Quebec Liberals have every reason to feel glum as 2025 draws to a close.

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They’ve just lost their leader on the eve of a critical election year. Pablo Rodriguez officially stepped aside Thursday after a month of escalating controversy that raised questions about his crisis management skills and lost him the support of many party rank and file.

They’ve spent the last month playing whack-a-mole with allegations of shady campaign financing practices that bring back unpleasant memories of Charbonneau Commission revelations and anti-corruption squad investigations.

They’ve watched any progress they’ve made in recent opinion polls evaporate.

And they find themselves bitterly divided as the fault lines of the last leadership campaign threaten to re-emerge amid recriminations over the events that triggered Rodriguez’s spectacular demise. Star Liberal MNA and then-parliamentary leader Marwah Rizqy fired chief of staff Geneviève Hinse, a longtime Rodriguez ally, for reasons that remain nebulous and she has been expelled from caucus.

But the Quebec Liberal Party has also been handed something extremely rare in politics: a do-over. And that’s an opportunity that may yet prove fortuitous.

Rodriguez did the right thing Thursday in resigning. As he acknowledged in his statement, he had become a distraction. And the party is bigger than one man.

Loyalists felt it was a cruel fate because the allegations of ethical breaches and campaign financing hijinks didn’t implicate him personally.

Rodriguez insisted he had no knowledge of the text messages sent by two unnamed people about