It is among other things for love that the economist Mario Polèse wrote the essay The Quebec miracle, recently published by Boréal. And since love is blind, there is also, probably, a certain blindness.
“It’s true, there is a declaration of love in there, he admits at the outset in an interview. Love is blind, absolutely, there’s probably some blindness to it. “It remains that he chose to speak of” this corner of the planet which [il] has fallen in love, Quebec ”, with the eyes of an economist, coupled with a sociologist. He can also speak about it as an immigrant, since, son of Austrians exiled in Holland during the war, then in New York, he arrived in Quebec, as an American, in the 1960s. “Which he then discovered was” self-conscious, had a feeling of inferiority. It was palpable, ”he says.
Since then, he has seen a real “miracle” take place, and the expression is perhaps also a joke since the ” priest ridden »Province, from the beginning of the XXe century, has become in a few decades more secular than France, which nevertheless led its own revolution. What Polèse argues is that the Canadians, whom France left behind, were, and still are, more politically aware than the clichés of the time suggested. And that this is what allowed them to become some of the “freest, most prosperous and (yes!) Happiest citizens on the planet,” he writes.
Political awareness
His first hypothesis, the economist improvising himself a historian, is that Quebec has not been such a small people since France left a population there, after all modest, in the hands of the English in 1760. “France has not left many people since the start of the colony. And the political behavior of these people is far from the behavior of an uneducated or lost people, he said. What I would like to say is that Quebeckers and Canadians were quite aware of their condition on the continent. “
Aware of the vulnerability of its position within English-speaking America, Quebec, formerly French Canada, played the card of survival, says the economist. In this regard, he mentions, for example, the revenge of the cradles, which was, after all, a guarantee of Quebec’s survival. He also suggests – is that an irony? – the Catholic Church as one of the foundations of the coming miracle. “After the Durham report, […] the only structured institution Canadians had at the time to survive was the Church, ”he says.
He also uses the term “miracle” in comparing Quebec to the United States, and in comparing its French-speaking population, once under the power of the English, to that of black Americans, even if, he admits, “French Canadians do not. are not descendants of slaves, have never experienced discrimination or systematic segregation of blacks. Any comparison like this, to be honest, is an affront to African Americans and the quite different kind of suffering they have endured.
The fact remains that, he writes later to describe Quebec emancipation, referring to the expression of Pierre Vallières, “the white Negroes have disappeared, but the black Negroes are still there, and the social gap between them and the White Americans is no less shouting than fifty years ago ”.
That said, it does not hurt to set the record straight for the pessimists when it comes to the quality of life in Quebec, and the spectacular ease with which it has survived the last century. This is what Polèse proposes to look at, adopting the gaze of the immigrant, certainly, but an immigrant who has gone, over the decades, from “them” to “us”, speaking of Quebecers.
Pragmatic above all
To sum up the political stance of Quebecers, it is the word “pragmatism” that first comes to mind. And it is besides this pragmatism, even a certain “opportunism”, which makes, in the current context, the idea of independence more “difficult to sell”.
It is also, according to Polèse, this pragmatism which makes Quebec more open to immigration than the world average. “If we compare ourselves to the world, Quebec still hosts an extremely high immigration rate,” he says. And if Prime Minister François Legault expresses reluctance about immigration thresholds, “we cannot qualify him as anti-immigrants”.
This pragmatism is also manifested in Quebec’s ambivalence towards Canada. “Quebec must always think strategically and geopolitically. We have no interest in Canada disappearing. We are both weak against the United States. Regardless of the type of solution, sovereignty-association or federalism, regardless of where we end up, Quebec has every interest in maintaining Canada. Not because we love it, but because it is a geopolitical reality. “
That said, no one is immune to abuses. And Mario Polèse, whose parents fled Nazi Germany, is in a good position to talk about it. “Of course, we are no different from other peoples, and stupidity can strike us too,” he says.