Geographically, the building is in the Place de l'Assemblée-Nationale, in the district of Vieux-Québec–Cap-Blanc–colline Parlementaire, part of the borough of La Cité-Limoilou, just outside the walls of Old Quebec.

[5] In 1620, Samuel de Champlain was ordered to stop further exploration of New France, of which he was lieutenant governor, and instead was asked to engage solely in administration of the newly discovered lands.

After several unsuccessful attempts of negotiation with the archbishop, Bernard-Claude Panet, he eventually agreed to transfer the ownership rights in 1831 – thus the building became colonial property in August 1832.

They quickly accepted the offer of the Sisters of Charity to rent their convent as a temporary seat of parliament, but on May 3, 1854, during works on repurposing the building, another fire ruined the new wing of the house they intended to use as a meeting place for the legislature.

[14] They afterwards rented a courthouse and a music hall as an emergency solution, until in 1858, the city acquired the land with the ruins of the Old Parliament Building (it later became the Champlain Market [fr]).

The proceeds were then used to construct a small building first intended as a post office, but then it was decided to move the legislature and the government in that place.

[19] Due to budget constraints, however, the building's Second Empire architecture was toned down somewhat from what was popular in Paris;[20] it was nevertheless called a "construction of the century", with up to 400 workers employed to erect the seat of parliament.

With tensions escalating, the employment of strikebreakers failing and the then Premier of Quebec, Henri-Gustave Joly, attacked on the street, the demonstrations were suppressed by the military in June 1878.

[8][23] The builders also faced other problems – in October 1884, a bombing damaged the construction site, and the government also experienced significant cost overruns.

[26][27] Four years after that, statues of various political and intellectual figures of importance to Quebec were mounted in niches in the walls of the building.

[25][28] The building initially hosted all major executive and legislative offices of the province of Quebec as well as the parliamentary library.

There are two side wings each with a small tower, one dedicated to Samuel de Champlain, explorer and founder of Quebec City, and the other to Paul Chomedey de Maisonneuve, founder of Montreal; and a 52-metre-tower placed between these two wings, which, in its turn, is named after Jacques Cartier, who made first contact between the French and what is now Canada.

[37] The concept of decorations as thought by Eugène-Étienne Taché was to show an open history of Quebec on the wall of parliament, including statues and the heraldry.

The front wall of the parliament building houses a total of 26 statues,[25] which were ordered in 1886 and delivered in 1894 from Louis-Philippe Hébert and eight other sculptors, all from Paris.

Two copies were displayed in Bordeaux since 1858 and until 1960, when it was dismantled to construct an underground parking lot[45] and due to rising costs of maintaining the fountain.

One of them was acquired by a nearby Saint-Germain-de-la-Rivière municipality, while the other, after having been disassembled and cut in pieces, eventually went to an antique shop in Saint-Ouen-sur-Seine, a Parisian suburb.

The former was originally white, but it was recolored twice: first in 1901, when it was repainted green, the traditional colour of the elected chamber of Westminster-style legislatures, and then in 1978 to blue, to facilitate the broadcast of debates on television.

It has 124 desks for the same number of members, separated by a corridor that leads from the main doors to the clerk's table, and further to the chair of the president of the National Assembly, whose seat is elevated on a pedestal.

A painting by Charles Huot, Débat sur les langues [fr] (French for 'debate on languages'), hangs behind the President's seat.

The painting opposite the entrance to the room is Charles Huot's Le Conseil souverain [fr] (French for 'the sovereign council'), which depicts a debate of the colonial government of New France.

The National Assembly decided to ditch the traditional Westminster layout of government facing the opposition in favour of a horseshoe outline of seats,[49] similar to the arrangement used in the Australian House of Representatives.

[54] The Le Parlementaire restaurant was not built when the building was inaugurated, but during an expansion in 1910s, Jean-Omer Marchand [fr] from Montreal and Georges-Émile Tanguay from Quebec City proposed a new space for a canteen for members of parliament in a Beaux-Arts style, which was popular at the time.

Accordingly, in November 2015, Jacques Chagnon, president of the National Assembly, unveiled a $60.5 million project that envisaged the construction of an underground entrance with enhanced security features, as well as a new conference room and space for parliamentary committees.

The Ordre des architectes du Québec, a provincial trade organization, gave an award to the planners of the expansion, lauding the preservation of architectural values in the building and increased accessibility;[64] Olivier Vallerand, a professor of architecture at McGill University, similarly approved of the design.

[65] On the other hand, the expansion came at a cost of reducing the area occupied by the Abenaki fountain, a change some, including Gaston Deschênes, a historian who wrote a monograph on the Parliament Building, criticized as violating the will of the original architect.