All Episodes
Previous Next
Sept. 19, 2022 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
01:43:51
Why Are Young People Converting to Conservatism? | Eric Duhaime | EP 289
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
They were asked, what scientific evidence do you have that carefuse could stop the spreading of COVID? You know what they came out with?
A public opinion poll.
That's the science they had.
And they said, look, this is what people want.
So that's not science.
I understand there's a methodology that is scientific, but that's about it.
It's political science.
That's what frightened people want when you ask them stupid questions that they answer impulsively when they've been frightened specifically and pointedly by their governments in collusion with the idiot legacy media that they're subsidizing.
Oh, hello everyone.
I'm pleased to be talking today with Mr.
Eric Douem, and he is the leader of the Conservative Party in the province of Quebec, the French-language dominant province in Canada.
And he is the fourth or the fifth Conservative leader to speak with me on my platform over the last year or so.
A process that's actually been accelerating in recent months.
I've spoken with a number of the candidates who are vying for the leadership of the Conservative Party in Canada at the federal level.
The Conservatives, for those of you who aren't Canadian or who are Canadian but don't know, The Conservatives and the Liberals at the federal level in Canada have battled continually throughout Canadian history for the leadership position.
And generally, it's the Liberals who win, although the Conservatives perhaps occupy the throne, so to speak, about a third of the time.
And so the basic political landscape in Canada is centre-right versus centre-left.
And we have a socialist party, the New Democratic Party, that also shows reasonably well federally, and they're farther left, generally speaking.
And for most of Canadian history, that's been the balance at the federal level.
There are additional parties playing a federal role, but they're relatively minor players now and historically.
Generally in Canada, over our entire history, which is since 1867 formally, although the country in many ways goes back hundreds of years before that, all the parties have been credible players and likely to do approximately what they all the parties have been credible players and likely to do approximately what they claim they'll do in some fundamental sense, which means they're no worse and maybe no better than generally respectable
And that's enabled Canadians to develop and maintain a fair bit of trust in their fundamental institutions.
And I would say that trust has been shaken quite profoundly in the last 20 years.
five or six years in a very large number of ways.
One of the consequences of that is that The relationship between the political class and the media class has shifted quite dramatically.
The legacy media everywhere in the world is dying a relatively painful death as network broadcasting becomes an untenable enterprise and as the proliferation of online publishing platforms has led to the demise of the dominance of centralized print journalists and all of that shaking out in all sorts of odd ways.
One of them is that the legacy media increasingly colludes with people in power, but also, and logically following from that, no longer serves its role as proper critic of democratic leadership, let's say.
And so the political class in Canada, particularly on the conservative side, seems to be waking up to this reality, perhaps because they're treated worse by the legacy media than the other parties, more unfairly because of the left-leaning bias that characterizes the legacy media.
And so one consequence of that, apparently, is that these leaders have been increasingly willing to talk on YouTube and then more specifically to talk with me.
Um...
And recently, Mr.
Douaim reached out to me.
He is the leader of the Conservative Party in Quebec and wanted to engage in a long-form discussion, which I think is a very good thing, given that it's a form of political discussion that Isn't filtered through arbitrary editing or the necessary process of parsing out trenchant soundbites.
And so it's actually possible to have a discussion that involves thought that also isn't a competition between the journalists, which would be me in this case, and the politician.
So I'm going to give you a bit of a bio of Mr.
DuAim, and I'd like to thank him for having the To speak with me and for having the courage to submit himself to a long-form discussion in public because that's not nothing to do that.
It's quite a daring form of self-exposure to do this without pre-preparation.
And none of the questions that I'm going to ask him were agreed upon beforehand.
There's There's no tricks here, except for the ones I can't help but play.
So, I'll give you a little bio about Mr.
DuAim, and then I think probably what we'll do is we'll try to situate We'll try to describe the political landscape in Quebec and to situate that within the broader political landscape in Canada so that people who are listening have a sense of what's going on there.
And we'll also attempt to describe why knowing such things, well, first of all, should be relevant to Canadians, obviously, but might also be relevant to people around the world who Increasingly, at their political level, especially in the West, are grappling with very similar problems.
It's a very weird convergence around the world of the assemblage of problems.
So, Mr.
Duim earned a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from the University of Montreal and a Master's degree from École Nationale d'Administration Publique.
He writes for the Journal to Montreal, he's had a long career as a journalist, and the National Post, which is one of Canada's national newspapers, and works on various non-legacy journalistic endeavors online and elsewhere.
He's one of the early adopters in Canada on the political horizon of the non legacy media forms like the podcast that we're engaging in at the moment.
More than a decade as a political advisor in Ottawa, Canada's capital, and Quebec City, which is Quebec's capital, he advised Stockwell Day, a leader of one of Canada's conservative parties, which have now amalgamated, by the way, when he led the Canadian Alliance from 2001 to 2004,
for Mario Dumont, who was leader of the Action Democratique du Québec from 2003 to 2008, and later Gilles Duceppe, Of the Bloc Québécois, which paradoxically and strangely is a separatist party for Quebec that operates nationally in Canada, because we have a very peculiar political system.
Duhaime also co-founded the Réseau Liberté Québec, a movement aimed at a revival of conservatism and libertarianism in Quebec, because Mr.
Duhaime leans on the conservative side to Individualistic, libertarian end of the distribution.
In November 2020, Douaim ran to succeed Conservative Party of Quebec leader, Adrien D. Pouliot, winning with 95% of the vote.
And so, I thought we'd start our discussion first by welcoming you, Mr.
Douaim, and then letting you expound for a bit on, maybe you can explain Quebec...
To our listeners, let's talk about the province a bit and about its interesting situation in the Canadian political landscape, and then we'll talk about the current Quebec political landscape and what you're endeavouring to achieve.
Thank you very much for welcoming me.
You want me to talk about Quebec?
For those who are not aware, of course, we're the French province in Canada, 25-23% of Canadians.
We've Politically speaking, over the last 50 years, Quebec has been a battleground between the separatists and the federalists.
So there's those who wanted Quebec to separate from Canada and those who wanted Quebec to stay within Canada for many decades.
Since I was born, we've always been fighting between those two political sides.
And now the political landscape is changing in Quebec slowly but surely.
There were two defeats for the yes side, so for the separatist side, in 1980 and in 1995.
And that's where probably many people all around the world heard the most about Quebec because it was a very, very...
tight result, especially in 95, where it was like not even 51% against 49.4%.
So that's been a huge political thing going on.
But nowadays, there's not as much appetite, especially not among the youngest generation, to talk about those divisive issues or elsewhere.
And we see that the two old parties that used to split us between federalists and separatists, the yes camp and the no camp, are melting down.
And now we have five political parties.
You know, it's very, very unusual for the kind of system that we're in.
And so there's five main political parties in this upcoming election at the provincial level.
There's one socialist party, Quebec Solidaire.
There's the governing party, the Coalition Avenir Québec, which is a nationalist centrist party.
There's the liberals, who are the former federalist side, who are still federalists, but...
More leaning on the left as well, and the separatist party historically, the Parti Québécois, who's also more on the left of the political spectrum.
So it's a very, very interesting period of time in our history, politically speaking, and this election could be a very historical election that is going to mark the end of a cycle and hopefully the beginning of a new one.
We'll be back with Eric Duhem in just a moment, but first let me tell you about Helix Sleep.
Getting a good night's sleep is one of the most important things you can do for your health.
That's why Helix Sleep provides tailored mattresses based on your unique sleep preferences.
The Helix lineup includes 14 mattresses, each designed for specific sleep positions and preferences.
Side sleeper models with memory foam layers offer optimal pressure relief.
Stomach and back sleeper models feature a more responsive foam to cradle and support your body.
Plus, Helix mattresses offer enhanced cooling features to keep you from overheating at night.
Don't compromise on comfort.
Take the Helix Sleep Quiz and find your perfect mattress in under two minutes.
Helix mattress ships straight to your door free of charge.
Try it for 100 nights risk free.
Go to helixsleep.com slash Jordan, take the Helix Sleep Quiz and get up to $200 off your mattress order plus two free pillows.
That's helixsleep.com slash Jordan for $200 off all mattress orders and two free pillows.
Canada's been a somewhat difficult country to cobble together because of the linguistic divide, because of the massive scale of the geographic enterprise, and because of the distinction and differences between the French civil law system and the English common law system.
And so it's been a real tricky balancing act for Canadians to keep the country unified from coast to coast, with Quebec sitting not precisely in the middle, but approximately We're ultimately in the middle.
And so, as Mr.
Douaim said, that just about came to destruction twice in the last 45 years.
We escaped with our country intact by the narrowest of margins.
It might be of some interest for people listening to know that in many ways, and please correct me if you believe my interpretation to be incomplete, Quebec was one of the last countries, so to speak, nations in the Western world that underwent the transition from traditional Catholicism to modernity.
The In the late 1950s, before that, Quebec was an extremely traditional Catholic enclave with extremely large families.
I did genetic research in Quebec for quite a long time, and it was very common for And so, Quebec was united on the French side, and very tightly kin-related, because Quebec was also settled by a relatively small number of French settlers.
And so, Quebec was also a tightly kin-related society, and the French were under the rubric of this intense Catholicism, The English in Quebec had more financial power, generally speaking, although they were a very small minority of people compared to the French.
In the 60s, Catholicism dissolved precipitously.
Church attendance plummeted.
Family size crashed to the point where In many recent decades, Quebec has had one of the lowest birth rates in the Western world.
The marriage rate collapsed.
And along with that collapse, interestingly enough, there was a real rise in nationalism.
And to me, it's always been the case that That was sort of a microcosm, in many ways, of what also happened in Europe.
As classical Christianity deteriorated, other systems of group-fostered belief flourished, and part of what drove Quebec separatism was, in some real sense, a substitute for the religious impulse that had united Quebecois before.
I talked to a Gallup pollster Probably 20 years ago, he answered a question I always had been curious about.
He said that their research had indicated that if you were a lapsed Catholic in Quebec compared to a continual churchgoer, let's say, and someone who maintained their faith, you were five times more likely to be an advocate for separatism.
And now Mr.
Duhame has pointed out that in recent years, and that would be post-1995 when we had the last referendum on Quebec separatism, the Quebec separatist cause has attracted less and less fervor, especially among the young.
And you mentioned to me in a bit of a brief conversation that we had before this podcast started that the Conservatives have actually started to become more popular They're showing their greatest growth in popularity among people who are relatively young in Quebec, which is really not what you'd expect.
So maybe you could explain a little bit about how you see the relative demographics and positions of the various political parties in Quebec.
Well, first off, I want to talk to you about, as you rightly pointed out, what we call it here was the Quiet Revolution in the late 50s, early 60s, when that shift happened, when the Catholic Church lost control, at a certain extent, of what was going on in Quebec.
And where the nanny state became growing and growing, that's been happening for the last 50 years.
So there was a complete shift and Quebec didn't do anything different from other societies except that it was done much faster.
It was a fast track of everything that we observed in the Western world.
We did it in a very short period of time.
Why so?
Probably because we're more homogeneous And so that's probably why the shift happened so quickly.
And that being said, the The impact politically, as you said, was that the Anglophones who were dominant, you know, economically speaking, well, there was a shift on that side as well with the growth of the nationalist and the separatist movement.
And I want to make sure here that we differentiate nationalism and separatism in Quebec.
I define myself as a nationalist, which means that I'm proud of being francophone.
I do believe that the common language in Quebec is French.
And I think that even Anglophones agree with that here in Quebec.
There's one million non-Francophones in Quebec who choose to stay here.
And the profile of those people today is very different than the one we had in the 60s or 70s.
The English community, to give you an example, 75% of parents who have kids at school here in Montreal and elsewhere in Quebec who are non-Francophones, 75% of them now send their kids to a French school, immersion programs, or bilingual schools.
So they want their kids to be bilingual and to grow in French and in English.
So it's not French against English.
And I think that nowadays my nationalism is positive.
I see Anglophones as allies.
To keep our uniqueness in America as a French society.
I don't see them as a threat.
I don't see them as enemies.
But I'm a nationalist.
I don't believe that Quebec should become English and we should assimilate.
That's not the point here.
So it's very different to say we want to break up Canada and we want to completely separate and have it our own and saying we want to promote French.
And when you want to become Quebec Premier, as I do, You have to understand that one of your first duties is that you're not just the leader of a province like elsewhere or a state in the US. You're also the political leader of the French minority in America.
There's no one politically that has more power than you do.
And one of your primary roles is, of course, to promote and to protect French.
And I want to do that.
And I think it's important for the Quebec Premier to do that as well.
That's on the linguistic front, if I could say so, the way that we see it.
And it does, as you said, the youth has a different approach because, you know, people who are, I would say the shift is between 55 and 60 years old right now in Quebec.
When you look at the polls, we're dominating the latest Main Street research.
Was saying that we're dominating between 18 and 50-ish, and then there's a complete switch.
And then when you're at 65 and over, it's like 11 to 1 in favor of the CAC, the governing party right now in Quebec.
So you see it's a completely reversal.
And we're especially popular as Conservatives.
Among people between 35 and 50 who still have kids at home.
Those people are the most hardcore conservatives that you can find right now in Quebec.
So it's interesting to look at the demographics, but we have to understand also that we're post-crisis and the crisis changed the political landscape as well.
You cannot lock down a society for over two years I think it's not going to have any political impact.
The people who suffered the most and who were the less at risk are now, you know, politically intervening and expressing their frustration at a certain extent.
And that also explains why We're particularly popular among parents of young kids compared to seniors.
So for a guy like you who likes to analyze what's going on in societies, I think Quebec is an interesting case because we had, in North America, we were the most locked down society, right?
There's nowhere else in the continent where restaurants were shut down as long as they were here.
Where even the construction industry was shut down, where even we had passports, the longest time to show passports, vaccine passports to get in restaurants or bars or gyms, where we had the carefew, the longest carefew, the most severe carefew, 50,000 Quebecers Got caught by the police were either arrested or given tickets for $1,500 each on average.
So, I mean, we went through a very, very strong period.
The government was the most severe at To many extent.
And so it's probably having a biggest political impact.
So it's not surprising that you see a political leader like me raising as quickly as we did over the last year, because, you know, the government went way, way, very far, uh, With the authority, and now there's kind of a counterbalance of people who are looking for a politician that respects much more their civic rights and their individual freedoms.
So it's a counterbalance, I think we are.
And I want also to point out one thing, because that may be of interest to everybody as well.
Here in Quebec, we have never seen a political party raising as quickly as the Conservative Party has over the last year.
When I decided to run for the leadership of the party less than two years ago, there were 500 members in the party.
As we speak, we have 60,000 members.
We're by far the largest party In terms of membership, we went from 1% in the polls to somewhere between 15% and 20% right now.
And we are the party that has the largest amount of donors in Quebec this year.
We're now represented at the National Assembly because I convinced one of the members of the CAC to cross the floor and join us.
We're going to participate in the leaders debate.
I mean, we're going up very, very quickly.
And we've never seen that.
Usually for a political party, it takes a few elections to reach the point where we're at right now.
For us, it took us a year.
And when you spoke about the media, the impact of the media, I just want to underline that during my leadership race between November 2020 and April 2021, I got one single article in the Main Street newspaper, a daily paper in Quebec.
It was in Le Devoir when José Vernard, a senator, decided to support me and become the president of my leadership race.
And Le Devoir wrote an article, which is not the main daily paper, and that was the only article.
And at the end of the leadership race, I had 15,000 members.
I had more members than the governing party of the Premier of Quebec, and not one single other media did talk about us.
They didn't even acknowledge our existence.
So it shows the shift.
And it explains why people like you are more popular than complete networks now and it explains the difference and also the generational clash at a certain extent in terms of media.
Right, right, right.
Well, I should also point out for the listeners, so I know Quebec reasonably well because I lived in Montreal from 1985 to 1993.
And I loved Montreal.
And for all of you who are listening, especially in North America where it's easy, there is no better place on the North American continent to visit in many ways if you're interested in an urban holiday than Montreal.
Montreal is a great city.
And I say that...
Despite the fact that the province that I grew up in, Alberta, it has the most fractious relationship in many ways with Quebec.
Partly because Alberta is very English in its linguistic traditions.
I took French in school throughout my entire life.
No one in Alberta speaks French to speak of and it's very difficult to pick up a language when even your teachers can't really speak it and there's no use of it in public.
I moved to Montreal when the separatist movement was really quite strong and I moved there with my wife who had a very difficult time obtaining employment although she could speak She was Anglophone and there were real obstacles in her path.
I went to an English university and so that protected me in some sense from my linguistic, the consequences of my linguistic ignorance.
But I loved Montreal.
And although I was not very happy in some sense being a Westerner about Quebec nationalism or Quebec separatism in particular, one of the things I did understand very rapidly was that part of this stunning charm of Montreal and part of what makes it unique It was a consequence of the very real barriers that those who were determined to protect Quebec culture had erected around the local institutions in Quebec.
And so one of the things that's very interesting about Montreal downtown, it's a very walkable city, by the way.
It has great restaurants and great restaurants.
Bars and an unbelievably vibrant and safe and dynamic and interesting and creative street life.
And the Montreal Municipal Authorities have done a lovely job of regenerating the old city and the old port looks great.
And Montreal is just a wonderful city.
And because of the barriers to Anglophone dominance, that's the Canadian word for English dominance, let's say, The city never became homogenized in its corporate culture and there were a tremendous proliferation of local businesses and that they all had all the charm of local businesses so they weren't chains of restaurants that were exactly the same as restaurants everywhere else and so despite the fact that these barriers Linguistic
barriers made life in some ways more difficult for me personally as an English speaker.
And despite the fact that I was somewhat irritated about the fact that the English had been routed out of Quebec in some fundamental way, and that the relationship between Alberta and Quebec was fractious, I loved Montreal.
And every time I go back there, I'm thrilled to be there.
It really is a remarkably wonderful city.
And so it begs the question, you know, How do you preserve the local while maintaining integration with the superordinate?
And we have that problem in the world right now because the world is increasingly international in some real sense.
There's a real utility in preserving local culture and At the town level, at the province level, at the state level, at the national level, to preserve the autonomy and unique charms of each of those levels, but also to integrate the whole into a harmonious union.
And all of us are struggling with that in a major way, and Canada struggles with that internally, in a way, in some sense, that mirrors the situation in the entire world.
And so that also complicates the political landscape.
And so, now, having said that, you also said that...
So, Quebec is also this very interesting contrast because Montreal is a very free city.
People pursue their own artistic interests.
It has a very dynamic street life.
People who live in Montreal live there.
It isn't a city that feels like it's made up of people who move there.
And it's a very free culture.
But Quebec also has this other element, which exists in paradoxical juxtaposition, which is in some ways more authoritarian in its proclivity than any other jurisdiction in Canada.
I really saw that when I interacted with the government at the municipal level in Quebec, which was often breeding all sorts of regulations that were just absolutely unreasonable and that was hard to negotiate with.
And you said that Quebec, like France, Had implemented extremely stringent COVID lockdowns, which is so much at odds with the spirit of a city like Montreal.
And you also pointed out that that's bred a desire for, would you say a desire for the more libertarian kind of conservatism that...
If I've got that right that you represent and would like to make a case for?
Yeah, well, you have to understand that, as you rightly pointed out earlier as well, when we talked about the fact that the religious factor was melting down since the 60s, the social conservatism in Quebec is almost inexistent.
Like, you know...
I'm the first openly gay leader of a conservative party in Canada's history, provincial or federal.
It's not a surprise that it's happening here in Quebec, because social conservatism is not part of the coalition of conservatives that we are.
We have fiscal conservatives and more libertarian conservatives, but we're very few social conservatives.
Do you want to outline the difference between those so that everybody who's listening understands?
So you said social, fiscal, and libertarian.
It isn't obvious to people what the differentiation between the various forms of conservatism is, especially because the legacy media almost never talks about it.
Fiscal conservatism is people who want lower taxes, smaller state, you know, so that's generally speaking how we define fiscal conservatives.
Social conservatives are usually more towards moral issues, so it's more Gay rights or abortion or all those hot issues that we hear a lot.
And the media talks a lot about that normally when they talk about conservatives.
And the third one is the libertarian.
It's the individual rights, the respect of civic rights, of individual freedoms.
So that's more the...
The aspect, the part that I'm in, but, you know, as a leader, you have to be representing all the wings within your party.
But there's really three, I see three main kind of conservatives in Canada.
And in Quebec, we only have two out of the three.
That's what I wanted to point it out.
So it might be a little bit different than elsewhere, even if it's a contradiction for many people, because they recall Quebec before pre-1960, which was the most religious society with a lot of kids for everyone, and we went from one...
One side to the other completely.
And now the religious practices here are much lower, especially among the youth.
And that's why our voters are even younger.
So it's a complete shift as well.
So the conservative movement in Quebec is different.
And there's a nationalist element as well that's probably not existent elsewhere in Canada.
Of people who want to promote and protect French and our culture and our uniqueness.
Because that's also conserving where we're from and our roots and our heritage.
So what is it that you're doing or the Conservative Party is doing in Quebec specifically apart from the reaction against the authoritarian clampdowns justified hypothetically by COVID? What do you think that you're doing that's working?
Let me give you an example.
One of the things I found as I've toured around And I suppose making a case, at least for certain conservative virtues, is that people, particularly young people, seem to respond very well to the idea that there is an intrinsic meaning in life and that intrinsic meaning is not to be found in the hedonistic,
limitless freedom that's characteristic of an impulsive life, but more likely to be found, especially under conditions of duress, As a consequence of adopting the responsibilities of a mature life.
And so that would be, well, existing to some degree in service for other people, especially the people that you love in your family.
Accepting responsibility for a marriage and a long-term relationship and...
Accepting responsibility, welcoming it for kids and taking care of your extended family and serving your community.
And this is all something that conservatives can really promote and I think there's an unbelievable hunger for it because one of the things I've noticed, and I have discussed this publicly a lot, I pay a lot of attention to my audiences and everywhere I go in the world, If I make a case for the nexus, let's say, between suffering, which is inevitable, and the meaning that emerges out of the voluntary adoption of responsibility, everyone falls silent.
And that happens all the time.
And my sense of that is, and this is part of the reason why I think there's a conservative opportunity that's beckoning in a major way that you might be tapping into, is that what conservatives have to offer young people, and that's the first time I've ever seen this really be the case, is the meaningful existence that characterizes It's so absurd that it has to be said that characterizes genuine maturation and sacrifice on behalf of others.
Like as a real viable pathway forward existentially and psychologically to have the kind of life that enables you to not be bitter in the face of catastrophe.
And so...
Now, it's a paradoxical thing, right?
Because apparently what you're offering on the libertarian side is something like freedom from authoritarian constraint.
That's an odd thing in some sense for a conservative to be offering.
But do you see why is it that What you're selling, so to speak, what you're promoting is resonating deeply among younger people in Quebec.
And how do you conceptualize that from the perspective of the development, let's say, of a political vision, which is something that conservatives tend to struggle to do?
We have to understand that historically, because we were stuck in the old debate, in the old constitutional fights and feuds, almost all the political parties in Quebec were more centre-left.
They were all social democrats and they were all in favour of the nanny state.
And that's why in Quebec we had a bigger state.
The state intervention was much stronger than elsewhere.
And even at the federal level, we used to vote more liberal.
And we, you know, it's always been, there was kind of a consensus on that side.
And now that that debate is over, there's a new one that is emerging.
And of course, the fact that it's new and the fact that it's fresh and the fact that it's different is attracting already a younger crowd because you're not scaring them off.
They love change.
But there's also the fact that I do believe that because of the social media, because of the new world that we're in, they're much more open towards the world, if I could say so.
And they want to be part of something also larger.
And for that, you need a little bit more freedom.
And you don't want to be just limited to Quebec.
And with the state intervention, everything is limited to Quebec.
So there's a vision of looking outside of the box.
I think that helps out a lot.
And the fact also, and I'm back to what happened over the last two years, who suffered the most during those days, you know?
You and I probably, you know, I care if you at 8 or 9 p.m., it's not the end of the world, but if I were 20, if I recall what I was doing after 9 p.m.
when I was 20, the impact was much larger on me.
And I think they took...
Much more than seniors, they realized how the state could, you know, ruin your life at a certain extent when they're pushing the envelope a little bit too far.
And so that woke up a lot of people, a lot of people who were completely apolitical.
It's not necessarily people coming from other parties that are joining us.
It's people who used to not even vote.
And now their card-carrying members and their volunteers on our campaigns are even running for us.
So there's something very, very different.
The paradigm also has shift on that side.
For many of us, we realize that politics could intervene a lot in our life.
And that's why we're standing up to say, look, stay out of it.
There's limits.
And that's why even the slogan of our campaign is Libre chez nous.
We didn't know.
You can't translate that perfectly in English, but if we translate it word to word, it's free at home.
And what it says is that, you know, there's limits.
I want to have the control.
We're talking about your family, your unit.
So even our slogan refers to that.
You know, like, the state cannot cross my entrance door without my will.
And so...
We want to go back to be empowered of what we're doing within our own houses.
And that, for a new generation, is probably something that is more interesting.
And even worldwide right now, we see that our parents were more Collectivist in many ways, you know, like just when you were talking about the separatist movement, the separatist movement at the base was a collective movement, you know, it was as Francophones, as old French Canadians, you know, it had something very collective.
And nowadays, because of social media, we're a little bit more individualistic, I think, at many extent.
And, you know, yes, we are Francophone, yes, we are Quebecers, but we're also part of all sorts of groups and all sorts of friends all over the world, and we unite based on different issues than just our language or our geographic limitations.
So it also has an impact on your political reality when it's time to vote.
Well, you can imagine that...
Okay, so Quebec was united in some sense on the French side under the Catholic Church, and then that fragmented.
And then Quebec attempted to unite under the auspices of a collective nationalism.
And then one of the consequences was that people were turning to a powerful and unified state as a vehicle for their dreams.
And that meant that the state became, as it became the vehicle for those dreams, it also became more intrusive in the ways that would be associated with excess, let's say, pretensions of benevolence.
And then you're making the case that The limitations of that approach became radically evident to young people when the state overplayed its hand in the aftermath of the COVID pandemic and locked them down way too hard.
And that woke up a generation of young people to the dangers of the overweening state, even if that was allied with some desirable expression of nationalism and group identity.
Does that seem about right?
Yeah, that's about how I feel.
That's what we saw over the last few months, the last few years here in Quebec.
It happened elsewhere as well.
We're not unique in the world where it did happen, but I think here it hit a little bit faster and stronger.
So the difference, and that's why Quebec society is an interesting case because of that, because as I said, we usually react quickly and more homogeneously than elsewhere.
And so from a sociological perspective, that's what you can observe right now.
So, on the policy side, there's a principle that governs conservative thinking that's actually derived from the Catholic Church and then even more deeply derived from an older biblical tradition based on the Old Testament Exodus story, that proper governance...
Proper distribution of responsibility should follow the principle of subsidiarity.
And so the notion is, and Edmund Burke developed this as well, it's a very good notion and I think it's correct.
It's one of the things that attracts me in some fundamental sense to conservative thinking, which is that...
Well, you can imagine a state where there's a single executive who has all the power and the people have none, and then you'd think of that as a tyranny, and that's obviously not desirable.
And then you might think, well, what's the alternative to a tyranny?
And you might say, well, direct democracy...
Where the voice of the people rules supreme and the leader must follow the whims of the crowd.
But the problem with that is that it's not that easy to figure out what the crowd thinks and the entire system can fall prey to suddenly arising poorly organized deviant impulses.
And so, what the founders of the American state did, and many other states as well, is set up a series of intermediary structures of power, let's say, and so you could sort of list them up hierarchically, there would be the domain of responsibility of the individual, there'd be the domain of the responsibility of the married couple, of the family, of the local community, then the town, then the state or province, and then the country.
And then...
Each of those levels would be requested to take as much responsibility for what they could at the local level, and the relationship between all those levels should be governed by the principle that if it can be decided at a lower level, then it should be.
And the reason that that's useful is twofold.
One is that it's a really good way of distributing, of delegating responsibility.
It's very efficient if everyone plays their role.
The second is, and this is another thing the Conservatives really have on their side.
You know, if the state does everything for you, let's say, well, in a sense, you're secure, right?
Although you're not, because you're beholden to the benevolence of the state, and that can be taken away arbitrarily.
But the downside is, and this is one of the downsides of universal basic income proposals, is like, well, what the hell is there left for you to do?
If the state does everything for you, Well, you're secure, but what's your life then?
You have no purpose.
And if the purpose of life, and this is another thing that the more libertarian conservatives could be offering, is like, imagine that the purpose of your life isn't security and satiation because you're not just an overgrown infant.
Imagine instead that the purpose of your life is something like responsible, productive, generous adventure.
And then the call would be Make space for people to manifest that in the particularities of their own life.
And then everyone has a real part to play and no one in some real sense is subordinate to anyone else.
Like there'd be a hierarchical structure and some people like you would be leading at the more abstract levels.
But your power would be, or your authority and your responsibility would be properly delimited.
And everything else everybody else was doing all the way down the hierarchy right to the level of running their individual enterprise would in some sense be just as meaningful and just as crucial.
And that strikes me as an extraordinarily useful vision of governance, especially in the aftermath of the COVID fiasco.
And it's interesting because that's something that you're right.
The Conservatives in Canada have not exploited as much as they could.
Because, you know, philosophically, we want power to be the closest to the citizen as possible.
We're supposed to be the party of decentralization.
And especially with the Quebec question...
You know, the Conservatives should be the party that is the closest to the Quebec aspiration traditionally.
Because one of the big problems in Canada was the one-size-fits-all from Ottawa.
And it didn't fit in Quebec because we were different in many aspects for all sorts of linguistic, historical reasons.
And so many Conservatives that I know in Ottawa are the most decentralist politicians of them all on the national stage.
But unfortunately, Conservatives have never been, it's never been a stronghold for Conservatism in Quebec.
Well, not for like a century, but it should be the opposite.
And when you were talking about Alberta earlier on, because where you're from originally, Alberta after Quebec is the most decentralist province in Canada.
And we should be the strongest allies.
But as you said, we're often on opposite sides for all sorts of other reasons, but philosophically, in terms of decentralization and power vis-à-vis citizens, we're the ones who share the The similar view.
We should always be on the same side and we should not be a centralist and look at Ottawa and think that they know best.
And that's what I'm trying to propose as well.
I think it will be important if we can have a real conservative party in Quebec at the provincial level.
And it's important because Quebecers, unlike other Canadians, we do identify ourselves first and foremost to our provincial government, more than the federal.
Our nationality is Quebec and our passport is Canadian.
So that's how we define ourselves.
And so the most important government for us is our provincial government because all the main things, education, healthcare and all sorts of things, it's provincial.
The federal government is managing things that are very far away from us, international relations and the army and Canada Post, but that's how we see it.
Our sense of community is related to the provincial government.
And in Alberta, after Quebec, it's the province where they have that as high as we do.
There's a strong sentiment of Alberta first.
And so if we have a true conservative movement in Quebec that could last, not just for an election, but for a generation or two, I think we're going to see new alliances between conservatives in Quebec and elsewhere in Canada.
And it could have a huge impact on the federal level.
And as you said, the dominant party historically has been the Liberals.
But if we're able to switch Quebec, which has always been one of the reasons why the Liberals were much more in power than the conservatives, because the French-Canadian Catholics used to vote more for the Liberals, I guess.
Historically, the Catholics were voting more Liberal.
And if that shifts, and if the decentralists start to link together in Canada, and those who want to have the power closest to them, the subsidiarity, as you talked about, then we're going to reshape not just Quebec politics, but Canadian politics altogether.
Well, you could imagine a vision that made the case that Quebec has maintained its distinct and valuable culture, particularly reflected, I would say, in Montreal, although Quebec City is also quite a remarkable place, and I don't know rural Quebec as well.
That it's the principle of local autonomy that in some sense has made that possible.
And that actually what's trying to be protected in some real sense is that local autonomy, which would be the special flavor of, well, the small business community in Quebec and the services that it manages and the street life and the festivals and the And the food culture and the joie de vivre, which is definitely present in Montreal, and the safety of the streets.
There's a lot of value in that local culture.
And what Quebecois presumed for the longest time, and maybe with some justification, was that it was necessary to centralize under a powerful provincial government and a nationalist movement to ensure autonomy on the cultural side.
But you could make a strong case, I think, and this is the case that you're outlining, that...
No.
The long-term survival of the uniqueness of local Francophone culture is actually dependent on the delivery of maximal autonomy to the citizenry and the subsidiary institutions.
And that would mean that you could, as a conservative, you could make a simultaneous call to the nationalism that's part of the Quebec ethos and this desire for individual autonomy that's emerging in the aftermath of Let's say the overreach of the nanny state.
That's a nice vision.
It gives everyone a place and also a role in living their life and preserving their cultural institutions responsibly at the same time.
I don't believe that the state can impose a language or a way of life.
It's each of us who have to make those decisions.
The young generation, let's say, like now, they don't want to talk about separation.
So even if you wanted to push, it's not because the Parti Québécois is going to deliver 20 speeches a day that everybody's going to become separatist and it's going to happen overnight.
You can't do that project if you have the youth against yourself.
And we have to make sure that we bring it back at an individual level to make sure that we're promoting the fact that you should speak French, you should be bilingual.
And it's working, actually, at many levels.
Quebecers, Francophones, and Anglophones have never been as bilingual as they are today.
And, you know, that's a richness.
I mean, we're the most bilingual.
I'm currently in Montreal in the most bilingual city in America.
And I think it should be a richness.
But unfortunately, over the last decade or half a century, it's been considered a source of division and fights.
And...
That needs to change.
And even if you say, I'm bilingual, it doesn't mean that Quebec is bilingual or both languages are equal on the territory.
Of course, because we're a small minority, we need to make sure that the common language remains French.
But it doesn't mean that at an individual level, we cannot all be bilingual.
And every parent I know in Quebec, they all want their kids to be bilingual.
You know, my parents don't speak English.
And my mom was a school bus driver and my father was a sheet metal worker.
Hard-working parents, perfect parents, but they didn't have the opportunity to learn English.
And they sent me to kindergarten in English and they did huge sacrifices.
To make sure that I had better tools in my toolbox than they did.
And I think every single parent wants that.
And it was not the state that imposed that to them.
They made a decision as good parents, like all good parents do everywhere.
And you want your kid to do better than yourself.
Yeah, and you should have the freedom to do that and the encouragement and the space to do that.
Because it is definitely, well, you see this is happening in the U.S. too, is that as the nanny state and the radical leftist incursion into federal and state institutions proceeds apace, where that's hit the most resistance is on the...
The issue of parent rights.
And people are pulling their children in the U.S. out of the public education system at a remarkable rate because people will accept without protest a fair bit of interference with their lives on behalf of a hypothetically benevolent but ultimately totalitarian state.
but they will not accept the propaganda campaigns directed at their children.
And so the reason I'm saying that isn't for a political reason exactly, it's to point out the logic of the principle of subsidiarity because you should have parents making decisions for their children precisely because there's no one who is going to care for children more than parents.
And if the state says it will, it's delusional.
Because how in the world can an abstract organization, distant from the children it's serving, unrelated to them, and not knowing them personally, possibly care for them in all their individual particularity, as well as biologically related kin who are immediately as well as biologically related kin who are immediately living with them?
I mean, it's a preposterous assumption on all fronts, and people will definitely rebel against that when their children are threatened.
Let me turn to a different issue.
I'm also interested, and I think this might be interesting to our international viewers and listeners.
Now, Quebec has a very unique political culture, and so does your party provincially.
Now, well...
When is the election going to be held in Quebec?
That's the first question.
October 3rd.
Okay, October 3rd.
So you're in the run-up to an election.
Now, at the same time, as some of those listening know, Canada is involved in a leadership race for the leadership of the Conservative Party federally in Canada.
So to become Prime Minister in Canada, you have to first rise to head a political party that has a chance of Being elected in a majority of seats, and then if that does happen, and you're the leader of the party, you become Prime Minister.
And at the moment, there are five candidates on the leadership front for the federal Conservatives, and I've interviewed three of them, Pierre Polyev Roman Barber and Leslie Lewis.
I was quite impressed with all three of them.
They're quite different as people.
They're very different in their backgrounds.
But it seemed to me like the adults were in the room, fundamentally, and they all had a certain degree of expertise and a fair degree of moral integrity.
Jean Charest's people decided that I... That they wouldn't talk to me for one reason or another, although I invited them several times, and I haven't been as successful in my pursuit of Scott Acheson's people, and that really has nothing to do with him and perhaps little to do with me.
It's just been circumstances, unfortunately.
How do you construe the relationship between your party provincially and And the Conservative Party federally and the other Conservative parties in Canada.
So let's start with that.
How do you think that balance should be established?
And what are you hoping for on the Federal Conservative front in relationship to your aspirations on the Provincial Conservative front?
Well, first off, you have to know that we have no organic links.
Unlike some other provinces, there's no link.
We're two completely separate entities.
Of course, we have the exact same name.
We're both conservatives and we are center-right.
We're defined on the same, on the political spectrum.
We're not far away from each other, but there's no direct links.
That being said, for me, the most important part with You know, as a Conservative within Canada is to build bridges with other Conservative parties provincially, first and foremost, because I'm a decentralist, I'm an autonomous, and I do believe that it's important to reach out to those people.
I think we have strong allies that Quebec has never exploited because, you know, when you're in a separatist dynamic where you have a party that is a very, very federalist party like the Liberals in Quebec have been over the last few decades, and on the other hand, you have the separatists, Well, the separatists don't want to work with anyone in Canada, even those who would like a little bit of decentralization to make sure that they don't show that Canada could work, you know?
And on the other hand, the federalists, you know, they want to be perceived as pro-Canada as much as they can.
So the more centralists they become, the better.
So there was no room for someone who was trying to build bridges with provincial parties to decentralize Canada when we have common goals.
And that's, for me, where I want to go, politically speaking.
Who do you see as...
Okay, so let's start on the provincial front.
So, again, for the international viewers, every Canada is made up of an assembly of provinces, and...
The political structure at the federal level tends to be somewhat mirrored at the provincial level.
So there are federal, conservative, liberal, and socialist parties, and there are provincial, conservative, liberal, and socialist parties, and they're either tightly or loosely affiliated in the manner that Mr.
Duane just mentioned.
You're interested in coalition building at the provincial level, On the Conservative side or with other perhaps interested welcoming partners, who do you see across the political landscape at the provincial level in Canada that you would regard as Reasonable and probable allies with whom you could build a tighter confederation.
I don't think it's necessarily just personalities, it's also provinces.
Because as we said earlier on, you know, your own provinces, where you were born in Alberta, it's always been the province that has been asking for more power from Ottawa outside of Quebec.
So they're natural allies on that front.
And it was true, even when René Lévesque was there, an old Quebec separatist premier, his best ally was Peter Lougheed at the time, the Alberta premier of the time.
And it's always, you know, when you look at it objectively, Alberta is probably the strongest ally of Quebec in terms of decentralization.
And I've, you know, I'm a good friend of Jason Kenney, the current premier of Daniel Smith, who's running for the leadership of the party, is also a close friend.
I've always had a lot of friends in Alberta among Conservatives, and I think that the first province that is normally and historically an ally should be Alberta.
Well, it would be lovely to see that, speaking as an Albertan, and maybe I can do a little sideways move here.
Canada is in a quandary Like the rest of the world, on the energy and environment front, and Quebec and Alberta have been at serious odds on that issue for the last decade, as well as Alberta and the federal government, and the chickens in many ways are coming home to roost.
I mean, the German Chancellor came to Canada a few weeks ago, cap in hand, and asked his old ally, the Canadians, for help with Liquid natural gas provision, for example, to help reduce this catastrophic German dependence on Russian fossil fuel exports.
And Trudeau basically sent him away empty-handed, stating in a manner so utterly preposterous that it's a form of idiot miracle that no business case could be made for Canada to export liquid natural gas to To Europe, to Germany in particular.
And that's so utterly preposterous because we have so much natural gas and we have the facilities to liquefy it.
And the only reason a business case can't be made is because the federal liberals have made it economically impossible for any actors to build the pipelines, for example, build the infrastructure and make this energy accessible.
And so if you were leader of the provincial government in Quebec...
What do you think you could do, what would you be inclined to do, let's say with Alberta and the rest of Canada to rectify that?
Well, the first thing regarding oil and gas, a few days ago I was in the Saguenay region I'm in the only political leader right now who's in favor of the LNG Quebec project, which is natural liquefied gas project, a $14 billion investment.
Our Quebec government initially was in favor of it.
Mr.
Legault, the current premier, even met with the Alberta premier and he was all in favor of it.
And then a few environmentalists stood up in Montreal and Mr.
Legault flip-flopped and decided that now he did even worse than that.
He did adopt a bill three months ago to say that in Quebec it's forbidden to explore and exploit any kind of oil and gas.
He went to the other extreme.
He denied the rights of the companies who already had rights given by the Quebec government.
And now we're sued.
I mean, the Quebec government is sued for billions.
I think it's $18 billion because we were denying rights of companies that were given by the government.
So it's a real mess.
So he scuttled a $14 billion project and then...
Accrued $18 billion in potential legal liability to not produce fossil fuel.
To look good in front of the environmentalists.
Let's put it that way.
I'm going to push you on that because it needs to be done.
So I'm going to be environmentalist here and I'm going to say we need to We need to transfer away from these despicable fossil fuels as rapidly as possible.
There's going to be a substantial amount of economic disruption.
As a consequence, people are going to have to bear more costs on the energy front, but that's okay because they should be burning less fossil fuel anyways because of the liability accrued by the planet.
These are necessary disruptions as we move toward a sustainable economy and If a few eggs have to be broken to make an omelette, then c'est la vie.
And so, what do you think about that line of argumentation?
How do you respond to it?
How do you counter it?
Do you accept it?
There's a few things we need to say.
First off, our dependence on gas and oil is not going to stop tomorrow.
The transition is going to take a few decades.
Actually, we're even estimating right now that for gas, let's say, for the next 50 years, there's going to be a growth in terms of demand.
So, you know, yes, we're going to get out of it, but it's not going to happen overnight.
It could happen in five, six, seven, eight decades.
Okay, so I say, well, that's too long.
We're going to be roasting in our oven-like homes in 10 years.
We have to act more precipitously, and if it requires force and fear, so be it.
So why is that a problematic argument, if it is?
It doesn't make sense in my book, because what are you going to do in the meantime?
Like, tomorrow morning, we're 100% dependent right now in Quebec of oil and gas coming from outside, okay?
And so...
And we saw what's happening in Western Europe right now because they were dependent of gas coming from Russia.
And we see how it's a huge problem not to be autonomous in terms of energy.
So are you proposing?
And the parties are always good.
Currently in Quebec, all the parties, all the other political parties, they have goals, you know, and they're promising that they're going to cut our gas emission by 30%.
37.5%, 45%, 55%.
It's like an auction to know which one is going to have the highest percentage of cutting gas emission.
But when you look at it, no one's ready to tell you how they're going to do that.
How many factories are they going to shut down?
How many million people are going to say they can't drive their cars anymore?
How many, you know, skidoos and yachts and everything?
How are they going to do that?
They never ever say it and Every single time those politicians promise that, they're always lying.
They never, ever achieve their goal.
It's always easy to look good.
And that's the problem with the left often.
They want to show off.
Well, we could also point out...
We can also point out that the Americans turned radically to natural gas fracking after the year 2000.
And let's just outline the consequences of that.
So the first bloody consequence was that they cut their carbon dioxide output by 15%.
And that was not something that any environmentalists predicted and certainly would have opposed, but it turned out to be the case that while the Americans essentially made themselves not only energy self-sufficient, but capable of then becoming one of the world's biggest potential exporters of fossil fuel products, they did it in a manner that simultaneously reduced the carbon load.
Absolutely.
And so I look at policies like Trudeau's policy and I think, okay, so what the hell is the goal here exactly?
You're going to demonize liquid natural gas in particular, which is an exceptionally clean fuel, which is extremely abundant and which is also extremely inexpensive, which you think would appeal to the lefties because, hypothetically, There compared about the poor.
And instead of noticing that and touting liquid natural gas as a replacement for coal and for wood, which of course the Germans are madly gathering at the moment to the point of driving firewood into shortage.
Instead of pointing out that that's a legitimate, clean and accessible alternative that's also cheap compared to, say, coal in China or coal in Europe, for that matter, the notion seems to be, no, we have to do something that we can't do in an impossible manner and create panic and economic havoc while doing it to pretend to do something on the environmental front that absolutely will not happen at all.
It's even worse than that.
You talked about the German delegation that came in Canada a few days ago.
They even came here in Quebec.
Now you're right to say they're going to have to switch over the winter from natural gas to coal, which is much worse.
It's 60% more emissions and everything.
If Canada was exporting our LNG project with gas, we would reduce emissions.
So we would do much better for the environment on top of creating very good jobs in our regions here in Canada.
But it's worse than that.
We're probably going to have to export coal.
Because they're also going to run out of coal.
And that's going to be okay according to Mr.
Trudeau's standards and the left standards and the environmentalist standards.
It's all to look good, but when you look at the data, when you look at the results, it's terrible what they're proposing.
It's even worse than what they're fighting against.
Well, let's go on that looking good side.
So one of the things I found out, and this was also true of the Conservative Party in In Ontario, and I'm relatively positively predisposed to the Conservatives in Ontario, especially given the nature of the alternative.
During COVID, and I know this because I was told this by senior members of the Ontario government, as well as Discussing recently with journalist Ruba Subramania and a group of people who are suing the Canadian government, the court documents have revealed, for example, that the travel ban that Trudeau implemented...
Hypothetically, to stop the spread of COVID, had so little scientific justification, despite being touted as scientifically justifiable, that even though the Trudeau cabinet gave direct orders to the people working in their health departments to formulate a scientific rationale to justify the ban, the people so ordered couldn't, even though some of them were willing to attempt the To do so.
So it lacked such scientific justification that even under duress, the people tasked with generating the rationale post hoc couldn't do it.
And that the reason the bloody travel ban was implemented to begin with, which deprived about 7 million people of the right to visit their dying relatives in hospitals, for example, the Actual rationale was that the liberal minority government,
federally, headed by Trudeau, wanted to launch a precipitous election to put themselves in the majority position and was looking for a wedge issue to divide Canadians so that they could ramp up their grip on power.
This has all been revealed in court documents.
It's utterly preposterous.
And so I'm pointing that out as part of a broader trend, this trend of, let's say, Looking good.
Well, why are we implementing a travel ban?
Well, because we're so concerned about your health.
It's like, well, no, that's not why.
You want to look like you're concerned about our health, but actually you want to catalyze your grip on power in the most manipulative way possible.
But then I also know, let's say on the conservative side, when COVID policies were being formulated and they were being touted as driven by the science, all that was happening...
Was that they were generating opinion polls that were sampling people's fear, noting what they were most afraid of, reacting to that fear with draconian lockdowns, although not as bad in Ontario as in Quebec, and then post hoc justifying that with a science that didn't exist, and then demonizing anyone who claimed that the science did not support that and that the measures were overreaching.
It was not just federally, by the way.
Here in Quebec, we went through even worse than that with the carefew.
There was not one single study showing that a carefew is having an impact to stop COVID. Actually, there's even people who have suggestions that it's even worse because you're concentrating more people in a few hours, so it's spreading faster.
And when we were asked, when the premier was asked for studies, we found out afterwards that the public health director was sending notes to his bureaucrats trying, can you find me a study?
Just before the press conference, they were looking for, and they couldn't find one.
And when they were asked, what scientific evidence do you have that carefuse could stop the spreading of COVID? You know what they came out with?
A public opinion poll.
That's the science they had.
And they said, look, this is what people want.
So that's not science.
I understand there's a methodology that is scientific, but that's about it.
It's political science.
That's what frightened people want when you ask them stupid questions that they answer impulsively when they've been frightened.
Absolutely.
Specifically and pointedly by their governments in collusion with the idiot legacy media that they're subsidizing.
So it isn't even...
Because people will say, well, that's what people wanted and maybe you should give it to them.
It's like...
And this is back to that principle of subsidiarity and distributed political responsibility.
You do not randomly sample impulsive public opinion and derive your doctrines of governance.
So I would ask you, how would you protect yourself if you were the leader of the Conservative Party in Quebec and the Premier from falling into that trap?
Because I've seen people all across the political spectrum claim allegiance to principles, but then govern by opinion polls. - Two things I want to say.
First, I want to go back to the oil and gas exploitation because it's another example of also government misusing public opinion polls.
We've done public opinion polls here as well.
And what we see is that when you ask people, do you want Quebec to exploit oil and gas?
People say, no, no, no, no.
The majority says no, because, you know, they think we're going to pollute and blah.
And then when you say, okay, there's a war currently in Ukraine.
It's having this impact on Germany.
Do you think we should send them our liquefied gas?
Yes or no?
Then you have a strong majority that's saying yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
Yeah, exactly.
So you have to be very cautious with the data of those polls.
You can't govern by polls, because depending on how you put the context in, you're going to have different results.
You know, I'm not in politics to follow polls.
I'm in politics to lead polls, as opposed to our government.
We never had a government here in Quebec that has been polling as much people It's two, three polls per day on average that they've done over the last few years.
It's crazy.
They probably polled more in this mandate than in Quebec's history altogether.
I decided to run for a party that was at 1% and had 500 members.
I was not attracted by the limousine or the title or power.
What drives me Is my ideas, is my ideal, is what I'm looking for, my vision for Quebec for the future.
And I think that's a huge difference.
And people know and they could say and I could testify that I'm not an opportunist.
And what I'm telling them, I'm not telling them 50 things.
I'm not going to change Quebec altogether overnight.
But there's four or five things that I want to change.
You know, I'm going to put some private in healthcare.
I'm going to lower taxes for people.
I'm going to exploit and even export our oil and gas in Quebec.
I will give more freedom of choice to parents and the education of their kids, and even for kindergarten, because here we have a A public daycare that is becoming almost a public monopoly that scares me off.
I'm going to, you know, so there's a few things like that that we're going to focus on for the first four years.
And I think that if we just achieve that, it's going to be huge.
Yeah, even if you just achieved that on the energy front, I mean, look at the situation that Canada's in, is that we could be rich.
You know, we're about 35% behind the Americans now in terms of our level of wealth.
And the economic foreseer's I don't remember which group, but it was a reputable group, estimated that of the G20 countries, Canada would have the lowest economic growth for the next four decades, by which time we should be 50% or 75% behind the Americans, when instead, imagine what we have in front of us.
Saskatchewan, I think, has more uranium than the rest of the world combined, if I remember that correctly.
We have almost inexhaustible oil and gas reserves, despite what people think.
Natural gas is extremely clean compared to the alternatives, particularly coal.
We could ramp up our production of fossil fuels in the clean and sustainable and moral manner that ethical Canadian businesses could offer.
We could make ourselves rich and We could provide that energy to China so that they could be less reliant on coal and to Europe so that the Europeans would have a diversified energy supply at a much lower cost and so we could make poor people rich around the world by doing so.
We could We'll increase geopolitical stability massively by differentiating our energy supplies, and the net consequence for the environment by the environmental standards would be beneficial compared to the alternative, which is, well, we'll destabilize things so rapidly like we did in Sri Lanka that we're going to throw people into poverty and blow the whole System of international trade, which is bloody well what we're risking right now in places like Europe.
It'll be a miracle if the European Union even survives, as far as I can tell, the next year.
Because when the energy crunch hits this winter, which it's very likely to do, there's going to be absolute hell to pay.
I mean, 70,000 people were demonstrating yesterday in Czechoslovakia.
So, we're playing with fire, and it is this bloody virtue signaling that says, well, of course I care about the environment, and so it's time to put the forcible clamps down on the access that poor people have to energy, as if that's going to do anything whatsoever except make a bad situation worse on every possible front.
Another sacred cow that we're attacking, and that's going to be of interest for Canadians outside of Quebec, is healthcare.
Because that's another thing that the virtue signaling is very, very important.
You know, we want everybody to have universal access, free, and the best in the world, and blah, blah.
We know the...
The rest of how they see it.
But the reality is that our system is inefficient.
And in Quebec, one of the reasons why we had to lock down our population more than anywhere else in the continent is because our healthcare system is probably the most inefficient.
And we need to fix that.
And obviously, it's not some small reform within a public monopoly that is going to achieve that.
Monopolies are not good.
It's not efficient.
And we need to open up.
We need to increase.
We need to have competition.
We need to decentralize.
And unfortunately, the centrally planned system that we have right now is not good.
Quebecers are spending a billion dollars every single week in a system that couldn't handle 200 or 300 patients in intensive healthcare facilities.
Well, did Quebec build...
In most of Canada, while the pandemic was raging, the government seemed to be utterly unable to build more emergency beds, despite the fact that the pandemic raged for a couple of years and despite the fact that there was a tremendous amount of money spent.
So what kind of differentiated and detailed vision do you have for improving the healthcare system by introducing some private-public diversification?
And why shouldn't people be afraid of that?
Well, first off, we have to respect the Canada Health Act, which says that everybody could have access to free services and it's universal.
So we're going to respect the Canada Health Act.
We're not running federally, we're running provincially, but we want to also make sure, you know, The principle is that it's an insurance that is public.
It doesn't mean that you have to deliver the services in a public monopoly.
So what we're saying is that we already have clinics that are private in Quebec, but currently it's 100 or 0, which means like a physician needs to work online.
For the public system, 100%, or for the private system, 100%.
He can't go 50-50 or 70-30.
You're either with us or with the enemy, that kind of thing.
We want to change that.
We want to give the freedom to physicians to say, look, if you can't work more than two or three days, because a lot of them are stuck with that because they don't have access to operation facilities or All sorts of things.
So then you can spend your extra time and go in the private sector and give more services to the population.
That's one thing.
The second thing we want to say is that you can have an insurance.
You can invest in your health.
You know, it's crazy in Canada.
You can invest to drink as much as you want if you go to a liquor store, a public monopoly of liquor store, or you can invest, you can gamble in a public utility also.
With as much money as you want, but you can't invest a penny in what's the most important in your life and the life of your family, which is your health.
Yeah, so for those who are listening, some of you are going to, especially the younger people with perhaps somewhat less experience, you're going to think, well, we don't want to compromise the principle of universal free access.
So my father, for example...
He had waited for a knee operation.
He's an older man.
He's in his mid-80s.
He waited for a knee replacement for two and a half years.
Now, one of the things I'd like to point out is that is a cost!
Of course.
And it's lucky it didn't kill them.
And so one of the ways that the universally accessible free healthcare system that Canada hypothetically possesses and that is hypothetically the best in the world, which is a very dubious claim, by the way, is that it just rations it.
And so what happens is that, as you pointed out, there are nowhere near enough operating rooms.
Not even close.
And so people are on waiting lists for long enough often to kill them, which I suppose is a cost savings of a sort, because they're waiting to gain access to operating rooms that just don't exist, even though the physicians are ready to do the operations.
And so you limit the cost by just limiting access.
But you don't bloody well limit the cost.
No.
You just make it impossible for people ever to pay enough to actually get cured.
And this is a very pervasive problem in the Canadian healthcare establishment.
It's not some little trivial problem.
There's much better systems around the world.
I visited, for example, Sweden a few years ago.
In Sweden, you can have a private...
Hospital next to a public hospital, and if the public hospital cannot provide you the services that you need within reasonable delays, you can cross over, go to the private facility, and the government is going to pay for it, which makes more sense.
No matter what the delays are, if the private sector can do it for cheaper than the public sector, you can go directly to the private sector.
Why don't we have those systems?
You know, Europe has much more efficient systems than we have right now in Canada.
But for some odd reasons, we think that our system is the best of the world, but it's not at all.
And we saw it with the pandemic.
We saw how fast the system cracked down and how we weren't able to provide services that people were paying for.
Well, and one of the consequences of that too, and this is partly because the government dominated the healthcare industry, is that, well, we can't actually cope with this influx of sick people because our system is dreadfully inefficient, so what do we do instead?
Because we can't actually offer medical services, we'll say, well, how about you don't get to go outside?
Because that looks like something to do and it looks like action on the part of the bureaucrats.
Or how about you can't travel in your own country?
That's it.
And so the degeneration and lack of utility of the public health care system was an indirect contributor to the authoritarian crackdown at the federal and provincial levels.
Absolutely.
And have you toyed at all with the idea of...
Because I'm always interested in the issue of experimentation.
If you were going to transform the healthcare system in Quebec by allowing for private competition and diversification of healthcare provision...
Do you have a vision of how you might do that in a manner that would be technically experimental, so that you could build toy projects and evaluate their utility with some half-decent set of metrics before scaling it up?
Absolutely.
We'll start in larger cities, obviously, because for all sorts of reasons, it's much more It makes more sense because the competition is going to be easier to do.
It looks very stupid.
It's a small change, but it could have a huge impact.
Currently, our hospitals, the way they're funded is that they have fixed budgets year after year, with a few percentage increase from one year to the other, no matter how many patients they're receiving every year.
We want just to make sure that the money follows the patient.
So at least the institution has an interest of bringing you in and providing you services instead of like currently, the less people come in and the better it is, the more profitable they are.
So we want just to reverse the way the state funds the system.
We're not going to have fixed budgets for hospitals with a small increase every year.
We're going to fund every intervention they're doing and as many patients, more patients they have, more money they will get.
So at least they're going to have an incentive, even as public institutions, to attract people and provide better services and make sure that patients are like clients and they want to make sure that they're satisfied when they get out of the hospital so next time they come to their facility instead of the one next door.
And so it's very small things that could be done to send a free market economy message That will improve the system.
Any ideas for...
I'll ask you two more sets of questions.
The first would be, do you have any ideas for innovations on the education front from K through 12 to through the university system, which in my estimation has become...
Well, the whole bloody system has become remarkably corrupt.
And then also, I'd like to...
Have your opinion about, we haven't talked much about the federal conservatives yet and the leadership race, and I'd be interested in your, what would you say, your opinions and also your hopes on that front.
So maybe we can start with the issue of education, if that's a reasonable place to go.
Education in Quebec, English Canadians need to know something.
The private sector is a little bit more present.
And that's also another lasting, how could I say, thing of the past because of the Catholic Church.
Many of those old schools, you know, were Catholic schools and they were transformed into private schools.
So we have more competition in education in Quebec than elsewhere.
And the state also funds private institutions, private schools in Quebec, as high as 75% of what they do for the public sector.
So there's already a competition.
And because of that, the public system has been much better.
So now they provide, you know, international programs or Or arts and all sorts of activities to make sure that they have to listen to parents because otherwise parents go to the private sector.
It has put a good pressure and it's exactly what we want to do in the healthcare system.
We've done it in part in schools, but we want to increase that a little bit more by going with the kind of vouchers so parents could have more freedom of choice of which school they're sending their kids You know, we do believe that it's the parents, again, it comes back to all the discussion we're having since the beginning.
We want to give more power in the hands of the parents to decide for the school of their kids.
So that's part of it.
But the big, big issue on education, the most important one right now, is regarding daycare.
Because we have, as I said, a public daycare in Quebec.
It's called the, you know, the kindergarten of...
Of young kids that have been largely funded by the state.
And there's over 100,000 kids right now that go into that public system.
But there's 52,000 kids that are on waiting lists.
Because this is what states intervention does.
It creates waiting lists.
That's how the cost is to wait.
Yeah, exactly.
That's where the cost is hidden.
Like your father and his knee.
You know the cost.
It's not his credit card.
It's the fact that he has to wait for over two years to get a surgery.
So what we're saying is that this is unacceptable.
And those parents pay taxes, by the way.
And they cannot have the service that they're paying for.
And also with the new reality, there's more and more parents nowadays that do not work Monday to Friday, 9 to 5.
Some of them now are just working two or three days outside their homes.
So what they need in terms of daycare is very different than what their parents or their grandparents needed for their kids.
So we want to make sure that we have a more flexible system and obviously the state can't provide that.
We need to go in the private sector and that's why we want to give $200 per week per kid to parents who are not within the public monopoly so they could decide for themselves which kind of kindergarten they're looking for and bring that to a private facility no matter what So it's a voucher system that's child-centered.
Exactly.
Are you aware by any chance, a more technical matter, are you aware of any chance of the details of Hungary's policy on families?
No, I'm not.
Okay, well, let me just run that through briefly.
I can send you some material.
I think they've done an unbelievably effective job on a variety of fronts.
Well, in Hungary...
I hope I have the details of this exactly right, but I definitely have the picture correct.
So the Hungarians were very concerned about their extremely low birth rate, and I think rightly so, because I think a very low birth rate is a sign that something has gone wrong in a society.
The priorities aren't right.
So are Quebecers, by the way.
I know, I know.
Well, that's partly why I'm bringing this up.
So what the Hungarians decided to do, and they spend about 6% or 7% of their GDP now, or their budget.
I don't remember if it's the budget or the GDP, but it's a large proportion of their governmental spending, and it's the fundamental policy objective.
So if you're a Hungarian mother...
And this tends to be focused particularly on people who are within stable long-term monogamous relationships with children.
If you have four children, you never pay income tax again in your life.
I think if you have three, it's 75% reduction.
If you have two, it's 50%.
If you have one, it's 25%.
And they've raised the birth rate in Hungary substantively.
They've also cut the abortion rate by 40% over the last about 12 years with no compulsion, with no real change in the underlying abortion laws.
And so they have a very, very family-friendly policy.
And they have very, very smart people working on it.
And so that's...
Well, that's something I found extremely interesting and promising.
Now, also, this is so cool, at the same time, they've increased female participation in the labor force by 13%.
So the people who opposed the family policy structure made the case that you were going to lock women at home and revert them to a more traditional role.
And this was part of something approximating a patriarchal plot.
But the reality is that women are receiving recognition for the long-term contribution they make to the growth of society and its stability.
And are more able to operate in the present and in the near future in the economic realm.
And so, anyways, I'll send you that material.
Absolutely, I'm looking forward to read that.
Yeah, it's very interesting.
Okay, so let's close this off, unless there's something else that you specifically want to address afterward, with your comments about the federal leadership race in Canada, your relations, if any, with the frontrunners,
and with your hopes about what might be accomplished You know, because we could have a Conservative government in Quebec and a Conservative government federally, hypothetically, at some point in the next relatively short period of time, you know, next few years, maybe even sooner than that on the Quebec front.
Who knows?
So, what do you see as the appropriate and desirable way forward in terms of your relationship with the federal Conservatives?
Well, to talk about my personal relation with the candidates running right now, you have to know that Jean Charest, who's from Quebec, who's one of the...
The participant in that race, he's a former Premier, so he was with the Liberal Party of Quebec.
I've been a political opponent at the provincial level with him for several years.
I know him, but we never worked together.
Pierre Polyev, who was perceived as a frontrunner, was a guy that I worked with for many years, even when he was a student working on Stockwell Day's leadership race.
That's when I met him many, many years ago.
He even campaigned for me when I ran for the ADQ, for the Action Démocratique du Québec.
He was a student working in Ottawa and decided to come for, I think he spent a month with me campaigning in my constituency during those days.
So I've known Pierre for ages.
And so we'll see.
It's not just the leader that is going to be important, but it's the direction that the party is going to take that, for me, is the most important.
I hope that the party is going to be nationalist, not just Quebec nationalist, but Canada nationalist, because I think that that's something lacking in Canada and Quebec right now.
It's not normal that it's truckers and protesters that are using the flag and that the Prime Minister is not.
The fact that we saw that over the last few months should ring a bell to many people.
Usually when you raise a flag, it's because you're supporting the democratic institution of your country.
It's not because you're protesting against the people who are supposed to represent you.
And so I hope that, you know, that's going to be one thing, that the person is going to defend our interests nationally, and that also it's going to be a decentralist that is going to respect provincial rights.
And I think both frontrunners are decentralists at a certain extent, because Mr.
Charest was a...
Quebec Premier, so he knows how important it is.
He knows provinces and their powers.
I know Pierre.
I know that Pierre is also a strong decentralist, so I think that's very important, and it's going to be interesting.
If there is a force provincially, since Quebecers identify themselves more with the provincial level than the federal level, the conservative brand in Quebec could also have a push federally, I think.
Because more and more people now are identifying themselves as conservatives in Quebec and I'm 100% sure that it's going to have an impact.
Even if it's not the same party, there's a link at many extent and it's going to be much easier to identify as a conservative.
So I think we could both help each other out.
But the opposite is also true.
If I do stupid things or the conservatives at the federal level do stupid things, we're going to impact badly each other and have a A negative overall impact.
Yeah, well, hopefully the Conservatives in Canada will be able to get themselves together on the organizational front and be useful allies rather than counterproductive and accidental opponents.
And so, are there any other issues that you would like to put before the people who are viewing and listening?
And maybe also, if people are interested in supporting you And helping along with this, What would you recommend that they do?
Well, if they're in Quebec, of course, they could get much more involved.
They could become a member.
They could give us money.
You know that here it's limited to $200 just for the election year.
The other years, it's only $100.
We have laws that forbid anybody but people who have a right to vote in Quebec to give money.
So corporations or anyone outside of Quebec, it's forbidden.
But every single Canadian 16 years old and older could become member of the party.
You can go on conservative.quebec and then you can be a card-carrying member even if you're outside of Quebec.
As many Quebecers, as an Albertan, you know that many Quebecers live in Alberta nowadays because that's where the jobs are for the oil and gas industry since we're depriving our people to have a right to work in that industry in Quebec.
So that's one thing they can do.
And the strength of the movement is also...
I don't see what's going on in Quebec right now, honestly, as a political party.
It's a movement.
It's not because of me.
It's not because of the Conservative Party.
It's something coming from the grassroots.
And there's a huge movement.
And those people are...
Talking on the social media, talking to their neighbors, their colleagues, their families.
You know, that's the way it works and it becomes organic right now.
And just commenting and liking things on Facebook is having an impact.
And we see it.
Sharing this video right now will have an impact.
You know, it's small little things that we think don't change anything, but it does have an impact as much as voting.
Well, you're a political operative and you have been for a long time and you've learned how the system works.
I mean, it's easy for young people in particular to think that, well, there's no point, for example, in joining a political party because they just can't...
They'll just be ignored.
And my experience, because I've worked in political parties, is exactly the opposite of that, is that if you're willing to commit, especially initially on the volunteer front, and you're good at it, the probability that doors will open to you with regard to your advancement is unbelievably high.
Absolutely.
And so, has that been reflected in your experience?
They're huge.
And even more than that, for the upcoming election, it's the participation rate we'll have to look at.
Because everything that we're talking about and the fact that we're talking to crowds who usually don't even vote is very, very important.
We need to make sure that we motivate those people and they do You know, they get out on October 3rd and they go cast their vote.
Because we're probably going to figure out the results before we even counted one single ballot.
Just by looking at the participation rate, we're going to know if we won or lost the election.
And because this is all, this is what, and it's not just in Quebec and provincially, it's everywhere right now.
I think when there's a movement like this, there's a grassroots movement, If you want to know if it's successful or not, look at the participation rate.
If the participation rate is going up the roof, you know that they're winning.
And in Quebec last election, for example, two-thirds of voters did get out and vote.
So one-third of people didn't go at all.
And for us, it's huge because we participate much more at the provincial level than at the federal level.
That's another difference between Quebec and Canada.
The people are more involved at the provincial than at the federal level when it's time to vote.
But this time we have to look at the participation rate and we have to increase that.
So everything we're doing and the fact that we're not in the mainstream media is also a reflect of that we're going outside of the normal box of voters.
So people who are listening, then we can say to them, well, listen, if you want to get involved, if you're interested in the ideas that have been discussed here and you find them in the least compelling, you could take a risk and join a political party, the party of your choice, obviously.
In this case, it would be the Conservatives.
It's not an expensive thing to do.
And if you're looking for something meaningful to be engaged in, Participation in a political party can open that up to you and then the next most important thing or perhaps even the more important thing given the immediacy of what's going on in Quebec is that if you are interested in these things and you think they're important then Please vote.
Get out and vote, yeah.
Get out and vote, because it matters.
And you know, it's been the case in many elections, especially over the last couple of decades, in many countries, that the vote is actually determined by a very small minority of people, because they're so close.
And so while you talked about the separatist vote in 1995, what was it?
49.9 to 50.1?
Was it that close?
49.6 to 50.4 if I recall properly.
Right, right.
So everyone's vote really did count and more elections are like that than you think.
And now we have five parties.
We have five parties in Quebec also, which means that you don't need 50% plus one to win.
The party that's going to win, it's going to be under 40.
It's probably 30-ish percent that is going to make a difference.
And 30-ish percent of two-thirds of people not voting, so it means 22%.
So you could lose 78% of voters and win an election.
Right, right, right, right.
So one of the things I've been trying to do as I've been touring around is to suggest to people who've become cynical that they shoulder a bit more civic responsibility.
It's like if you think the system can't be changed in some incremental, fundamental and responsible sense, And you justify your own cynicism and apathy with that presupposition.
You might want to test that out by doing something like joining a civic organization or a political party.
And what you will find is that if you have the will, the way for you will be made way faster than you could possibly imagine.
And I think that might be more true on the political front than in any other domain of activity, because every political party I've ever been associated with in any way is constantly starving Absolutely.
Well, it was really good talking to you today.
I'm very pleased with the fact that you agreed to speak with me and delighted to offer you the opportunity to delineate your views in some ways.
More comprehensive sense in a relatively public square.
Is there anything else you would like to say to the people who are watching and listening either provincially, federally or internationally before we close?
I want to say merci beaucoup.
Thank you very much.
It was great talking to you and hopefully next time we can chat face to face in Toronto or Montreal.
That'd be good.
I'm coming to Montreal in a month and a half or so and so maybe we can arrange to do that then.
I might be Premier at that time.
That would make it even, in some sense, more exciting.
So, pleasure to meet you, and I hope we do get a chance to meet in person in the relatively near future.
Hello, everyone.
▲
Export Selection