National Action - The social state necessary for independence

In their book published in 2021, Brief History of the Quiet Revolution, historians Martin Pâquet and Stéphane Savard tell us that February 16, 1983 marks the end of the Quiet Revolution. It's the day the ruling Parti Québécois adopted Bill 111, which canceled the wage gains granted to public and parapublic sector employees during the last negotiations, and forced the return to work of CEGEP professors and school teachers. of the public sector. The editorial writer for Le Devoir, Lise Bissonnette, called it "the most odious emergency law ever tabled in the National Assembly" (Le Devoir, February 16, 1983) because it suspended articles of the Quebec Charter of Rights and human freedoms.

The 1981-1983 recession had just increased the public deficit substantially and in September 1982, the President of the Treasury Board, Yves Bérubé, points out that the resources of the State are not unlimited. In Le Devoir of September 23, he invites the population to make painful observations. Quebec is experiencing the worst recession since the crisis of the 1930s and in this context, it is begging the unions to accept the rigor of the wage offers made by the government. Prime Minister Lévesque's cabinet is divided between economic ministers and social ministers (Martine Tremblay, 2006). For the former, the Quebec state must be made less burdensome, for the latter, the question of social justice must remain integrated into the national question.

This recession was caused by the US Federal Reserve, which had abruptly put an end to the inflation that had been raging since the beginning of the 1970s. It had raised interest rates above 20%, causing a severe global recession and stratospheric unemployment.

The Liberal Party of Quebec wins the December 1985 election. Several of its influential members are already involved, since the publication of the report of the Royal Commission on Economic Union and Canada's Development Prospects (Macdonald Commission) , in the application of its proposal to reduce the role of the State and to sign a free trade agreement with the United States. Through their political party, they are trying to implement these recommendations in Quebec, without much immediate success, because their leader, Robert Bourassa, instinctively fears such an upheaval. Privatize, deregulate, reduce the size of the state, the mood of global capitalism wants to return to the basic game, that of letting the laws of supply and demand play freely and abolishing all obstacles imposed by the social state. . We have just changed the paradigm, but for Bourassa, it is too much.

Curiously, it was Bernard Landry, Minister of Foreign Trade in the second Lévesque government, who showed the most enthusiasm. Not re-elected in the 1985 elections, he volunteered to become an advocate of the idea of ​​free trade. He sees in it the possibility for an independent Quebec to have access to a gigantic market of 255 million consumers and he promotes it as if it were a salutary virtue for achieving Quebec independence. Landry does not see that it is not the same free trade that has so fascinated him in Europe. This new version not only covers goods, but also services, government procurement, agribusiness, patent protection for multinationals and the right of companies to sue governments.

Jacques Parizeau also shares this vision. For him, fearing the “bad mood of English Canada, such an agreement with the United States would protect Quebec from possible commercial reprisals following a declaration of independence. This is because the free trade agreement which has just been signed with the United States and which will be extended to Mexico (NAFTA, 1994) is equipped with what we would call in computer language a virus whose function is to question the social state, the base on which the independence movement was erected to create the Quebec nation-state. Parizeau will recognize his error in 2009 in his book The sovereignty of Quebec. Yesterday, today and tomorrow.

According to the German sociologist Wolfgang Streeck (2014), the social state is the product of a compromise concluded after the Second World War between Capital and Labour. In 1945, the capitalist world was weakened. The United States shares the victory against the Nazi regime with the Soviet Union, which has been granted the task of dividing Europe into zones of influence. At the very heart of the American zone of influence remain important communist organizations which played an important role in the victory in Greece, Italy and France. The Scandinavian countries have a powerful neighbor on their doorstep, the Soviet Union, which arouses the curiosity of the working classes. Social democracy is developing there more than anywhere else. In this context, governments must soften capitalism by adopting the measures proposed by the British economist John Maynard Keynes at the time of the Great Depression.

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According to the latter, state intervention is necessary to stimulate private initiative in the economy even if capital retains the main role. In a downturn, the state can afford deficits that will be made up once the economy picks up. The goal is to achieve full employment and at the end of the war, as no one wanted to relive the unemployment nightmare of the crisis of the thirties, the governments agreed to support consumption by allocating resources for unemployment insurance and social assistance.

According to Streeck, this was the main element of the postwar compromise between Capital and Labour, as it would allow for continued economic growth, wage increases automatically indexed to the cost of living, constantly improved work and the regular addition of new social protections. This is what allowed the appearance of a new phenomenon: state interventionism in the economy. In Canada, it was the federal government that took the initiative, but Duplessis resisted such an encroachment of provincial jurisdictions, causing the long delay at the origin of the Quiet Revolution… which gave birth to the Parti Québécois.

Then, during the 1960s, the global elite began to discredit him, as they no longer saw the point in continuing to conform to this historic post-war compromise. She refused, henceforth, to consent to the State being able to redistribute wealth and intervene in favor of the common good. She realized that she was the one who financed this prosperity which allowed the working classes to contest it. But above all, towards the end of the 1960s, the fall in the rates of return on their investments reminded them annoyingly of the fundamental laws of capitalism.

Streeck therefore turns the explanation of the crisis that arose upside down. It was not the people who abused democracy by constantly demanding social investments which would have increased state expenditure, but rather it was the owners of capital who refused to pay what should have been their corresponding share in production growth. This renunciation of states to impose them made the social state, redistributor of wealth, an indebted state. In fact, the owners of capital had never accepted this post-war compromise. They seized every possible opportunity to get out of this straitjacket which imposed constraints on them on the fixing of wages, the obligation to contribute to social policies, the increase in the labor supply and the social advantages of companies to which they had previously consented. Their intention was to effect a radical return to the free market that everyone believed was a bygone era. No one could imagine, at the beginning of the 1980s, that one day we would return to an increasingly free market economy. Even less the Parti Québécois, which owed its birth to the late arrival of the social state in Quebec.

It regained some vigor under the leadership of Jacques Parizeau, who saw the opportunity to hold a second referendum. However, Lucien Bouchard, who became leader of the Parti Québécois three months after the No victory, demonstrated great political skill in his swearing-in speech by using the national question as a lever to reduce state spending. In fact, he took up the neoliberal discourse of austerity: public finances are in a difficult situation and each deficit increases the debt which limits the capacities of the State. He used a reassuring image: “giving taxpayers a breath of fresh air” without raising taxes or sales taxes in order to “loosen the straitjacket” and regain “room to maneuver”. Achieving this objective would make it possible to establish sovereignty on more solid and “more modern” bases. He originated the image of the family budget used to address the issue of growing public debt. However, polls showed that women were the first to drop out of his austerity regime, confirmed by the nurses' strike in 1999.

When he took power in 2003, Jean Charest had a clear path ahead of him. Its intention to raise tuition fees in March 2010 showed no openness to compromise with the university, union and student communities. He simply proceeded with the execution of his intentions to raise tuition fees by 75% as of September 2012.

The Parti Québécois once again missed its chance to reconnect with its origins. Prime Minister Pauline Marois gave mixed support to the students, recalling that we must first create wealth before distributing it. It only confirmed the break of this young generation with the Parti Québécois for whom unlimited growth means even more destruction of the planet's ecosystems. It was proven that one could not want to create a nation-state and reduce the role of the state at the same time.