How many times did the aspiring premier of Québec solidaire utter the word “poverty” during his campaign launch speech? Zero. “Poor”? Same. “Workers”, “unionized”, “non-unionized”? Zilch. “Itinerant”, “welfare recipients”? They have probably been thrown into the dustbin of history in solidarity with the proletarians and the working class.
It did not take two minutes for Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois to identify the group of Quebecers now essential in the eyes of his political party: “The cost of living crisis is impoverishing the middle class,” he thundered. Well, that’s not quite correct, even if he’s not the only one to say so. As Statistics Canada tells us, in the last year, the most inflationary, the average wage rose (to 8%) more than inflation (to 7.3%). The middle class is not getting poorer, but inflation is preventing it from getting richer.
The absolute certainty, however, is that those on minimum wage only got a 5.5% raise late in May, 2.5 points below inflation for that month. this. It is, if we dared to name them, the poor, the workers, the non-unionized.
Maybe they’re crying out for help? Not in the speech of the supportive spokesperson, who informs us that “food banks are full of middle-class people”. He will name these new losers of the class struggle three times during his speech, to the exclusion of all others, sometimes called parents, families and elders, but never anything else.
This insistence on the middle class has been Justin Trudeau’s leitmotif since 2015. According to him, no one is more important than this hard to define mass of citizens, this catch-all expression that targets the vast majority of voters. According to tax experts at the University of Sherbrooke, 42% of Quebecers are middle class, but 56% think they are. A study by EKOS reveals that self-identification with the middle class jumps to 70% and beyond when earning more than $80,000 a year!
Québec solidaire was a left-wing, anti-capitalist party that fully assumes, with Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, its transformation into a center-left, social-democratic party. I do not denounce, I note. Its new love affair with the middle class is the result of this transformation, which responds to a pure marketing imperative. To keep its seats and get more, GND must hunt for new lands.
The grooming of the solidarity discourse is at this price. Solidarity prose has also been cleaned in its new platform of all the terms mentioned above, except for the word “poverty”, twice mentioned. Besides, the word “capitalism” does not appear there, neither capitalists, nor bosses, nor bourgeoisie or exploiters, only the “very rich”. At the time these lines were written, it is also impossible to find on the QS website the 2009 manifesto of Françoise David and Amir Khadir, To get out of the crisis: go beyond capitalism?. There is only one press release. Links to the original text have been severed, literally and figuratively. (It can be found online at the library of the National Assembly.) It is the great ideological solidarity cleaning.
It is known that at the start of the campaign, QS removed from its site a series of podcasts exploring “dangerous ideas”, such as the reduction of police funding, compulsory vaccination or the nationalization of the Internet. A spokesperson even said that the furtive presence on the site of the name of a candidate rejected since having liked a column by Richard Martineau had been “a technical problem”. Like what, among solidarity, self-censorship goes hand in hand with self-mockery.
But all of that is secondary. Justin Trudeau spoke very little about poverty and annoyed us with the expression “middle class” during his election campaigns. Once in power, he ensured that the poverty rate more than halved in five years (from 14.5% in 2015 to 6.4% in 2020) with a significant drop among children, thanks to the new child allowance. This is a considerable achievement.
The QS platform, including an immediate increase to $18 an hour in the minimum wage, points in this direction, like its desire to tax the super rich. But not the measures announced to curb inflation, which are outrageously biased in favor of the upper middle class. In fact, of all the anti-inflation plans, that of QS is, after that of the Conservative Party of Quebec, the least generous at the bottom of the scale. According to the calculations of the Parti Québécois economist Alexis Gagné-Lebrun, those who earn less than $25,000/year would only receive $300 with the solidarity workers. The most generous is the PQ at $2255. At the top of the scale, QS would send $2,300 to those who earn $200,000/year, more than all the other parties, and above all much more than the PQ, which would send them nothing.
This is because the GND team has chosen to give all citizens a QST holiday. Tax holiday for customers of the canteen as well as for those of four-star restaurants. Tax break for clothing buyers at Walmart as well as for those who frequent the big fashion designers.
In fact, in terms of fiscal progressivism, even the Liberal Party of Quebec is doing better than QS, by increasing the solidarity tax credit for the most disadvantaged by 25% (the PQ doubles the credit).
The campaign is not over and we can only draw conclusions by accumulating all the carrots and all the tax sticks of each. But for the moment, the solidarity pendulum has unfortunately left its penchant for the poor and benefits Westmount voters more than those of Tétreaultville.
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