The Winds of Ezra

As usual, guest speaker Ezra Levant said it best without fully appreciating the significance of what he’d just said.

“The average age would not be 25 for a right-wing event in Alberta,” Levant told 500 conservatives gathered in Quebec City for the first meeting of the Quebec Freedom Network. “I feel like an old man.”


Conservative Canada’s Mr. Saturday Night spent 75 minutes last Saturday morning delivering his trademark snappy patter on the horrors of human rights commissions, the grim litany of threats to free speech in this country, and the evils of acquiescing to the “fascist theocracy” of militant Islam.


Yet it was his ad lib exit line on the youthful composition of the audience, and his own relationship to it, that stood as his most compelling observation – and perhaps the most hopeful single thing said during at the inaugural Freedom Network gathering.


It was only 14 years ago, after all, that Levant was himself one of those mid-20somethings at Calgary’s Winds of Change conference, which he not only attended but helped organize with David Frum.


Ultimately, the Winds of Change set in motion the same sort of conversation shift among Canada’s conservatives that the Quebec Freedom Network hopes to stimulate in la belle province.


No one would pretend that the 1996 gathering in Calgary, like last weekend’s meeting in Quebec City, was anything but a tentative first step. It took a decade of false starts, electoral disasters (many of which seemed, curiously, to have the callow Mr. Levant involved), and wound-healing for fractured Canadian conservatives to forge an effective coalition within Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party. The time frame is a realistic one for conservatives in the Quebec Freedom Network to keep in mind if their end is power and not just talk. The Quebec network’s primary goals remain unclear since no one seems to know whether it will be just be a talking shop, try to re-energize the troubled ADQ provincially, or lead to creation of a whole new political party.


Still, as with Winds of Change, there was an unmistakable feeling of something significant having begun in terms of organizers’ stated ambition of shifting Quebec’s political dialogue from the insular polarity of sovereignist-federalist disputes to the left-right axis conventional in modern nation states.


As political philosopher Frederick Tetu told the Freedom Network audience, the interminable binary proposal of either sovereignty or federalism has left zero space or energy to debate the kind of economic state Quebecers want, or need, to have. With culture dominating the discussions, the commerce required to support that culture has been ignored, much to the province’s fiscal peril.


Put another way, discredited socialism remains entrenched within Quebec because the fixation on federalism versus sovereignty has left no time to challenge the left-nationalist orthodoxy that only the State can protect the nation.


Maxime Bernier, the Conservative MP for the Beauce region south of Quebec City, pointed out the poisonous paradox that after 50 years of debate, and two torturous referendums on “the national question”, Quebec is economically weaker and more financially dependent on Canada than it was when sovereignty first emerged as the primary political option.


In fact, he argued, the “two nationalisms of Canada and Quebec” have reinforced each other in a co-dependency relationship that was toxic to the economic growth and the genuine autonomy of the province.


“Successive governments in Quebec have undermined our autonomy by demanding more and more from the federal government,” Mr. Bernier said. “They want independence, yet they are more dependent than ever.”

Quebec, he said, need only insist on respect for the autonomy it’s already guaranteed in the Canadian constitution. The result would be a Quebec that regains its legitimate constitutional autonomy within a united Canada, thereby allowing Quebecers to see their fellow Canadians as colleagues, not threats.


Such talk, of course, directly affronts the left-nationalist orthodoxy that created and sustains the so-called Quebec model of omnipresent state intervention in both economics and culture.


Here, however, Mr. Levant once again stepped out as the unrealized embodiment of the shift in Quebec that those behind the Freedom Network seek to represent. The unilingual Jewish kid from Pump Hill in Calgary, called upon to address an audience that was almost unanimously francophone, tossed off his telling observations and trenchant one-liners entirely in English. And no one batted an eye.


Ten or 15 years ago, back when Mr. Levant was young, it’s virtually certain there would have been showy walkouts, or at the very least audible hissing, had the founding of a new Quebec political movement been kicked off by a speech from a high-profile anglophone unable to speak French in Quebec City.


Last Saturday morning, though, they applauded even when Mr. Levant asked such pointed questions as: “How did Quebecers forget their lineage of freedom?”


In truth, most of the audience was too young to remember that forgetting (huh?), which bodes well for the Quebec Freedom Network as it develops in the years ahead - while Mr. Levant ages to become the grand old man of Canadian conservatives.