Unions should not dissuade Quebecers’ solidarity

Ruminating over anecdotes of injustice and government mismanagement is a professional hazard, but I find myself particularly fixated on the case of Capitaine-Luc-Fortin elementary school in the town of Saint-Sébastien, near the U.S. border.

For almost as long as I’ve been alive, the school hadn’t been given a fresh coat of paint.

I’d think it’s likely some of today’s students were staring at the same worn taupe wall as their parents did.

There is no more perfect case study on the dysfunction plaguing the Quebec government and its bureaucracies, of what amounts to systemic collusion ravaging the public purse: Mayor Martin Thibert, who has children enrolled at the school, admirably decided to take matters (negligent maintenance of public schools) into his own hands in February by raising $3,500 and gathering volunteers to repaint the school.

“With help from precious partners and numerous volunteers,” Thibert told his constituents on Facebook, “we were repainting part of our school as a nice surprise to our kids coming back from break.”

In most places on Earth, gathering community members to repaint the local school would be seen on a spectrum of kindness somewhere between perfectly normal and extraordinarily kind behaviour.

In Quebec, where citizens are expected to accommodate even the most absurd technocratic protocols in the name of nationalism, this behaviour has been treated as deviant, bordering on criminal.

“Following a complaint,” Thibert wrote, “the CCQ (Commission de la construction du Québec) this evening turned up at the school and put a stop to the work …”

It has been essentially forbidden in Quebec to carry out volunteer work of any significance in public institutions, to protect union-sanctioned skilled labour.

There is of course some logic to preventing even the best Samaritans from conducting public works activities for which they may not be qualified or insured, or able to carry out safely.

Repainting classrooms that have been neglected for more than three decades is not the best example of labour so skilled and essential that government should be required to protect and police it.

The inspector, according to witnesses, demanded to see identification for all 10 volunteers, who were advised they’d be receiving fines, and “threatened to call the provincial police,” Thibert later told The Canadian Press. “My wife went home to get my ID because she didn’t want me getting arrested over painting a school.”

There is a happy ending to this story, though, at least for blissfully unaware children attending Capitaine-Luc-Fortin and the flush unionized painters of Saint-Sébastien: The school was repainted after all by governmentapproved workers making $94 per hour (that’s not hyperbole; painters, according to reports, made $94 per hour, which would have cost the school up to $120,000 had parents not started the job).

Last month, Andrew Potter resigned as director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada following the publication of a column where he clumsily argued that bungled response to a snowstorm exposed a lack of social solidarity among Quebecers.

I disagreed with his assessment of Quebecers, but wrote that, had he limited his criticism to the public sector and avoided bizarre generalizations, I may have agreed.

Saint-Sébastien, I’d like to think, is a rather clear demonstration of the divide between the public and the public sector. Quebecers have a fine sense of community, but are often stifled by the aforementioned nationalist technocracies.

Following public outcry, the Liberal government announced that restrictions on volunteering for minor public works projects would be loosened; FTQ-Construction leaders and nationalist pundits condemned the decision.

The $94-per-hour classroom painter is obviously not an example of the strides made by organized labour to provide a sustainable wage to working class Quebecers. Unions are now vigorously pushing back against displays of solidarity by Quebecers; Saint-Sébastien is the manifestation of a defeated labour movement that has all but abandoned its social mission in favour of crony capitalism.