In The Quiet Revolution 60 years later, the group of researchers gathered under the direction of Stéphane Paquin and X. Hubert Rioux demonstrates that, far from disintegrating as is commonly understood, the Quebec State is on the contrary constantly developing and that it intervenes today more than ever, counting on the success, evident in the long term, of many of its public policies.
State-Provigo, free trade, zero deficit, reengineering of the state, austerity, Barrette reform, lark: since the mid-1980s, neoliberal attacks against the welfare state inherited from the Quiet Revolution have followed one another, culminating in the long reign of the Quebec Liberal Party, from 2003 to 2018. Sixty years after the election of the government of Jean Lesage, which was to lay the foundations of Quebec as we know it today, how is what should we call the “Quebec model”?
Back to the future
François Legault may well raise altars to the glory of Maurice Duplessis, as he did in the show’s end-of-year review Infoman, the chances of seeing the Quebec state return to the situation that prevailed before 1960 are virtually nil. “As an example, the Lesage government’s first budget amounted to just under $500 million, the equivalent of $4.5 billion today. Presented last March, the Girard budget was close to 125 billion dollars, which represents an increase of more than 2,700%, for a population increase of only 60%, ”says Stéphane Paquin, professor at the School. National Public Administration.
How can the continued growth of the Quebec state be explained, when the effects of the budget cuts of recent decades have been hard felt by the population? “There is a methodological issue here. Obviously, there have been cuts, tightenings, but, to get a fair picture, we must also consider the social expenditures that have been added,” he specifies.
Known, on the one hand, for having established a first era of austerity at the end of the 1990s in order to achieve a zero deficit, the PQ government of Lucien Bouchard created, on the other hand and at the same time, the subsidized day care and drug insurance, two measures that will increase the government’s annual expenditure by several billion dollars. Although of neoliberal leanings, the following governments generally continued Quebec’s historic commitment to social development, while, however, carrying out certain ill-advised reforms, which had the effect of weakening the Quebec model, particularly in the area of health.
In Quebec, we live like that
The resilience and persistence of the public institutions that make up the Québec model can be explained, among other things, by their interconnection and their strong social component. This distinctive dimension is due in particular to the presence of representatives of civil society on their board of directors and to the fact that in Quebec, the heavyweights of finance are respectively state corporations, union funds and the Mouvement Desjardins, a cooperative. A unique fact in North America. As for the community organizations, they are supported by the State, in a dynamic of institutionalizing the contestation. Government action is therefore carried out according to modes of consultation and “conflictual cooperation”, which, far from being perfect, nevertheless have the merit of initiating a vast societal dialogue. This living together constitutes a marker of identity that is less overtly ostentatious than the love of poutine and other objects of national pride, but possibly just as significant.
A sign of the lasting roots of the Quebec model, it was to the State that citizens naturally turned in the first moments of the COVID-19 crisis. A relatively new reflex, note also Luc Bernier and Daniel Latouche in the chapter they devote to the construction of the Quebec state. While Quebecers mainly deal with the provincial government in normal times, the federal government has offered them and businesses particularly generous emergency aid.
Is this increased social involvement of the Canadian state likely to change the relationship with these orders of government? “It is still too early to say with certainty, especially since the polls traditionally show a higher degree of satisfaction of Quebecers with the government of Quebec than with that of Canada. Federal involvement could, however, foster interest in the ROC for certain flagship Quebec social measures, such as those relating to early childhood, nearly 25 years after their implementation,” analyzes Professor Paquin.
Means for the future
In the opinion of the researcher at the Institute for Research in Contemporary Economics X. Hubert Rioux, who co-directs The Quiet Revolution 60 years later, Québec has powerful levers to operate the urgent ecological transition. Not only does the past choice to bet on hydroelectricity constitute an important comparative advantage, but the State can also count on mechanisms such as the carbon market shared with California and a significant capacity for economic, industrial and territorial planning.
In the spirit of the reforms of the Quiet Revolution, which put economic development at the service of social development, the researcher reminds us that the State is not an end in itself, but a set of means made available to Quebecers. and their representatives to intervene on the issues they deem to be priorities, while respecting the common interest. We only hope that the environmental question will not take too long to integrate its definition.