MONTREAL—A star candidate’s claim that he’d experienced political interference when he was a police officer made waves on the Quebec campaign trail on Sunday, as members of the opposing parties called on Ian Lafreniere to clarify his remarks.

Lafreniere, a longtime Montreal police spokesperson and current Coalition Avenir Quebec candidate, told TVA on Saturday that the thing he hated most about being a police officer was the “political interference” — though he did not go into details about the allegation.

Reaction among the other parties was swift, with several opposition politicians questioning why Lafreniere didn’t come forward with his allegations when he was still a member of the force.

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“I hope he will be able to detail what he said with specific facts, because normally he would have to denounce it if he was witness to that in his career,” Liberal Leader Philippe Couillard said Sunday morning.

Earlier in the day, fellow Liberal candidate Marc Tanguay suggested Lafreniere’s statements were hypocritical, because one of the Coalition Avenir Quebec’s commitments is to review the nomination process for the heads of the province’s police forces, including the anti-corruption squad, the Montreal police and the provincial police.

In Vaudreuil, west of Montreal, Coalition Leader Francois Legault said his plan is to ensure the head of the anti-corruption unit, known as UPAC, would be confirmed through a two-thirds vote of the legislature in order to ensure neutrality.

“The (Parti Quebecois) is in agreement with that, the only one who is not in agreement with that is Philippe Couillard and the Liberal Party,” Legault said of the outgoing premier.

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“So why does the Liberal Party want to choose the UPAC boss alone?”

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Couillard defended the current system of having cabinet choose the head of UPAC, saying it was created based on a recommendation from the Charbonneau commission investigation into corruption in the construction industry.

Parti Quebecois Leader Jean-Francois Lisee, meanwhile, questioned Lafreniere’s credibility and called on the candidate to provide proof of the serious accusations he made.

“I’m ready to believe it, but show it,” he said at a campaign stop in Sept-Iles, in the Cote-Nord region of eastern Quebec.

On Friday, Legault said he was considering whether to offer police protection to Lafreniere after campaign-style posters depicting the ex-police officer with a bullet in his head were recently displayed at a junior college north of Montreal.