Un gnome d’État

La grève étudiante a déjà duré trois mois. Trois mois. Une grève étudiante.

On a dit que Jean Charest est à la tête d’un gouvernement illégitime, on peut discuter de sa légitimité mais il a été démocratiquement élu. On peut cependant affirmer que Jean Charest est un leader faible.

Je me demande ce que pense, par exemple, le président de la France quand il rencontre Jean Charest. La France est un État possédant l’arme nucléaire, la France entretient des liens diplomatiques avec Israël et les pays arabes, La France et l’Allemagne portent sur leurs épaules le destin de l’Europe. Le président de la France joue dans la cour des grands. Jean Charest est embourbé dans un conflit étudiant. Sarkozy se disait-il secrètement, en rencontrant Charest : “Casse-toi, pauvre con”?

Imaginons que Lucien Bouchard soit présentement premier ministre du Québec. N’aurait-il sermonné les leaders étudiants? Jouant de sa stature et de son autorité morale, ne leur aurait-il pas fait honte d’être en grève? On dira ce qu’on voudra de Bouchard, il a quand même imposé le déficit zéro en préservant une relative paix sociale.

Imaginons que Robert Bourassa soit premier ministre aujourd’hui. Ne pourrait-on imaginer qu’il aurait négocié avec les étudiants, qu’il leur aurait sorti des déclarations qui veulent tout et rien dire et même le contraire où chacun aurait vu une façon de sauver la face? Les étudiants seraient retournés en classe et, quelques mois plus tard sans doute, certains d’entre eux, mais pas tous, auraient eu l’idée que, peut-être, ils s’étaient fait un peu fourrer, mais peut-être pas vraiment.

Et comment le froid Harper aurait-il géré cette crise?

Jean Charest, comme un risible apprenti sorcier, a tenté de laisser le conflit s’envenimer en espérant en récolter les fruits politiques, et aujourd’hui la situation est pire que jamais.

Jean Charest dépose une loi spéciale pour protéger le droit à l’éducation. Voilà, le droit à l’éducation, cette formule, ce slogan, sera ce qui lui servira de pensée politique pour les prochaines semaines jusqu’à que ses faiseurs d’images lui pondent quelque chose d’autre. C’est ce qu’il répétera comme un autiste en réponse à toute question.

Aujourd’hui, c’est le droit à l’éducation ; hier, c’était “Nous sommes prêts” et “Les deux mains sur le volant” et “On ne veut pas envoyer les criminels à la télévision, mais en prison”. Le slogan comme pensée politique. L’abrutissante pensée politique de Jean Charest est à la pensée politique ce que le slogan publicitaire est à la philosophie.

Pourrait-on dire que l’éducation a été au Québec un instrument d’émancipation nationale pour un peuple qui était, il y a soixante ans, pauvre et sous-éduqué, un peuple de seconde classe dans son pays? Pourrait-on se demander si l’éducation, avec la recherche et le développement, ne serait pas l’avenir d’une petite nation face à la mondialisation? Pourrait-on se demander si l’éducation profite plus, autant, ou moins à l’individu ou à la société? Pourrait-on se demander, d’une façon plus pragmatique, comment nous avons l’intention d’utiliser les fonds supplémentaires que nous voulons ajouter aux budgets des universités? Peut-on se demander si il est bien sage de financer presqu’entièrement l’éducation de quelqu’un qui quittera le Québec dès son diplôme obtenu?

Non. Oubliez ces questions. Ces sont des questions d’un homme d’État. Jean Charest n’a pas cette envergure, ni cette stature. Ce n’est pas un homme d’État, c’est un gnome d’État.

Les grands esprits se rencontrent…

National Post, may 14th, 2012 : Today’s letters: Majority say it’s time for Quebec to go.

Last week, National Post letters editor Paul Russell asked readers: “Does Quebec have a future in Canada?” Approximately 60 people responded, with about 40 saying “no.”

Click here to read the letters…

 

Two Montreal Gazette articles that got my attention

The Montreal Gazette recently published two articles that got my attention by their unusual perspective.

First article. On april 19th, Janet Bagnall writes about our 7$ daycare program. The program, she writes,  “doesn’t cost Quebec, the federal government or any other province a dime. It is fully self-sufficient, bringing in more money than it costs in subsidies”.

Luc Godbout, professor of economics at the Université de Sherbrooke, is quoted saying : “We tax ourselves at a rate several percentage points higher. If other provinces want the same public services, they can pay for them by raising their taxes.”

If find interesting that Ms Bagnall, referring to Québec’s daycare program, uses the term “OUR” subsidized system.

Second article. On april 25th, Michael Holden, senior economist at the Canada West Foundation, writes an article aiming at setting the record staight about Alberta paying for Québec’s social programs.

He writes : “It is [...] untrue that equalization allows Quebec to afford services that are impossibly generous for Alberta. The equalization formula tells us that the Alberta government could collect twice as much revenue as Quebec (including its equalization payments) if both provinces had identical tax rates. In other words, Alberta could easily afford tuition rates lower than those in Quebec, and plenty more besides, if it was willing to pay for them.”

If find these two articles interesting because they take side with Québec. The way I see things, if Québec suffers from inequities of the federal system, anglo quebeckers also suffer along with the whole Québec population. Language debate aside, the economic interests of anglos and francos are the same. When a part of our income taxes finances Ontario automobile industry instead of forestry, it hurts everyone in Québec, francos, allos and anglos.

If find interesting to see The Gazette publishing two articles addressing conflictual economic issues from a Québec perspective.

The Reconquest of Montreal

Everybody knows for a fact that I am in favor of independence because I have been brainwashed by separatist propaganda and because I have attended the separatist factories that we call schools.

Interestingly, american Mark V. Levine’s The Reconquest of Montreal is the book that I have found to be the most interesting, the most fascinating and the most relevant about the language issue in Montréal. Perhaps also the most objective.

I have found in this book the narration of a profound social change that occured in not more than a generation, a narration and an analysis backed by facts and perhaps the most comprehensive figures that I have seen on the subject.

Interestingly, this book was written by an outsider.

Separatist’s bullshit? Somehow, Mr Macpherson does not seem to think so…

 

The man behind Angryfrenchguy.com

Is the guy behind Angryfrenchguy.com is a radical anglo hater?

For those who would like to know the man behind Angryfrenchguy.com, here is an interview with Georges.

He looks quite soft spoken and rational to me. I like his style.

Too bad he didn’t write anything for a while.

Acadians endlessly re-living past traumas over and over.

I recently briefly discussed the fact that the Great Upheaval was at the core of the acadian identity as a people with some No Dogs or Anglophones blog commenters.

Apparatchik, an interesting and articulated commenter wrote : ” I [...] don’t happen to believe that a person/people ought to self-define exclusively through remembered tragedies alone. [...] What I’m getting at is that re-living past traumas over and over doesn’t help us move on today. There’s a time to mourn, but after that it’s not right to keep re-hashing the same old sob stories. ”

I did not then take time to explain how the story of the acadians is much more that a sob story and it annoyingly stayed in the back of my mind…

***

The Great Upheaval is at the core of the acadian’s identity as a people. But do they endlessly re-live this past trauma over and over again? No, they don’t and it is something that outsiders completely misunderstand.

The 1755 deportation of the acadians is of course the founding event of their identity as a people. Before the deportation, they were french settlers in the new world. Sons worked the land that their fathers cleared, they had built villages and children would grow up and build their own houses. They lived in a historic continuity. After the deportation, they were refugees scattered across America and Europe, living in places where they were often unwelcomed and where they did not really fit, they lived in isolation. The world they formerly knew no longer existed.

This deportation is therefore the event that will define their identity as a people, but the deportation is only the beginning of the story.

Their story is also the story of the pride to rebuild together a church, a school, a college and to see the first son to become priest, lawyer or doctor out of this people once reduced back to subsistence farming.

Their story is about the joy of finding back lost relatives who too remembered the old stories of Acadia, the old songs, and the old ways, relatives who you could speak with in this language in which you could truely and spontainiously be yourself.

In 1847, Henry Longfellow wrote his epic poem Evangeline and the acadians recognized themselves in this story of courage and hope.

And in 1859, reading François-Edme Rameau’s La France aux colonies : Acadiens et Canadiens, they read at last, in their own language, their own history for the first time. Their story is about discovering that the story of one’s family was also the story of dozens, hundreds and thousands of other families. Their story is about discovering that you are no longer alone. And I think they must have enjoyed this newly found togetherness more than anyone because they knew the pain of losing it.

Their story is the story of a people that found back itself.

Their story is much more than the story of their darkest night, it is the story of those who never stopped hoping and  who lived to see the dawn that followed.

It is the story of a resurrection.

Montréal and Toronto, additionnal notes.

The number of head offices located in Toronto was already growing fast by the 30s, well before the rise of separatism.

One also sees that, after 1961, the number of head offices located in “other places” is also decreasing at a rate quite similar to Montreal’s. I would argue that it is because Toronto drained from Montreal but also from abroad since the metropolis of a country takes advantage of being the metropolis. (If there is ever one national financial market regulation agency, guess where it will be located? St-Jean New Brunswick? Guess again…)

(The first Montréal and Toronto post is here.)

Surprising…

From Globe and Mail Jeffrey Simpson :

“Quebec’s economy is doing better than Ontario’s, with a lower unemployment rate and a deficit more under control. Ratings agencies are warning Ontario and its institutions these days, not Quebec.”

(http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/jeffrey-simpson/with-separatism-on-hold-what-next-for-quebec/article2281051/)

 

Talking to a wall

Many english quebeckers say that this language thing is an absurd waiste of time.

I guess that you are saying something like : “This language thing hurts Québec’s economy and since we live in Québec, it is our economy too. Montreal could and should be in a better position that it is now.”

And when you are saying this, we hear something like : “Your language is worthed nothing and your society is a failure.”

One would say that we seem not to speak the same language…

A unheard rational argument

And the argument that our  linguistic laws hurt our economy by driving  anglophones and businesses  out of Québec is a rational argument. Yet, francophones do not seem to care. Isn’t it strange? Why is that so?

I see two tentative explanations.

First, we tend to see our history as the history of our people as french quebeckers, more than, let’s say the history of Montreal or of the territory. We see our history like this : we lived in the country, more and more of us moved to cities, we were second class citizens in the then english Montreal ; thanks to the quiet revolution, we got more educated, we improved our situation and we closed the historical gap between english and french. That Montreal of the 50s was economicaly thriving, we don’t really care since french canadians were not economicaly thriving.We see that our situation as a social group has improved over the decades. English Montrealers care a little more about the past economic thrive of Montreal because it was the thrive of their own social group.

Second, we tend not to see the exodus of anglophones as a catastrophy. (Please, take a deep breath and let me explain a little more…) We became the majority on our territory because of a high birth rate and because of the departure of scores of anglophones gone populating the newly developping Ontario (19th century).

The division of the province of Québec in Lower and Upper Canada made us a majority on our territory. For decades, we raised money to buy land from  english quebeckers leaving for Upper Canada (and later to Ontario). Since there was then a will to assimilate us by massive english immigration (a plan that failed, because, among other things, settlers preferred the warmer southern lands, geography again…), we tend to  see the historical english migration to Ontario as a good thing. We reconquered our lands without a single gun shot.

Also, one can see the rest of North America working like a safety valve. If, let’s say, all North America spoke spanish and that  english quebeckers could then not so easily leave Québec to settle eslewhere, one could think that our fights could be a lot meaner.

Necessity is not the mother of invention

“[...] historically, necessity has not been the mother of invention ; rather, necessity opportunistically picks up invention and improvises improvements on it and new uses for it, but the roots of invention are to be found elsewhere, in motives like curiosity and especially [...] esthetic curiosity.”

“Scientists are used to the fact that discoveries are often the unanticipated by-products of other intentions. It is the same in economic drift.” (Jane Jacobs, Cities and the Wealth of Wations, p.222)

An illustration :This man in Bangbok Thailand needed a mean of transport in flooded areas. He did not invent the tricycle. He improvised a new use and improved the already existing tricycle.