Alexandre Boulerice, the sole New Democrat in Quebec and a fixture of the party's diminished federal caucus, is leaving Parliament Hill to run provincially under the banner of Québec solidaire, Le Journal de Montréal has learned.
The departure comes just weeks after Avi Lewis took the helm of the federal NDP, delivering an early and deeply symbolic setback to a leader who hasn't yet marked one month on the job.
The move, described by two sources close to the matter as a done deal, will be formally announced at a news conference Monday in the Montréal riding of Gouin. Boulerice's departure from federal politics had become an open secret in political circles for some time, but the timing is a gut punch for a party still reeling from an electoral drubbing last year that reduced its caucus to a fraction of its former size.
Under federal parliamentary math, Boulerice's exit means the departure of 16% of the current NDP caucus, a staggering early attrition rate for a leader whose tenure was supposed to signal renewal, not retreat.
The flight of the veteran progressive to Québec solidaire's provincial stage was driven, Boulerice explained earlier this year, by a desire to combat what he called a “national conservatism” taking root in the province, “with attacks on public services, with attacks on immigrants, on refugees, with attacks on workers' rights.”
The two-term MP, who has long been a recognizable left-wing voice in French Canada, is betting that his brand of politics has a better home inside the sovereigntist and decidedly left-leaning party led by Québec solidaire.
For Lewis, the defection is a baptism by fire. Acclaimed as federal NDP leader in late March, he immediately identified rebuilding the Quebec wing as a top priority. The new NDP leader made a personal appeal to Boulerice to stay and help reconstruct a party that was, in his own words, "decimated" in the last campaign.
That pitch, delivered face-to-face in late March, has now officially failed.
Québec solidaire, currently languishing at just 8% in a Léger poll released this week, broke its own internal rules to clear the path for Boulerice. The party had adopted a resolution in June 2025, reserving candidacies in ridings it already holds for women and non-binary people.
In recent weeks, however, members were told that “a left-wing sovereigntist man of great prominence, who shares Québec solidaire's values and is rooted in the riding, expressed interest in running in Gouin.” The membership ultimately voted to allow the exception, a significant breach of a freshly minted rule, but one the struggling party hopes will inject energy just in time for its May 8-10 policy convention.
Boulerice's candidacy will be touted as a star recruitment that whips up a party still absorbing the announced departures of several big names, including former co-spokesperson Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois. Québec solidaire's leadership is betting that a familiar, media-savvy politician with deep roots in the riding can reverse a slide in the polls that has the left-wing formation in single digits and at risk of marginalization in the next provincial election campaign.
For the federal NDP, the optics are grim. After the 2025 election, the party's presence in Quebec was reduced to a lone seat: Boulerice's riding of Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie. Without him, Lewis presides over a caucus with zero francophone Quebec representation, a void that will fuel criticism that the party is retreating to its Western and urban Ontario redoubts. The 16% caucus reduction figure is likely to be weaponized by the Conservatives and especially the Bloc Québécois at the first opportunity.
For Alexandre Boulerice, the calculation is personal and ideological. The MP has framed his upcoming jump as a realignment of his progressive mission with the stage where he feels it matters most. Whether the move proves to be a lifeline for Québec solidaire or a permanent scar for the federal NDP will be determined in the months ahead.
More details will be made available following Monday's press conference.
