It’s still all about Quebec
ELECTION FEVER The federal government has sacrificed many of the country’s larger interests in a vain attempt to buy the respect and affection of Quebecers, says Brian Lee Crowley
Afederal election is looming. We are already being inundated with politicians promising us many goodies. But don’t get your hopes up. Contrary to appearances, this election, like so many others, and like Ottawa politics since the 1960s, is not about you. It’s not about Atlantic Canada, or the West or Ontario. It will be dominated by only one issue, often unspoken, but no less real: Quebec.
In saying this, I do not criticize Quebecers, who are brilliant political strategists. The people who deserve our criticism are rather our leaders in Ottawa, of every political stripe, who have sacrificed many of the country’s larger interests in a vain attempt to buy the respect and affection of Quebecers. No one’s interests have been more sacrificed than Atlantic Canada’s. Prior to the late 1960s, we were closing the prosperity gap nicely with the rest of Canada. Our unemployment was consistently very close to the national average. Growth was strong. And transfers from Ottawa, the numerical manifestation of our dependence, were at a relatively low level. But around the end of the ’ 60s, Ottawa’s spending in the region was massively ramped up, chiefly through employment insurance and regional development spending. This caused massive disruption in the region’s economy from which we struggle to recover. Why? It had nothing to do with “ helping” Atlantic Canada, and everything to do with responding to the growth of the Quebec separatist movement by creating “ national” programs intended to foster dependence. Virtually all that has happened in regional policy since the late ’ 60s has not been aimed at Atlantic Canada — we have merely been collateral damage.
Ottawa is in a bidding war with Quebec city for the loyalty of Quebecers. Both sides regard it as axiomatic that, while emotion and sentiment will play their role, the most powerful ties between citizen and government are ties of self- interest. That, in turn, they define as dependence. A citizen dependent on a flow of benefits from one government will likely not vote to quit that government’s jurisdiction. Thus Ottawa ramped up EI, regional development, equalization, marketing boards and a host of other programs.
Similarly, Quebec wanted to show it could step into any void created by Ottawa’s absence. Accordingly, for instance, Quebec now spends more on business subsidies than all the other provinces put together. More generally, the taxes raised by Quebec’s provincial and local government are much larger than in the other provinces.
Last year, for example, such provincial and local taxes took 26.6 per cent of the province’s GDP; in Ontario it was 19.6 per cent and in Alberta a mere 18.1 per cent. The extra money finances Quebec’s bid for the loyalty of Quebecers, and the bidding goes on under both federalist and sovereigntist governments.
Ottawa finds it difficult to own up to the fact that much of its policy is driven by a fear of Quebec and an unwillingness to confront the nationalist movement directly. Consequently, many policies allegedly pursue other goals. But Ottawa’s true intentions are always revealed by their unwillingness to subject their policies to tough tests of effectiveness.
Thus, when Ontario started to make a fuss about the amount of money being extracted from its economy each year by Ottawa for redistribution to other jurisdictions, a federal minister was sent to make a speech, not defending Ottawa’s redistributive efforts, but remonstrating with Ontario for questioning it. The auditor- general asks repeatedly, in vain, for real tests of the effectiveness of regional development agencies. Such examples are legion. We cannot discuss openly and critically equalization, regional development, EI or a host of other programs to see if they actually do good, or if they, in fact, corrupt our politics, mire us in dependence, ruin our competitiveness and obstruct efforts to raise our productivity and hence our standard of living. When we cannot ask whether programs are actually achieving their stated goals because such questions might threaten the future of the country, you begin to understand what Samuel Johnson meant when he said “ Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel” and what Socrates meant when he said “ The unexamined life is not worth living.” Brian Lee Crowley is president of the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies, a public policy think tank in Halifax.