Jean-François Lisée

Jean-François Lisée (born February 13, 1958 in Thetford Mines) is a politician in Quebec, Canada, and the leader of the Parti Québécois since October 2016. He was first elected a member of the National Assembly of Quebec in the 2012 Quebec election in the electoral district of Rosemont.
Prior to winning political office, he was a political analyst, journalist, author, intellectual and sovereignist thinker. He was a "special advisor" to former PQ premiers of Quebec Jacques Parizeau and Lucien Bouchard. Prior to his election, he was the Executive Director of the International Study and Research Centre at the University of Montreal. His work centred on Quebec sovereignty, the sociological phenomena affecting the latter's support, as well as the "Quebec Model" and social democracy in an era of globalization.
He served concurrently as the Minister of International Relations, the Francophonie, External Trade as well as the minister responsible for the Montreal region in the cabinet of Pauline Marois from 2012 to 2014.
Lisée formally entered Parti Québécois leadership election in May 2016, saying he would not campaign for sovereignty in his first mandate as premier. He was elected leader of the PQ on 7 October, winning 50.63% of the ballots during the second round.

Lisée holds a licence in laws from the Université de Montréal, a master in communication studies from the UQAM and a degree in journalism from the Centre de formation des journalistes in Paris. In the 1980s, he was a reporter in Paris and Washington for both Canadian and French media. During that decade, he began an expansive investigation into 30 years of American political, diplomatic, financial and media attention toward Quebec and its independence movement, resulting in the book In the Eye of the Eagle, published in 1990. It won the Governor General's Award for non-fiction. Two books followed: Le Tricheur and Le Naufrageur, both of which were highly critical of former Quebec Premier Robert Bourassa. According to Lisée, his refusal to support sovereignty in the context of the Meech Lake Accord failure left many Quebec nationalists feeling betrayed.

In 1994, he became a "special advisor" to Premier Jacques Parizeau and an important strategist for the 1995 Quebec referendum campaign. After the sovereignty referendum failure and Parizeau's resulting resignation, Lisée then became advisor to Parizeau's successor, Lucien Bouchard. Lisée resigned from this post in late 1999 because of disagreements over the sovereignty strategy of the provincial PQ government. He explained his own strategy in 'Emergency Exit: How to Avert Quebec Decline (2000).

Lisée was guest scholar from 2001 to 2003 at the International Research and Study Centre (CERI) in Paris and at the Political Science Department of the University of Montreal. He was the Executive Director of the International Studies Centre at the University of Montreal (CERIUM) from 2004 to 2012. He is also a member of the Political Research and Social Development Centre (CPDS) and founder of international politics website PolitiquesSociales.net. He periodically writes articles published in the current affairs magazine L'actualité.

• Governor General's Award (1990)
• Jules-Fournier Award (1990)