Who is Conservative Party of Quebec Leader Éric Duhaime?

Heading into Monday's Quebec general election, leader Éric Duhaime hoped to see a dozen Conservative Party of Quebec (CPQ) candidates, including himself, elected to the National Assembly — the minimum for official party status.

By night's end, however, he and the party had "written a page" in the province's history, winning 19 seats, the third most in a crowded field.

"This evening is only the beginning," the 57-year-old former political advisor and radio host told enthusiastic supporters of the party, as reported by the Montreal Gazette.

Duhaime committed to working with Paul St-Pierre Plamondon's minority Parti Québécois government "to cut bureaucracy, put money back in families' pockets and reform the old Quebec model" and said the CPQ would not "support a referendum that will weaken Quebec."

Before Monday's result, the CPQ was represented by lone MNA Maïté Blanchette Vézina (La Peltrie), who joined after leaving the Coalition Avenir Québec in the spring following extensive discussions with Duhaime.

Here's what to know about the leader who led the party to claim its first seats in the provincial legislature in more than 90 years.

Born April 15, 1969, Duhaime grew up an only child in the Montreal suburb of Laval, where his mother was a bus driver and his father worked in construction, according to his CPQ Bio.

"He has said that from a young age he wanted to get involved in politics to give a voice to ordinary people, whom he believes are too often overlooked by the political elite," it reads.

He attended the Université de Montréal, earning a bachelor's in political science, and later obtained a master's degree in public administration from the École nationale d'administration publique (ENAP).

Duhaime is also gay, having come out in a 2017 book, La fin de l'homosexualité et le dernier gay (The end of homosexuality and the last gay man), his first of five books to date.

In the 1990s, Duhaime worked as a political advisor to Bloc Québécois leaders Lucien Bouchard and Michel Gauthier. At the provincial level, he was also a Parti Québécois activist. He later joined Reform Party Leader Preston Manning's "United Alternative" movement, before throwing his support behind Stockwell Day's successful leadership bid for the Canadian Alliance party. He then served as an advisor to the leader from 2000 to 2002.

From 2003 to 2008, he was an advisor to Mario Dumont, leader of the Action démocratique du Québec (ADQ), and Bloc leader Gilles Duceppe.

In 2009, he joined the National Democratic Institute as a consultant — a U.S.-based non-governmental organization that promotes democratic institutions — and worked in Morocco, Mauritania and Iraq.

He told National Post's Catherine Lévesque he returned from the latter suffering from PTSD, but the media attention from having been there led to more opportunities to provide commentary. He later joined Québecors stable of columnists.

While still writing columns, he became a regular radio host in 2012, finding a wider audience on stations such as Noovo, Télé-Québec and Radio X, "a pillar of what in Quebec is called 'radio poubelle' — trash radio," according to The Breach.

In 2003, before working for Dumont, a then-34-year-old Duhmaine entered Quebec's general election under the ADQ, but finished third.

He told National Post that current Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre, also a political staffer at the time, helped him canvass suburban neighbourhoods that summer while he was visiting Montreal.

He remained on the periphery of the political world until 2021, when his notoriety helped him cruise to victory in the CPQ's leadership race to succeed Adrien Pouliot, capturing 96 per cent of the vote conducted entirely online due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

But a seat in the legislature evaded him in the 2022 election, as he fell to the CAQ's Sylvain Levesque in the riding of Chauveau.

He also failed to get elected in the 2025 by-election for the Arthabaska riding (now redrawn as Arthabaska-L'Érable), losing to the Parti Québécois' Alex Boissonneault by more than 4,000 ballots.

Monday night was a different story, however, with preliminary results indicating Duhaime steamrolled the competition by capturing 63 per cent of the Bellechasse riding vote. The PQ's Jerome Couture was a distant second (15 per cent).

His first book offered a criticism of homosexual victimhood and, according to the jacket synopsis, aimed "to show that it is possible to be gay and happy in Quebec" without being a "martyr."

It was followed by 2012's L'État contre les jeunes: Comment les baby-boomers ont détourné le système (The State versus Youth: How Baby Boomers Hijacked the System), Libérez-nous des syndicats! (Free us from the Unions) a year later, and La SAQ pousse le bouchon! (The SAQ pushes the envelope!) in 2014, a criticism of the province's liquor authority.

His fifth book, Destination Autonomie, in which he discusses how Quebec can gain more autonomy within Confederation, was released in April.

Just days before the election, he admitted that he used AI to help write the book after Quebecor media outlets reported last week that 62 per cent was machine-generated, according to The Canadian Press.

"AI is important to us. It's part of reality," he said Friday. "That said, it has to be done under human supervision. And that's exactly what happened."

— With files from Catherine Levesque

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