In Quebec, like everywhere in the province, the news is in slow motion. It is perhaps partly for this reason that a story of a trip to Scandinavia involving Mayor Bruno Marchand is attracting attention. Scheduled for the end of March, this ten-day trip to Copenhagen, Helsinki and Malmö will aim to acquire knowledge related to the Québec tramway project. Unsurprisingly, the opposition criticizes the mayor for bringing five people and for having set the limit of the total expense allowance for accompanying persons at $36,000.
It is the custom in Quebec to be scandalized by such situations.
A few years ago, the President of the National Assembly Jacques Chagnon was criticized for offering wine and gourmet meals to parliamentarians. Quebecers had just gone through the Couillard years – marked by austerity – and some of them simply couldn’t believe it: so no crust sandwiches and orange juice were served to elected officials!
It makes you wonder if behind these protests are not hiding certain elements of our condition.
In the aftermath of the Quiet Revolution, some sociologists and historians argued that Quebecers had lived outside politics before 1960. These thinkers took too severe a look at New France and French Canada, but still rightly observed that we had difficulty understanding the very foundations of power relations, grasping the virtues of vertical order and, in this kind of situation, for example, accepting that the mayor of the capital does not discover Scandinavia on Google Maps.
The question deserves to be asked: if the opposition to the city hall of Quebec believes that the journey of the mayor is not responsible, how are our elected officials supposed to do their job? To learn, you have to meet people. And sometimes you have to travel to do it. Then, to spend ten days in Scandinavia, you must certainly fly, sleep in a hotel, travel there and eat. It’s the bare minimum.
Citizens, on the other hand, are quite right to expect hugely productive returns from their politicians. But in this case, is it fair to hope that the latter move on foot on the spot, buy groceries to prepare their meals and sleep in hotels far from the city center?
Upon his return from France and Tunisia, in the fall of 2022, Mayor Marchand made public his expense report: $3,000 for eight days. This included airfare, hotels and meals. Undoubtedly so as not to attract attention at the start of his mandate, the mayor of the capital had clearly traveled like a 21-year-old young person “in packsack “. However, at the dawn of a trip to one of the most expensive regions on Earth, he is still the target of suspicion.
Obviously, there is no question here of defending the abundance or even the expenses of such an idle and useless Governor General of Canada. Nor is it a question of forgetting that the West — as a whole — is going through a crisis of verticality, that the distance has narrowed between heads of state and civil society, to such an extent that Justin Trudeau had a handful of gravel thrown in his face during the last election campaign and Emmanuel Macron was slapped a few months ago. Nor should we ignore the economic difficulties experienced by the middle class. These certainly fuel the amazement at the possibility of a trip to Scandinavia. But this detour would distance us from the Quebec condition.
For a long time now we have been uneasy about money, power and even, when it comes to us, prestige. In the 1990s, Jacques Parizeau, nicknamed Monsieur, was advised to be less earthy, to give up the three-piece suit and to speak “popular” French. It was Lucien Bouchard, whom Quebeckers called Lulu, who saved face for the Yes camp in the middle of the referendum.
The modesty of Quebecers is a fine quality. But it need not be penitential.