Oct 10
29
Conservative movement in Quebec may be rising
The Calgary Herald – October 29, 2010
Conservative movement in Quebec is rising
By Peter Stockland
As usual, Calgary author Ezra Levant said it best without perhaps 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 about 500 conservatives gathered in Quebec City last week for the founding meeting of the Reseau Liberte Quebec (Quebec Freedom Network). “I feel like an old man.”
Levant 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.
Only 14 years ago, after all, Levant was one of those mid-20 somethings at Calgary’s Winds of Change conference, which he helped organize with David Frum. Ultimately, the Winds of Change set in motion the generational shift among Canada’s conservatives that the Quebec Freedom Network hopes to stimulate in la belle province. Out of the Winds conference, a whole crop of 25-year-olds stepped forward to ease their elders aside and reunite divided conservatives. Just so, the under-30s in Quebec City may be the force to shift Quebec society in a direction it desperately needs.