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In the wake of Quebec’s provincial election in 2014, a bitter contest that saw the Liberals win a convincing majority and the Parti Québécois suffer its worst defeat in 40 years, newly minted premier Philippe Couillard spoke of a “tectonic shift” in Quebec’s political landscape.

But I would argue that the result we saw in this province a year ago was an aftershock of larger, even more unexpected political earthquake that occurred here in 2011 — the NDP’s “Orange Wave” breakthrough in Quebec.

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Let’s be clear — four years ago, nobody foresaw that Canada’s perennial third-place federal party would score 59 seats in a province that was presumed to be real estate dominated by the federal Liberals and the Bloc Québécois (the NDP sure didn’t). And in the aftermath of that detonation, there was plenty of speculation from pundits and political operators whose orthodoxies had been shattered into a zillion tiny pieces that the NDP win had been a fluke — the result of a convergence of factors that were unlikely to recur in 2015.