The self-described CEO of the next generation of Quebec sovereigntists is a 17-year-old rapper and TikTok sensation who claims to be more influential than Premier François Legault.
Miguel Monteiro-Beauchamp, who goes by the name kinji00, was born in Portugal and grew up in Gatineau, Que. As Canada marks the 30th anniversary of Quebec’s last referendum on independence, held on Oct. 30, 1995, Monteiro-Beauchamp is emerging as the ambassador of a new wave of Gen Z sovereigntists.
None of them were born when Quebec last voted on whether to leave Canada three decades ago. But they are proud and very online, expressing their allegiance through memes and TikTok edits. They are also mobilizing in the real world, starting independence clubs at their colleges and universities.
Their numbers may not yet be large enough to constitute a major political force. But at a march for independence in Montreal last weekend that attracted hundreds of supporters, young people appeared to outnumber those who were around to cast a ballot in 1995.
“There’s definitely something that wasn’t there five years ago,” said Mounir Kaddouri, a 28-year-old YouTuber who supports Quebec sovereignty. “A hype, a momentum.”
On the evening of the 1995 referendum, Quebec rock band Les Colocs released an album during a live show, in anticipation of a sovereigntist victory. Cameras captured an emotional André “Dédé” Fortin, the band’s frontman, as he absorbed the defeat in real time.
In the last song he wrote before taking his own life in 2000, Fortin reflected on that loss: “I am like my people, indecisive and dreamy / I speak to anyone who wants to hear about my fictional country / My heart full of vertigo and gnawed by fear,” he wrote.
Monteiro-Beauchamp’s desire for independence, in contrast, is neither indecisive nor dreamy. A mixtape released with his brother on Quebec’s national holiday in June is called À la prochaine fois (Until next time), a tribute to the famous words spoken by the father of Quebec sovereignty, René Lévesque, upon losing the province’s first independence referendum in 1980.
He pays homage to his predecessors, but he is not tethered to disappointments past. His songs are upbeat, irreverent, often explicit. “René Lévesque walked and now kinji runs,” he raps on one song that has been streamed nearly half a million times on Spotify. Elsewhere: “Jean Chrétien is a bastard, he stole my fleur-de-lis.”
“I think there are a lot of people, especially older people, who will see (the 1995 referendum) as a defeat,” said Catherine Lamoureux-Schmidt, co-spokesperson of a fledgling group for student sovereigntists called Mouvement Étudiant Indépendantiste.
“We don’t see it that way at all,” she said. “We see it as a period in the past, a stage in Quebec’s history.”
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Her group, founded in April, is working to support a new crop of sovereigntist committees at Quebec junior colleges and universities. Léonard Vidal, the group’s other spokesperson, said of the 22 such committees in operation, only three or four date back more than a few years.
Neither Vidal, 19, nor Lamoureux-Schmidt, 20, grew up in sovereigntist families. They said they both took up the cause in recent years, after spending time abroad and realizing how proud they were to be Quebecers.
Both attended the independence rally last weekend in downtown Montreal. The event was organized in part by OUI Québec, a sovereigntist group that’s working to mobilize youth.
“In the last four years, most of our action has been to create a new generation that’s in favour of Quebec independence,” said Camille Goyette-Gingras, the group’s president.
The mood was celebratory and hopeful, as young people waved Quebec flags and bore signs calling for a “Québec libre.” “This is just the start – let’s keep up the fight!” they chanted.
The enthusiasm of young sovereigntists “blindsided” Quebec’s media establishment this year, said Kaddouri, the YouTuber. But the trend has been emerging online over the last couple of years, he explained. “If you had the right radar and you were in touch with internet culture in Quebec, you’ve seen it coming.”
Kaddouri said Gen Z sovereigntists have repackaged the independence movement in Reddit threads and Instagram meme accounts. On TikTok, young people wrapped in the Quebec flag lip-synch Lévesque’s famous speech after the first referendum. Other videos splice together footage from 1980 and 1995, often put to music.
It’s a new esthetic flavoured with humour and nostalgia, Kaddouri said, and unburdened by doubt. “It’s almost like it is obvious that Québec should be a country,” he said. “You don’t even have to explain. … And that’s at odds with how this movement evolved throughout the years.”
The renewed interest in independence comes amid much hand-wringing in broader Quebec society over the perceived indifference of young people to their own culture and heritage. In August, a study found that 80 per cent of Quebecers aged 15 to 29 mostly watch non-Quebec films, while only four per cent said they listened mainly to Quebec music.
Be that as it may, there’s a growing community of Quebec influencers working to establish an online identity that is neither Canadian nor French, Kaddouri said. Their content may not be explicitly sovereigntist, he added, but “it promotes the idea of being proud.”
For some young people, a desire for independence necessarily means an alliance with the Parti Québécois, which is promising to hold a third referendum by 2030 if it forms government in an election scheduled for October 2026. The party has been leading in the polls for the better part of two years.
Zack Corbin, a 21-year-old content creator in Rimouski, Que., said he wants to see the PQ take more than the 77 seats it won in 1994. “If we can manage to get a little more … we’re almost certain to win the referendum,” he said.
Corbin publishes videos on several platforms – Facebook for the olds, TikTok for the youth – urging people to vote for the PQ next year, and to vote “yes” in a third referendum.
But other young sovereigntists promote a vision of independence that does not wholly align with that of the PQ, which has promised to slash immigration and bemoans what it perceives to be a steep decline of French in Quebec.
“Quebec in our hearts, we don’t give a damn where you were born,” Monteiro-Beauchamp raps in one of his songs. He unapologetically uses a mix of French and English, and his version of sovereignty, shared by many young Quebecers, is entirely divorced from “ethno-nationalism,” Kaddouri said.
Lamoureux-Schmidt and Vidal are careful to describe their group as non-partisan. The independent state they have in mind is “inclusive, green, feminist” and supportive of Indigenous rights, Vidal said.
Early on, Vidal had a hard time calling himself a sovereigntist for fear of being labelled a racist. But now, young people feel comfortable advocating for a “contemporary” vision of independence that is “a little more open to the world,” he said.
Still, if there is to be a third referendum in the next few years, it will almost certainly be launched by the PQ, and Vidal and Lamoureux-Schmidt said they’ll be ready to form the “yes” campaign. Lamoureux-Schmidt pointed out that no one in Quebec under the age of 48 has ever voted on independence. “I think it’s very legitimate to want to express an opinion,” she said.
For all his belief in a groundswell of support for independence among young people, however, Kaddouri hesitates on the question of a referendum. He would vote for independence, he said. But he also knows that polls consistently show the majority of Quebecers say they would vote against sovereignty.
“I think if there should be a referendum, it should be winnable,” he said. “So I wouldn’t rush to it. I feel there’s a lot of groundwork to be done to convince a lot of people to vote ‘yes.’”
– With files from Miriam Lafontaine
