Where is the national question?

Everyone is professing astonishment at the bombshell Lucien Bouchard and friends have just dropped on Quebec. On his website, Paul Wells is even running a contest to name the most breathtaking declaration in the group’s manifesto, Pour un Québec lucide -- breathtaking, not only for its rejection of most of the nostrums by which the province has been governed for the past four decades, but of its principal author’s own past statements.

To be sure, there is a pleasing effrontery in the manifesto’s complaint that “the slightest change to the way government functions ... is met with an angry outcry and objections.” Yes, that would more or less describe the 1998 provincial election, when Jean “Slightest Change” Charest was savaged up and down the land by Lucien “Angry Outcry” Bouchard for daring to suggest some minor tinkering with the province’s reigning orthodoxy.

Likewise, it is a bit of a giggle to read, in Wells’s translation, that “the first condition of liberty is the ability to question the status quo without being hauled before the inquisition tribunal of the Quebec consensus.” There was a time when Torquemada Bouchard was one of the more ruthless enforcers of that same consensus. But then, there was a time when Mr. Bouchard would have scoffed at the suggestion that “there are no miracle solutions” to Quebec’s problems. Remember? Remember “Oui, et c’est possible”? Remember how sovereignty would resolve all issues, dispel all evils, “as if with a magic wand?”

But while it takes a certain panache to repudiate everything you once believed, without ever letting on that you once believed them, it does not quite amount to a revolution. After all, Mr. Bouchard has been doing that all his life. And while the document’s recitation of certain obvious economic facts -- eg Quebec is the most heavily indebted jurisdiction in North America, and (it might have added) the highest taxed -- may shock them on the Grande Allée, on the whole the document appeals as much to Quebecers’ complacency as to any latent appetite for radical change.

Thus, readers are assured that Quebec has “succeeded remarkably in catching up with the rest of Canada over the past half-century.” The “Quebec model” of heavy-handed political interference in the economy has been “one that has served us well, all things considered.” But, alas, “the world has changed,” what with people getting older and all, and “the formulas of the past will no longer be adequate.”

But the formulas of the past were never adequate. They could more accurately be described as disastrous, gusting to calamitous. The Quebec model is not a brilliant success that has sadly been overtaken by events. It is an unbroken record of failure. Quebec has not been “catching up” with the rest of Canada. It has been falling further and further behind.

But that’s a quibble. Where the manifesto is more genuinely lacking in vision is in its deliberate disregard for the one subject that cannot be overlooked: the national question. Talk about your elephant in the room! “Some members of our group are in favour of sovereignty,“ they write, “others believe that Quebec’s future will be better ensured within Canada. Despite these different points of view, we are all certain that whatever choice Quebeckers make, the challenges facing us remain the same.”

That’s not true, of course. Were Quebec to make a bid to secede, the challenges would without a doubt be immeasurably worse. Even the attempt would cripple the province. And while it is progress to hear the group declare that sovereignty would not automatically cure Quebec’s ills, they are still only half-way there. It isn’t just that sovereignty is not the solution. Sovereignty is the problem, and will remain so for as long as the subject continues to dominate debate in Quebec.

Where does the rigid conformity the manifesto decries come from, if not from the nationalist insistence on absolute solidarity in defence of the Quebec model -- indeed that such “consensus” is part of the Quebec model? What is the wellspring of the wishful thinking it deplores, if not the utopian dream of sovereignty itself? Why is debate in the province so stunted, if not on account of the organization of politics around a single issue?

The statism from which the group would wean Quebec is inextricably bound up in its nationalism. It isn’t just that statism is inherently nationalist, requiring as it does the cultivation of a strongly felt sense of collective identity to sustain it. It is also that nationalism is inherently statist. It is statist in its methods -- the shepherd state, forever chasing its wayward flock back into the nationalist pen -- and it is statist in its aims. This is most acute in nationalism’s terminal phase, separatism. After all, if you are prepared to sacrifice everything to have your own state, it presupposes a fairly strong belief in the state to begin with. As Jacques Parizeau used to say, the reason he was a separatist was that he wanted to get his hands on “the tools.”

Ergo: There can be no turning away from statism without also turning away from nationalism.