Maura Forrest

Maura Forrest covers Quebec politics, culture and identity for The Globe and Mail, with a focus on how debates over sovereignty, elections and social change intersect. Her reporting combines close coverage of Parti Québécois strategies and referendum promises with attention to how government policy and cultural trends shape everyday life in Quebec.

Quebec politics, culture and identity

Forrest’s primary brief is Quebec politics, with an explicit mandate to cover the province’s politics, culture and identity.

Her work situates party platforms, constitutional questions and election campaigns within longer-running tensions over language, nationalism and the role of Quebec within Canada. She often writes pieces that explain how political decisions resonate beyond the National Assembly, from tuition policy to environmental health, tying complex files back to the lived experience of students, families and communities. Before joining The Globe and Mail, she reported for The Canadian Press on topics ranging from Quebec sovereignty to high-speed rail, and earlier covered federal politics for national outlets including The National Post and POLITICO, experience that informs her grasp of both provincial and federal dynamics.

Quebec elections and sovereignty

A large portion of Forrest’s recent work tracks Quebec’s shifting electoral landscape and the evolving prospects for sovereignty. She has reported on how the Parti Québécois could secure a majority government despite relatively low support for independence, laying out the electoral math and regional dynamics behind that scenario.

In another piece, she describes a crowded political landscape that has left voters lukewarm as an election approaches, examining disillusionment with multiple parties and the challenges of mobilizing support.

Her coverage of a sovereignty referendum becoming a central focus of the campaign shows her attention to how a single issue can reorder strategies across the political spectrum. She has also detailed the PQ’s decision to delay any push for a referendum until after Donald Trump leaves office, treating the timing as a geopolitical calculation and spelling out its implications for Quebec’s constitutional future.

Forrest’s election reporting is not limited to party tactics; it often probes how voters’ identities and generational outlooks shape the campaign. In a feature on Quebec’s Gen Z sovereigntists, she portrays young activists who embrace independence through memes and social media while bristling at the Parti Québécois old guard, highlighting a disconnect between youth culture and traditional movement branding. Her work on identity politics fading into the background ahead of an October provincial vote underscores how concerns about cost of living, services and other issues can eclipse long-standing debates over secularism and language, without erasing them.

Together, these pieces show a reporter who treats sovereignty as both a numeric question of seats and votes and a cultural question of how different generations express belonging.

Policy and social impact stories

Beyond campaigns, Forrest writes on policy decisions and their social consequences, often using accessible case studies to bring complex files to life. Her article on McGill and Concordia dropping their battle against a provincial tuition hike for out-of-province students explains the financial stakes for universities and students while situating the move within Quebec’s broader approach to higher education and language policy.

In an explanatory piece on why wildfire smoke is difficult to forecast and damaging to health, co-written with Lana Hall, she breaks down the science of smoke behaviour and the health risks for residents, connecting environmental issues directly to public well-being. Her coverage of a Quebec woman who regained a chance at fertility thanks to uterine surgery before radiation treatment uses an individual story to illuminate advances in medical care and the human dimension of health policy decisions. These stories show a pattern: Forrest takes technical subjects - whether financial models, atmospheric science or medical procedures - and translates them into plain language anchored in concrete human impact.

Her political profiles also carry a strong policy thread.

In coverage of PQ Leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, she follows his vow to break with the monarchy and explores how that position could trigger a constitutional showdown, linking symbolic moves to legal and institutional consequences. When she appears on The Globe and Mail’s podcast The Decibel, she extends this explanatory work in audio form, discussing how age and ideology could decide a provincial election, and distilling her reporting into clear takeaways about what matters most to voters.

Culture and generational perspectives

Forrest’s remit includes Quebec culture, and she uses arts and lifestyle stories to reflect the province’s evolving identity.

In a feature on Angine de Poitrine, Quebec’s masked math-rock band, she examines how the group’s theatrical anonymity and intricate sound have driven its rise, treating the band as a lens on contemporary Quebec creativity and the appeal of experimental music. Her Gen Z sovereigntists piece likewise blurs the line between politics and culture, showing how “fun times” and patriotic memes sit alongside serious constitutional ambitions for younger activists.

These stories are grounded in reporting but written with an eye for how aesthetic choices, humour and online culture shape political expression.

Across politics, policy and culture, Forrest maintains a consistent approach: she writes in clear, straightforward prose, draws out the stakes of complex files and pays close attention to how identity - generational, linguistic, ideological - shapes Quebec’s debates. Her body of work is defined less by partisan positioning than by a sustained interest in how institutions, laws and cultural currents interact, whether the subject is a referendum promise, a tuition hike, wildfire smoke or a breakthrough surgery.