page_title: Quebec City
section_title: Politics
hierarchical_section_title: Quebec City / Politics
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Monument Honoré-Mercier, devant l'hôtel du Parlement du Québec
context_page_description: Quebec City, officially Québec, is the capital city of the Canadian province of Quebec. As of July 2016 the city had a population of 531,902, and the metropolitan area had a population of 800,296. It is the eleventh largest city and the seventh largest metropolitan area in Canada.
  The Algonquian people had originally named the area Kébec, an Algonquin word meaning "where the river narrows", because the Saint Lawrence River narrows proximate to the promontory of Quebec and its Cape Diamant. Explorer Samuel de Champlain founded a French settlement here in 1608, and adopted the Algonquin name. Quebec City is one of the oldest European cities in North America. The ramparts surrounding Old Quebec are the only fortified city walls remaining in the Americas north of Mexico. This area was declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1985 as the "Historic District of Old Québec".
  The city's landmarks include the Château Frontenac hotel that dominates the skyline and the Citadelle of Quebec, an intact fortress that forms the centrepiece of the ramparts surrounding the old city and includes a secondary royal residence.
context_section_description: Since the 1970s, centre-right parties such as Union Nationale, Crédit social, Conservative Party of Canada (CPC), Action démocratique du Québec and Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) have been more popular in the Quebec City region than elsewhere in the province. After the federal election of 2006, six of the ten conservative ridings of the province were found in its metropolitan area (where the CPC garnered 39% of the vote, against 25% at the provincial scale) and in the city proper, the CPC won three of the four seats that existed at that time (the riding of Quebec went to the Bloc). Along with the city's lesser support for Quebec sovereignty, this led political pundits to speculate about a "Quebec City mystery".
  Various lines of thought were offered, including the popularity of the talk radio stations CHOI and FM93 expressing fiscally conservative and non-politically correct opinions. Over the years, this genre has been qualified by its detractors as radio poubelle (fr) ("trash radio") and hosts like Jeff Fillion and André Arthur likened to shock jocks. Also, compared to the rest of the province, people of the area may favor harsher criminal sentences, and lower-class households may share political views more in line with those earning more. The reasons for this remain unclear. Another researcher put forward the historical factors that led to Montreal surpassing Quebec as the metropolis of British North America in the early 19th century. According to this theory, its permanent status of "second city" (albeit the capital) engendered feelings of "repressed jealousy".
  The "mystery" was relativized following the 2011 federal election. All five ridings within the city were won by the leftist New Democratic Party, in the so-called "orange wave" that temporarily swept the province. Nonetheless, five of the six seats won by the Conservatives in the province were found in the greater Quebec City area. At the 2018 provincial election, the leftist party Québec solidaire managed to win two districts, Taschereau and Jean-Lesage, the most densely populated in town, but the centre-right CAQ, as it swept the province, won six of the nine districts encompassing the city, and 15 of the 18 in the administratives regions of Capitale-Nationale and Chaudière-Appalaches (south shore of the city).
caption: The provincial Parliament Building is located in the city.
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