The Parti Québécois (PQ) fielded a full slate of 125 candidates in the 2008 Quebec provincial election and elected fifty-one members to emerge as the Official Opposition party in the national assembly. Many of the party's candidates have separate biography pages; information about others may be found here.
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Argenteuil: John Saywell
John Saywell is a lawyer and urban planner. One of the relatively few anglophone PQ members, he has served as a commissioner with the Office québécois de la langue française. At a public meeting of the Bouchard-Taylor Commission in 2007, he called for blended provincial school boards that would end the de facto separation of students into French- and English-language schools.
Saywell has been a PQ candidate in two provincial elections. He was elected mayor of Grenville-sur-la-Rouge in a December 2010 by-election, winning about fifty-six per cent of the vote.
He is the son of the late Canadian historian John Saywell, who wrote a history of the Parti Québécois in 1977.
Brome—Missisquoi: Richard Leclerc
Richard Leclerc was born and raised in Montreal and moved to Brome—Missisquoi on a full-time basis in 2003. He is a veteran publicist and has taught social marketing at the Universite de Montreal.
Leclerc has worked with the Quebec sovereigntist movement since the 1980 referendum on sovereignty. He has worked on several Parti Québécois and Bloc Québécois campaigns, and he assisted the government of Quebec's anti-smoking campaign in the mid-2000s. In the 2005 municipal elections, he worked for the winning electoral slate in Sutton.
He first ran for the Quebec legislature in the 2007 provincial election, calling for infrastructural renewal and a public market in Farnham. In both 2007 and 2008, Leclerc lost to veteran Liberal Party politician Pierre Paradis.
Leclerc became editor of the Guide de la production locale et de l'achat chez nous, a Brome—Missisquoi tourism guide, in 2009. In 2010, he designed a controversially brash campaign for Quebec medical specialists who were in wage negotiations with the government.
There is a different Richard Leclerc who serves on the Commission scolaire de la Région-de-Sherbrooke as of 2010.
Jean-Lesage: Hélène Guillemette
Hélène Guillemette has Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees in Anthropology from Université Laval (1997, 1999). She was a political attaché to Parti Québécois MNA François Gendron from 2003 to 2005. In February 2006, she became a development agent for À cœur d’homme, an organization that seeks to end male violence against women. She is married to Bloc Québécois Member of Parliament (MP) Pascal-Pierre Paillé, and the couple have two children.
Guillemette sought the PQ nomination for Jean-Lesage in the 2007 provincial election, but lost to Christian Simard. She later became president of the PQ's Jean-Lesage association in late 2007, defeating incumbent Jean-François Jacob in a highly contested vote. After winning the party's nomination for the 2008 election, she took part in a high-profile party press conference on health issues. She received 7,471 votes (26.68%), finishing second against Liberal candidate André Drolet.
Orford: Michel Breton
Michel Breton became a riding assistant to Bloc Québécois Member of Parliament (MP) Christian Ouellet in 2006, a position he still holds as of 2011. He has run for the Parti Québécois in two elections. In 2007, he opposed the sale of a part of Mont-Orford National Park to private interests. As of 2011, he is the PQ's riding president in Orford.