A voice for federalism and freedom, silenced

The National Post notes that Jeff Fillion, a popular and controversial DJ at Quebec's to-be-silenced CHOI radio, is an outspoken opponent of Quebec separation and statism. This may not have been the reason so many people (well, around 90, anyway) complained to the CRTC about his station, but it didn't help. (Via Kevin Jaeger at The Shotgun)

Leaving aside the legal issue of freedom of expression and the political issue of the scope of the CRTC's powers, I believe it is very much in the Canadian public interest that Fillion be kept on the air. The reason his station has ruffled so many feathers in Quebec City is not because Fillion is racy -- but because he has dared to express ideas that Quebec's nationalists deem heretical.

Observers in the rest of Canada might have already wondered why Quebec's nationalist leaders haven't leapt to Fillion's defence. Think about it: a federal institution, based in Ottawa and headed by an anglophone, closes the most popular radio station in Quebec city, the heart of Quebec's French heartland, for reasons of content. It would seem to be a golden opportunity for the likes of Bernard Landry and Gilles Duceppe to protect les interets du Quebec, and lambaste the CRTC for not being sensitive to francophones' preferences, for not understanding Quebec's unique character, and so forth. Since Quebecers often like to brag that they are more culturally permissive than English Canadians, the CRTC's decision could easily have been cast as an act of Anglo-Saxon Puritanism.

Yet none of this has happened. On the contrary, Agnes Maltais, a former Parti Quebecois minister from Quebec city, and one of the only surviving PQ MNAs in the region, was quick this week to tell anyone who would listen that the CRTC's decision was "une decision juste."

But this sanguine reaction should not come as a surprise. Jeff Fillion -- along with Andre Arthur, the anchor of CHOI's sister station -- has long been disliked by Quebec's separatists.
[...]
Unlike most francophone federalists, who are of the soft-nationalistic ilk, and so go soft in their attacks on separatists, Fillion takes no prisoners. Indeed, he is perhaps the only well-known French public voice in the province whose attacks against separatism are full-throated and passionate.

When his morning show was first aired in 1998, Fillion was an unknown from out of town and CHOI was the least listened-to commercial radio station in the market. In the provincial election that took place that November, the PQ won 17 of the 19 ridings in the Quebec City area. But last year, with Fillion having become the number one morning man in the region, attacking the PQ relentlessly and actively backing Mario Dumont's ADQ party, support for the PQ plummeted dramatically. The PQ went from 17 MNAs to only two. Apart from Dumont's Riviere-du-Loup riding, Quebec city was the only region in the whole province where the ADQ managed to have MNAs elected.

Fillion's audience is made up of young francophones, the kind of voters who are expected to comprise the shock troops of separatism. Day in, day out, he encourages them to refuse the herd mentality of the statist, Quebec model. His ideology is libertarian. (Last winter, for instance, he was one of the few Quebecers who defended Don Cherry's right to say what he did about French hockey players.) And he believes the separatists' national project would add nothing to the rights, freedoms and prosperity we already enjoy. On the contrary, he believes the corporatism and protectionism underlying the nationalistic project threaten these rights. As Fillion sees it, separation would allow Quebec politicians to dramatically extend the interventionist politics that have sprouted since the revolution tranquille.

I would defend Fillion's right to remain on the air even if he were a far-left seperatist. But voices like his are rarely heard in Quebec, and his pending expulsion from the airwaves is a disgrace. Come to think of it, if the Post's profile is accurate, we could use a few more like him in the rest of Canada.

In a related story, Andrew Coyne notes that the Canadian Association of Broadcasters has bravely chosen to take no position on the CHOI controversy. Pathetic.

Posted by damian at July 22, 2004 09:35 PM