Juno News - August 16, 2022


What makes the Quebec Conservative Party different from other parties？

Topics
legacy media accusations
Mentioned
Francois Legault Élie Cantén-Antaire Eric Duhem Acter
Globe and Mail runs defence for the WEF The government can’t create jobs!

Episode Stats


Length

7 minutes

Words per minute

187.74

Word count

1,329

Sentence count

79


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I catch up with Quebec Conservative Party Leader Eric Duhaime to talk about how his campaign is coming along, the legacy media's coverage of his party, and what he's looking forward to in the upcoming election.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Ili Canté-Nantel here for True North at the Hôtel V in Gatineau,
00:00:05.240 where Quebec Conservative Party leader Eric Duhem
00:00:07.940 is announcing his latest candidate for the upcoming provincial election.
00:00:12.240 The PCQ is an anomaly in Canadian politics
00:00:15.300 because the once very small party that only received 1.46% of the vote
00:00:20.860 in the last provincial election has placed second in some polls,
00:00:25.620 with one poll giving the party 24% support.
00:00:30.000 I had the opportunity to catch up with Duhem to ask him a couple of questions,
00:00:33.900 including how his election readiness is coming along,
00:00:37.440 what he thinks of the legacy media's coverage of him and his party,
00:00:41.400 as well as what are his expectations going into the campaign period.
00:00:46.160 How many candidates does your party have now for the election
00:00:48.980 and are you satisfied with the team that you've built?
00:00:51.380 Absolutely. We are now at 108 candidates out of 125.
00:00:55.920 We'll have another 10 candidates to announce within the next few hours.
00:00:59.220 We're revealing our platform on Sunday.
00:01:02.600 So we're kind of in a sprint right now.
00:01:05.200 There's so many things to do.
00:01:06.720 And the election is now, what, 54, 55 days ahead of us.
00:01:11.580 So it's going to be a great sprint and we're looking forward to it.
00:01:16.560 Obviously, with the election comes media coverage.
00:01:19.160 The CBC ran a piece where it claimed that 30% of your candidates
00:01:23.400 were linked to conspiracy theories and what they call right-wing extremists.
00:01:28.380 What do you make of the legacy media putting reports out there
00:01:31.400 suggesting that your candidates are conspiracy theorists and have links to extremism?
00:01:36.280 It's always surprising that because someone shared a link or liked a page
00:01:40.000 or made a comment somewhere, they're automatically labelled.
00:01:42.940 It's weird that they're not concerned about the fact that a cabinet minister of Legault's government
00:01:48.680 has been accused three times by the ethics commissioner for patronage or conflict of interest.
00:01:56.440 And that doesn't make the big news.
00:01:58.060 But they're trying to find out, you know, someone who I've shared something on the link.
00:02:01.920 And you have to understand that over the last two years,
00:02:03.920 being a conspiracy theorist is just that you were against the government on any issues
00:02:08.440 and you were not like all the members of the National Assembly of the four other parties
00:02:13.000 who were all saying, yes, yes, yes, Mr. Legault, as soon as you were asking questions,
00:02:16.880 they were saying that you were a conspiracy theorist.
00:02:19.140 So I think that, you know, we have to calm down.
00:02:22.240 Those accusations are completely false and it's a disgrace that some reporters are paying too much attention to that.
00:02:28.080 Right.
00:02:28.520 Right. François Legault's CAC has been running an ad on TV which features an old woman
00:02:33.180 saying that no one could have handled the pandemic better than him.
00:02:37.560 Considering that Legault's pandemic response included some of the harshest lockdowns in all of Canada,
00:02:42.860 a vaccine passport that restricted access to church and to groceries in Walmart and Costco,
00:02:47.480 and that also put in a curfew twice even when around 90% of the population was vaccinated.
00:02:54.160 What do you make of the fact he seems to be proud of his response
00:02:57.500 and campaigning on that response?
00:03:00.320 It's very surprising.
00:03:01.280 First off, he underpaid that poor old woman who gave her a check of $200.
00:03:06.060 Well, it works like $10,000 or $20,000 according to the estimates done by the unions of Acter.
00:03:12.880 The other thing that is surprising with those ads is that, you know,
00:03:15.940 when they say no one would have done better,
00:03:17.960 well, my answer to that is who would have done worst?
00:03:20.760 Because we were the province where we've been the most locked down.
00:03:24.520 The curfews, the restaurants were shut down for the longest period of time.
00:03:28.960 The only place where the construction industry was shut down.
00:03:32.220 And we can go on and on and on and on.
00:03:34.340 Quebec went the furthest of all the provinces in Canada.
00:03:37.620 And we have by far, to this day, the worst record in terms of death of COVID.
00:03:42.880 So if the measures were so good and he's done everything so perfectly,
00:03:47.480 how come we're the worst in the country and one of the worst in the continent?
00:03:51.420 I'm wondering why, how could they say such a thing?
00:03:54.040 I mean, it's a disgrace that they're trying to say that no one would have done better.
00:03:57.800 It's actually the opposite.
00:03:58.840 No one would have probably done worst.
00:04:01.100 Right.
00:04:01.500 So the Conservative Party in 2018 got 1.46% of the vote, no seats.
00:04:06.360 Now some polls have put you in second place.
00:04:09.080 And the Main Street poll had you at 24%, almost a quarter of support, which is extraordinary.
00:04:16.100 So going into this campaign, what would you consider a victory?
00:04:19.480 Would it be one seat, 10 seats, opposition or forming government?
00:04:23.220 Well, honestly, if you asked me the question a year ago,
00:04:25.480 I would have said to get elected personally and have a few percent or more.
00:04:30.180 But nowadays, as you said, it's changing very quickly.
00:04:33.900 Obviously, the party went from 500 members to 60,000 members,
00:04:38.980 from 1% in the polls to 15%, 19% or 24%, depending of which polling firm you believe in.
00:04:45.740 We're also the party that is raising the big,
00:04:49.080 we have the biggest amount of donors right now in Quebec this year.
00:04:52.680 And the growth keeps going.
00:04:54.400 We also, we've been invited to the leaders debate that are going to be held during the election campaign.
00:04:59.880 So, I mean, we've already, you know, did much, much better than what we were expecting.
00:05:05.880 We were going to have 125 candidates out of 125 seats.
00:05:09.920 So I think we already have a huge success.
00:05:13.120 In terms of votes, well, it's not, it's the privilege of every single Quebec voter to do that.
00:05:17.960 And no matter how many there's going to be, it's going to be a victory.
00:05:20.040 Because if the Conservative Party of Quebec wasn't there,
00:05:22.480 the four other parties are so similar that many of us would have stayed home.
00:05:25.840 And what the Conservative Party contribution is going to be is that we're going to increase the participation rate,
00:05:30.640 which is great, not just for the Conservatives, but for democracy in Quebec.
00:05:34.020 Right. And one last question.
00:05:36.320 So, one of the reasons attributed for your growth has been your strong opposition to the COVID measures.
00:05:44.480 You're one of the only political leaders in all of Canada that has stood up against the lockdowns and the mandates
00:05:49.060 when it wasn't popular to do so.
00:05:50.940 So, moving forward four years from now, hopefully when there's no more COVID and it's no longer a prominent issue,
00:05:58.600 how does your party stay relevant and not become irrelevant like maybe the Parti Québécois has over the years?
00:06:05.260 Well, we're a Conservative Party, and that means also that we want lower taxes.
00:06:09.820 We're the only ones who are going to propose decreasing taxes for all Quebecers during the election campaign.
00:06:14.720 We want to suspend tax on gas with what's going on with the inflation right now.
00:06:18.820 We're the only ones also who are ready to open up the door to the private sector in health care.
00:06:23.420 We're also the only ones in Quebec right now that say it's time to exploit our gas and oil in Quebec.
00:06:29.140 And I can keep going on and on and on.
00:06:33.400 We're the only ones who are saying that we should fund all parents who need a kindergarten for their kids,
00:06:38.700 not just the public monopoly.
00:06:41.140 And so there's a lot of things where we're completely different,
00:06:43.920 and we're going to show that and we're going to have the opportunity to talk about it
00:06:47.320 when we reveal our platform on Sunday and during the whole election campaign.
00:06:52.200 True North will continue to bring you independent coverage of the Quebec provincial election.
00:06:56.700 To support our work, please visit donate.tnc.news to make a donation.
00:07:02.460 For True North, I'm Élie Cantén-Antaire.
00:07:03.920 They're not there or are you.