The new separatists were barely born the last time the province came close to leaving Canada
The first thing I notice on arriving at Club Pays, a pro-sovereignty cafe and bar that opened earlier this year in Montreal, is a neon sign: “Bienvenue dans le Mouvement!” Welcome to the Movement! The second thing I notice is that the movement appears to be running late.
I’m here for Fête pour le OUI, the cafe’s inaugural Friday-night party for independence. But there are five people in the joint. For a moment, I panic—so much for the youth sovereignty boom—before realizing my mistake: at 9 p.m., I am only two hours late, making me early, at least by Montreal standards.
Within thirty minutes, though, a couple dozen twentysomethings are on the dance floor, bouncing along to indie-pop bops by Ariane Roy and Hubert Lenoir. The pants are barrel legged. The tees, on all the genders, are cropped. The merch—T-shirts and onesies and totes with impeccable branding—is firmly in support of a free and independent Quebec.
At the bar, I start chatting with a twenty-five-year-old elementary school teacher (who asks that I withhold her name for professional reasons) as she rummages through a fishbowl of pro-independence pins, hunting for one she doesn’t already have. She’s a sovereigntist; she wants Quebec to become a country. She just doesn’t see herself in the party that’s spent the last six decades trying to make that happen.
“I’m fully for a sovereign Quebec,” she says. “But I’m also for an inclusive Quebec.” At the provincial elections on October 5, she’s planning to vote for Québec solidaire, the party she says most closely reflects her values. The Parti Québécois, which spearheaded the province’s independence movement for decades, currently does not. The draw for her tonight wasn’t a political debate. It was the prospect of a room full of people her age—which just happened to be at a pro-independence cafe.
For the past year-plus, Quebec has been having a minor cultural freakout over the apparent return of sovereignty in a generation that wasn’t alive for the last referendum, in 1995. And because these are Gen Zers—the oldest of whom were born around 1997—much of it is happening online, in streams and memes and clips of teens lip-synching to a forty-six-year-old referendum speech by Réné Lévesque.
The enthusiasm is easy to see. It’s harder to measure. This burgeoning sovereigntist culture has developed at a time when overall support for an independent Quebec is hovering near its lowest point in decades. But maybe this moment, the one the polls are measuring in the fall of 2026, isn’t about producing a unified voting bloc but a cultural space, online and IRL, in which sovereignty has become thinkable again.
Naturally, it was a twenty-nine-year-old YouTuber who was the first to articulate what was happening. Mounir Kaddouri, who goes by the alias Maire de Laval online, had noticed the topic of sovereignty bubbling up on his social feeds for a few years. He tried to make sense of it in Les nouveau souverainistes, a short documentary for the youth-culture outlet Urbania, released just a few days before Quebec’s Fête nationale in 2025. Then, as now, the polls didn’t reflect it, but Kaddouri, and everyone he spoke to, knew something was happening.
Archival referendum footage was circulating as TikTok edits. Lévesque, Jacques Parizeau, and Charles de Gaulle were short-form fodder. Girls were posting fit checks soundtracked by a certain Quebec rock icon, captioned “hot girls like Jean Leloup.” And there were sovereignty meme accounts—so many sovereignty meme accounts—creating a highly sharable deluge of Québécois brainrot.
Kinji00, a Portugal-born, Quebec-raised rapper, now eighteen, was racking up millions of views with pro-independence tracks that cast him, with characteristic teenage modesty, the face of the movement: “La nouvelle vague souverainiste, je suis CEO” (The new sovereigntist wave, I’m the CEO), he rapped. Whatever it amounted to politically, Kaddouri made a convincing case that something was shifting culturally. Then, the Olds found out.
A Leger survey released a few days after Kaddouri’s documentary found that nearly half of Quebecers aged eighteen to thirty-four supported independence, compared with just 33 percent overall. A CROP sampling later that summer added fuel to the story, finding 56 percent of young respondents in favour of independence. The polls sparked a maelstrom of coverage in traditional media. Dozens and dozens of articles, opinion pieces, radio spots, and TV segments were published, and by the time the thirtieth anniversary of the 1995 referendum rolled around last October, there was a full-fledged narrative: the kids are all sovereigntists.
The whole thing caught Éric Bélanger a little off guard. Bélanger is a professor of political science at McGill University who studies Quebec politics and public opinion. What surprised him wasn’t just the claim that an entire generation had suddenly swung toward sovereignty but how readily the media picked it up and ran with it. He and a colleague went back through roughly three years of Leger polling and found that the summer of 2025 was an outlier—the only period when young people were clearly more sovereigntist than the population overall. By that fall, youth support had fallen back around the population average and has fluctuated little since. “Something was happening,” Bélanger concedes. “It just didn’t last.”
Nando Pastorino, for one, doesn’t think the numbers tell the whole story. What has struck him most is not necessarily a wholesale conversion among people his age and younger but a change in what they’re willing to talk about.
The thirty-one-year-old content creator has been a sovereigntist for close to a decade and first joined the PQ in 2017, back when, as he remembers it, discussing independence was considered outdated—almost corny. So people just didn’t. He had no idea if his friends were sovereigntists or not or if it was even something they thought about.
A few years ago, he says, that began to shift. The topic of sovereignty started coming up on its own, and people—whether they supported independence or not—were up for talking about it. “Just the fact that they’re open to the discussion,” he says, “for me, that’s very new.”
Pastorino’s theory of the renewed interest, one that’s shared by others, is that the Québécois his age are unencumbered by the emotional baggage of past campaigns and past losses. They have no memory of watching the Yes side come within a percentage point of victory in 1995. He’s met older sovereigntists who still become emotional talking about that night, people he describes as deeply afraid of losing again. His generation inherited the question but not necessarily the hurt. “They’re not afraid of losing,” Pastorino says. “They’ve never lost.”
For most of its history, the modern sovereignty movement has had an obvious vehicle in the PQ. Today, the relationship can be looser. Precociously political, Marc-Antoine Lemay took the traditional route into the sovereignty movement, joining the PQ at sixteen, before he could even vote, eventually working for the party briefly. But even then, he didn’t see Quebec solidaire as an adversary but another vehicle for independence, one that could reach people the PQ couldn’t.
Eventually, Lemay wanted to be able to talk more directly to sovereigntists, and the sovereignty-curious, across party lines. In 2021, he launched Génération OUI, the staunchly pro-independence, deliberately non-partisan podcast he hosts. Part of the goal is to keep the cause bigger than the parties carrying it, which, after all, can change leaders or strategies or priorities. But if they stop talking about sovereignty, a non-partisan voice like Génération OUI doesn’t have to.
And it’s not the only voice out there. Génération OUI is part of a growing crop of pro-independence organizations, artists, and influencers, similarly untethered to any particular party. Rapper Kinji00 has explicitly refused affiliation in order to better “bring together” sovereigntists. YouTuber and filmmaker Kaddouri, meanwhile, moves comfortably between the movement and electoral politics: during this campaign, he gathered some twenty young Québécois to talk about the issues that matter to them, then took their questions to the leaders of all five major parties.
Last fall, Ariane Vaillières—the content creator better known as Cocottee to her more than 6 million followers—caused a full-on frenzy when, at a wildly popular Formula 4 race for internet celebrities, she asked to compete under the fleur-de-lys rather than the Maple Leaf. “Quebec is going to become a country one day,” she declared. PQ leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon was quick to share the clip, but Vaillières herself has no public affiliation with the party, or any other: her allegiance, at least publicly, is to the cause.
And then there’s OUI Québec, the non-partisan umbrella organization that operates Club Pays, where running groups, knitting nights, and open mics turn independence into something like a social scene—sovereignty through dance parties, not political parties. The organization’s premise is that the national project, as it’s called, needs a citizen movement broad enough to outlast an electoral cycle. Independence can’t belong to any one political group, which means keeping their work at arm’s length from party politics.
(During an election, though, that distance can become awkwardly literal. Wanting to avoid any possible suggestion of partisanship, OUI Québec refused to give any interviews during the campaign, even to talk about the youth sovereignty trend, and when I attended the pro-independence dance party, they tried to prevent me from talking to attendees as well.)
“The Yes side has to be a coalition,” says Lemay. “A big part of what Génération OUI is about is bringing together sovereigntists from across the political spectrum.” He adds that even the PQ—polling at 30 percent and within reach of a majority government—recognizes that an eventual Yes camp would have to extend beyond its own membership, reaching pro-independence voters to both its left and right.
The upside of a big tent is that people don’t have to agree on much beyond the vague idea of free Quebec. Sovereignty can be the common cause of people who come to it from very different politics, and for very different reasons.
Rad, the youth-oriented division of Radio-Canada, recently brought together twenty young Québécois to debate sovereignty—ten for independence, including Pastorino, and ten against. The heterogeneity of what a Yes coalition might look like was on full display.
There were sovereigntists who saw independence as a way to protect Quebec culture and the French language and others, like Pastorino, who emphasized democratic self-determination or greater economic autonomy. A twenty-six-year-old originally from Burundi imagined building immigration around dignity and a willingness to welcome more asylum seekers, while a thirty-three-year-old teacher from Sainte-Thérèse worried that federally controlled temporary immigration was anglicizing Quebec and diminishing its demographic weight within Canada. A young environmentalist argued that independence would free the province from a Canadian “petrostate” whose priorities she saw as fundamentally different from Quebec’s. A thirty-one-year-old Innu man spoke of building a new country “nation to nation” with Indigenous peoples. The common denominator was less a shared vision of an independent Quebec than the simple belief that Quebec should get to decide these things for itself.
All those shades of blue can look like they’re fragmenting during an election. Sovereigntists who agree on independence but not on, say, immigration, might cast their ballots accordingly. Indeed, polling shows pro-independence voters scattered across four parties—all the major ones except the Liberals—even though only two support sovereignty. These voters also differ on how much independence matters relative to everything else: for some, it is the organizing principle of their politics; for others, like the elementary school teacher at the bar, it’s one priority among many.
She wants Quebec to become a country. She plans to vote for a sovereigntist party. But she doesn’t think independence should happen now. “I just don’t think it’s the moment,” she tells me, as Arcade Fire’s “No Cars Go” blasts in the background, an accidentally apt soundtrack for wanting to go somewhere, just not yet. As an elementary school teacher in a highly diverse, heavily immigrant borough in northwest Montreal, she worries that some of her students feel excluded from Québécois identity due to the current political climate. For her, that’s not the foundation on which to build the country she wants Quebec to become.
Which raises the question of what “support for sovereignty” actually means, and what the surveys actually measure. Lemay was happy with last summer’s reported spikes in support but guarded—polls go up and down, after all, and it’s not like a referendum was imminent. A wave only matters if the movement can keep it going until there’s actually something to vote on. What mattered about the 2025 surge, to him, was that it drew attention to the cause and gave them an idea of the people they might be able to reach. “The referendum’s in three years,” he says. “We’ve got time to organize.”
Bélanger is more cautious about what any of those numbers can tell us. The Leger result from last June was based on a small sample size—roughly 200 respondents under thirty-five—while the CROP survey asked a broad question about whether Quebec should become an independent country one day. Pollsters are also having an increasingly hard time reaching young respondents in the first place. Still, Bélanger doesn’t dismiss the numbers altogether. They may reflect a kind of latent support among young people that could be activated under the right circumstances.
The most recent canvasses show overall support for sovereignty around 30 percent—among those aged eighteen to thirty-four, it’s closer to 34 percent. Pastorino argues that an election-time poll is a poor proxy for how sovereignty supporters might behave in a referendum. Right now, a left-wing sovereigntist has to decide whether they can live with the PQ’s politics; a right-wing one has to make the same calculation from the opposite direction.
“Once it’s a referendum, those aren’t questions anymore,” says Pastrorino. “The question is simply whether or not we want to be a country.”
