MONTREAL—Tens of thousands of Quebecers took to the streets this weekend to call for more decisive action on climate change. In Montreal alone, 50,000 took part in the demonstration.

In the short space of a week, more than 150,000 signed a pledge that commits them to reduce their carbon footprints but also demands more proactive leadership on the issue from governments.

Those numbers provide an answer of sorts to those who wondered whether Quebec’s culture of political mobilization had waned along with the sovereignty movement.

Some of the activism and the passion that for so many decades attended the debate over the province’s political future has shifted to the environmental front.

That shift is not happening in a vacuum.

It is already impacting the priorities of the rookie Coalition Avenir Québec government. And it could cost Andrew Scheer’s Conservatives any hope of gains in Canada’s second-largest province in next fall’s federal election.

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In Quebec, the anti-carbon pricing platform Scheer has been spending the fall shoring up is dead on arrival both in the National Assembly and on the ground.

As for his commitment to the Energy East pipeline — a project designed to transport oil from the Prairies through Ontario and Quebec to the Atlantic Coast — it amounts to a target on the back of his candidates as well as an incentive for Quebec’s premier to keep at a safe distance from the federal Conservatives.

Among the right-of-centre premiers and leaders who have emerged since Justin Trudeau became prime minister, Premier François Legault already stands alone in support of the federal climate-change framework. The Quebec cap-and-trade system put in place under previous governments is there to stay.

In the eye of many climate change activists outside Quebec, that puts him on the side of angels. But in Quebec, the environment is widely seen as the CAQ’s Achilles’ heel. The party’s recent election platform was virtually silent on the issue. Over his first month as premier, Legault has invested an unexpectedly high amount of time shoring up his environmental credentials.

While the likes of Scheer and Ontario Premier Doug Ford have been flexing their muscles in anticipation of a big election fight over Trudeau’s carbon pricing policy he has gone in the opposite direction.

Legault has reversed his party’s position on allowing shale gas exploration on Anticosti Island. He has admitted his platform did not make the grade on the environment and promised the CAQ would do better in government.

Legault dispatched three of his ministers to Saturday’s Montreal march. And while he did not sign on to the “Pacte pour la transition” — the carbon-footprint-reduction pledge sponsored by a coalition of hundreds of artists, climate change activists, scientists and academics — the premier met with one of its leading organizers on Friday.

No promises were made but the conversation was, by all accounts, amicable.

Whether Legault can keep his government on the good side of an ever-expanding climate change movement is an open question. There will not be a lack of issues on which the two are bound not to see eye to eye. So far the performance of rookie environment minister, MarieChantal Chassé, has been underwhelming. But the premier has a fighting chance of building a connection.

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The same cannot be said of Scheer’s CPC.

If the past is any indication, the first inclination of Conservative strategists will be to dismiss the ongoing Quebec developments as the work of an elitist cohort of left-wing activists. They will find plenty of punditry in support of that take.

But among the backers of the Transition Pact, there are more Quebec household names than Scheer can ever hope to get to know between now and the federal election. Together, they command a larger audience than he ever will. In the recent past, more formidable leaders than Scheer have taken on similar Quebec coalitions…and lost.

In the 2008 election, a similar movement propelled Stephen Harper’s party into negative momentum territory. The issue then was a modest reduction in some culture budgets. Those relatively minor cuts caused major damage to the Conservative brand in Quebec and likely cost the party an early shot at a governing majority. Climate change is in a different, more powerful, league.

A final thought: As I watched hundreds of commuters pour out of my neighbourhood’s subway station on their way to Saturday’s march, I wondered if Ontario’s recent history might have been a bit different had a similar army of voters taken to the streets to oppose the Ford government’s decision to bail out of the federal climate change framework…

Chantal Hébert is a columnist based in Ottawa covering politics. Follow her on Twitter: @ChantalHbert

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