It was with frozen feet, Common Front sign in hand and thinking about the standoff between state employees and the government that the thought of good old Nicolas Machiavelli came back to me. He is often criticized for having put forward an evil and depraved political philosophy. Nobody, in fact, wants to be called Machiavellian today. The reality, however, with regard to his thinking, is quite different.
Machiavelli never saw any particular attraction in doing evil. He believed, realistically, that acting morally was simply not a valid rule for those who would be called upon to exercise power. Consequently, subjecting good and evil to a greater imperative, the maintenance and conservation of power, would become the cornerstone of his thought. He was a pragmatist.
The effective statesman should avoid having his decisions undermined by the dreams and ideals of the people. He would be cold, calculating and would measure his success against a truly conclusive standard of measurement: his capacity, as head of state, to endure.
The recent setbacks of the Legault government, this disastrous poll and the approximately 566,500 state employees (and voters!), including 420,000 members of the Common Front, who are currently shouting their anger in the streets could lead some to believe that the The reign of the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) is showing signs of running out of steam. Machiavelli, I believe, would not draw the same conclusions.
If it is not reasonable to attribute malicious intentions to people who certainly exercise power to the best of their ability, we can still let ourselves imagine how a government should proceed if it one day decided to put an end to the existence of these two pillars of our society which are the public health and education systems. What advice would Machiavelli give to a head of state in order to proceed smoothly with the gradual but assured dismantling of this great ideal of society which consisted, among other things, of guaranteeing quality education for all? Allow me some speculation here…
About education
Machiavelli, I believe, would advise the decision-maker to heavily subsidize private schools and minimize the scourge of school segregation which is currently rife. We would allow the poor mastery of the French language observed among nationals of public establishments to continue. We wouldn’t make too much of the dropout. We would avoid as much as possible talking about the incivility observed in schools and the class management problems which ensue. We would invest as little as possible in infrastructure…
So, after a few years of underfunding and willful blindness, the case would be heard. The people themselves would demand the destruction of this ideal of the Enlightenment which consisted of offering an equal chance to access knowledge and we would relegate to the history books this mysterious era in which our people had believed that everyone should have right to a good education.
About health
It is going, I fear, exactly the same for the health system. A colleague once asked me if I knew how to get a person to swallow an elephant. By serving it to him with a spoon, he confided to me.
So here is what Machiavelli’s advice could well be.
Let private clinics occupy more and more space in patient care. Make sure, despite your promises, that you do not offer many citizens access to a family doctor. Encourage the exodus of health professionals to the private sector by making their working conditions within the public system particularly unattractive. Increase peripheral tasks, account reissue and bureaucracy to slow down the system.
Let private employment agencies take over the responsibilities that once fell to the administrators of public institutions and make taxpayers pay, because of these same agencies, $120 an hour to afford the services of a nurse in a hospital, for example. You will then have more than enough arguments to break this other societal ideal of providing accessible, quality health care for all.
Citizens, loathed by double billing – one that they find themselves obliged to pay to have access to the private sector, and the other that they pay through a heavy burden of taxes – will demand more ‘themselves the end of this system.
Machiavelli, always pragmatic, would certainly see undeniable advantages for the sovereign in the fall of the universal education system. Don’t we say that an ignorant people are easier to subjugate?
And if ever, fortunately, in a negotiation context where we seek to make state employees believe that they must become even poorer, a very clumsy politician only comes to offer citizens games (at five million dollars!), but forgetting the bread, Machiavelli would certainly insist that this unfortunate person be solely responsible for his mud. Thus, the people would finally have their scapegoat, which would allow the sovereign to take advantage of the diversion to continue to shamelessly dismantle these great and beautiful institutions with which the Quebec population had endowed itself in order to make its living conditions more just. and better.