I love Pierre Fitzgibbon. Sometimes, not all the time. Not when he thinks he is above the code of ethics for elected members of the National Assembly. Not when his vision of economic development is to transform Quebec into an energy Dollarama, as the president of Hydro-Quebec said.
But Mr Fitzgibbon is about the only minister with the stature and ability to say that some of his government’s policies are just “press lines”, public relations that ignore reality.
Take his recent statement that Quebecers will have to learn “energy sobriety”. Start conserving electricity. Using the dishwasher late at night or turning the heat down when they leave the house and turning it up when they come home.
We can say that it is full of meaning and that we should have done this a long time ago, even if Hydro-Québec’s campaigns in this direction have not had the expected success.
We can also fear that he wants Quebec consumers to save electricity in order to have more of it to sell to large foreign consumers, either through direct sales or to aluminum smelters or other energy-intensive industries.
But Mr Fitzgibbon also sent another message. Contrary to the official attitude of the Legault government on environmental issues: either that we can achieve our greenhouse gas reduction targets without really changing our habits. That we can easily drive to a carbon-free Quebec while keeping our F-150.
If we want to be serious about reducing our consumption, we will have to take far more drastic measures than dynamic electricity pricing so that it costs more during peak hours.
And it is inevitable that we will have to change some of our habits and even some development models such as urban sprawl. Mr. Fitzgibbon is not quite there, but at least he knows that the change will not come if we are not able to arrive “in a cold house” rather than heating it when it is empty!
Another example is the immigration policy which would like to welcome 100% Francophone immigration and which is presented by the government as the best way to avoid the “Louisianization” of Quebec.
We had not finished announcing the policy that Mr. Fitzgibbon was already calling for exceptions to the 100% rule. And for good reason.
We cannot want Quebec to become a world leader in the battery sector and in the electrification of transportation if we cannot recruit, wherever they are, the best researchers, experts and technicians.
For example, said the minister, there are already companies, such as the South Korean Posco, which will soon set up a cathode plant for lithium batteries in Bécancour. “It’s clear that there aren’t many South Koreans who speak French,” he said.
Obviously. And this is also true in several other important sectors, particularly in the Montreal region, such as artificial intelligence, engineering, health or video games.
“It would be fun to have 100% [de nouveaux arrivants francophones], but you have to be realistic, you have to balance that with the needs. We have to make exceptions,” Mr. Fitzgibbon also said. Which is just common sense.
But the government, led by the prime minister, says it wants to achieve 100% francophone immigration. What is rather spectacular as a reversal: during the electoral campaign, the question of immigration was used by the CAQ as a scarecrow, the proof of the great danger for the survival of French. Now it has become the lifeline of French. That must be “doing judo”, to use a fashionable expression.
Obviously, none of this is going to help solve the labor shortage problems that we find everywhere, in the public sector as well as in the private sector. In big cities as well as in the regions. A problem that is on the way to becoming a real scourge in several sectors of activity.
And, on this, the Minister of the Economy does not question the position of the government. For him, the solution is to requalify the workforce, even if it will take much longer and the crisis is now.
As the President of the Board of Trade of Metropolitan Montreal said: “The available workforce that is already present in the territory obviously does not meet current needs. »
Well, we cannot expect a minister to always indicate his disagreement with his government. But I can’t help it: sometimes, just sometimes, I really like Pierre Fitzgibbon’s outspokenness.