Quebec’s real revolution will come when it looks itself in the eye
Conrad Black
Sep 1, 2012
The Quebec election campaign, which will end with Tuesday’s election, reflects a modern campaign tradition in which leaders ambiguously go to and fro, nibbling at the edges of issues and then retracing their steps. This past week, for instance, Liberal premier Jean Charest said he would urge Ottawa to apply Bill 101’s language strictures to the federal presence in Quebec — before backtracking. For her part, Pauline Marois dusted off a radical plan to exclude non-French speakers from elected office — before she too backed down.
My prediction is that the Quebec election will produce a result roughly analogous to that observed in Britain two years ago (which also was a three-way affair): the defeat of all parties.
In 2009, British voters routed a Labour Party that had squandered the prosperity and credibility built up by Margaret Thatcher and generally conserved by John Major. But the electorate was sufficiently skeptical about the new Conservative leader, David Cameron, with all his pandering and hokey photo-ops, that it denied him outright victory, and made him share power in the first peace-time coalition in Britain since one coopered together by King George V in 1931, with the unfeasible Liberal Democrats led by Nick Clegg, whose popularity has since descended to single digits.
Likewise, none of the Quebec parties deserves to win or has run a winning campaign, and this is part of the contemporary international trend. Even Germany, the West’s most successful country, will require Chancellor Merkel to perform some electoral gymnastics to hold her position, though she probably will, in a grand coalition with the Social Democrats, as nearly a fifth of the votes are divided between the old Communists and the “Pirates,” a cyber-anarchist/nihilist party in the most rigorous tradition of Teutonic philosophical pessimism.
Charest is the only one who makes any policy sense, as he has opposed the student demonstrations, which were an outrage in themselves and were promoted by Quebec’s unions, as well as by Marois’ Parti Québécois and the hard-line separatist Québec Solidaire. Charest has avoided insane tax proposals, though he has waffled feebly over the ancient bugbear of protection of the French language (despite the fact that polls now indicate that most of his supporters don’t speak French as their primary language).
Charest is facing the problems of being an uninspiring political operator without a large personal following. The economy is sluggish, there is plenty of evidence of financial improprieties by the regime, the province is tired of him, and he doesn’t have the sort of charisma that rekindles the faith of his partisans such as Duplessis or Trudeau possessed. While Marois fares no better in this category, the leader of the CAQ (Coalition Pour l’Avenir du Quebec), Francois Legault, at least enjoys some novelty, as a relatively new face in a new party.
Still, neither opposition party makes much sense. Marois is ambiguous about another trip to the referendary barricades; she wants to increase taxes on incomes above $130,000 and again on those over $250,000 — as well as boosting capital-gains taxes (something Legault, too, says he would do as premier). All parties want to protect Quebec companies from non-Quebec takeovers, the CAQ promises to cut electricity costs, and the PQ will impose the inevitable hydrocarbon tax. In French Quebec, leftist fads take a long time to fade.
The campaign is so lacklustre because all the parties are dancing around the Quebec problem without addressing it. Most Quebecers are not really interested in Canada, but aren’t especially hostile to it, dimly recognizing that their adherence as Canadians has been bought by transfer payments from English Canada; and they resent that fact. In their frustration at the impossibility of Quebec seceding — not only because it would be impossible to assemble a clear majority for a serious referendum question, but because it would be too harmful economically — some Quebec leaders are outbidding each other in their cultural oppression of minorities.
In the 1980 and 1995 referenda, there at least was the appearance that a bare majority on a trick question would tear the country apart, and Quebec seemed to have some ability to frighten Canada. Quebec nationalist dogma in those days was that English Canada was just an excrescence of the Anglo-Americans, whose chief purpose was to anesthetize the flowering Quebec nation, so long stifled by English money and the weakness of inadequately patriotic Québécois, but the future belonged to the true believers. René Lévesque and Lucien Bouchard — the only sovereigntists to win provincial elections, along with Jacques Parizeau — both lost faith in the project, and the Benjamin Franklin of Quebec independence, Claude Morin, proved to be an RCMP double agent.
Now Quebec has provincial debt as great as the provincial economic product. It is a public sector-heavy society that is productive only in some natural resources, and would collapse if the province seceded, as transfer payments would cease and hundreds of thousands more Quebecers would leave. The political and economic correlation of forces is shifting to Ontario and the prairies beyond; 30 more federal MPs are being added, almost all of them west of Quebec, and the collapsed French Quebec birthrate is being replaced with immigrants whose knowledge of French is marginal in many cases, and who have little interest in the parochial fetish of Quebec independence.
What is needed, and will come eventually, is a Quebec leader and party that sells full participation in Canada with retention of the French language in those regions where its numbers make that possible; an ungrudging subscription to federalism with two official languages; and a return to the undoubted pecuniary vocation of French Canadian enterprise, not the dead hand of a clumsy, pompous, imitative, stifling public sector.
Quebec and its Quiet Revolution have failed, and its politicians have failed. The real revolution will come when Quebec looks itself in the eye and realizes where its ambitions and possibilities intersect.
National Post
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