“When we compare ourselves, we console ourselves,” says the adage.
Do you want to console yourself? Scan the headlines of the French newspapers every morning: you will realize that our cousins across the Atlantic are complaining about the same problems that we are complaining about.
Labor shortage, bullying at school, exhaustion of teachers and health workers, impact of the aging population, delinquency and incivility in the streets, universities plagued by woke cancer, drop in academic results, housing crisis, pressure created by the massive arrival of immigrants on the social safety net, etc.
And the bureaucracy.
The cursed bureaucracy that stifles entrepreneurs and discourages initiative.
The cursed machine
Certainly, our paperwork problems are not as acute as those which plague France.
In terms of bureaucracy, the French are the world champions in all categories. Thanks, among other things, to the stupid demands of the European Union which, if this continues, will soon force all citizens to fill out a form in triplicate in order to be able to go pee.
But we too are drowning in paperwork.
In recent months, I have interviewed many traders and small entrepreneurs in QUB.
They are unanimous: they are stifled by bureaucracy, rules of all kinds and forms.
- Listen to the Martineau – Dutrizac meeting between Benoît Dutrizac and Richard Martineau via QUB :
The same goes for doctors (this is one of the reasons why they leave the public system in such large numbers).
While the government allows foreign multinationals to circumvent the rules (think of the Swedish Northvolt which benefited from a “leave” from BAPE), Quebec SMEs are not entitled to any break.
Result: instead of encouraging our entrepreneurs, the administrative machine discourages them.
“We are not asking for checks or financial aid in hard cash, we are asking for a reduction in the rules,” as the representative of an association of small entrepreneurs told me. “Give us more freedom and more autonomy, and we will do the rest!”
The madhouse
“Our daily lives are increasingly invaded by administrative hassles of all kinds,” writes the American anthropologist David Graeber in his essay Bureaucracywhich won the Prize for best foreign essay in France in 2016.
As soon as we have to ask for information, bam, we find ourselves in Asterix’s madhouse.
“Do 1, do 3, wrong department, you need to go to this other person, etc.”
Photo Adobe Stock
Without forgetting the legendary: “Your call is important to us…”, a supreme insult which should deserve to its author the torture of the drop or that of the wheel.
“No population in the history of the world has spent so much time on paperwork,” continues Graeber. Bureaucracy has invaded everything, and the phenomenon, far from disappearing, is expanding.”
For this anthropologist (who launched the Occupy Wall Street movement), the tyranny of rules and evaluation is a form of violence that occurs daily at all levels of society, both in the public sphere and in the private sphere. The bureaucrats, he says, have set up a system of arbitrary extortion which, instead of irrigating innovation, creativity and imagination, dries them up.
No wonder small businesses are dying!