François Legault expresses his concerns about the future of Quebec every week, but he rejects the idea of a commission that would look into the subject.
It was PQ leader Paul St-Pierre-Plamondon who made the proposal to him formally yesterday, in a letter.
Discredit
I hear you say: “Oh no, not another commission? »
Since the Charbonneau Commission, it seems that this type of exercise has been discredited. Claimed for years with horns and cries by almost everyone in Quebec (except the FTQ) it seemed, after long work, to end in a fishtail.
However, in the past, major commissions have enabled many advances in Quebec.
I mentioned here recently the Tremblay Commission on constitutional problems, launched 70 years ago by Maurice Duplessis. He was skeptical of his results. He had all the same decided, before it ended, to appropriate one of his ideas: the creation of a Quebec income tax.
The Séguin Commission in 2000 documented the serious problem of the “fiscal imbalance” and allowed the governments, both Landry and Charest, to put pressure on the parties in Ottawa to commit to resolving this problem. In 2007, Stephen Harper’s Conservatives offered hundreds of millions in settlement.
Problems
Current Canadian federalism poses serious, “systemic” problems for the Quebec nation. Even Quebec federalists recognized this in the past (the Ryans, Bourassas, Charests, Pelletiers, etc.), since they demanded a constitutional amendment of the Meech or Charlottetown type. Since then, almost nothing has changed in this deleterious structure.
Loss of demographic weight in Quebec; growth of unitary design in the rest of Canada; Ottawa’s dominance through spending power and thousands of key appointments: these and other phenomena deserve to be studied. In light of the specificities of our time, such as the ecological transition, which will force Canada to gradually abandon its status as an oil state. This risks aggravating old faults, creating new ones.
The Legault government, its conception of Quebec, is already constantly coming up against real structural problems: insufficient funding for health due to the federal blockage; immigration issues; Ottawa’s indolence in the face of the precarious status of the French language.
This is without counting the 21 promises contained in the “New project for the nationalists of Quebec” of the CAQ, published in 2015. Only one has been carried out – the constitutional recognition of the Quebec nation -, thanks to a unilateral gesture from Quebec , in Law 96.
Sub-Charest
The response that the Legault government gave yesterday to the idea of a commission seemed to come from a Charest cabinet from 2003 or 2007. The CAQ has made several “significant gains” for Quebec and “the magic solution for PQ is a referendum on sovereignty. However, the solutions could be federalist, fall within a federal framework.
It would still be necessary to want to solve the problems for real, not only to be “angry” for a few hours.