Quebec Premier Francois Legault reacts to the election of a Liberal minority government at the National Assembly in Quebec City on Oct. 22, 2019. The election results mean Legault’s capacity to play the Conservatives or the New Democrats against the Liberals for his own benefit has been seriously diminished, Chantal Hébert writes. Jacques Boissinot / THE CANADIAN PRESS

There may come a time when Quebec premier François Legault rues the day when he helped the Bloc Québécois genie come out of its bottle.

That genie is as likely to come back to haunt his Coalition Avenir Québec government as to make life more difficult for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in a hung Parliament.

In time, Legault may find he overreached and in the process set himself up — and not Trudeau — for unforeseen consequences.

From the prime minister’s perspective, the return of a solid Bloc contingent to the House of Commons is more an inconvenient than a major impediment.

That return may even come with a silver partisan lining for the Liberals.

Trudeau dodged a bullet when the NDP finished the night on Monday with enough seats to hold the balance of power in the reconfigured House of Commons.

There should be more than enough progressive common ground between the NDP, the Liberals and the Greens to chart a stable way forward in Parliament without Trudeau having to curry favour with the Bloc at every turn.

Even on issues such as the Trans Mountain expansion that could see the Bloc join forces with the other third parties against the minority Liberals, the latter should be able to count on Conservative support to keep their government and the pipeline project alive.

And then, the Liberals finished first in Quebec on Monday, losing only a handful of the 40 seats they had won in the last election.

In the near future, the NDP with a single seat left in the province and — to a lesser degree — the Conservatives with only 10 will not be forces to contend with in Quebec.

As a result of the Bloc’s resurgence, the Liberals come out of the election in Trudeau’s home-province with a major edge on their national competition.

But by the same token, Legault’s capacity to play the Conservatives or the New Democrats against the Liberals for his own benefit along with their willingness to play ball with his CAQ government has been seriously diminished.

By intervening in the federal campaign to present what he cast as non-negotiable demands, the Quebec premier primarily wanted to burnish his nationalist credentials.

By all accounts he felt, at least initially, that he had everything to gain from casting himself in the role of potential kingmaker in the federal battle for power.

By the end of the summer the premier and his team had become impatient with the somewhat glacial pace of negotiations with Justin Trudeau’s government over a series of files.

Among other issues, a deal on immigration — a top item on Legault’s to-do list — had failed to materialize.

With Quebec expected to be a crucial Liberal/Conservative election battleground, the CAQ brain trust believed it had the leverage to advance their government’s demands.

It is possible that Legault and his people had not anticipated how Bill 21 — as Quebec’s contentious secularism law is commonly known — would complicate the pre-election optics of handing over more power on immigration to the province.

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It is one thing for a national leader seeking re-election to refuse to jump in front of the legal parade against Bill 21 and another to look like he is willing to give away the immigration store to the law’s parent government.

It is also possible that Legault — like the federal strategists who had gamed out the upcoming election in the backrooms of Canada’s main parties — had not factored a Bloc Québécois recovery in his political calculations.

Be that as it may, for his troubles what the premier helped make happen on Monday was the best election night Quebec’s sovereignty movement, and by extension the beleaguered Parti Québécois, has had in a long time.

That is not to say that the Bloc’s showing — the strongest for the party in a decade — will put Quebec back on a sovereignty fast track. That is not in the offing, at least over the life of Trudeau’s minority government.

But the success of the Bloc could have a domino effect on its PQ cousin.

If there is one front where Legault is less than bulletproof it is that of climate change.

For now, the premier and Blanchet speak the same anti-pipeline language, but not necessarily for the same reasons.

Legault hopes his oft-stated opposition to the resurrection of a plan to build a pipeline across Quebec will earn him a pass for other fossil-fuel related developments.

The latter are increasingly in the sights of the opposition parties in the national assembly and the province’s vocal environment movement.

Over the campaign, Blanchet has studiously kept his powder dry on those projects, arguing that one should wait for the result of environmental assessments to take a definitive stance.

But it is not hard to see how Quebec’s latest federal political star could turn his guns on the premier who facilitated his ascent in the name of protecting the planet.

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

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