34 | 7 | 42.08% |
| 1904 | 24 | 6 | 31.27% |
| 1908 | 62 | 14 | 39.92% |
| 1912 | 75 | 16 | 42.68% |
| 1916 | 55 | 6 | 35.09% |
| 1919 | 22 | 5 | 19.50% |
| 1923 | 71 | 20 | 40.47% |
| 1927 | 69 | 9 | 35.45% |
| 1931 | 89 | 11 | 43.06% |
| 1935 | 34 | 16 | 18.84% |
| 1985 | 48 | 0 | 1.03% |
| 1989 | 12 | 0 | 0.14% |
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