Why Are Young People Converting to Conservatism？ ｜ Eric Duhaime ｜ EP 289 (99b_UFNamWA)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=99b_UFNamWA

They were asked, what scientific evidence do you have that Carrefour 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 Douin, 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 battle continually, 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 center right versus center 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 claim they’ll do in some fundamental sense, which means they’re no worse and maybe no better than generally respectable and responsible human enterprises. 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 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 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. And recently, Mr. Douaym 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 sound bites. 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 and the politician. So I’m going to give you a bit of a bio of Mr. Douaym, and I’d like to thank him for having the or for being willing 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 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. Douaym, and then I think probably what we’ll do is we’ll try to situate the political landscape, 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 of the assemblage of problems and potential political solutions. So Mr. Douaym 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 de Montréal. 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 forums like the podcasts that we’re engaging in at the moment. He spent 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 Demont, who was leader of the Action Démocratique du Quebec 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. Douaym also co-founded the Réseau Liberté Québec, a movement aimed at a revival of conservatism and libertarianism in Quebec, because Mr. Douaym leans on the conservative side towards the more individualistic libertarian end of the distribution. In November 2020, Douaym ran to succeed Conservative Party of Quebec leader Adrian D. Puglio, winning with 95 percent of the vote. And so I thought we’d start a discussion first by welcoming you, Mr. Douaym, 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, where the French province in Canada, 25, 23 percent 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. You know, 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 percent against 49.4 percent. 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 where 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 Solidaires. There’s the governing party, the Coalition Avner Quebec, which is a nationalist centrist party. There’s the liberals who are the former federalists 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 going to 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 two hundred dollars off your mattress order plus two free pillows. That’s helixsleep.com slash Jordan for two hundred dollars off all mattress orders and two free pillows. Canada has been a somewhat difficult country to cobble together because of the linguistic divide, because of the massive scale of the 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 in the middle. And so, as Mr. Douaym 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 to modernity. The the the awakening in Quebec, let’s say, occurred 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. It was very common for the older people in our research samples to have had ten siblings, very large families. And then 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 tightly kin related society. And the French were 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 Quebec before. I talked to a Gallup pollster. It’s probably 20 years ago. He answered a question I always had being 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. Douheim 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 fervour, especially among the young. And you mentioned to me in a bit of a brief conversation that we had before this podcast started that you’re actually 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 the as you rightly pointed out, the 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, you know, 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. Like we 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 people. 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 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, you know, 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 percent of parents who have kids at school here in Montreal and elsewhere in Quebec who are non-Francophones, 75 percent 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 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. Like, I do believe that 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. So that’s on the linguistic front. If I could say so, the the way that we see it and it does, as you said, the youth as 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 one in favor of the CAC, the government, 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. We 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, you know, post-crisis. And the crisis changed the political landscape as well. You cannot lock down a society for over two years and 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 it’s a 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 we had passports. The longest time for to show passports, vaccine passports to get in in in restaurants or bars or gyms or where we we had a curfew, the longest curfew, the most severe curfews. Fifty thousand Quebecers got got caught by the police, were either arrested or given tickets for fifteen hundred dollars each on average. So, I mean, we went through a very, very strong period. The government was the the most severe at 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 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 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, you know, we have never seen a political party raising as quickly as the Conservative Party has over the last year. When I ran 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, were by far the largest party in terms of membership. We went from one percent in the polls to somewhere between 50 and 15 and 20 percent right now. And we were 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 member of the CAC to cross over, cross the floor and join us. We’re going to participate in the leaders debate. We’re 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, that I got one single article in the Main Street newspaper, a daily paper in Quebec. It was in Le Devoir when José Verner, a senator, decided to 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 15000 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, is in many ways the most fra… 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, but 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 French reasonably well, 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 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 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, well-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. 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 also 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, 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. So I mean, that’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 there’s no, there’s not, 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. So 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, you know, gay rights or abortion or all those issues that we hear a lot in the media talks about a lot about that normally when they talk about conservatives and the third one is the libertarian. It’s the individual rights, the respect for of civic rights, of individual freedoms. So that’s more the the aspect that 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 there’s 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. And so it’s it might be a little bit different than elsewhere because the 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 and we went from one one side to the other completely. And now the religious practices here are much lower and especially among the youth. And that’s why our voters are even younger. So it’s it’s a complete shift as well. So the the conservative movement in Quebec is different. And there’s a 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. That is because that’s also conserving, you know, 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 that in the hedonistic, limitless freedom that’s characteristic of an impulsive life, but more likely to be found, especially under conditions of duress in as a consequence of adopting the responsibilities of a 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 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 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 this is 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 and the old constitutional fights and feuds, almost all the political parties in Quebec were more center left. It was all they were all social Democrats and they were all in favor of the nanny state. And that’s why in Quebec we had, you know, a bigger state. The state intervention was much stronger than elsewhere. And even at the federal level, we we used to vote more liberal. And we, you know, it’s 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 you’re not scaring them off. They love change. But there’s also the fact that I do believe that they’re, you know, because of the social media, because of the new world that we’re in, they’re much more open towards the the world, if I could say so. And they that’s something, you know, 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. Everything is so there’s a vision of looking outside of the box. I think that helps out a lot. 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 eight or nine p.m. It’s not the end of the world. But if I were 20, if I recall what I was doing after nine 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 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, not. And now they’re card carrying members and their volunteers on our campaigns are even running for us. So there there’s something very, very different. The paradigm also has shift on that side. And it’s a you know, 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, you know, stay out of it. There’s limits. And that’s why even the slogan of our campaign is Libre Chez Nous. We we didn’t know it. You can’t translate that perfectly in English, but if we translate it word to word, it’s free at home. So it’s but and 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 the so, you know, we want we want to go back to give to to be empowered of what we’re doing without within our own houses. And it’s and that for a new generation is probably something that is, you know, is more interesting and even worldwide right now, we see that, you know, 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 was 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, and many extent. And, you know, we we were 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 the it also has an impact on your political reality when it’s time to vote. So you can imagine that. OK, so that 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 so and then one of the consequences was that 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 that became the limitations of that approach that just 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 that’s about how I feel it. Like that’s what we saw over the last few months, the last few years here in Quebec. It’s it happened elsewhere as well. It’s not we’re not unique in the world where it did happen. But I think here it hit a little bit faster and stronger. The 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, so let’s 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 would 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 the 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, 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, this is one of the downsides of universal basic income proposals, it’s 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 philosophically, we want power to be the closest to the citizen as possible. We were 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 problem 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 decentralized 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 and it’s there’s a it should be the opposite. And when you were talking about Alberta earlier on, because where you’re where you’re from originally, the Alberta after Quebec is the most decentralized province in Canada and we should be the strongest allies. But as you as you said, we’re often at the on opposite sides because for all sorts of other reasons, but philosophically, in terms of decentralization and power vis-a-vis citizen, we’re the ones who share the similar view. And we should we should always be on the same side and we should not be a centralist and look at Ottawa that they think that they know best. So the 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. You know, the federal it’s like having, you know, our nationality is Quebec and our passport is Canadian. So the the that’s how we define ourselves. And so the most important government for us is our provincial government because, you know, all the main things, education, health care 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 and Canada Post. But that’s how we see it. Like so that our sense of community is related to the provincial government. And in Alberta, after Quebec, it’s the province where they have have that as high as we do. There’s a strong sentiment of Alberta first. And so if we have a true 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 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 than the Conservatives, because the French Canadian Catholics used to vote more for the Liberals. Historically, it was more the Catholic, the Catholics were voting more liberal. And if that shifts and if the decentralized start to link together in Canada and those who want to have the the power closest to them, the subsidiarity, as you as you talked about, then it could we’re going to reshape not just Quebec politics, but Canadian politics altogether. Well, you could imagine 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 the small business community in Quebec and the services that it manages and the street life and the festivals 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 Quebec, Quebec, 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 serving 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. And, you know, if 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 Quebecois is going to deliver 20 speeches a day that everybody is going to become separatist and it’s going to happen overnight. You can’t do those projects, that project, if you have the youth against yourself. And, you know, we have to make sure that we bring it back at an individual level to make sure that, you know, 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. We need to. And even if you say I’m bilingual, it doesn’t mean that Quebec is bilingual or the common language 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, hardworking parents, perfect parents, but they didn’t have the opportunity to learn English. And they sent me to a kindergarten in English and they did a huge sacrifice 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… You see this is happening in the US 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 issue of parent rights. And people are pulling their children in the US 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. Exactly. And if the state says it will, it’s delusional because, well, 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 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. So 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. OK, 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 Poliev, Roman Barber and Leslin Lewis. And 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 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 Aitchison’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 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 were 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 as a Conservative within Canada is to build bridges with other Conservative parties provincially, first and foremost, because I’m a decentralized, 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 they don’t show that Canada could work, you know, and on the other and on the other hand, the federalists, you know, they want they want to be perceived as pro-Canada as much as they can. So the more central is 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 OK, 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 or it’s also provinces, because, as we said earlier on, you know, your own province is 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 Lévaque was there, an old Quebec separatist premier, his best ally was Peter Lohit 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’m a good friend of Jason Kenney, the current premier, Daniel Smith, who’s running for his leaders 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 as 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 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 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 well, to rectify that? Well, the first thing regarding oil and gas, a few days ago, I was in the Saguenay region, northeast of Quebec, to say that I’m the only political leader right now who’s in favor of the LNG Quebec project, which is natural liquefied gas, liquefied project, a 14 billion dollars 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 flipped flop 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 he denied the rights of the companies who already had rights given by the Quebec government and now were sued, were sued. I mean, the Quebec government is sued for billions. I think it’s 18 billion dollars 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 dollar project and then accrued 18 billion dollars in potential legal liability to not produce fossil fuel. Yeah. OK, so now I’m going to push you. You look good in front of the environmentalists. Let’s put it that way. I’m going to push you on that because 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 OK, 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 omelet, then c’est la vie. And so what do you think about that line of argumentation? How do you 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 on on 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. OK, so I say, well, that’s that’s too that’s too long. We’re going to be roasting in our 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 what why is that a problematic argument? If it is, it is a you. It doesn’t it doesn’t make sense in my book because what are you going to do in the meantime, like tomorrow morning, we’re 100 percent dependent right now in Quebec of oil and gas coming from outside. OK, from and so if you know, and we saw what 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. I 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 our gas emission by thirty seven point five percent, forty five percent, fifty five percent. It’s like, you know, 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 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 could also point out that the Americans turned radically to natural gas fracking after the year 2000. Yeah. And let’s just outline the consequences of that. So the first bloody consequence was that they cut their carbon dioxide output by 15 percent. And so that was not something that any environmentalists predicted and certainly would have opposed. But it turned out to be the case that, well, 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, OK, 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 they’re 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 percent more emissions and everything. Like 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 OK, according to Mr. Trudeau’s standards and the left’s standards and the environmentalist standards. The net, you know, 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 let’s go on that looking good side. So one of the things I found out, this was also true of the Conservative Party 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 had 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 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 seven 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 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 and 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 trying, 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 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 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 governed by opinion polls. Two things I want to say. 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 they think we’re going to pollute and love. And then when you say, OK, there’s a war currently in Ukraine. It’s having this impact on Germany. Do you think we should have we should send them our liquefied gas? Yes or no. Then you have a strong majority that is saying yes, yes, yes, yes. Yes. So so you have to be very cautious with the data of those polls. You can’t govern by polls because depending of 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. And I as opposed to our government, we 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. Never. They probably polled more in this mandate than in Quebec’s history altogether. And so me, you know, I I decided to run for a party that was at one percent and had five hundred members. You know, I was not attracted by the limousine or the title or power. What you know, what what drives me is my ideas, is my ideal, is my 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 there, I’m not an opportunist. And when I’m telling them, I’m not telling them 50 things there. 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 health care. I’m going to lower taxes for people. I’m going to exploit and even export our oil and gas in Quebec. I will I will give more freedom of choice to parents and the education of their kids and even for kindergarten, because here we have 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 even if you just achieved that on the energy front. I mean, look at the situation that Canada is in, is that we could be rich. No, we’re about 35 percent behind the Americans now in terms of our level of wealth. And the the the the economic foreseers, 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 last for the next four decades, by which time we should be 50 percent or 75 percent 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 we can 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 make our lives abundant for our children while doing so. 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 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 is very likely to do, there’s going to be absolute hell to pay. Seventy thousand 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. And then another sacred cow that we’re attacking and that’s going to be of interest for Canadians outside of Quebec is health care, 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 health care 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 dollar every single week in a system that couldn’t handle two or three hundred patients in intensive health care facilities. Well, did Quebec build it? 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 health care 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 for 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 zero, which means like a physician needs to say to work for the public system 100 percent or for the private system 100 percent. He can’t he can’t go 50 50 or 70 30. It’s it’s it’s you’re either with us or with the enemy, like kind of thing. We want to change that. We want to give the freedom of to physicians to say, look, if you can’t work more than two or three days, because that’s 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 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 well, 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. But let’s so my father, for example, he’s been he had waited for a knee operation. He’s an 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, it’s lucky it didn’t kill him. And so they’re one of the ways that the universally accessible free health care 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 health care 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 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. Or even if there’s no even 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. So 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 in the world, but it’s not at all. And we saw it with the pandemic. You know, 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 health care 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 and lack of utility of the public health care system was a direct, it was an indirect contributor to the authoritarian crackdown at the federal and provincial levels. Absolutely. And so 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 health care system in Quebec by allowing for private competition and diversification of health care provision, would you be able to do you have a vision of how you might do that in a manner that would be technically experimental so that you can 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. We’re also it looks very stupid. It’s a small change, but it could be a huge it could have a huge impact. Currently, our hospitals, the way they’re funded is that they have fixed budgets year after year. And with a few, you know, a few percentage increase from one year to the other, no matter how many patients they’re receiving every year. And so we want just to make sure that the money follows the patient. So 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 next 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. Hmm. Any any ideas for it? 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 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. That’s a reasonable place to go. Education in Quebec. English Canadians need to know something that the private sector is a little bit more present. And that’s also another it’s also another lasting, how could I say, a thing of the past because of the Catholic Church, many of those old schools, you know, they 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 public private institutions, private schools in Quebec, as high as 75 percent of what they do for the the public sector. So there’s already a competition. We want to increase that. And because of that, the public system has been much better. So now they provide international programs or sports and also there’s our 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 in the health care system. We’ve done it in part in the in schools. But we want to increase that a little bit more by going with the kind of vouchers so they could 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 the, you know, the kindergarten of of young kids that has been funded by the state, largely funded by the state. And there’s over 100000 kids right now that go into that public system. And but there’s 52000 kids that are on waiting list because this is what, you know, state’s intervention does. It creates waiting lists. That’s how the the cost is to wait. Yeah, exactly. That’s where the cost is hidden. Like your father and his knee, like it’s, you know, the cost is 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 don’t they cannot. 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, nine to five, you know, and with 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 two hundred dollars per week per kid to parents who are not within the public monopoly so they could decide for themselves where they could, you know, which kind of kindergarten they’re looking for and bring that to a private facility, no matter what it is. So it’s a voucher system that’s child centered. Exactly. Are you aware by any chance more technical matter, are you aware of any chance of the details of the of Hungary’s policy on families? No, I’m not. OK, 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 the 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 six or seven percent of their GDP now or their budget. I don’t remember 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 percent reduction. If you have two, it’s 50 percent. If you have one, it’s 25 percent. And they’ve raised the birth rate in Hungary substantively. They’ve also cut the abortion rate by 40 percent 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 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 percent. 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, 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. I’m looking forward to read that. Yeah, it’s very, it’s very interesting. OK, so let’s close this off if you unless there’s something else that you specifically want to address afterward with your 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 for several years. I know him, but we never worked together. Pierre Pauliev is who’s perceived as a frontrunner, was a, you know, 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 Accent démocratique du Quebec. He was a student working in Ottawa and decided to come for a, I think he spent a month with me campaigning on the, in my constituency during those days. So I’ve known Pierre for ages. And so we’ll see. But, you know, 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’s 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 like, you know, the fact that we saw that over the last few months should ring a bell to many people. You know, usually when you raise a flag, it’s because you’re supporting the institution, the democratic institution of your country. It’s not because you’re protesting against the people who are supposed to represent you. And so the so I hope that, you know, that’s one 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 decentralized that is going to respect provincial rights. And I think both both front runners are decentralized at a certain extent because Mr. Chiré was a Quebec premier, so he knows how important it is for, you know, he knows provinces and their powers. I know Pierre, I know that Pierre is also a strong decentralized. So I think that’s very important and it’s going to be interesting. And it could, you know, if 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 we’re more and more people now are identifying themselves as conservatives in Quebec, and I’m 100 percent sure that it’s going to have an impact, even if it’s not the same party. You know, there’s a link at many extent and people will. 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 negative overall impact. Yeah, well, hopefully the conservatives in Canada will be able to get themselves together on the organisational front and 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 and helping along with this, with with the realisation of your vision, 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 two hundred dollars per just for the election year. The other years, it’s only one hundred dollars. 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. And for the 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 because it’s not I don’t see what’s going on in Quebec right now, honestly, as a as a political party. It’s a movement. It’s not it’s not because of me. It’s not because of a conservative party. It’s something coming from the grassroots and the there’s a huge movement. And those people are talking on the social media, talking to their neighbors, their colleagues, their families. You know, it’s 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. The you know, it’s 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. And so has that has that been reflected in your experience? 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 that’s 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 can 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, participational 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. Exactly. 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 percent to win. The party that’s going to win, it’s going to be under 40. It’s 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 percent. So you could lose 78 percent 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 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 for manpower, work and money. Absolutely. So, 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 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, 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. I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on DailyWirePlus.com.