By Allison Lampert and Ismail Shakil
MONTREAL/OTTAWA (Reuters) -The nationalist Coalition Avenir Quebec (CAQ) is on track to retain power in the mostly French-speaking Canadian province of Quebec, CBC News projected on Monday, after leader Francois Legault campaigned on protecting the French language and the economy.
The center-right CAQ, which was founded in 2011, was leading in 57 of the 76 seats for which CBC projections were available. CAQ needs 63 seats for a majority in the 125-seat Quebec legislature. Polls closed at 8 p.m. local time (0000 GMT).
CAQ, which had been widely expected to win reelection in the face of a fractured opposition, came to power after winning 74 seats in the 2018 election.
In the recent campaign, Legault, 65, promised to cut middle-class taxes to blunt the impact of high inflation on Quebec’s 8.5 million people and vowed to protect the status of the province’s official French language.
Legault’s projected win follows a controversial campaign centered on identity, immigration and a rise in inflation, and marked by several gaffes. He apologized last month for awkwardly linking newcomers to Quebec with extremism and warned last week that bringing in immigrants who did not speak French would be “suicidal.”
Quebec’s labor minister also apologized on Twitter last week for saying that most immigrants “go to Montreal, don’t work, don’t speak French, and don’t adhere to the values of Quebec.”
Legault, who was a minister for the separatist Parti Quebecois (PQ) government from 1998 to 2003, has proposed to cap immigration at 50,000 per year, just a quarter of neighboring Ontario’s annual figure. Quebec accounts for a fifth of Canada’s overall GDP and is the country’s second most populous province.
(Reporting by Allison Lampert in Montreal and Ismail Shakil in Ottawa; Editing by Paul Simao and Leslie Adler)
