Quebec’s incumbent agriculture, food and fisheries minister will be returning to the province’s legislature as part of an even larger government caucus.
Preliminary results in Monday’s provincial election put Francois Legault’s Coalition avenir Quebec (CAQ) in a solid majority government position with 90 of 125 seats, followed by Dominique Anglade’s Liberals, remaining in official opposition with 21, Quebec solidaire with 11 and the Parti Quebecois with three.
Monday’s vote marks a net pickup of 13 seats for the CAQ, mainly at the expense of the Liberals (down eight) and PQ (down six).
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Legault’s current agriculture minister Andre Lamontagne, MNA for the Drummondville-area riding of Johnson since 2014, held that riding on Monday night, scoring 21,944 votes with all polls reporting.
Lamontagne led on Monday night by a comfortable spread of over 15,600 votes ahead of the closest runner-up, teacher Luce Danceau of the provincial Conservative party.
Lamontagne has been ag minister since the CAQ came to government in 2018, having previously served in third-party opposition as the caquistes’ critic for the economy, innovation and exports.
He operated three supermarkets in the 1980s and 1990s, co-owned a chain of travel agencies and later ran a management consulting firm; in 2010 he became owner of a business specializing in buying, refurbishing, resale and leasing of helicopters.
The opposition Liberals’ post-election bench in the Quebec assembly, meanwhile, will include several incumbent MNAs who have sat on the assembly committee for agriculture, fisheries, energy and natural resources — as well as that committee’s vice-chair, Jennifer Maccarone, MNA for the Montreal riding of Westmount-Saint-Louis.
Quebec’s Union des producteurs agricoles (UPA) in recent weeks laid out several priorities for the campaign, including improved financing terms for new farmers buying farmland in the face of rapidly rising land values and urban sprawl, as well as conserving the province’s relatively small agricultural land base. –– Glacier FarmMedia Network
