This summer, René Lévesque would have been 100 years old. Until August 24, birthday, The duty highlights on all its platforms the memory of the founder of the Parti Québécois, one of the greatest prime ministers in the history of Quebec.
This is the last place where one would have thought to find the governments led by René Lévesque. Yet it is in the economy that they left one of their deepest imprints on Quebec society.
An imprint made of left-wing values and pragmatism, and more in line with the continuity than in rupture with a major economic catch-up that began long before their arrival.
“Nothing in his personality or even in his nature led him to take an interest, and even less to be passionate about the economy, remembered René Lévesque, his former Minister of State for Economic Development, then Minister of Foreign Trade. , Bernard Landry, during a symposium on the subject in 2014. However, he contributed powerfully to the creation of wealth in Quebec and his influence was decisive in the very construction of the famous Quebec inc., towards which his instinct hardly attracted him. »
When we ask the question of René Lévesque’s economic heritage, we usually evoke his role as a minister within the “thunder team” of Liberal Prime Minister Jean Lesage, where he will, of course, complete the nationalization of the electricity, but will also participate in the modernization of the Quebec state launched by the Quiet Revolution. It was later, however, that he truly held the reins of power, when the Parti Québécois, of which he was the leader, won the 1976 elections. He remained in charge until his resignation in 1985, a few months before the defeat of his party.
After the 1976 election, “the first of all concerns was the economy,” said René Lévesque in his memoirs. Not only because growth was then marking time and the time had come to settle the hefty bill for the Montreal Olympics, but also because “the economic question in all its forms — business, employment, budget, finances — is ending by touching everything and vice versa”.
Place for Francophones
A slew of measures and economic reforms followed at a dizzying pace, including: the nationalization of automobile insurance, the law on the protection of agricultural land, the reduction of sales taxes on the threatened sectors of furniture, textiles and clothing, the organization of socio-economic summits, the launch of the Stock Savings Plan (REA) program, the Cullen-Couture agreement transferring the selection of economic immigrants from Ottawa to Quebec and, of course, the Charter of the French language, better known as “Law 101”.
“’Law 101′ is a profoundly economic law,” says economist and professor emeritus of the National Institute for Scientific Research (INRS), Mario Polèse. In particular, it imposed French in terms of the integration of immigrants, commercial signage and the language of work. It was also a “terrible social and economic shock” which is not unrelated to the departure from the head offices of several companies and about 200,000 English-speaking workers, often the most qualified, to Ontario or elsewhere. “This first had an economic cost. But it also freed up space that other French-speaking companies and workers were able to come and occupy, thanks in particular to the progress in education made with the Quiet Revolution”, observes the expert who described the economic catch-up and social des francophones in a recent work entitled The Quebec miracle. ” This is [la chaîne d’épicerie] Dominion and the [compagnie d’assurances] Sun Life who left, but were replaced by Provigo and other francophone companies. »
The first governments of the Parti Québécois also marked a break in terms of the social climate, observes François Vaillancourt, professor emeritus of economics at the University of Montreal. By adopting an anti-scab law and by organizing socio-economic summits where the government, employers and unions were invited around the same table, they put in place conditions that helped to pacify labor relations. in addition to opening places for dialogue to seek consensus on major issues.
Join a continuity
But for François Vaillancourt, the Lévesque governments were above all a continuation of what had been launched with the Quiet Revolution. In terms of human capital, “Bill 101” and the Cullen-Couture agreement brought immigration to reinforce the educational reforms of the 1960s, which enabled Francophone workers to catch up tremendously. In terms of financial capital, the creation of the Fonds de solidarité of the FTQ and the tax incentives to become shareholders in Québec companies under the Stock Savings Plan (REA) have added new sources of financing to what had begun to offer institutions like the Caisse de depot et placement du Québec.
In fact, to find the beginning of this great social and economic transformation of Quebec, we must not stop our gaze at the Quiet Revolution, but go back to the 1940s and the brief reign of the Liberal government of Adélard Godbout, believes Vincent Geloso, Professor of Economics at George Mason University, USA. It was notably from its Compulsory Public Education Act and the obtaining of the right to vote for women that the economic catch-up of French-speaking Quebecers began and that their government began to conceive that its role was not limited to building bridges and roads. “The Lévesque governments were more the result than a cause of this slow evolution. »
Statistical tools make it possible to estimate the impact that these governments have had on the long trajectory of the Quebec economy, explains the expert. “The conclusion is that this impact was slightly positive until 1980 and slightly negative in the second term, but all in all zero. That is to say that there has been no acceleration or slowdown in the economic catch-up of French-speaking Quebecers. Which is remarkable, when you think about it, with all the evil that some people say about leftist governments, which is moreover, nationalist. »
A pragmatic left
It’s that René Lévesque was not a left-wing separatist like the others, underlines Pierre Fortin, professor emeritus at the University of Quebec in Montreal, who was his main economic adviser in 1984 and 1985. was not an ideologue, but a pragmatist. Above all, he sought to advance the cause of Quebecers and a just society. »
The economist cites as an example the heartbreaking battle that his government waged against its own public sector employees during the terrible economic crisis of the early 1980s and which ended in the retroactive erasure of promised salary increases and entered into force a few months earlier. “Lévesque found it untenable and indecent to pay wage increases to workers who had job security when the unemployment rate was 16% and even 26% among young people. »
He was not an ideologue, but a pragmatist. Above all, he sought to advance the cause of Quebecers and a just society.
Pierre Fortin also cites the example of the minimum wage that René Lévesque decided to freeze after it was shown to him that, past a certain threshold, it was detrimental to job creation. Or the blessing he gave, in 1985, to the Canada-US free trade project because, he said, like Gaétan Boucher and Sylvie Bernier at the Olympic Games, businesses in a trade-oriented economy, like that of Quebec, could never win gold medals without rubbing shoulders with the best in the world.
“In these three cases, René Lévesque broke with what the left thought of his time and exposed his government to criticism, observes Pierre Fortin. But he did it in the name of justice and common sense. »
Mario Polèse shares this analysis. “I believe this is René Lévesque’s second great legacy that we still inherit. He is the father of our form of social democracy. His party could easily have taken a more left-wing turn, as Bob Rae’s NDP government later did in Ontario to the detriment of the economy. Instead, he showed that a balance could be maintained between social values of justice and equality and economic reality. »
It starts in the head
However, it is not an economic or financial decision strictly speaking that Pierre Fortin first thinks of when asked what was René Lévesque’s most important contribution to the prosperity of Quebecers.
“Its greatest economic impact was initially sociological. It was to show Quebecers — and others — that it was not true that they were born for a small loaf. To convince them that they could take charge of their own economy and make it a success. He was not the only one, of course, to contribute to it. But it’s not nothing. »