Régis Labeaume came out of the closet. He is an independentist. Well, we knew that he was once a Parti Québécois candidate in Quebec. But time passes and beliefs fluctuate. Not for Regis. In his chronicle of The Press, he sets things straight. But he took a dislike to Paul St-Pierre Plamondon. Which is his strictest right. Régis has a generous hard tooth. He began a column on the Liberal Party of Quebec by announcing: “I will be heartless, rude and condescending. » Promise kept. Geneviève Guilbault is one of his Turk heads: GG, he writes, “does not think he is a 7-Up flat “. Those who link the housing crisis to the wave of immigration, like PSPP (and the Canadian banks), he wrote on January 22, are creating “xenophobic metastases” and are preparing for us an electoral campaign where “it will burp the old sure “.
In his latest text, Labeaume rages that St-Pierre Plamondon dares to mention the creation of a Quebec currency while René Lévesque in 1980 and Jacques Parizeau in 1995 wanted to keep the Canadian one. He imagines Parizeau “explaining the mysteries of life to the unseemly,” he adds, “with both fingers in his nose.” Ah, but here it is, dear Régis. What if Parizeau had, in the meantime, changed his mind?
First, what has happened since 1995 so that we can reasonably lean towards the Quebec currency? When I launched my leadership race in 2015, I had the intuition that our convolutions on the common passport, dual citizenship, the common dollar were harming, more than helping, our cause. These questions each have merit, but gave the impression that we were timid, part-time separatists.
As a generalist, I noted how the euro had entered into crisis and only played into the hands of the German locomotive to the detriment of neighboring countries, incapable of using monetary leverage to protect their economies. Brussels (in fact Berlin) has tightened the screws. The finance ministers of each member country must now submit their budgets to the European Commission. Will we see tomorrow the Minister of Finance of a sovereign Quebec having his budget reviewed in Ottawa in the name of the common currency?
We also saw how speculators went on a rampage to prevent States from using another’s currency, or from aligning theirs to the American dollar. In this new relentless context, a Quebec with the Canadian dollar would be an attractive target. Speculators would devalue his bonds to force him, in haste, to create his currency. Would it not be safer to follow the example of the majority of countries in the world – most of whose economies are less strong than ours – and to sustainably base our currency on our own strength and our own economic diversity?
Initially, market skepticism would undervalue our currency, ushering in a prosperous period for our exports and tourism. There would not only be advantages. We would have to overpay for our share of interest on the Canadian debt. Our imports, including oil, would be temporarily more expensive. Over time, our currency would stabilize at its true value.
I had discussed these questions with two renowned Quebec economists whom I cannot name here (I invite them to come forward), but who had, for one, drawn these conclusions, for the other, estimated that, in the new context, the two options were equivalent. Thus informed, I hastened to test this hypothesis with Mr. Parizeau. If I publicly announced this position, and then my former boss publicly lectured me, let’s say, “with both fingers in the nose”, I would be in big trouble.
Relief ! He was of the same opinion. He brought up a calendar argument. Ireland, he explained to me, had gained independence in 1922 while keeping the English pound but had announced that it would create its own currency in 1928. Which was done. (Its value, floating, de facto followed that of the English pound until 1979.)
He also opened up about it to Jean-Martin Aussant, to whom he was very close. “We discussed this issue at length, Monsieur and I, when I was writing the National Option platform in 2011,” Jean-Martin told me. As with me, Mr. Parizeau insisted on proceeding in stages. “He simply suggested keeping the Canadian dollar in the short term in order to ensure a certain continuity of business while Quebec would initially concentrate on restructuring its government machine” by absorbing federal ministries and civil servants, recalls Jean-Martin. “But he very clearly left the door open (wide open) to a sovereign state which would then decide to have its own central bank, and therefore its own currency. »
Mr. Parizeau cited Nobel Prize winners James Meade (who was his professor at the London School of Economics) and Robert Mundell on the optimal currency areas (optimal currency zones). For him, Canada was not one for Quebec. It was in fact after 1995, and especially between 2005 and 2015, that the Canadian dollar was doped with black gold, causing an artificial increase in the prices of exported Quebec products, destroying in five years 55,000 of our manufacturing jobs, a disaster that the existence of a Quebec currency would have spared us. Parizeau, keen on monetary policy, was perfectly aware of this.
Interest rates are not decided in isolation and those of Canada and the United States would influence ours. Mr. Parizeau explained that our central bank could decide to stick to the rates of its neighbors when it would be good for Quebec, or to distance itself when necessary. This is basically what we call, dear Régis, independence.