Last week, the CBC reported that a large number of employees in the video game sector in Quebec have been experiencing frustrations since the adoption of Bill 96.
If the government does not amend the most controversial clause of the law, which stipulates that government services will henceforth be communicated exclusively in French to immigrants who have arrived in the country for six months, we may well see a wave of departures among the 10,000 employees in the industry.
In Quebec, we are more than familiar with this kind of threat. If truth be told, they have been downright redundant for at least sixty years.
In his excellent biography of Daniel Johnson, Pierre Godin documents in an almost cinematographic way one of the first episodes of the “capital flight”. We are in 1967. Quebec is then entering a new era. Johnson Sr. is seriously ill and is resting in Hawaii. The FLQ’s bombs continue to go off, Jean Lesage’s Liberal Party suffered defeat a year earlier, Charles de Gaulle came to remind Quebecers that they could participate in history and René Lévesque is preparing to publish Quebec option.
For Montreal finance, this situation is a disaster. That’s why we decided to send the top French-speaking people from rue Saint-Jacques to Hawaii. Paul Desmarais, Marc Carrière and Marcel Faribault then hoped to take advantage of Prime Minister Johnson’s vulnerability and convince him to proceed with a strategic retreat. The businessmen rehearsed their pirouette well on the plane. Johnson’s “Equality or Independence” plan has already begun to upset the business world, you have to be reasonable after all, they keep telling him.
Tired, Johnson obeyed.
On returning to Montreal, the Prime Minister received a call from Jacques Parizeau, then a member of the board of directors of the Caisse de dépôt. The latter is categorical: no irregular transaction has been recorded on Quebec securities in recent weeks.
Yet these are the titles that would have flown the first if there had – really – been a wave of panic.
Three years later, two days before the 1970 election, the Royal Trust of Montreal staged another “capital flight” in the hope of discouraging the population from voting for René Lévesque’s Parti Québécois. Photos of the masquerade are published on the front page of all the newspapers the next day. Once again, the blackmail pays off since Quebeckers elect Robert Bourassa.
Examples like these, there are hundreds.
Every time Quebecers give themselves modest means to aspire to a more or less decent existence, they must come up against the specter of economic decline. In 1976, more than 200 head offices decided to leave Quebec following the election of the Parti Québécois.
However, as Jacques Parizeau recalled twenty years later, for three years in a row, “in 1977, 1978 and 1979, manufacturing investments increased in Quebec more rapidly than in Ontario. Long live political uncertainty! »
Faced with this new wave of blackmail that threatens to fall on Quebec with the adoption of laws 96 (Act respecting the official and common language of Quebec, French) and 21 (Act respecting the secularism of the State), the most uncertain among us would do well to revisit the courageous thought of Jacques Parizeau. A graduate of the London School of Economics and architect of Quebec Inc., the latter has never flinched before the bravado of finance, which is most of the time insensitive and hostile to the higher interests of the Quebec nation.
Faced with a Bernard Finestone, president of the Montreal Board of Trade, who advised Camille Laurin never to forget that he was after all only a powerless minister in the face of Anglo-Saxon finance, Parizeau replied quite simply: “Good riddance ! »
The same year, in front of the hostile parterre of the Chamber of Commerce, he interrupted his speech, looked up at the crowd and reminded them that “pride in being does not compromise prosperity”.
Jacques Parizeau understood that Quebecers are resourceful and have always found solutions since 1759. He also understood that crawling will never be one.