Getting it right on the war of the Isms (and Boisclair's fatal flaw -- hint: it isn't cocaine)

Chantal Hébert recently pointed out on CBC news that the two most popular leaders of the federalist cause in Quebec in 1995 were Paul Martin and Jean Charest. As no one new has emerged alongside them, and both have seen their popularity plummet, the obvious implication is that Canada's fucked.

A closer look, though, shows that the battle between 'federalism' and 'le souverainisme' is not at all what most English-language commentary implies. The first thing to know about English commentary about Quebec is that it's usually ignorant or deliberately misleading. Edward Said said that one reason people get away with such distorted protraits of the Orient is that no one knows much about the region. Similarly, Enlglish Canadians outside Montreal (and most English students at McGill...) know shockingly little about Quebec.

The two things all English Canadians should know right now is that Quebec-based Anglophones are historically associated with an exploitative, capitalist upper class, and that Jean Charest's miserable approval ratings have nothing to do with federalism, and everything to do with his neoliberal economic policies, which Quebecers have continuously rejected since their 1960s quiet revolution.

Jean Charest, much like Paul Martin in fact, is more distinguished by his neoliberalism than his federalism. Each of the two men believes in restructuring the state to replace government programs with market forces. Charest promised to replace Quebec's social-democratic model and is now trying his best to do so -- which is why he will lose the next election.

Paul Martin, meanwhile, doesn't have much to offer Quebecers either. His 'Canada' has a budgetary surplus because he demolished social democratic social spending in his 1995 budget (a 19% cut in program spending) and has used the resulting surpluses to pay down debt and cut taxes. The "fiscal imbalance", which makes Quebecers furious, is basically the imbalance between the federal government's piggish surpluses and the provincial government's bare coffers - an imbalance directly related to Martin's spendthrift ideology.

"Stay in Canada," Charest and Martin implore, "it's such a fabulous country, we're shrinking its government as fast as we can! Come on, stay, we can all be a big happy family in which each sibling competes against the other to be in the top 15% of Canadian income earners -- because the bottom 85% have all gotten poorer since the early '90s, thanks to our reforms."

Now, given that Quebec is the most progressive (i.e. leftwing) province in the country, as shown by polls and popular government programs, does it really make sense for neoliberals -- the Canadian economic right -- to sell federalism to Quebec? Without a question, the longer Canadian neoliberalism and Canadian federalism are allowed to be interchangeable, the more likely Quebecers will be to abadon a country -- and an ideology -- they don't believe in.

(Keep in mind, the Bloc is not just a sovereigntist party, it also espouses social-democratic ideals almost identical to those of the NDP; Gilles Duceppe did not even vote in the 1980 referendum because as a Maoist, he believed that workers across Canada should unite.)

It doesn't have to be this way. Either the Quebec Liberals or the federal Liberals could adopt progressive policies more in tune with Canadian and Quebecer values. Or, more promising, with proportional representation, the NDP could gain a foothold in Quebec and take on the mantle of Canada's progressive federalist party. As it stands, though, the first-past-the-post system is a formidable barrier to entry for them.

Here's where Anré Boisclair comes in. Quebec has never had a truly leftwing party of its own, for reasons many Quebecers have been at a loss to explain. Recently, the Parti Quebecois has been the province's left-of-centre grouping, but in an ambiguous way. Lucien Bouchard was an old Mulroney cabinet minister, and has recently declared support for economic policies similar to Charest's.

National liberation movements have a history of coalitions that submerge all social and economic currents into a single nationalist river. Quebecers share responsibility for having a Premier who represents the federalism of many Quebecers -- in other words, a break from referendum mania -- but the economic and social views of hardly any. Strangely enough, if Boisclair is elected as Quebec's next premier, the situation could remain the same.

There's been so much talk of his cocaine use, his homosexuality, the moderation of his sovereignism, and the fact that he's under ninety, there's been little discussion of how he would actually run a province, never mind a country. Well, a little story in the Globe and Mail gives us a hint:

But the more old-fashioned Péquistes and some younger restless tenants of independence are wary of him, seeing him as a smooth-talking neo-Liberal with a tepid commitment to sovereignty and a tin ear for their social-democratic ideals.

[...]

As minister of social solidarity in 1998, Mr. Boisclair tackled the issue of government spending cuts with the ruthlessness of an entrepreneur.

One controversial instance occurred with the demutualization of the Canadian insurance industry, the process where life insurers converted from mutual enterprises owned by their policy holders to publicly traded companies owned by shareholders.

Welfare recipients who were policy owners became eligible to receive shares worth thousands of dollars.

Mr. Boisclair's department was criticized for making no efforts to explain to welfare recipients that their new assets had to be declared and that they would lose their benefits and have their money seized by the government.

In one high-profile case, a single mother of two who got off welfare and opened a hair salon was left on the brink of bankruptcy after the government insisted she reimburse back taxes. That move and other cost-cutting initiatives angered anti-poverty groups that were lobbying the government for concrete steps to help the poor.

"[Mr. Boisclair] wasn't very receptive to our concerns," social activist Vivian Labrie recalled.

Most of this Globe story focuses on other things, but already we can see trouble brewing in paradise. How would Boisclair, who just got an MBA from Harvard, react to the Supreme Court ruling authorizing private health care in Quebec if he were in power? If the Liberals pass this law, would he repeal it and fortify the public system before holding a referendum?

There's a saying in Quebec that there will never be sovereignty because only the PQ would call a referendum; and because governments in power tend to annoy people, the population would express their anger at the government by voting 'no' in a referendum. Well, imagine the PQ governing with policies reminiscent of the hated Liberals. Not exactly winning conditions.

Boisclair knows this too. (Let's leave aside the conspirace theory that he doesn't even want to win the referendum.) Already cagey about his love for the white lady, he'll probably try to keep his economic cards to his chest until after a referendum. In other words, he'll call English Canada's bluff, betting that all we can come up with is more of the same. We should force him to show his hand, and we should make sure that when the chips fall, ours looks very different than it does now.