SAINT-FÉLICIEN, QUE.— Philippe Couillard’s Quebec Liberal party sailed to an astonishing victory, winning a majority government in the provincial election that resulted in the defeat and resignation of Parti Québécois Leader Pauline Marois.

The Liberal leader’s accomplishment is a surprising achievement for the former Quebec health minister and neurosurgeon who just a few months ago was widely seen as an indecisive rookie leader.

But the 56-year-old Couillard benefitted from Marois’s many campaign missteps and a disastrous campaign in which voters appeared to get cold feet when Pierre Karl Péladeau entered the race and said he wanted to make Quebec a country.

“My dear friends, the division is over. The reconciliation has begun,” Couillard told cheering supporters Monday night. “We are all Quebecers. The pride in Quebec, of our identity, our language and our flag belongs to all Quebecers.”

The Liberals won 70 of the legislature's 125 seats, compared with 30 for the PQ. The Coalition Avenir Québec took 22 seats and Québec Solidaire finished with an additional seat for a total of three.

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Prime Minister Stephen Harper also weighed in on the results, congratulating Couilard and thanking Marois “for her public service.”

“The results clearly demonstrate that Quebecers have rejected the idea of a referendum and want a government that will be focused on the economy and job creation,” Harper said in a statement. “We look forward to working with the new government of Quebec on those priorities.”

Among the new Liberals elected were Couillard’s fiscal trio of Jacques Daoust, Martin Coiteux and Carlos Leitao, three nationally and internationally renowned economists who underscored the party message that this election was about who was best suited to turn around the province’s troubled economy.

The Liberals also won the riding of La Pinière, where the head of Quebec’s association of medical specialists and possible next health minister, Gaetan Barrette, was running against a longtime Liberal politician who split with Couillard’s party last fall and ran for re-election as an independent.

The party’s decisive win is all the more significant given that the Liberal were booted from power just 18 months ago after years of damaging revelations that it had orchestrated illegal political financing schemes. Those revelations are subject of an ongoing police investigation by Quebec’s anti-corruption police force, something that Couillard’s opponents raised repeatedly throughout the campaign to little avail.

Though Couillard, who was health minister from 2003 to 2008, is not linked to the alleged wrongdoing, he will nonetheless have to answer for the Liberals as more revelations emerge from a provincial corruption inquiry that will hear testimony in the coming weeks on the ties between construction firms bidding on government contracts and Quebec’s political parties.

Liberal supporter Marina Lessard, who works at the Université du Québec à Chicoutimi, said Couillard was able to combat that difficult past with a respectful tone throughout the campaign.

“He was always respectful in his responses while the others were too critical,” she said. “We want to have the peace. We want to have a period of stability.”

She said that in the Lac-Saint-Jean region, normally an area of strong PQ support, the Liberal leader also benefited from the backing of students after Marois’ decision to increase tuition fees. She had campaigned in 2012 as a sympathizer and ally of the student movement following the Maple Spring strikes the forced universities and colleges to cut short a school semester.

“I was astonished at the (local junior college) when they told me that they weren’t saying it out loud but that they voted Liberal,” Lessard said.

The stunning defeat of the PQ brings to a close Marois’ political career, which began in 1978 when she started working as a press secretary for then-finance minister Jacques Parizeau, her former university professor before being elected in 1981 under René Lévesque.

When the campaign was launched on March 5, polls suggested the minority PQ government had enough support to win a four-year lock on power. The strong backing was likely due to PQ legislation to create a so-called values charter that would have enshrined state secularism by banning government employees from wearing religious symbols at work. Despite being legally dubious, it was a popular initiative among francophones that was seen as protecting Quebecois identity, though it wasn’t enough to inoculate the sovereigntists from other campaign stumbles.

Voters appeared to get cold feet after the introduction of the multimillionaire media baron Pierre Karl Péladeau as a star PQ candidate that was meant to bring a boost of credibility to the PQ’s economic platform. Péladeau’s now iconic declaration that he wanted “to make Quebec a country” along with an awkward pump of his fist in the air came at the end of a 10-minute speech on the need for better productivity, job creation and fiscal management, but marked the abrupt start of the PQ’s slide in the polls.

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The former president of Quebecor, was not punished by voters in the riding of Saint-Jérôme, north of Montreal, winning the local contest handily.

A number of front-bench PQ ministers lost their seats Monday night, including immigration minister Diane DeCourcy, health minister Réjean Hebert and environment minister Yves-Francois Blanchet.

Also losing his seat was former student leader Leo Bureau-Blouin who became the youngest ever member of the Quebec legislature when he was elected in 2012.

“We are right to be disappointed, but we’ll never give up,” said former PQ democratic institutions minister Bernard Drainville. “We’ve overcome worse challenges than an election loss and we’ll get through this too.”

The late-campaign collapse of support for Marois’ party benefitted the third- and fourth-place parties in the Quebec legislature. It was anticipated that François Legault’s Coalition Avenir Québec would be wiped out when the election began, reduced from 18 seats to a rump, but looked but the party gained seats.

“We chose to tell the truth to Quebecers rather than to play the electoral card and I don’t regret it,” he said “It’s respectful and it bodes well for the future . . . We were able to make our voices and our ideas heard.”

Legault said he intends to remain in his post for the next four years, offering a “vigilant” opposition to Couillard’s Liberals.

“We weren’t always in agreement on our ideas and that remains true today,” he said.

Couillard has committed to reintroducing a PQ bill that would make Quebec the first jurisdiction in Canada to legalize euthanasia. The bill was in its final stages but could not be passed into law before the election was called. He also plans to put in place an ambitious infrastructure program designed to open up Quebec’s resource-rich north to mining and mineral exploration.

The outcome will be a relief in Ottawa, where Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservatives government, had reportedly been worrying about the prospect of a PQ-victory and the possibility Marois would begin a build up to a third referendum.

In Couillard, Harper will have a committed federalist ally and a shared obsession with the economy and job growth. The new Quebec premier also has a long relationship with federal NDP leader Thomas Mulcair from their days serving in the Quebec cabinet where Mulcair was the provincial environment minister.

But that goodwill may be tested over such federal issues as the future of the embattled Senate. While the Conservatives want to bring in an elected, reformed Senate, the NDP favours the abolition of the upper chamber. If any of those proposals move ahead in the coming years, the Liberal leader has said that he will use any federal moves to change the Canadian Constitution to push for such things as Quebec’s recognition as a distinct society within Canada, more power over Supreme Court appointments, limits on federal spending powers and powers to veto constitutional changes.

When Couillard was selected as Liberal leader one year ago, he had pledged to put Quebec’s signature on the Constitution by 2017, the 150th anniversary of Canada’s founding. He abandoned that deadline during the election, saying that he would wait for a national issue like Senate reform or Canada’s relationship with the First Nations before presenting such a demand.

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