SIGNS OF THE TIMES

DECEMBER 1995

By Barry Stagg

Title: Quebec's Bourgeois Separatists

The referendum is won in Quebec. The "non" brigade, ragged and incompetent, staggered over the finish line a nose ahead of the surging republicans. The fevered separatists still remain on the battlefield, beaten but unvanquished. What is the source of this seemingly irrational quest for political freedom in the midst of our peaceable kingdom?

Militant Quebec separatists appear to come in large numbers from the government-fed middle class . They are essentially the bourgeoisie of a Quebec economy tilted toward socialism and government activism in the past 35 years. The mundane reality of this tilt is that the middling worker has confused a government backed pay cheque with one earned out of the revenue of private capitalism. Thus slothful academics and cynical civil servants can equate their security of income drawn from government bank accounts with Quebec economic health and vigor. Quebec has a social problem and a socialist problem . Spoon fed government sinecures grown fat on the payouts from dubious public projects believe that the pathetic make-work economy of the public sector equals an economic colossus. How else to explain the support that Quebec organized labor heaped upon the separatists losers?

Hydro Quebec is a prime example of the self-delusion of the Quebec bourgeoisie in the referendum runup. This utility is a dinosaur still insisting that huge northern dams and water diversions are profitable despite overwhelming lack of demand from the American markets. It is only with the still bountiful boost from Newfoundland's Churchill Falls project that this electricity broker maintains any headway at all. Despite the obvious weakness in the electricity business there are civil servants and Hydro drones who believe that employment nirvana will be reached by Hydro Quebec hiring on a few thousand more paper pushers in the new and powerful Republic of Quebec. Their delusion is all the more profound when it is revealed that this utility stands alone in Canada if not in all of North America in professing to be able to carry on as a private sector giant. Where Ontario Hydro has retrenched after years of huge losses and layoffs the Quebec geniuses persist in living in the 1970's . Fortunately for Quebec and horribly unfortunately for Newfoundland the 1970's were the years when Quebec made its most obscenely high profits from the province's sales of Labrador power. In one of the most exquisite ironies of this generation, the profits from the illgotten power of Labrador have dried up , leaving the sneering giant of Hydro Quebec holding a bag of unrealized expectations and a lot of smug and overpaid workers pretending to be lions of private industry.

The problems of a misled socialist workforce are compounded by the spendthrift irresponsibility of every federal government since the Trudeau regime began in 1968. In a crassly philistine effort to buy Quebecers love with our money, the federal cheque writers have gone further down the "make work' road in Quebec than anywhere else in Canada . Jobs and projects of scandalously transparent virtue have been shovelled into Quebec . The perpetually complaining separatist regards this flow of money as an axiomatic right, something that is a kind of redress for that nasty business on the Plains of Abraham. This has made for a provincial economy that uses its separatist complaint as a tool of permanent appeasement. The protected, pampered and sheltered economy of Quebec , backed by federal largesse has made a province of smug, insular and fundamentally naive citizens.

Naivete is an appropriate word of French origin to apply to the separatist cause. Only through the most basic acts of self-delusion and self-denial can separatists ignore the obvious facts that point to a Canada made over in their image rather than a Quebec modified to suit the rest of the country. How can the insular bourgeoisie of the towns and villages of the Quebec heartland refuse to accept that their present situation, rife with unbridled federal funding, is the ultimate social destination of the reviled "10-42" make work system now so roundly condemned in Newfoundland ? The unemployment boondoggle has been recognized for the corrosive scam that it is but Quebec seems hellbent on having at least its "pur laine" citizens outfitted for permanent dependency on playground socialist policies that are dying a fortunate death everywhere else in Canada. Does Lucien Bouchard want the federal government to designate Quebec as a Caucasian reservation where redress for phantom social debts is paid in perpetuity?

The cold hard facts of fiscal frugality are about to be inflicted upon a Quebec population stunningly oblivious to the debt maelstrom raging in the rest of the world. It would be sweetly ironic for Bouchard, the would-be Sun King, to preside as Quebec premier over the descent of that over-indulged province into the whirlpool of economic depression it has so foolishly and smugly brought on itself. Perhaps Canada's vaunted social safety net will look awfully inviting to the masters of cake-eating now standing on the abyss of Gallic self-determination.


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