Canada 360° | resist work

After Félix Leclerc sang in 1972 that “the surest way to kill a man is to prevent him from working by giving him money”, his social-democratic detractors did not soon to be heard. Did he share with regard to those excluded from the labor market the prejudices exposed in Poor people (1978), by Plume Latraverse? Did he oppose the various income assistance programs?

In Acadie, the song tribute to unemployment insurance, UIC (1978), expressed a more fundamental disagreement with Félix Leclerc’s remarks, making even the most empathetic of social democrats uncomfortable: “I’ve been on the UIC for a year… We’re not Quebecers / Because we are made like that / We smoke and drink, and we don’t mind / In Acadie, long live the UIC”. Far from being isolated or unique to a single song, this uninhibited repudiation of wage labor continually recurs in contemporary Acadian popular song.

In 2018, Menoncle Jason repeated the 1755 position almost verbatim: “ [C]Isn’t it true that I’m going to break my back to work… if I could, I’d challenge ISIS [assurance-emploi] year round “. In his song, house wine (1999), Cayouche goes on to add, by suggesting that even the work required to be entitled to unemployment insurance benefits is too much: “We’re fine in Acadie / I don’t want to know anything about the UIC / we don’t hurt / and we are beautiful”. In The chain of my tractor (1994), the artist paints a sympathetic portrait of those who choose (like him at the time) to live on social welfare.

Humorous, even light, these songs are no less subversive, expressing a criticism of wage labor to be taken seriously.

Their initial problem is posed in the traditional song, Work is too hardtaken up by Zachary Richard (1977): how to emancipate oneself from work when one cannot emancipate oneself at work?

The answers provided go well beyond income assistance programs. The two most recent albums of the star Acadian system, that of Lisa LeBlanc (chic disco) and P’tit Belliveau (A man and his piano), thus meditate on the role of procrastination as a weapon of resistance to the culture of work performance. In Why do today (“what could you do tomorrow?”), Lisa LeBlanc questions the wisdom of the famous proverb, recalling that the task at hand is not necessarily more important than the well-being that one can feel in the present moment. Procrastination here offers a space of freedom that work deprives us of by urging us to be constantly In the juice. In tomorrow, the P’tit Belliveau sings practically the same refrain with the same gaiety and drawing on a musical style as original as the chiac disco that could be characterized as acadjone techno (the chiac referring to the French of the south-east of the New Brunswick, where Lisa LeBlanc is from, and the French acadjone from Baie Sainte-Marie, Nova Scotia, where P’tit Belliveau is from): “Tomorrow I’m going to mower the lawn / no, you won’t / Tomorrow I’ll train for a marathon / no, you won’t…”. He then asks himself ironically: “How is it that the only business that is greater than my ambitions / It is my desire to sit down and do no good? “. The answer can be found in the next stanza: “Hey, there’s always tomorrow… / I’m going to lower my head and have fun / Being like an animal oh! “.

Enemy of productivity, procrastination is here politicized, claimed as a weapon in the arsenal of the worker at odds with his work.

Some will see in this report adversarial at work reflects the economic alienation of the Acadians. The obvious problem with such an assumption is that real Acadia is no longer particularly marginalized economically.

Rather, the critique of work developed by Acadian musical artists should be interpreted as a response to the dominant discourse in North America according to which work is the privileged path to social ascent and happiness.

Hard work – subjectively judged as such, for all sorts of reasons – is a universally observable reality, both in Acadia and elsewhere on the continent; everywhere, workers legitimately seek to resist it. The intellectual and political relevance of popular Acadian song – and its commercial success – thus largely transcends Acadia, although this relevance is rarely recognized, as Acadian musical artists are most often confined to the role of party entertainers.