A judicial recount may no longer be in the cards for Québec solidaire after updated results show the race in Saint-Henri—Sainte-Anne may not have been as close as once thought.
On election night and into Tuesday, it appeared QS lost the Montreal riding to the Quebec Liberal Party by 39 votes — one of the tightest races on election night.
Liberal Benoit Clermont was at 13,340 votes, while incumbent QS MNA Guillaume Cliche-Rivard was at 13,301 votes. The difference was 0.11 per cent of the total vote.
READ: Quebec 2026 election results for all ridings across the province
But those preliminary figures were updated on the Élections Québec around 2 p.m. Tuesday.
Clermont now has 13,341 votes while Cliche-Rivard dropped to 13,066 — a difference of 275 votes.
According to Élections Québec, an application for a judicial recount can be filed with the Court of Québec – within four days of the election – if the second-place candidate lost by one-thousandth of the votes cast.
Prior to the updated figures, the website showed 36,097 valid ballots had been cast. That total is now 35 864. In either case, one-thousandth of the votes cast would therefore be 36 votes — well below the new difference.
“Guillaume Cliche-Rivard is one of the best MNAs in the National Assembly of Quebec, and it’s heartbreaking to lose him,” Québec solidaire co-spokesperson Ruba Ghazal said earlier Tuesday.
“But we are going to see all the opportunities to do another counting of the vote. People in Saint-Henri—Sainte-Anne, they deserve to have the real result, that the difference is too small. So we are evaluating all the possibilities that we can have to do this recount.”
“After several hours of vote counting, fewer than 40 votes separate me from my Liberal opponent, Benoît Clermont,” Cliche-Rivard wrote on social media late on election night. “Given this uncertainty, we are currently evaluating all legal avenues that ensure the full expression of democracy, including a request for a judicial recount.
“I would like to acknowledge the excellent campaign run by all the candidates in the riding; however, the citizens of the Sud-Ouest deserve a clear answer regarding the election result. See you soon.”
The race was even closer in a nearby riding, on Montreal’s South Shore.
Only 10 votes separated Liberal candidate Affine Lwalalika from the PQ’s Stephan Fogaing in Vachon — a difference of 0.02 per cent of all valid votes cast.
Read More: Quebec election: updated numbers for Saint-Henri-Sainte-Anne