The Conservatives held power in Quebec for 25 out of 30 years, providing eight of the province's ten premiers in that period.
The execution of Louis Riel in 1885 outraged French Canadians and hurt the Macdonald Conservatives at the polls.
After Macdonald's death in 1891, the coalition that formed the national Conservatives unravelled, particularly around the Manitoba Schools Question that pitted English-Canadian Protestants against French-Canadian Catholics.
In 1929, mayor of Montreal Camillien Houde succeeded Arthur Sauvé as leader of the Conservative Party, which went on to lose four by-elections.
The Union Nationale formed the government again from 1966–1970 and afterwards went into rapid decline, being supplanted by the Parti Québécois as the main opposition to the Liberals.
Claude Wagner, a judge and a prominent Quebec Liberal cabinet minister who departed provincial politics in 1970, ran successfully as a Progressive Conservative in the 1972 federal election, and was the front-runner in the party leadership convention in 1976 before losing on the final ballot to Joe Clark.
When Bourassa returned to politics in the 1980s, he worked closely with the federal Progressive Conservatives led by Brian Mulroney.
With the decline of support for separatism in the early twenty-first century there are indications that Quebec politics is returning to a right/left divide and there have been several attempts to create centre-right parties, with varying success.