Why Are Young People Converting to Conservatism? | Eric Duhaime | EP 289

They were asked, "What scientific evidence do you have that caring for the vulnerable could stop the spread of COVID?" You know what they came out with? A public opinion poll. That's the science they had. They said, "Look, people, 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 Duhaime, and he is the leader of the Conservative Party in the province of Quebec, the French language dominant province in Canada. 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. Generally, it's the liberals who win, although the conservatives perhaps occupy the throne, so to speak, about a third of the time.

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. 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. 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.

That's enabled Canadians to develop and maintain a fair bit of trust in their fundamental institutions. 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.

All of that is shaking out in all sorts of odd ways. One of them is that the legacy media increasingly colludes with people in power but also, and logically following from that, no longer serves its role as proper critic of democratic leadership, let's say. 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.

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. Recently, Mr. Duhaime 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.

It's actually possible to have a discussion that involves thought that also isn't a competition between the journalists, which would be me in this case, and the politician. I'm going to give you a bit of a bio of Mr. Duhaime, and I'd like to thank him for having, well, 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 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 are no tricks here, except for the ones I can't help but play.

So, I'll give you a little bio about Mr. Duhaime and then I think probably what we'll do is we'll try to situate the political landscape, describe the political landscape in Quebec, and situate that within the broader political landscape in Canada so that people who are listening have a sense of what's going on there. We'll also attempt to describe why knowing such things should be relevant to Canadians, obviously, but might also be relevant to people around the world who, increasingly at their political level, especially in the West, are grappling with very similar problems.

It's a very weird convergence around the world of the assemblage of problems and potential political solutions. Mr. Duhaime 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 forms, like the podcast 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, from Mario Dumont, who was leader of the Action Démocratique du Québec from 2003 to 2008, and later Gilles Duceppe of the Bloc Québécois, which paradoxically and strangely is a separatist party for Quebec that operates nationally in Canada because we have a very peculiar political system.

Duhaime also co-founded the Rassemblement pour la Liberté du Québec, a movement aimed at a revival of conservatism and libertarianism in Quebec because Mr. Duhaime leans on the conservative side towards the more individualistic libertarian end of the distribution. In November 2020, Duhaime ran to succeed Conservative Party of Quebec leader Adrien D. Pugliese, winning with 95 percent of the vote.

So, I thought we'd start our discussion first by welcoming you, Mr. Duhaime, and then letting you expand 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. Then we'll talk about the current Quebec political landscape and what you're endeavoring to achieve.

Thank you very much for welcoming me. Well, you want me to talk about Quebec for those who are not aware. Of course, we're the French province in Canada. You know, 20, 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, since I was born, we've always been fighting between those two political sides.

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. That's probably where many people all around the world heard the most about Quebec because it was a very, very tight result, especially in '95, where it was like not even 51 against 49.4 percent. So that's been a huge political thing going on. But nowadays, there's not as much appetite, especially not among the younger generation, to talk about those divisive issues.

Elsewhere, 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. Now we have five political parties. It's very unusual for the kind of system that we're in. There are five main political parties in this upcoming election at the provincial level: there's one socialist party, Québec solidaire; there's the governing party, the Coalition Avenir Québec, which is a nationalist centrist party; there's the Liberals, who are the former federalist side, who are still federalists but more leaning on the left; and the separatist party, historically, the Parti Québécois, who's also more on the left of the political spectrum.

So it's a very interesting period of time in our history, politically speaking, and this election could be a historic 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 Duhaime 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.

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Canada has been a somewhat difficult country to cobble together because of the linguistic divide, because of the massive scale of the geographic enterprise, and because of the distinction and differences between the French civil law system and the English common law system. 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.

As Mr. Duhaime said, that just about came to destruction twice in the last 45 years. We escaped with our country intact by the narrowest of margins. It might be of some interest for people listening to know that in many ways, and please correct me if you believe my interpretation to be incomplete, Quebec was one of the last countries so to speak, nations in the western world that underwent the transition from traditional Catholicism to modernity. The 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, and it was very common for the older people in our research samples to have had 10 siblings—very large families. So Quebec was united on the French side and very tightly kin-related because Quebec was also settled by a relatively small number of French settlers, and so Quebec was also a tightly kin-related society.

The French were under the rubric of this intense Catholicism. The English in Quebec had more financial power generally speaking, although they were a very small minority of people compared to the French. In the '60s, Catholicism dissolved precipitously; church attendance plummeted, family size crashed to the point where in many recent decades, Quebec has had one of the lowest birth rates in the western world. The marriage rate collapsed and, along with that collapse, interestingly enough, there was a real rise in nationalism.

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. Part of what drove Quebec separatism was, in some real sense, a substitute for the religious impulse that had united Quebecois before. I talked to a Gallup pollster probably 20 years ago; he answered a question I always had been curious about. He said that their research had indicated that if you were a lapsed Catholic in Quebec compared to a continual church-goer, let's say, and someone who maintained their faith, you were five times more likely to be an advocate for separatism.

Now Mr. Duhaime pointed out that in recent years—and that would be post-1995 when we had the last referendum on Quebec separatism—the Quebec separatist cause has attracted less and less fervor, especially among the young. 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, 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 after a certain extent of what was going on in Quebec. The nanny state became, you know, growing and growing. That's been happening for the last 50 years.

There was a complete shift and Quebec didn't do anything different from other societies. Except that it was done much faster. We were in a fast track of everything that we observed in the Western world. We did it in a very short period of time. Why? Probably because we're more homogeneous people, and so that's probably why the shift happened so quickly.

That being said, the impact politically, as you said, was that the Anglophones, who were dominant economically speaking, well, there was a shift on that side as well with the growth of the nationalist and the separatist movement. I want to make sure here that we differentiate nationalism and separatism in Quebec.

I define myself as a nationalist, which means that I'm proud of being Francophone. I do believe that the common language in Quebec is French, and I think that even Anglophones agree with that. Here in Quebec, there's one million non-Francophones in Quebec who choose to stay here. The profile of those people today has changed very much from 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. They want their kids to be bilingual and to grow in French and in English. So it's not French against English. 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, so I do believe that Quebec should not become English and we should assimilate; that's not the point here. 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. 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 U.S.

You're also the political leader of the French minority in America. There's no one politically that has more power than you do. One of your primary roles is, of course, to promote and protect French, and I want to do that. 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 way that we see it does, as you said, the youth have a different approach. 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 when you're 65 and over, it's like 11 to 1 in favor of the CAC, the governing party right now in Quebec.

You see it's a completely reversal, and we're especially popular as conservatives among people between 35 and 50 who still have kids at home. Those people are the most hardcore conservatives that you can find right now in Quebec. So, it's interesting to look at the demographics.

But we have to understand also that we're post-crisis, and the crisis changed the political landscape as well. You cannot lock down a society for over two years and think it's not going to have any political impact. The people who suffered the most and who were the least at risk are now, you know, politically intervening and expressing their frustration to a certain extent, and that also explains why we're particularly popular among parents of young kids compared to seniors.

For a guy like you, who likes to analyze what's going on in societies, I think Quebec is an interesting case because, in North America, we were the most locked-down society. 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 we had vaccine passports for the longest time to show passports to get in restaurants or bars or gyms, where we had the longest curfew, the most severe curfews.

50,000 Quebecers got caught by the police; they were either arrested or given tickets for $1,500 each on average. I mean, we went through a very strong period; the government was the most severe at many extents. It's probably having the biggest political impact.

So, it's not surprising that you see a political leader like me rising as quickly as we did over the last year because, you know, the government went very far with the authority, and now there's kind of a counterbalance of people searching for a politician that respects much more of their civic rights and their individual freedoms. So, it's a counterbalance, and I want to also point out one thing because that may be of interest to everybody as well.

Here in Quebec, we've never seen a political party raising as quickly as the Conservative Party has over the last year. When I decided to run for the leadership of the party less than two years ago, there were 500 members. As we speak, we have 60,000 members. We're by far the largest party in terms of membership. We went from one percent in the polls to somewhere between 15 and 20 percent right now.

We are the party that has the largest amount of donors in Quebec this year. We're now represented at the National Assembly because I convinced one of the members of the CAC to cross the floor and join us. We're going to participate in the leaders' debate. 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. When you spoke about the media and the impact of the media, I just want to underline that during my leadership race between November 2020 and April 2021, I got one single article in a mainstream newspaper, a daily paper in Quebec. It was in Le Devoir when Josée Verner, a senator, decided to support me and become the president of my leadership race.

Le Devoir wrote an article, which is not the main daily paper; that was the only article. At the end of the leadership race, I had 15,000 members; I had more members than the governing party of the Premier of Quebec, and not one single other media did talk about us. They didn't even acknowledge our existence, so it shows the shift and it explains why people like you are more popular than complete networks now.

It explains the difference and also the clash, to a certain extent, in terms of media. Right, right, right. Well, I should also point out for the listeners, I know Quebec reasonably well because I lived in Montreal from 1985 to 1993, and I loved Montreal. 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. I say that despite the fact that the province that I grew up in, Alberta, is, in many ways, the most fraught; it has the most fractious relationship 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 the linguistic 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.

One of the things that's very interesting about downtown Montreal is that it's a very walkable city, by the way. It has great restaurants and great bars and an unbelievably vibrant and safe and dynamic street life. The Montreal municipal authorities have done a lovely job of regenerating the old city, and the old port looks great. 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.

There was a tremendous proliferation of local businesses, and they all had all the charm of local businesses. They weren't chains of restaurants that were exactly the same as restaurants everywhere else. 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. 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: how do you preserve the local while maintaining integration with the superordinate? 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 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 that mirrors the situation in the entire world. That also complicates the political landscape. Now, having said that, you also said that, and 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.

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. 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, too, as you rightly pointed out earlier, when we talked about the fact that the religious factor was melting down since the '60s. Their social conservatism in Quebec is almost nonexistent. You know, I'm the first openly gay leader of a conservative party in Canada's history, provincial or federal, so I mean that, and it's not a surprise that it's happening here in Quebec because social conservatism is not part of the coalition of conservatives that we are.

We have fiscal conservatives and more libertarian conservatives, but very few social conservatives. Do you want to outline the difference between those two so that everybody who's listening understands?

So you said social, fiscal, and libertarian. It isn't obvious to people what the differentiation between the various forms of conservatism is, especially because the legacy media almost never talks about it. Fiscal conservatism is people who want lower taxes, smaller state, you know, so that's generally speaking how we define fiscal conservatives.

Social conservatives are usually more towards moral issues, so it's more gay rights or abortion or all those hot issues that we hear a lot and the media talks about it a lot about that normally when they talk about conservatives. And the third one is the libertarian; it's about individual rights, the respect for civic rights of individual freedoms. That's more the aspect that I see.

As a leader, you have to be representing all the wings within your party, but there's really three; I see three main kinds of conservatives in Canada, and in Quebec, we only have two out of the three. That's what I wanted to point out.

It might be a little bit different than elsewhere because 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. We went from one side to the other completely, and now the religious practices here are much slower, especially among the youth, and that's why our voters are even younger.

It's a complete shift as well. The conservative movement in Quebec is different, and there's a nationalist element as well that's probably not existent elsewhere in Canada of people who want to promote and protect French and our culture and our uniqueness. That is also because that's conserving where we're from and our roots and our heritage.

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, like, the hedonistic limitless freedom that's characteristic of an impulsive life, but more likely to be found, especially under conditions of duress, as a consequence of adopting the responsibilities of a mature life.

That would be well, existing to some degree in service for other people, especially the people that you love in your family, accepting responsibility for a marriage and a long-term relationship, and accepting responsibility welcoming it for kids and taking care of your extended family and serving your community. This is all something that conservatives can really promote, and I think there's an unbelievable hunger for it.

Because one of the things I've noticed, and I have discussed this publicly a lot, I pay a lot of attention to my audiences, and everywhere I go in the world, if I make a case for the nexus, let's say, between suffering, which is inevitable, and the meaning that emerges out of the voluntary adoption of responsibility, everyone falls silent. That happens all the time, and my sense of that is—and this is part of the reason why I think there's a conservative opportunity that's beckoning in a major way that you might be tapping into—is that what conservatives have to offer young people, and that's the first time I've ever seen this really be the case, is the meaningful existence that characterizes.

It's so absurd that it has to be said that it characterizes genuine maturation and sacrifice on behalf of others 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. 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 it is that what you're selling, so to speak, what you're promoting is resonating deeply among younger people in Quebec? 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, the old constitutional fights and feuds, almost all the political parties in Quebec were more center-left. They were all social democrats, and they were all in favor of the nanny state. That's why in Quebec we had a bigger state; state intervention was much stronger than elsewhere.

Even at the federal level, we used to vote more liberal. It's always been; there was a kind of consensus on that side, and now that debate is over. There's a new one that is emerging. Of course, the fact that it's new and the fact that it's fresh and the fact that it's different is attracting already a younger crowd, because you're not scaring them off; they love changing.

But there's also the fact that I do believe that because of social media and because of the new world that we're in, they're much more open to the world, if I could say so. That's something, you know, they want to be part of something larger, and for that, you need a little bit more freedom. You don't want to be just limited to Quebec; with the state intervention, everything is limited to Quebec.

So there is 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 and I probably, you know, you care if you're at 8 or 9 p.m. It's not the end of the world, but if I were 20, if I recall what I was doing after 9 p.m. when I was 20, the impact was much larger on me, and I think they took much more than seniors.

They realized how the state could, you know, ruin your life to a certain extent when they're pushing the envelope a little bit too far. That also explains why you see a political leader like me raising as quickly as we did over the last year because, you know, the government went very far with the authority.

Now there's kind of a counterbalance of people who are looking for a politician that respects much more their civic rights and their individual freedoms. So, it's a counterbalance, and I want to also point out one thing because that's that may be of interest to everybody. Here in Quebec, you know, we've never seen a political party raising as quickly as the Conservative Party has over the last year.

When I decided to run for the leadership of the party less than two years ago, there were 500 members, and as we speak, we have 60,000 members. We're by far the largest party in terms of membership. We went from one percent in the polls to somewhere between 15 and 20 percent right now. We are the party that has the largest amount of donors in Quebec this year.

We're now represented at the National Assembly because I convinced one of the members of the CAC to cross the floor and join us. We're going to participate in the leaders' debate. I mean, we're going up very, very quickly, and we've never seen that. Usually for a political party, it takes a few elections to reach the point where we're at right now. For us, it took us a year.

When you spoke about the media and the impact of the media, I just want to underline that during my leadership race between November 2020 and April 2021, I got one single article in a main street newspaper, a daily paper in Quebec. It was in Le Devoir when Josée Verner decided to support me and become the president of my leadership race.

Le Devoir wrote an article, which is not the main daily paper; that was the only article. At the end of the leadership race, I had 15,000 members; I had more members than the governing party of the Premier of Quebec, and not one single other media did talk about us. They didn't even acknowledge our existence, so it shows the shift. It explains why people like you are more popular than complete networks now, and it explains the difference.

Also, the clash, to a certain extent, in terms of media. Right, right, right. Well, I should also point out for the listeners, I know Quebec reasonably well. I lived in Montreal from 1985 to 1993 and loved Montreal. 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. Despite the fact that the province that I grew up in, Alberta, is, in many ways, the most fraught— 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 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 ignorance, but I loved Montreal.

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.

One of the things that's very interesting about downtown Montreal is it's a very walkable city, by the way. It has great restaurants and great bars and an unbelievably vibrant and safe and dynamic street life. 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 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. There was a tremendous proliferation of local businesses, and they all had the charm of local businesses. They weren't chains of restaurants that were exactly the same as restaurants everywhere else.

And 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. 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: how do you preserve the local while maintaining integration with the superordinate? 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 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 that also complicates the political landscape.

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 interrupted, interacted with the government at the municipal level in Quebec, which was often breeding all sorts of regulations that were just absolutely unreasonable and that was hard to negotiate with.

And you said that Quebec, like France, had implemented extremely stringent COVID lockdowns, which is so much at odds with the spirit of a city like Montreal, and you also pointed out that that's bred a desire for, would you say, a desire for the more libertarian kind of conservatism that, if I've got that right, that you represent and would like to make a case for?

Yeah, well, you have to understand that too. As you rightly pointed out earlier as well, when we talked about the fact that the religious factor was melting down since the '60s, their social conservatism in Quebec is almost inexistent. 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—and it's not a surprise that it's happening here in Quebec because social conservatism is not part of the coalition of conservatives that we are.

We have fiscal conservatives and more libertarian conservatives but very few social conservatives. Do you want to outline the difference between those so that everybody who's listening understands?

So you said social, fiscal, and libertarian. It isn't obvious to people what the differentiation between the various forms of conservatism is, especially because the legacy media almost never talks about it.

Fiscal conservatism is people who want lower taxes, smaller state, you know, so that's generally speaking how we define fiscal conservatives.

Social conservatives are usually more towards moral issues; so it's more gay rights or abortion or all those hot issues that we hear a lot, and the media talks about it a lot when they talk about conservatives. And the third one is the libertarian; it's about individual rights, the respect for civic rights of individual freedoms. That's more the aspect that I see.

As a leader, you have to be representing all the wings within your party, but there's really three; I see three main kinds of conservatives in Canada, and in Quebec we only have two out of the three. That's what I wanted to point out.

It might be a little bit different than elsewhere because 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. We went from one side to the other completely, and now the religious practices here are much slower, especially among the youth, and that's why our voters are even younger.

It's a complete shift as well. The conservative movement in Quebec is different, and there's a nationalist element as well that's probably not existent elsewhere in Canada of people who want to promote and protect French and our culture and our uniqueness.

That is also because that's conserving where we're from and our roots and our heritage. 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, like, the hedonistic limitless freedom that's characteristic of an impulsive life, but more likely to be found, especially under conditions of duress, as a consequence of adopting the responsibilities of a mature life.

That would be well, existing to some degree in service for other people, especially the people that you love in your family, accepting responsibility for a marriage and a long-term relationship, and accepting responsibility welcoming it for kids and taking care of your extended family and serving your community. This is all something that conservatives can really promote, and I think there's an unbelievable hunger for it.

Because one of the things I've noticed, and I have discussed this publicly a lot, I pay a lot of attention to my audiences, and everywhere I go in the world, if I make a case for the nexus, let's say, between suffering, which is inevitable, and the meaning that emerges out of the voluntary adoption of responsibility, everyone falls silent. That happens all the time, and my sense of that is—and this is part of the reason why I think there's a conservative opportunity that's beckoning in a major way that you might be tapping into—is that what conservatives have to offer young people, and that's the first time I've ever seen this really be the case, is the meaningful existence that characterizes.

It's so absurd that it has to be said that it characterizes genuine maturation and sacrifice on behalf of others 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.

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 it is that what you're selling, so to speak, what you're promoting is resonating deeply among younger people in Quebec? 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, the old constitutional fights and feuds, almost all the political parties in Quebec were more center-left. They were all social democrats, and they were all in favor of the nanny state. That's why in Quebec we had a bigger state; state intervention was much stronger than elsewhere.

Even at the federal level, we used to vote more liberal. It's always been; there was a kind of consensus on that side, and now that debate is over. There's a new one that is emerging. Of course, the fact that it's new and the fact that it's fresh and the fact that it's different is attracting already a younger crowd, because you're not scaring them off; they love changing.

But there's also the fact that I do believe that because of social media and because of the new world that we're in, they're much more open to the world, if I could say so. That's something, you know, they want to be part of something larger, and for that, you need a little bit more freedom. You don't want to be just limited to Quebec; with the state intervention, everything is limited to Quebec.

So there is 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 and I probably, you know, you care if you're at 8 or 9 p.m. It's not the end of the world, but if I were 20, if I recall what I was doing after 9 p.m. when I was 20, the impact was much larger on me, and I think they took much more than seniors.

They realized how the state could, you know, ruin your life to a certain extent when they're pushing the envelope a little bit too far. That also explains why you see a political leader like me raising as quickly as we did over the last year because, you know, the government went very far with the authority.

Now there's kind of a counterbalance of people who are looking for a politician that respects much more their civic rights and their individual freedoms. So it’s a counterbalance, and I want to also point out one thing because that may be of interest to everybody. Here in Quebec, you know, we've never seen a political party raising as quickly as the Conservative Party has over the last year.

When I decided to run for the leadership of the party less than two years ago, there were 500 members, and as we speak, we have 60,000 members. We're by far the largest party in terms of membership. We went from one percent in the polls to somewhere between 15 and 20 percent right now. We are the party that has the largest amount of donors in Quebec this year.

We're now represented at the National Assembly because I convinced one of the members of the CAC to cross the floor and join us. We're going to participate in the leaders' debate. I mean, we're going up very, very quickly, and we've never seen that. Usually for a political party, it takes a few elections to reach the point where we're at right now.

For us, it took us a year. When you spoke about the media and the impact of the media, I just want to underline that during my leadership race between November 2020 and April 2021, I got one single article in a main street newspaper, a daily paper in Quebec. It was in Le Devoir when Josée Verner decided to support me and become the president of my leadership race.

Le Devoir wrote an article, which is not the main daily paper; that was the only article. At the end of the leadership race, I had 15,000 members; I had more members than the governing party of the Premier of Quebec, and not one single other media did talk about us. They didn't even acknowledge our existence. So, it shows the shift and it explains why people like you are more popular than complete networks now.

It explains the difference and also the clash, to a certain extent, in terms of media. Right, right, right. Well, I should also point out for the listeners, I know Quebec reasonably well. I lived in Montreal from 1985 to 1993 and loved Montreal. 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. I say that despite the fact that the province that I grew up in, Alberta, is, in many ways, the most fraught—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 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 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.

One of the things that's very interesting about downtown Montreal is it's a very walkable city, by the way. It has great restaurants and great bars and an unbelievably vibrant and safe and dynamic street life. The Montreal municipal authorities have done a lovely job of regenerating the old city. The old port looks great, and Montreal is just a wonderful city.

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. There was a tremendous proliferation of local businesses, and they all had the charm of local businesses. They weren't chains of restaurants that were exactly the same as restaurants everywhere else. 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.

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: how do you preserve the local while maintaining integration with the superordinate?

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 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. So now, having said that, you also said that—and 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. 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 too, as you rightly pointed out earlier as well, when we talked about the fact that the religious factor was melting down since the '60s. Their social conservatism in Quebec is almost inexistent.

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—and it's not a surprise that it's happening here in Quebec because social conservatism is not part of the coalition of conservatives that we are. We have fiscal conservatives and more libertarian conservatives, but very few social conservatives.

Do you want to outline the difference between those so that everybody who's listening understands? So you said social, fiscal, and libertarian. It isn't obvious to people what the differentiation between the various forms of conservatism is, especially because the legacy media almost never talks about it.

Fiscal conservatism is people who want lower taxes, smaller state; you know, so that's generally speaking how we define fiscal conservatives. Social conservatives are usually more towards moral issues; so it's more gay rights or abortion or all those hot issues that we hear a lot, and the media talks about it a lot about that normally when they talk about conservatives; and the third one is the libertarian; it's about individual rights, the respect for civic rights of individual freedoms; that's more the aspect that I see.

As a leader, you have to be representing all the wings within your party, but there's really three; I see three main kinds of conservatives in Canada, and in Quebec, we only have two out of the three; that's what I wanted to point out. It might be a little bit different than elsewhere because 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.

We went from one side to the other completely, and now the religious practices here are much slower, especially among the youth, and that's why our voters are even younger. It's a complete shift as well. The conservative movement in Quebec is different, and there's a nationalist element as well— an element 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 also because of that's conserving where we're from and our roots and our heritage.

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, like, the hedonistic limitless freedom that's characteristic of an impulsive life; but more likely to be found, especially under conditions of duress, as a consequence of adopting the responsibilities of a mature life.

That would be well, existing to some degree in service for other people, especially the people that you love in your family, accepting responsibility for a marriage and a long-term relationship, and accepting responsibility welcoming it for kids and taking care of your extended family, and serving your community; this is all something that conservatives can really promote, and I think there's an unbelievable hunger for it.

Because one of the things I've noticed and I have discussed this publicly a lot; I pay a lot of attention to my audiences, and everywhere I go in the world, if I make a case for the nexus, let's say, between suffering, which is inevitable, and the meaning that emerges out of the voluntary adoption of responsibility, everyone falls silent. That happens all the time, and my sense of that is—and this is part of the reason why I think there's a conservative opportunity that’s beckoning in a major way that you might be tapping into—is that what conservatives have to offer young people, and that's the first time I've ever seen this really be the case, is the meaningful existence that characterizes.

It's so absurd that it has to be said that it 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 it is 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, the old constitutional fights and feuds, almost all the political parties in Quebec were more center-left. They were all social democrats, and they were all in favor of the nanny state; that's why in Quebec we had a bigger state, state intervention was much stronger than elsewhere, and even at the federal level, we used to vote more liberal.

It's always been; there was a kind of consensus on that side, and now that debate is over, there's a new one that is emerging. Of course, the fact that it's new and the fact that it's fresh and the fact that it's different is attracting already a younger crowd because you're not scaring them off; they love changing.

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 to the world, if I could say so.

They want to be part of something also larger, and for that, you need a little bit more freedom. You don't want to be just limited to Quebec, and with the state intervention, everything is limited to Quebec.

So there's a vision of looking outside of the box; I think that helps out a lot. The fact also—and I'm back to what happened over the last two years—who suffered the most during those days? You and I probably, you know, you care if you're at 8 or 9 p.m. It's not the end of the world but if I were 20, if I recall what I was doing after 9 p.m. when I was 20, the impact was much larger on me and I think they took much more than seniors.

They realized how the state could, you know, ruin your life at a certain extent when they're pushing the envelope a little bit too far and so that also explains why 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 counterbalance and I want to also point out one thing because that may be of interest to everybody.

Here in Quebec, you know, we've never seen a political party raising as quickly as the Conservative Party has over the last year. When I decided to run for the leadership of the party less than two years ago, there were 500 members and as we speak, we have 60,000 members; we're by far the largest party in terms of membership.

We went from one percent in the polls to somewhere between 15 and 20 percent right now, and we are the party that has the largest amount of donors in Quebec this year.

We're now represented at the National Assembly because I convinced one of the member of the CAC to cross over and join us; we're going to participate in the leaders debate, meaning we're going up 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.

When you spoke about the media and the impact of the media, I just want to underline that during my leadership race between November 2020 and April 2021, I got one single article in a main street newspaper, a daily paper in Quebec. It was in Le Devoir when Josée Verner decided to support me and become the president of my leadership race, and Le Devoir wrote an article, which is not the main daily paper and that was the only article and at the end of the leadership race, I had 15,000 members.

I had more members than the governing party of the Premier of Quebec and not one single other media did talk about us; they didn’t even acknowledge our existence.

So, it shows the shift and it explains why people like you are more popular than complete networks now. It explains the difference and also the clash at a certain extent in terms of media.

Right, right, right. Well, I should also point out for the listeners, 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 fraught; 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 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.

One of the things that's very interesting about downtown Montreal is 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 street life. 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.

There was a tremendous proliferation of local businesses and 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, and it really is a remarkably wonderful city.

And so, it begs the question: how do you preserve the local while maintaining integration with the superordinate? We have that problem in the world right now because the world is increasingly international in some real sense. There’s a real utility in preserving local culture and at the town level, at the province level, at the state level, at the national level to preserve the autonomy and unique charms of each of those levels but also to integrate the whole into a harmonious union and all of us are struggling with that in a major way.

And Canada struggles with that internally in a way in some sense that mirrors the situation in the entire world and so that also complicates the political landscape. So now, having said that, you also said that, and 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 than authoritarian in its proclivity than any other jurisdiction in Canada.

I really saw that when I interrupt, 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. 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, you represent and would like to make a case for?

Yeah, well, you have to understand that too as you rightly pointed out earlier as well when we talked about the fact that the religious factor were you know was melting down since the '60s. Their 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 the— 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 are very few social conservatives.

Do you want to outline the difference between those two 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 gay rights or abortion or all those hot issues that we hear a lot and the media talks about it a lot about that normally when they talk about conservatives.

And the third one is the libertarian; it's about individual rights, the respect for civic rights of individual freedoms, so that's more the aspect that I see; but you know, as a leader, you have to be representing all the wings within your party, but there are really three— I see three main kinds of conservatives in Canada and in Quebec we only have two out of the three; that's what I wanted to point out.

It might be a little bit different than elsewhere because, 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. We went from one side to the other completely and now the, you know, the religious practices here and are much slower and especially among the youth, and that's why our voters are even younger.

So it's a— it's a complete shift as well. So the conservative movement in Quebec is different and there's a nationalist element as well that’s probably not existent elsewhere in Canada of people who want to promote and protect French and our culture and our uniqueness because that's also conserving, 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 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 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 nexus let's say between suffering which is inevitable and the meaning that emerges out of the voluntary adoption of responsibility, everyone falls silent and that happens all the time and my sense of that is, and this is part of the reason why I think there's a conservative opportunity that's beckoning in a major way that you might be tapping into is that what conservatives have to offer young people—and that's the first time I've ever seen this really be the case—is the meaningful existence that characterizes.

It's so absurd that it has to be said that characterizes genuine maturation and sacrifice on behalf of others like as a real viable pathway forward, existentially and psychologically to have the kind of life that enables you to not be bitter in the face of catastrophe.

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 it is that what you're selling so to speak what you're promoting is resonating deeply among younger people in Quebec and how do you conceptualize that from the perspective of the development?

Let's say of a political vision, which is something that conservatives tend to struggle to do. We have to understand that historically, because we were stuck in the old debate in the old constitutional fights and feuds—almost all the political parties in Quebec were more center-left, they were all social democrats, and they were all in favor of the nanny state. That's why in Quebec we had, you know, a bigger state, that the state intervention was much stronger than elsewhere and even at the federal level.

We used to vote more liberal and, you know, it's always been there was kind of a consensus on that side, and now 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 all already a younger crowd because you're not scaring them off; they love changing.

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 to the world, if I could say so. They want to be part of something also larger and for that, you need a little bit more freedom and you and you don't want to be just limited to Quebec, and with the state intervention, everything is limited to Quebec.

So there is 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 and I probably, you know, you care if you're at 8 or 9 p.m. It's not the end of the world, but if I were 20, if I recall what I was doing after 9 p.m. when I was 20, the impact was much larger on me and I think they took much more than seniors.

They realized how the state could, you know, ruin your life to a certain extent when they're pushing the envelope a little bit too far and so that also explains why 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 counterbalance and I want to also point out one thing because it's that may be of interest to everybody as well, here in Quebec, you know, we've never seen a political party raising as quickly as the Conservative Party has over the last year when I decided to run for the leadership of the party less than two years ago, there were 500 members—

As we speak, we have 60,000 members; we're by far the largest party in terms of membership. We went from one percent in the polls to somewhere between 15 and 20 percent right now, and we are the party that has the largest amount of donors in Quebec this year.

We're now represented at the National Assembly because I convinced one of the members of the CAC to cross over and join us; we're going to participate in the leaders' debate, I mean, we're going up very, very quickly, and we've never seen that. Usually for a political party it takes a few elections to reach the point where we're at right now; for us, it took us a year.

When you spoke about the media and the impact of the media, I just want to underline that during my leadership race between November 2020 and April 2021, I got one single article in a main street newspaper, a daily paper in Quebec; it was in Le Devoir when Josée Verner, senator, decided to support me and become the president of my leadership race.

Le Devoir wrote an article, which is not the main daily paper and that was the only article. At the end of the leadership race, I had 15,000 members; I had more members than the governing party of the Premier of Quebec and not one single other media did talk about us—they didn't even acknowledge our existence. So, it shows the shift and it explains why people like you are more popular than complete networks now, and it explains the difference and also the clash, at a certain extent, in terms of media.

Right, right, right. Well, I should also point out for the listeners; I know Quebec reasonably well because I lived in Montreal from 1985 to 1993 and loved Montreal. 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 fraught; 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 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.

One of the things that's very interesting about downtown Montreal is it's a very walkable city by the way; it has great restaurants and great bars and an unbelievably vibrant and safe and dynamic street life. 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.

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 was a tremendous proliferation of local businesses and 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 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 and it really is a remarkably wonderful city.

And so it begs the question: how do you preserve the local while maintaining integration with the superordinate? 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 that also complicates the political landscape. So now having said that, you also said that, and 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 than authoritarian in its proclivity than any other jurisdiction in Canada.

I really saw that when I interrupted, interacted with the government at the municipal level in Quebec which was also often breeding all sorts of regulations which 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 too, as you rightly pointed out earlier as well when we talked about the fact that the religious factor was melting down since the 60s. Their 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 the— I mean that's not