New bill will hurt readers, and may not help booksellers

It’s as if the members of the Marois cabinet sit around asking each other, “what else can we do to get the smart people to leave?”

The government has already proposed oppressive legislation containing new restrictions on English and its odious ban on the wearing of religious symbols by minorities at work in public services, which has the universities and hospitals warning of a brain drain.

Since the Parti Québécois does not have a majority in the National Assembly, however, neither of those bills will be passed into law in its present form before the next general election. Indeed, the government has already said it will not proceed further in this legislature with the language legislation, Bill 14.

So, in the meantime, the government is to introduce another bill to increase the price of books for those Quebecers both literate and affluent enough to buy them.

The bill, to be introduced in the new year, would limit the discount on the retail price of a new book. It’s intended to help independent bookstores that can’t afford to compete with chains by offering the same deep discounts.

This bill may have a better chance of being passed into law than the ones on language and religious symbols.

While the Coalition Avenir Québec party came out against the books bill immediately after it was an- nounced on Monday by Culture Minister Maka Kotto, the official opposition Liberals did not take a clear stand.

The bill probably wouldn’t be of much help to the independent bookstores that successfully lobbied for it, however.

It might eliminate a competitive advantage of the chains, but even then, it’s not certain that the independents could afford to offer the full 10 per cent discount allowed by the bill in the first nine months after a book’s release.

Even if they could, the bill still wouldn’t give them any new competitive advantage over the chains.

So its most likely effect would be simply to raise the price of books and discourage Quebecers, especially less affluent ones, from buying as many as they do now.

And they already lag behind other Canadians in reading rates.

For even on Planet PQ, where everything is seen through an atmosphere coloured fleurdelisé blue, the same laws of economics apply as on Earth.

You’d think the government would understand that. Only last week, Finance Minister Nicolas Marceau admitted that one reason the government will run a $2.5-billion deficit this year is that raising the provincial sales tax had discouraged consumer spending, reducing the revenue from the tax.

Kotto argued that books are not a commercial product like any other.

Yet his bill would make them less affordable. And it would treat the books sold by chains the way Quebec still treated margarine as recently as five years ago, forbidding the sale of yellow margarine to protect the province’s butter producers.

In addition to having an apparently shaky grasp of economics, the government doesn’t even know whether Kotto’s proposed legislation would actually work. It would try it out for three years, then decide whether to keep it.

The legislation could turn out to be a 21st-century equivalent of France’s heavily fortified Maginot Line, which the Germans circumvented in the Second World War. Kotto’s spokesperson told me the government doesn’t know yet whether the bill could be applied to prices charged by online booksellers based outside Quebec, such as Indigo and Amazon.

Kotto’s announcement fol- lowed last week’s proposal of a 15 per cent pay raise for members of the National Assembly. One of the arguments in favour of the raise is that MNAs pass more laws than other legislators.

That kind of productivity is not necessarily good, however, if the bill Kotto announced is any indication.