The news went virtually unnoticed in Quebec, but it certainly caught the attention of Premier François Legault and his Minister of the Economy, Pierre Fitzgibbon.
Posted yesterday at 9:00 a.m.
Frenchman Roland Lescure has been appointed Minister of Industry by President Emmanuel Macron. However, Lescure is more than a friend of Quebec, we can even say that he is a little Quebecer.
In the 2017 legislative elections, Lescure joined the president’s party and was elected deputy of the French in North America. He knows Quebec well.
Before making the leap into French politics, he spent ten years as vice-president of the Caisse de depot et placement du Québec, one of the province’s major financial institutions. Life in Montreal and his experience at the Caisse had a great impact on him to the point where, in a book published last year, Our totems and our taboos: let’s go beyond them! devoted to the blockages of French society, he drew inspiration from his Quebec experience to promote certain reforms in his country.
I met Lescure in Paris last February while writing a book on France. He told me how Quebec inspired his political action.
“I discovered in Quebec a modern society, on the move, ready to debate everything, open to experimentation and where prohibitions are few,” he says. This gives him a tremendous ability to adapt, to renew himself and even to correct his mistakes and his quirks. On certain aspects, Quebec is a benchmark. »
France, on the contrary, “is still a prisoner of totems and taboos which block its economic, social, human and even international development”. He talks about it in his book where, using anecdotes, real-life cases, in-depth analyses, he takes a critical look at his country and offers possible solutions often inspired by his stay in Quebec.
This experience allowed him to judge the efficiency of the Quebec administration and to draw ideas from it in order to apply them to the French administration. This has been characterized for decades by the interminable waiting time and the number of documents to be provided for a simple formality. He tells an anecdote in his book. “When I arrived in Montreal, I had to go to the Société de l’assurance automobile du Québec to renew my driver’s license,” he wrote. An official placed me in front of a blue panel, took a photo, asked me to wait: in thirty minutes, he came back, my license in hand. »
Ten years later, a completely different experience awaited him on his return to France. He had to redo his license and go to the prefecture where a long line was waiting for him. He presented all the necessary documents, but did not receive his license until three months later.
Roland Lescure has had enough of this way of working, especially as the horror stories about the French administration accumulate.
After the 2018-2019 yellow vest crisis, the government organized a major social debate across the country. Thousands of French people came to express themselves, sometimes in the presence of President Macron. Lescure was present. “I listened to them with interest, I remember the words with which the administration was qualified: inaccessible, centralized, slow, sprawling, technocratic, but above all and above all, complex”, he writes.
A consultation on the Internet revealed that 86% of participants consider that there are too many administrative levels in France, while nearly half of respondents claim to have already waived rights and allowances because of overly complex administrative procedures.
On the strength of his experience with us, Lescure suggested to the president, during a meeting with the deputies of his party, “to take the example of the Canadian organization, where all public action is brought together in a single service : Service Canada,” he wrote. This model would avoid being sent from counter to counter, from administration to administration.
About twenty days later, Lescure learned on the radio that the government was launching an administrative reform. It was embodied in the deployment of 2,000 structures, baptized “France services”. This single window will provide access to the main public service organizations. Lescure derives a great sense of personal satisfaction from this.
The Legault government’s international policy published in 2019 emphasizes trade, market diversification and the ability to attract investment. France is Quebec’s fifth-largest trading partner, but trade between the two holds untapped potential, says a memo from Quebec’s economy ministry released last year.
Let’s take advantage of having a friend in high places in Paris to deepen a political, economic and cultural relationship that is as exceptional as it is fruitful.
* Jocelyn Coulon was political adviser to the Minister of Foreign Affairs in 2016-2017. He is finishing a book on France which will be published early next year.