Segacs's World I Know

Archive for the ‘Quebec sait faire’ Category

The student tuition protests have dragged on for 14 weeks now and show no sign of ending anytime soon. With the city under siege and anger rising, the media has been flooded with analysis and op-ed pieces of all stripes. But there are some things that nobody’s saying, probably because they’re afraid to rock the boat. That doesn’t make them any less true, though.

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How has this winter been lousy? Let us count the ways…

Hockey discontentment

The Habs just wrapped up their worst season in recent history. After finishing dead last in the East and the third worst team in the entire league. This season saw local favourite Mikey Cammalleri shipped off to Calgary in the middle of a game, coach Jacques Martin fired mid-season and replaced — albeit temporarily — by “maudite anglais” backup Randy Cunneyworth, and — finally — some housecleaning in the front office that saw Pierre Gauthier and Bob Gainey get the long-awaited boot.  The prospect of drafting high is small consolation to the fans, and it’s clear that we’re in for a long painful rebuilding process. Meanwhile, there might not even be any hockey at the start of next season, as the threat of lockout looms. Might be time to start taking an interest in another sport. The Montreal Impact just went MLS this season… any footy fans out there?

Weather discontentment

It was an unseasonably (some would claim unreasonably) warm winter, with very little snow and summer-like temperatures that saw crowds of spectators take in the St. Patrick’s Day parade in shorts. For those of us who actually like winter — and, y’know, for businesses who make money from it — it was a lousy year. Sure, the naysayers will be happy, but I’m still bemoaning my waste of a ski season. Enough with this global warming already; I miss winter, dammit!

Student discontentment

I’ve been saying it since my student days: Quebec’s tuition freeze needs to go.  And it looks like this time, it might well happen, as Jean Charest has sworn he won’t cave. Of course, the student union groups are having none of it, out protesting shit-disturbing as they claim they’ll settle for nothing less than free education. Never mind that the numbers don’t support their cause, or that the whole concept of a student strike is nonsensical when you consider that the only people it hurts are the students.

Public opinion is not on the side of the student groups this time around (unless you consider the ever-opportunistic PQ, always trolling for votes). Even many students have had enough, with at least one case of a successful injunction by a student who just wants to go to class and (gasp!) get the education he’s paying for.

The fact that Quebecers pay by far the lowest tuition in Canada and still will after the hike, or the fact that enrollment is lower here than it is in provinces with higher tuition, or even the generous increases in bursaries, none of those arguments are going to sway anyone. And that’s because the so-called students — who are actually political wannabes with romanticized notions of the 60s who enrol in one class per semester so they can live off the student fee contributions of actual students — don’t want to compromise; they just want their names in the paper, and maybe a chance to smash stuff.

And before you go accusing me of being dismissive of an important issue, we’ve lived this all before. Many times. I’ve written about it before. Many times. The only difference is that this time, something might actually change.

Francois Legault finally unveiled his new political party’s logo, which, erm, looks an awful lot like his old party’s logo.

The Coalition Avenir Quebec (or CAQ, for short, which really brings to mind a whole host of new acronym joke possibilities) was, if you recall, ahead in polls even before it existed. And now, Legault’s generic statements about wanting to move Quebec “forward” and “focus on the issues that matter” sound just like the tired same-old-same-old, even on the day he announces something that’s supposed to be shiny and new.

Barry Wilson of CTV Montreal called Legault the “flavour of the month” in an editorial that pretty much points out the obvious: Quebecers vote according to fads, which fizzle quickly. Witness the ADQ, which rose to official opposition status under Mario Dumont before virtually disappearing from the electoral map in the following election. Witness the meteoric “Orange Crush” rise of the Federal NDP this past election, which crashed and burned almost days afterwards when people figured out that they’d voted for unqualified candidates who couldn’t speak their language and had never even been to their riding.

Legault is repeating tired old clichés and avoiding saying very much. He’s getting a lot of media attention for it. He’ll have his fifteen minutes in the sun.

But it won’t last. We’ve seen this before. When it comes to politics, there really is nothing new under the sun.

I’m taking these results with a big shakerful of salt: A new CROP poll finds that a majority of Quebecers – 63% – are proud to be Canadian, and that 71% feel the sovereignty debate is a thing of the past:

In another sign that Quebecers are rejecting decades of political debate surrounding the Quebec sovereignty issue, the poll found that respondents were reluctant to identify themselves with traditional ideological brands. Only 19 per cent identified themselves as sovereignists, 20 per cent as federalists, 17 per cent as nationalists and eight per cent as autonomists.

The biggest portion of respondents – 37 per cent – did not identify themselves with any of those categories.

Which raises the question of terminology and phrasing. I’m not convinced that the national identity debate is dead; I think it’s just going through a re-branding. Words like “nationalism” and “sovereignty” are turning off the current generation – in both languages. But the sharp divide still remains, possibly reinforced by the Harper government’s massive lack of popularity here in Quebec.

Another thing going on here might be a sense of security. Quebecers, thanks to two generations of protections, now feel like their identity is less threatened than ever before. At the same time, they’re extending beyond borders. The struggles of today are more global and less local in scope, and the nationalism debate is going to naturally seem outdated to a bilingual francophone from HoMa who is organizing a G8 protest and campaigning for human rights in North Africa.

The point is, I don’t think that Quebecers feel more Canadian than they do in the past. I think they’re just less interested in talking constitutional debate.

Still, this is the first cautionary piece of good news that we’ve seen on the federalist side in ages. I’d like to see some reinforcing polling numbers over time, but it could mean good news in terms of how the next provincial election debate will be shaped. Especially if Francois Legault keeps beating the “beyond sovereignty” drum and forcing the other parties to talk about something else. Like, maybe healthcare, or infrastructure, or the economy, or issues of real concern to Quebecers of all political stripes.

One can hope, anyway.

More proof – as if you needed it – that Quebecers are bandwagon voters:

François Legault, who is on a 17-stop tour across Quebec to seek feedback on his ideas to reform politics in the province, says he is “humbled” by polls suggesting he would win a provincial election if it were held now, even though he still has not formed a party.

That, right there, says everything you need to know about the wisdom of the electorate. Or, more accurately, the lack thereof.

Quebecers don’t actually care about silly things like party platforms or issues. We just care about what’s new and shiny this week. (Orange Crush, anyone?)

Our roads, bridges, overpasses, underpasses, interchanges, heck, pretty much all of our infrastructure is coming apart at the seams. This weekend’s collapse of part of the Ville-Marie Expressway was only the latest incident in a long list of signs that our road system is literally falling apart.

Cartoonist Yvon Roy has proposed three new designs to Transport Quebec for road signs:

The critical problems with the Ville-Marie were known about as early as 2008. And, as with the Turcot, the Champlain Bridge, the Mercier Bridge, and – tragically, the De La Concorde Overpass that collapsed in 2006, city and provincial officials are long on finger-pointing and blame, and short on solutions.

The best example of a picture saying a thousand words might have come from the Catholic Church, which, last April, posted a billboard urging people to pray before driving across the Champlain Bridge.

Looks like when Josh Freed predicted that we might soon be prisoners on the island of Montreal, he was a little too close to the mark.

The sudden defection of four high-profile Parti Quebecois MNAs, including Louise Beaudoin, has everyone asking questions, and has Pauline Marois scrambling to defend her leadership of a party that can only be characterized as being in the midst of a full-scale crisis.

And everyone is asking, what the hell happened? How could a party that had a commanding lead in the polls, whose leader won a 93% confidence vote less than two months ago, and who most pundits predicted had a virtual lock on winning the next provincial election, be self-destructing like this?

The ostensible catalyst – a vote on a private member’s bill that would have guaranteed naming rights for a new arena in a bid to attract an NHL team back to Quebec City – was merely the trigger; the ingredients of this turmoil have been marinating much longer than that. That vote has been shelved now anyway, though it’s entirely beside the point.

So what happened in a mere two months?

Well, the NDP happened, for one thing. The media wanted to claim that the Layton sweep of Quebec – and the Bloc Quebecois self-destruction that accompanied it – meant that Quebecers had moved past sovereignty, and were embracing their role as part of a united Canada. Bloggers claimed that sovereignty is dead in Quebec.

Those of us who live here know different. We know that the NDP win here, coupled with the Tory win just about everywhere else, actually led to an increase in support for sovereignty in the aftermath of an election that made us feel more alienated from the rest of Canada than ever.

And the defecting MNAs from the PQ know it too. They see the tide turning, and they’re getting impatient. They’re pushing for a sea change. No more “winning conditions”, no more of Marois’s strategy – so eagerly backed just two short months ago – of putting referendum timing on the back burner and concentrating on winning elections and on governing. They don’t want to govern a province; they want a country. And they feel like fifteen years since the squeaker referendum of 1995 is fifteen years too many.

This position is being made clear by Jean-Martin Aussant, the fourth PQ member to defect and the most openly blunt about his reasons:

“I’m here to work on sovereignty. And I don’t think she’s the one Quebecers will want to follow, at a very high rate, towards sovereignty,” Aussant told a news conference.

“That’s a very cruel statement. It’s a hard one to say. It’s probably a hard one to hear, from them, but that’s what I think.”

And now former Premier Bernard Landry is speaking out, too:

Landry says the PQ has become too complacent and its members, who want a more strident pursuit of the party’s raison d’etre, are now pushing back.

“There are other things (causing this),” Landry told Radio-Canada on Tuesday. He said the pursuit of power should take a back seat to principles — like the quest for independence.

Such a move would represent a strategic shift for a party which, for more than 15 years, has placed its emphasis on governing or winning government — and has simply expressed its hope to hold a vote on independence eventually, whenever the conditions are right.

“Rene Levesque did not found this party to govern the province of Quebec,” Landry said Tuesday. “The obsession should be public service — not taking power. It’s better to take power later — but to take it with dignity.”

The Pequistes who are dialing up the sovereignty-now talk aren’t doing so off the cuff. They’re seeing the same things we are; hearing the same conversations, feeling the same winds in the air. They’re seeing how Stephen Harper in power and Jack Layton in opposition is making many Quebec soft nationalists re-evaluate just how Canadian they feel after all. And they feel like it’s time to strike while the iron is hot.

On the surface, the self-destruction of one sovereignty party and the turmoil of the other would be good news for federalism. Under the surface, it’s anything but.

So Louise Beaudoin says out loud what most of the PQ has been saying – openly or not-so-openly – for years: We only care about one culture, and that’s pure laine quebecois, and everyone else can shape up or get out.

Okay, not in so many words, but that was the gist of the Pequiste leader’s remarks to the press after a group of Sikhs were denied entrance to the National Assembly. They were there to speak out against Bill 94, a racist piece of claptrap that would deny services to Muslim women wearing face coverings, for instance, and is supported by an overwhelming 95% of Quebecers. This law as written won’t impact the Sikh community specifically, but the people who came out to speak up were there to represent the 5% of people who disapprove of the Quebec government’s attempt to further infringe on religious freedom for xenophobic reasons.

Now, there is a very legitimate question about the kirpan, and whether any kind of weapon – ceremonial or otherwise – should be permitted past security screening at the National Assembly. Beaudoin could have taken the high road, saying “we would like to hear from all Quebecers, and we invite the views of the Sikh community on this issue, and we regret that security concerns did not allow us to admit them” or something to that effect. It wouldn’t have solved the tricky kirpan debate, but it would have signalled an openness to at least discuss it.

But Beaudoin chose the low road. Specifically, she said that:

“Religious freedom exists, but there are other values,” she added. “Multiculturalism may be a Canadian value. But it is not a Quebec one.

“And we haven’t signed the constitution of Canada because it contains this notion of multiculturalism.

“I think we can be different.”

If by “different”, she means “more xenophobic”, then she’s hit the nail on the head. At least there’s no hypocricy in Beaudoin’s position. It’s getting harder to call racism one of Quebec’s “dirty little secrets” when it’s being promoted so openly. Quebec has never wanted to be pluralistic, accepting or tolerant. If the disastrous reasonable accommodation debates showed us anything, it’s that most people in Quebec would prefer us to turn into France and do away with religious freedom altogether.

Meanwhile, the Liberals missed an opportunity to take a strong position against Beaudoin and company. Charest’s team waffled on the issue, staying quiet and basically stumbling through an attempt to walk the fine line between not pissing anyone off and not pissing anyone off. All of that to cover the dirty little secret that, if it weren’t for the fact that the Liberals rely on the “ethnic vote” to get elected, most of them would be as opposed to multicultural values as their Pequiste compatriots. That’s some strong leadership we’ve got in Quebec City, folks.

My logical follow-up question to Louise Beaudoin is therefore this: If multiculturalism isn’t a Quebec value, how can we change that and turn it into one?

The other day, a conversation thread on Facebook about the online petition demanding Jean Charest’s resignation turned into a friendly debate/discussion about Quebec politics. The comments posted by a number of people were interesting and varied, and at one point, the discussion became about the accountability of politicians to the people they serve, and the nature of democracy, kicked off by the following comment by Phil:

My Quebec resembles the Swiss or Swedish kind of socialism way with shelter and food as a basic human rights, one where large decisions are made in a perpetual referendum where everyone vote and gets a say in where tax money goes. Out with representatives and in with True democracy.

Alexandre expanded on the thought in a follow-up comment:

The democracy you describe is strangely similar to the one I have in mind, one where each issue debated at the political level needs to be voted on by mini-referendums (by computer votes, secured, etc.). Ultimately, we could downsize the government significantly and use that kind of system to steer all the debates. Do you want an investigation on the construction industry: Yes, No… Political parties would then have 1 month on big issue and 2 weeks on smaller issues to inform, convince and steer the population to vote and then the vote would be held and the PEOPLE would chose the outcome, totally oblivious to any party in power at the moment, with no veto, no muzzling, just the people choosing their way. That would be true democracy.

I’ve heard these arguments before. They’re the basis for the anti-Charest petition, and, in fact, are at the heart of the political system itself. How much of an obligation do politicians have to vote according to the mood of their constituents? How far can – or should – they go in using opinion polls as a basis to govern? And at what point do they no longer represent the people who put them in office, by ignoring them too much?

We don’t live in a democracy. We live in a representative democracy. That means, we vote every once in a while for people to represent us and make the decisions of governing on our behalf. If we don’t like their decisions, we can vote them out of office. But we don’t put every decision to a direct vote, and I don’t think we realistically could, or even should.

A pure democracy would be impractical. It would get bogged down with the logistics of endless votes. It would cause a self-selection bias with low turnout and only the fringe minority casting ballots. It would force people to make decisions on issues that they know little or nothing about, because – unlike politicians – they have day jobs and can’t possibly keep up with every issue that elected officials and their paid staff spend time on.

And, more importantly, a pure democracy would be irresponsible, even if we could implement it practically. Why? Because a majority-rules only system has no built-in protections for minorities. “Do you want an investigation into the construction industry?” seems like a fairly straightforward question - if the population wants it, do it; if not, don’t.  But what about other questions, like, “Should people have to prove that they can speak French before being allowed to vote?” A 2007 CROP poll showed majority support for the idea, which went much further than even the Marois-proposed legislation at the time. How about, “should people be allowed to wear a hijab in the workplace?” Do we take France’s example and strip the rights of religious minorities, just on the majority’s say-so?

And hey, just look at what happened when the Habs started letting people vote on the three stars of the game. Agree or disagree with the old star rankings, at least they were usually reflective of the game itself, and players from the opposing team would earn stars if their performance merited it. Now, with Price getting top star virtually every game, it’s turned into a joke. Good thing it means next to nothing. But now imagine a similar system in place for things that actually matter.

Governing is already largely about a popularity contest. If governments stray too far from what the people want, they pay the price on election day. It’s why they already rely so heavily on polling data and public opinion in order to govern. But to take it a step further and assume that all significant decisions should be taken to a vote would be to make matters all that much worse.

No, I’m not in favour of the nanny-state approach or the “father knows best” idea of governing. I don’t think our politicians know best. I think we need lots of scrutiny and checks and balances to avoid letting them do whatever they want.

But I also think that decisions sometimes need to be made that aren’t just reflective of what the mood of the people is on a particular day. Sometimes, people with a little bit of inside or expert knowledge about a situation are better qualified to make the kinds of day-to-day decisions that it takes to run a government.

And that’s why a pure democracy wouldn’t work, and a representative democracy – to borrow an old, tired, Churchill-ism, is the worst system, except for all the other ones we’ve tried.

When it comes to so-called “universal” Medicare under the Canada Health Act, as the Globe and Mail reports, Quebecers are truly second-class citizens:

Under the portability requirement, every Canadian is entitled to full medical coverage, no matter where he or she lives, and provincial health insurance plans are supposed to be good anywhere in the country.

But that tenet is showing cracks at the Quebec-Ontario boundary. Quebec patients are turned away or pay out-of-pocket for medical services outside their home province, essentially denied portability.

[ . . . ]

And physicians inside Quebec have their own issues to contend with. Louis Godin, head of the Fédération des médecins omnipraticiens du Québec, says the government needs to resolve the problems in its home province before appeasing doctors elsewhere. Two million Quebeckers don’t have a family physician. Meanwhile, in the four faculties of medicine, 250 family-medical spots remained vacant over the past four years because doctors are paid roughly 30 per cent less than their counterparts elsewhere in the country. There’s a lack of medical infrastructure, especially along the boundary, which has resulted in a number of doctors moving to private clinics or simply picking up and leaving for other provinces.

Basically, what this means is that there are much longer waiting lists for elective procedures inside Quebec, due to a severe shortage of doctors and resources. So people go to Ontario to get health services. If they pay up-front and ask to get reimbursed by RAMQ, they’ll only get part of their money back — if they’re lucky. And many doctors in other provinces will refuse to see Quebec patients, because they’re strained enough meeting the demand from the local populace, and because of the bureaucratic roadblocks that get thrown up when they themselves try to bill RAMQ for their services.

This is an inevitable consequence of a system that makes federal promises but relies on provincial jurisdictions to carry them out. Quebec’s healthcare is a mess, and understandably, the rest of Canada doesn’t particularly want to enable or subsidize the mess.

If the Quebec government were truly serious about fixing healthcare, it would pay doctors as much as they’re getting paid in other provinces, make more spots available, and commit funds for infrastructure and services, to stem the steady tide of doctors across provincial borders. Canada already has a hard enough time hanging onto doctors who are seduced by the private salaries and perks south of the border in the US. But this inter-province competition needs to stop.

Of course, it won’t happen. Quebec will point a finger at Ottawa, at once demanding more funding, and then loudly decrying it when it’s offered as “interference” in a provincial matter. Biting the hand that feeds — nothing new for La Belle Province.

So if you’re living in Quebec and are one of the rare few with a family doc, consider yourself lucky. And if not, well, best hope you don’t get sick anytime soon.