Reports that the gunman at a Parti Quebecois victory rally muttered “the English are waking up” in accented French while being escorted to a police cruiser will send a chill through Canada.

One person died and another was critically injured in the shooting at a speech by the separatist group’s leader, Pauline Marois, the leader of Parti Quebecois (PQ), newly elected as Quebec’s premier. The gunman’s alleged comments will raise fears that tensions between the province’s anglophones and francophones, separatists and federalists, are once again coming to the boil.

Tuesday’s election took place against a backdrop of corruption scandals involving the Liberal-led administration and widespread protests over tuition increases. The protests, which were supported by PQ, escalated into an Occupy-style “Maple spring” with environmentalist, anti-capitalist and separatist overtones. Police arrested 2,500 people and authorities enacted new legislation restricting public demonstrations in the province.

Quebec has held two referendums on secession, the second of which, in 1995, was voted down by a margin of less than one per cent. Polls show two-thirds of Quebecois say they are not interested in sovereignty, making a third referendum unlikely under Marois’s tenure.

Language policy has long been a source of tension in Quebec. Marois has drawn criticism from anglophone groups for proposals to strengthen the province’s charter of the French language, often called Bill 101. She has proposed legislation requiring immigrants who run for public office to be proficient in French, and restricting access to English-language junior colleges.

Shootings are rare in Canada, and Quebec’s last incidence of political violence was in 1970 when the leftwing labour minister Pierre Laporte was kidnapped by a radical Quebec group and later found dead in the trunk of a car.

“Ottawa should be worried, but I don’t know if they are worried,” said Antonia Maioni, political science professor at McGill University. “Not because of the immediate threat of separation, but because Madame Marois will be rattling the constitutional cage in a way that we haven’t seen over the past decade.” — The Guardian, London