MONTREAL - Pauline Marois made it clear Thursday night that for her, the election Tuesday is not about changing the government.

It’s about changing countries.

“I need a majority mandate to make Quebec a country,” she said, setting off thunderous applause and heart-pounding chants of “We want a country" and “We are going to win!”

With most of her Montreal-area PQ candidates behind her, Marois was serenaded by the crowd, “My dear Pauline, this is your turn to talk of love.”

“Don’t play the game of Stephen Harper, who prays with his two hands together to have François Legault on his knees before him Wednesday morning,” Marois said, appealing to her members to make a final effort to win a majority for her and to be “contagious.”

“We are a few days from an historic moment,” the PQ leader said.

She referred to the mobilization last spring of young people across the province against the Liberal government’s proposed $1,788 university tuition hike, which she pledges to roll back after winning the election.

“The election is in five days and that date will mark the beginning of a great mobilization’” she said.

Premier Jean Charest said the strike was a boycott and said students should pay their “fair share.”

“I have chosen to make the mining companies pay,” Marois said, alluding to her plan to raise to 30 per cent from 16 per cent Quebec’s mining royalties.

“In Quebec we don’t resolve conflicts by beating up on our children,” she said, quoting the late French president François Mitterand, who said: “Those who hold their children in contempt are always wrong.”

Charest has campaigned for “jobs, the economy and democracy,” saying Marois represents a new “referendum and the street,” noting she wore the red cloth square, symbolic of the student protest.

“Our young people are beautiful!” Marois said.

She promised Quebec would develop electric transportation technologies and her government would propose a new Bill 101, with tougher rules to integrate immigrants into Quebec’s French society.

And a PQ government would present a charter of secularism, making it illegal for public-sector employees, including teachers and nurses, to wear non-Christian religious symbols, while tolerating the Catholic crucifix.

“We don’t have to apologize for who we are,” the PQ leader said.

Naming two of her candidates, Maka Kotto, from Cameroon, and Djemila Benhabib, who grew up in Algeria, Marois said when Quebec becomes an independent country, “we will all be part of the founding people of a sovereign Quebec.”

“Together we will build a ‘tightly mixed’ country,” she said.

Before Marois spoke, 10 of her candidates, including Kotto and Benhabib, spoke in praise of her.

But the biggest applause was for Léo Bureau-Blouin, a leader of the student strike who now is the PQ candidate in Laval-des-Rapides.

Marois was introduced by Julie Snyder, a television star and wife of Pierre Karl Péladeau, one of Quebec’s most-powerful business leaders, who controls the Quebecor empire.

Actor Emmanuel Bilodeau, who once played René Lévesque in a television series, was host of the warm-up show. He focused on the leadership of Marois, the PQ goal of making Quebec an independent country, and the party’s desired election outcome: a victory by Marois, who would be Quebec’s first woman premier.

“Please,” Bilodeau appealed. “liberate us from the Liberals.”

There was a musical presentation, featuring well-known Quebec performers like Michel Rivard, Yves Lambert, Yann Perreau and Paul Piché, using the words of Quebec poet Gaston Miron set to music.

Rivard touched on the theme that Marois would be Quebec’s first woman premier, then added, “We will be there with you for what follows. And you know what I’m talking about.”

The words prompted the crowd of more 2,000 PQ supporters to chant, “We want a country!”