Pauline Marois, the leader of Parti Québécois, returned to finish her victory speech in Montreal.
OTTAWA — A victory speech by Pauline Marois, whose separatist Parti Québécois claimed victory in a provincial election on Tuesday, was abruptly cut short when a man fired shots into the hall where she was speaking, killing one man and injuring another.
Montreal police said that the man entered the meeting hall through a back door and fired shots. As Ms. Marois was stating her “firm conviction that Quebec needs to become a sovereign country,” she was abruptly pulled off the stage by two plain-clothes officers.
Montreal police said that the man then left the building and set a fire behind the hall. Television images showed dramatic flames near a fire escape.
Constable Daniel Richer, a police spokesman, said a 45-year-old man died in the shooting, and another man, in his 30s, was hospitalized for “nervous shock.” He had no other information about the victims.
Later footage showed officers carefully retrieving a rifle and possibly a handgun from behind the hall as a handcuffed man lay nearby. The man, who was wearing a bathrobe, black underwear and a black balaclava, was later placed in a police cruiser. Several news reports said that he said, in French, “the English are awakening.”
The police said they knew little about the man except that he is about 50 years old. His motives and intention were not immediately clear.
Ms. Marois later reappeared on the stage and said there had “been an incident with a starter pistol or something” and urged her supporters to leave quietly.
The victory of the Parti Québécois was a result that many observers characterized as more of a rejection of Quebec’s scandal-plagued Liberal Party than an endorsement of separation. Ms. Marois’s party captured the largest number of seats in the provincial assembly in Tuesday’s election, but fewer than the number needed for a majority
For several years, polls have suggested that there is relatively little interest among Quebec residents in separating from Canada. But breaking with recent Parti Québécois tradition, Ms. Marois made it an important issue of her campaign.
While Ms. Marois did not promise to hold a vote on separation promptly, her platform was laden with measures aimed at her party’s separatist — or as she prefers, “sovereignist” — power base. During the campaign, Ms. Marois proposed that all candidates for municipal or provincial office show their fluency in French. She also pledged to further limit access to the province’s English-language junior colleges and to ban clothing with religious connotations like head scarves and skullcaps.
Ms. Marois also said that within 100 days of taking office as the province’s premier, she would expand provincial laws mandating the use of French to include, among other things, small businesses.
The Liberal Party, which has led Quebec Province for nine years, was a close second in results by late evening. Several polls had suggested, incorrectly, as it turned out, that Liberals, who oppose separatism for Quebec, would be devastated in the vote.
The election followed a spring and early summer marked by sometimes disruptive student protests over tuition increases.
The decision by Quebec’s premier, Jean Charest, a Liberal, to call an election during the summer was viewed by many as opportunistic and perhaps desperate. In Quebec and the rest of Canada, politics usually fade from public consciousness during the relatively brief summer season. Traditionally, summer campaigns are begun only by unpopular governments in the hope that the public’s seasonal antipathy to politics will work in their favor.
A commission established by Mr. Charest is examining allegations of links between organized crime, political fund-raising in the province and government construction contracts. While some corruption allegations involve earlier Parti Québécois governments, most attention has been focused on Mr. Charest’s Liberal government. The accusations followed several high-profile infrastructure failures, including the collapse of a highway overpass, and earlier this year it seemed likely that Mr. Charest’s nine years as premier would soon end. That proved true on Tuesday night, when he lost his bid for re-election to the provincial legislature.
Earlier, though, the student protests had provided Mr. Charest’s government with an unexpected second chance.
Students took to the streets, often in strikingly large numbers, to demonstrate against postsecondary tuition increases.
As in the rest of Canada, Quebec’s colleges and universities are largely publicly financed, but the province’s tuition rates are the lowest in North America, and broad public sentiment clearly favored Mr. Charest’s plans to raise them.
Ms. Marois, however, began wearing a small red square of fabric, the symbol of the student protesters, and supported their often unfocused demands.
As the demonstrations grew increasingly large and raised fears that they might jeopardize the summer tourist season, Mr. Charest introduced emergency legislation that might have eroded some of the political good will his tuition plan had generated. It provided for steep fines and other measures that were intended to end the protests but that were seen as excessive by many civil liberties advocates.
The legislation set off a new round of demonstrations by people of all ages and occupations who called themselves “casseroles” for the way they banged spoons on pots and pans as they marched through the streets.
Mr. Charest, whose Liberal Party did not hold a majority in the assembly, called the election early last month, casting himself as the only political leader who could prevent Quebec from falling into political chaos.
“In the last few months we’ve heard a lot from a number of student leaders,” he said during an early campaign stop. “We’ve heard from people in the street. We’ve heard from those who have been hitting away at pots and pans. Now is the time for the silent majority.”
Although Ms. Marois stopped pinning a red cloth square onto her clothes as the election drew near, she did continue to support the protesters.
“I like being part of the street movement,” she said last month at a news conference. “It would do Mr. Charest some good to do the same.”
One of the student movement leaders, Léo Bureau-Blouin, was among the Parti Québécois candidates elected on Tuesday.
