Each month, we profile someone connected to CBRC, featuring them in The Update, our monthly newsletter. Check out the Oct 2026 newsletter here.
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Photo: Manon Massé
Manon Massé (she/her) is an openly lesbian politician and feminist activist in Quebec. She has become a public figure and important face of the social justice movement, notably for the rights of 2S/LGBTQIA+ communities. In 2014, she became a Member of the National Assembly (MNA) of Quebec in and will complete her final term in October 2026.
Manon was young when she first understood politics as a means for action. “At 19, I had the privilege of being hired for my first ‘grown-up job’ by a popular education organization.” It was in this environment that Manon quickly came to understand the reality of workers like her parents, a reality created by people who pull strings to achieve and maintain their privileges at the expense of the working class. The riding that she would go on to represent for 12 years was the same locale she started working in as a young adult, which also encompasses Montreal’s Gay Village.
Popular education, which Manon describes as the soil from which her political career grew, holds as a founding principle that the people experiencing a situation are the most qualified to find a solution. By valuing lived experience as much as academic knowledge, this approach stirred Manon into action: “When you’re showing up as a young worker, you don’t need to have the ultimate truth: you work together to develop knowledge and understanding, and determine the actions you need to take to support or fight back against a situation.” This collaborative approach, a core principle of popular education, informed Manon’s practices as an activist.
After over 20 years of community organizing, activism, popular education, and advocacy work, it was clear to her that the Quebec National Assembly’s political parties were not responding to the needs of real people. “In the early 2000s, I said to myself, ‘if they can’t do their fucking job, I’ll go do it for them.’ That was my motivation.” In 2006, Manon Massé co-founded Québec Solidaire, a political party that, as she puts it, strives to create “a society where everyone has a chance, where public services play a major role in redistributing wealth and where the ruling class contribute their fair share.” For Manon, it’s clear that “on the political chessboard, you have some parties that seek to maintain their privileges and the system, while others are there to put a stop to that, to give people an equal chance and ensure the greater good.”
Today, after having been a co-spokesperson for Québec Solidaire for 7 years, helping elect 12 MNAs to defend social justice within the National Assembly, and being an MNA herself for 12 years (the average MNA term is 4.5 years), Manon is not leaving politics — she is leaving an institution. “The day I stop doing politics is the day I die,” she says. “I’m leaving parliamentarism.”
As an activist and a politician, Manon always tends towards an inclusive approach. “The more we defend the rights of people who are ostracized, discriminated against, and ignored, the more we’re defending everyone’s rights.” This is one reason why she has focused so much on women’s rights. “When we decided to increase minimum wage to make it possible to live with dignity, we didn’t have to add ‘for women’ to that sentence, because we know that 70% of minimum wage earners are women,” she clarifies.
At Summit 2026, Manon wishes to share a broad vision and explore the continuum of the struggle we are engaged in: “A community organization that defends our rights and creates a relationship of influence using a letter-writing campaign, a grassroots collective that organizes bold direct actions to force the media and politicians to take a stance on an issue, a nurse who won’t keep quiet until her HIV-positive patients have access to proper care and services, a politician who brings a petition written by a group of young people to the National Assembly — this is all advocacy work.”
Manon adds that the people who have privilege and aim to maintain it — the right wing — readily band together and protect each other. “On the left, we may have had the luxury of being overly idealistic before, each thinking that they had the correct approach as our rights gradually increased, but that’s not the case anymore: we’re being attacked head-on.” As she will explain in her Summit keynote presentation on October 30, Manon stresses the importance of reinforcing and nurturing our alliances across sectors and perceived divisions. This teaming up must be done if we want to engage with decision-makers and protect our rights.
Manon’s visit to Summit will come just as she completes her final term and begins a new chapter in her life. But before turning that page, she’d like to take some time to identify her next mission. “The last time I did something like this, I was co-founding a political party to infiltrate an institution, and I did that.” Manon is staying open during this pivot: “I have no idea what’s coming, but I know it will involve defending our rights.”
