Paul St-Pierre Plamondon: 7 things you probably didn’t know about Quebec’s new premier

Quebec has a new premier.

Paul St-Pierre Plamondon led the Parti Québécois to victory in Monday’s provincial election, and will now lead the province with a minority government (not bad for a party that won just three seats in 2022).

The 49-year-old lawyer from Trois-Rivières has been PQ leader since 2020, and has represented the Montreal riding of Camille-Laurin since 2022. Along the way, he’s become best known for one thing: his push for Quebec sovereignty.

But there’s more to the province’s next premier than his politics.

Here are seven things you probably didn’t know about Paul St-Pierre Plamondon.

He speaks five languages, and his first campaign was in Danish

– YouTube www.youtube.com

In addition to French and English, St-Pierre Plamondon speaks Danish, Swedish and Spanish.

The Danish dates back to his teenage years, when he spent a year as an exchange student in Denmark. According to a 2024 La Presse report, the 17-year-old ran for class president almost as a joke, despite not speaking the language at the time.

He went on to become student body president, and proposed that the school hold a plebiscite on smoking. So technically, the PQ leader’s first referendum wasn’t about Quebec at all.

He’s kept up the language since. In 2023, he gave an interview about Quebec independence to Danish national television, entirely in Danish.

He’s quite the athlete

– YouTube www.youtube.com

St-Pierre Plamondon’s father, Jacques Plamondon, was the director general of the Quebec Table Tennis Federation, according to The Canadian Encyclopedia.

But it was regular tennis where the future premier made his mark. He won the Quebec tennis championship at just 12 years old.

His athletic résumé doesn’t stop there. While studying at Oxford, he played goalie for the university’s hockey team.

Fun fact: Prime Minister Mark Carney played goalie for the same team about a decade earlier.

He studied at McGill and Oxford

St-Pierre Plamondon has an impressive academic résumé. He earned a bachelor’s degree in civil and common law from McGill University in 2001, and was involved in student government while he was there. He later completed an MBA at Oxford University in 2006, and also holds a certificate in international law from Lund University in Sweden.

His legal career took him abroad too. He worked as a human rights lawyer in Bolivia and did legal affairs work for NATO in Belgium, according to Oxford’s politics department, before returning to Quebec to practice law.

He’s a dad of three

St-Pierre Plamondon and his wife, Alexandra Tremblay, have three kids: Laurette, Maurice and Henri.

When St-Pierre Plamondon announced in February 2023 that the couple was expecting a baby boy, the expected due date was June 24, better known in Quebec as the Fête nationale. It doesn’t get much more PQ than that.

He was briefly a model

Yes, really.

While living in Norway, St-Pierre Plamondon had a very short-lived modelling career. In a video shared on the PQ’s social media, he explained that his Norwegian girlfriend at the time had a sister who worked in marketing. One morning, she called them in a panic because the two models booked for a potato chip shoot hadn’t shown up.

It’s not every day you can say your premier was once the face of a snack.

He was the only one in his family to vote Yes in 1995

St-Pierre Plamondon was 18 when Quebecers voted to separate from Canada for the second time in 1995.

He voted Yes, and he was the only person in his family to do so, he told The Canadian Press in 2023.

But didn’t stay a sovereigntist. He later became a federalist, criticizing the independence movement for having split Quebec in two. It was his experience working as a lawyer that eventually brought him back to the sovereignty side.

He plans to pursue a referendum, even with a minority

St-Pierre Plamondon has been clear that a referendum on Quebec independence is coming during his first mandate, and a minority government doesn’t change that.

“Whether we’re in a minority or majority, that commitment doesn’t change,” he said during the campaign in September.

That said, he has committed not to hold a referendum while Donald Trump is in office, arguing that the unpredictability of the U.S. administration could disrupt the debate. That would push a potential vote to 2029 or 2030.

Whether he can pull that off with a minority in the National Assembly is another question entirely.