Green, to a point — Quebec eyes protests in France
THE YELLOW-VESTED PROTESTERS AREN’T THE VERY POOR. — COLBY COSH
Québec Solidaire, the far-left sovereigntist party that made a splash in the province’s October election, was ebullient this weekend as it met for its National Council. QS pulled even with the Parti Québécois in the seat count in October, and the gang could be forgiven for seeing this as a signal that it is taking over from a lame legacy movement as the preferred vehicle for the hard nationalist left in Quebec. On the global scene, localism and chauvinism of all stripes is having what looks like a good run. Large centralized neoliberal institutions like the government of Canada: not so much. Maybe this is truly Québec Solidaire’s moment!
Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, one of QS’s leaders, seems to feel this way. Quebec is ever alive to political stirrings in good old France, and Nadeau-Dubois did not hesitate to mention them in his introductory speech to the conference. The violent “gilet jaune” (“yellow vest”) protests in non-metropolitan France, he said, reveal that the Western world is “at the end of a cycle.” The protests, he argued, “demonstrate eloquently that without social justice, the ecological transition will never stand.” This leaves Québec Solidaire well positioned to imitate a movement that besieges “parliament and the streets” alike “without ever giving an inch”.
You can see what’s going on here. No one is too sure whether the gilets jaunes should be considered leftwing or right-wing, but the one thing everyone can agree upon is that they succeeded in blacking the eye of the centrist, corporate-friendly President Emmanuel Macron, who backed down on big ecotax hikes in the face of mayhem. Cosplay revolutionaries like Québec Solidaire will look for any excuse to praise a successful street uprising like this, even if it involves overlooking what is, at a bare minimum, a heavy right-wing National Front streak in the sea of yellow. The instinct to identify with successful anarchic violence is so strong that when this violence is ostensibly employed against pro-environmental policy, the ostensibly arch-green QS will grope for some formula, however absurd, that allows them to exalt it.
Macron’s cancelled tax measures were intentionally strong medicine. Past policy in France encouraged the nation’s land transport fleet to rely heavily on diesel, and so it now has an environmental problem of “path dependence” when it comes to cars for private use and small business. France is far behind neighbouring Germany in imposing taxes on automotive fuels. Macron, suffused with his own sense of being an outsider insurgent on the French scene, imposed a particularly big tax hike on the price of diesel.
This would have hit Frenchmen in the hinterland, and particularly those who use vans or light trucks in their work, especially hard. As an Albertan I can’t help sensing a rhyme with the political unrest in my own part of the world. The gilets jaunes include people who have real economic grievances, but there is an underlying purely moral, or even invidious, aspect. People living traditional working-class lives, which may include a little more car or truck than they need, don’t like being lectured by liberals from over there.
But I can perceive no more of a true “social justice” issue in the French violence, as opposed to inchoate resentment of a distant ruling class, than I can in the complaining here. Observers of Canada’s carbon taxation will say that France ought to have a cushion for the poorest, perhaps in the form of a flat per-capita rebate; and I will say to them “Uh, it’s France; you really don’t think they have something like that?” Beautiful Marianne, personification of the French state, sends a pretty big “energy cheque” directly to households that can be applied to heating bills. The yellow-vested protesters aren’t the very poor: the vests, which denote vehicle ownership, are a specific signifier of this. Their demands for tax cuts (and, in one circular, Frexit from the European Union) ought to make it even more obvious.
Well, if France has to disincentivize the consumption of diesel as an environmental imperative, that is going to be a little hard on operators of diesel engines no matter what. The French budget is in no shape to just be buying everyone Teslas and Nissan Leafs. Leftist critics of Macron are naturally proposing grand planning schemes as an alternative to nudging behaviour through taxation: one idea put forward was that more shopping malls ought to be built in the French suburbs so that scattered rural dwellers wouldn’t have to drive so much.
It is all a little reminiscent of Washington state, which I wrote about in November: there has been pretty broad support there for a carbon tax, but ballot resolutions that would have introduced one got beaten because the left didn’t like a revenue-neutral tax and business didn’t want gigantic expensive public works schemes that had nothing to do with climate. Everybody wanted to help the planet only in the way that suited their ideological predispositions. Nothing got done. Québec Solidaire’s green radicalism is blended with their advocacy of separation, and their love of anticorporate fashion signalling, in a sort of thick grey utopian soup. What happens if they ever need to unmix it?