Minister Jean Boulet said we need fewer immigrants and more robots. He told the magazine News. Not in the number that has been lying around for three years in your dentist’s waiting room, but in the one that is these days near the now more or less automated and robotic checkouts of supermarkets.
Will machines replace men by recreating the world indefinitely? For Jean Boulet, this is in any case the way of progress. “Everything that is repetitive becomes automated,” he says in News. Robots will soon replace immigrants for redundant work. This will be, in his view, the royal avenue to increase productivity and save money, as his government never ceases to wish.
Can a minister who essentially always repeats the same thing also be mechanized? A fake minister in the form of a real robot, is it coming soon?
For the moment, there is no question of seeing more immigrants, repeats Minister Boulet. He rejects the idea of raising immigration thresholds to counter the labor shortage, as demanded by the world of work.
In 1931, in the midst of the economic crisis, La Bolduc sang that in terms of productivity, “a Canadian was worth three immigrants” and that, in any case, we “cannot bear them any longer”. In his jig titled The book to Canadians, la Bolduc added that “it is not reasonable, when there is work, that it is foreigners who are engaged”. In this old song, to which Jean Boulet now adds a verse of his own, how many immigrants would a robot equal? And what is an immigrant’s life worth compared to a robot, for that matter?
Minister Boulet is obsessed with immigration. In December 2021, he launched a tweet in the ether of the Net asking Ottawa to “close Roxham Road”, this passage through which immigrants who want to apply for asylum in Canada pass. “We must all mobilize in the face of the rise in cases of COVID-19”, said this eructation, in order “not to overload our health system”. The Minister thus posed a curious equation, never demonstrated, between this immigration and contamination. To clear himself of his remarks bordering on xenophobia, Mr. Boulet hastened to say that “the human quality of the message is not optimal”. Maybe a robot would have done better, who knows?
Since then, his government has continued to make this Roxham road a kind of Turk’s head, which constantly insinuates that the entire future of Quebec is threatened by immigration. “We are clearly asking the federal government and Justin Trudeau to close Roxham Road,” Prime Minister Legault trumpeted again in May.
Let’s close it, Roxham Road! After all, only a little more than 800 km of the border between Quebec and the United States will remain to be sealed. A beautiful program in perspective for who wants to believe, as in the mid-1930s, that all our problems are due to unfortunate immigrants in search of humanity.
Note that he is full of charity, Mr. Boulet. The one who follows him a little attentively on social networks no longer counts the number of times we see him, tanned complexion and radiant smile, making an appearance at a charity work. He is not minister of “social solidarity” for nothing.
Formerly, such a ministry would have been called the Ministry of Good Works and Happy Thoughts. But, what do you want, times have changed. Didn’t you notice? However, the minister explained it to you: here we are in the era of robots.
What will the world be like in 2050, that is, when there will be robots everywhere? First, what is “the world”? From the point of view of the government in Quebec, it is first and foremost Ontario, the standard measure in all things. In News, we learn by listening to Mr. Boulet that the productivity of Quebec companies has been better than that of Ontario companies in recent times. Do we need more to believe more strongly in a bright future?
In 2050, according to various demographic projections, Ontario will probably have just over 20 million citizens, the majority English-speaking. Migration will account for almost 90% of this population growth. Will Quebec have about 8 million citizens and 2 million robots? Everyone would be happy in such a world. Should we consider further, in terms of fiction, what this could look like?
Imagine that there will be, in this radiant Quebec, neighborhoods of robots where you can eat a few dishes of bolts prepared by chefs from the robotic diaspora. In our unchanged CHSLDs, robots will still serve Jello and mashed potatoes made from powder. Another machine, this one responsible for Public Health, will ensure every week that everything is going to be fine. An android writer, consecrated immortal, will publish a book entitled How to have sex with a robot without getting tired. And everyone will sing of the robotic greatness of Quebec, of the cultural sun it represents to enlighten humanity. We will be proud.
There will no longer even be a need to conduct electoral campaigns on the backs of foreigners, as we did in 1930 or in 2022. The dehumanization and instrumentalization of the immigrant will belong for good to the time before the robots. . At least that will be real progress.