Let’s lift this tuition freeze ASAP

February 4, 2007 (09:04) | Quebec, Politics, Economics | 4 Comments | french

If one thing should be dealt with decisively and courageously in Québec, before anything else that is, it would be to abolish once and for all the tuition freeze on all post-secondary education. Yes, I know many will disagree, but I strongly believe we should leave it to CEGEPs and universities (there could be exceptions, but they shouldn’t be the rule) to decide freely of their user-fee level. This is for the sake of literally everything we need to put our brains around, which is to say most of what is important to human beings on this precarious biosphere. If anybody anywhere had gotten the beginning of the start of a cogent argument to defend a post-secondary tuition freeze like the one we are stuck with in Québec, we’d have heard about it already. Way too many magical powers are imputed to low tuition, but the illusion is finally wearing thin, and it’s high time it does.

Now, it’s pretty obvious that the only reason this freeze is still on is our dysfunctional nationalist political equilibrium. But this is another of our little taboos. If it weren’t for the PQ pandering to idealist voters because sovereignty is supposedly worth whatever its cost, this would have been long gone. Sovereigntists who know better, fully aware of how this unsustainable thing would be lifted the very moment Québec would separate, are just letting the fat rhetoric around it swing votes that the Liberals have to compete for as well. This wouldn’t happen if the PQ was a normal political party, but it’s not, so it does. As a Liberal myself, who can’t stand the socially conservative and populist agenda of Mario Dumont, I still have to admit that the ADQ has gotten its platform right on the money, at least in theory, for both healthcare and higher education. At the point we got in this province, with the statist inertia we’re stuck with now, more market freedom in these areas is our best chance for more social justice rather than less. But the tuition freeze I think is even worse than the healthcare problem, if only because finding solutions to the latter means focusing brains on it, brains which the former is sending in all the wrong directions.

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Merde!

January 26, 2007 (17:43) | Quebec, Politics | 1 Comment | french

It’s been a while, I know. This blogging thing is pretty demanding after all, especially considering my long and convoluted thinking process, reflected in my long and convoluted writing style. Hopefully, I’ll get lighter and have more punch, but I don’t expect to get there before a few more months of learning-by-doing. In the meantime, the shortcoming I most urgently want to get under control is my difficulty with expressing my views on something before everybody else starts looking somewhere else. Sometimes it seems like we’re stuck with a huge public attention deficit disorder - never enough time to go to the bottom of anything, or at least deep enough under the surface to make sense of it - but the truth is that resource allocation for collective awareness always competes with the requirements of action.

Enough with that, then. Let me get to the point that I want to make today. On the french twin of this blog, I will have done it in two steps (take 1 and take 2), two weeks apart. Here, I’ll do it all at once, testing, that is, a home-grown sociological hypothesis of mine on a couple of newsmaking surveys in Québec. In fact, a dozen days apart, two competing polling firms provoked highly concentrated debate about apparently unrelated questions, except for the fact of a generalized blame game about who should be held responsible for mishandling these complex questions. If this seems ridiculous, it could well be because it is. And then it’s already off the radar. Until it gets back on, obviously.

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How intelligent is your reading of the morning paper?

January 8, 2007 (12:24) | Canada, Quebec, Politics | No Comments | french

For my first reading notes in this blog, I decided to review a little book published in french in 2005, written by a literary columnist at Le Devoir, Montreal’s openly sovereigntist daily, a paper which in all fairness remains a major reference for anyone with an honest desire to better understand Québec’s political ethos. Louis Cornellier teaches french lit by day at a small town CEGEP (the intermediate level here between high-school and university), and reviews non-fiction for the paper. Like many of his colleagues, he makes no secret of his sovereigntist creed and of his strong social-democratic beliefs. Yet this little book which caught my eye is a sort of training manual for newspaper reading, titled Lire le Québec au quotidien, meant explicitly to assist citizens, including students obviously, who would want to read “intelligently” our three main french-language dailies: Le Journal de Montréal, La Presse, and Le Devoir.

However laudable the intention though, the project was obviously risky, considering the implied obligation for the author to take enough distance from his own biases and conflicts of interest. As a part-time teacher myself, and of economics for non-economists at that, this obligation is something I manage with extreme precaution, and I must admit I was somewhat skeptical of Cornellier’s commitment to maintain a fair perspective. In the end, although his efforts deserve praise in many ways, his essay is indeed quite misleading where it counts most, and in particular for those he intended to help.

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Unfinished business

December 31, 2006 (15:23) | This and other blogs, Politics, Economics | No Comments | french

Short post today. Well, relatively short. With the few scattered entries that I published since I opened shop, and with a learning curve still pretty hard to climb, I thought I should focus these final musings of 2006 on… 2007.

In fact, since I would rather wait for next year before I get in any more trouble, I will just take a little time now to walk around my garden, and identify these few main questions that I will try to raise, hopefully with some relevant insights, in the coming year. Two main questions really, one deeper, one less so. Well, they’re actually two sides of the same, which is basically this one: whatever will happen to the left? On the deeper side, will the left be able to rethink itself so as to confront the real world? And on the surface, how will it transform its own incarnation in this very reality?

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The tired sovereigntism of Bernard Landry

December 23, 2006 (09:32) | Quebec, Politics | No Comments | french

First, let me be clear about one thing. I do respect the intellectual battle that Bernard Landry goes on fighting for the benefit of Québec sovereignty, and I have no doubt whatsoever about his sincerity or his dedication for a cause which, according to his belief, is in the long-term interest of the people of Québec. I just hold a different belief, and if one thing could truly clarify the debate on the future of our Québec nation, it would be to agree, among both sovereigntists and federalists in Québec, on the fundamental proposition over which our disagreement is, really, a simple matter of prediction. For some, including Mr Landry, our society will see its language and culture thrive with more strength and vitality rather than less, if we choose to break up with our Canadian history and have a new country, whereas for others like me, this very same goal will be better attained if on the contrary, we embrace seriously the political partnership that we have with nine other provinces. Everything else is just rhetorics, strategy and opportunism. We are all worth better than that.

Yet once we agree to consider the real question, the sovereigntist doctrine is despairingly vacuous, at least as it appears in Bernard Landry’s recent letters to La Presse, including its latest, published on Thursday. Nothing, anywhere, to show that the resources necessary to further our culture’s development will be in any greater abundance comes independance. Nothing. Nada. What is there left, really, once we leave behind these absurd and scornful appeals to a collective dignity that is already so vibrant, honourable and confident inside Canada, as to reflect our sacrifice of some local maneuvering power in exchange for enlarging our influence in other ways, if only by holding a quarter of the federal power over a territory, resources and population included, of more than six times the size of ours? Or would one be asking to liberate a people from god knows what sort of bond, even if our new powers were insufficient to mitigate the consequences of further isolation between two oceans, one without human customers and the other even more insensitive before long to the french fact, including in its northernmost part? Mystery.

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Politics and cultural figures in Quebec: a healthy mix?

December 19, 2006 (11:52) | Quebec, Politics | No Comments | french

Sunday night, as he received his Masque - the Québécois Tony award - for best actor, former dancer with LaLaLa Human Steps Marc Béland ended his comments with a rhetorical “what are we waiting for, before we make a country for ourselves?” At least, I’m assuming it was rhetorical, otherwise one would hardly understand either the motive for asking it or the ensuing applause. And it actually left me with some uneasiness, not so much as a federalist - we get used to this, I’m afraid - but mostly as a Québécois myself. I mean, this is about how what we call here “la question nationale” is debated in that part of the public arena which is populated by those who provide the living material out of which our culture gets shaped. One would expect, rightly or not, that this group of people, more than any other, would want to speak to political issues without self-censorship or partisan rhetoric, and in a way that would point to the same universally human themes as those that permeate art and literature: love, death, inner conflict, letting go of the familiar, accepting the unexpected and opening to otherness. And yet…

No doubt this uneasiness of mine has its roots in a culture which has built itself on a collective will to survive past the trauma of Conquest - always that, yet again - a culture stamped with a reassuring sense of belonging to a predictable catholic territory - well, I’m not too sure really, and I certainly don’t want to lose myself in over-speculating on our history, with its already paradoxical character of a presumably liberating prison. But it is certainly not new that Québec artists, playwrights, singers or poets who do speak publicly about politics - and with Quebec sovereignty, the anti-capitalist discourse seems like a necessary corollary - do so in a strange quasi-unanimity, something which I think can justify anyone’s uneasiness.

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Back from the liberal convention

December 6, 2006 (17:10) | Canada, Politics | No Comments | french

For Québec federalists of all hues of (multi-)national loyalty, the last couple of months must have been quite a roller coaster, with its most intense drops and turns all concentrated in one single final greening day of the big red convention. It’s certainly been the case for me, that’s for sure. What an incredible rush, still sinking in and far from over, obviously. Now that the forces are realigning after an even bigger political surprise than Stephen Harper’s nation motion, a new landscape is starting to shape up that is quite fascinating, especially with our habitual predictive categories so wonderfully destabilized. No doubt the Liberal Party may just have made the riskiest bet around, but if the new boss plays his cards right, and he’s got some powerful ones, the dividends could be really, really huge.

Naturally, but only with the benefit of hindsight, some of what I just wrote will seem like absolute nonsense to the typical Québécois radical nationalist. In the latter’s point of view, and I know ‘cos I’ve been there, if one thing should have been expected from the Party of Pierre Trudeau, it was precisely its thoughtfully calculated selection of yet another “p’tit gars” of somewhere in Québec who would do the dirty work for the mean Anglo colonialists. I even bet you that some of our sovereigntist sisters, uncles, co-workers and friends, are just as convinced as your usual conspiration theory buff, that the whole nation thing around Michaël Ignatieff, that the money and power flowing to his campaign as well as to that of Bob Rae, were all carefully planned diversions to make Stéphane Dion “appear” like the choice of ordinary people, those with more hopes and goodwill than hard colonial power. As an aside, it’s quite interesting, although unfortunate, that what in english is called the grassroots may be so deprived of any real life force when we translate it in french by “la base” (the basis - as if a political party was an inanimate construction).

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Semantic roulette, Rex wrote. I call it conversation.

November 26, 2006 (16:33) | Canada, Quebec, Politics | 2 Comments | french

Seems like lots of Canadians have been surprised lately by an old skeleton coming out of its closet. For sure, the Québec nation saga must have crossed some imaginary line as it now appears that a (close to) unanimous motion in the House of Commons will be adopted tomorrow attributing something referenced by the word “nation” to something referenced by one or many different words starting with “Q”. Rex Murphy in the Globe, yesterday, called this exercise “semantic roulette”, as to lament the whole thing, obviously. But isn’t semantic roulette, when you think about it, describing marvelously what people do when they simply say something that could be misconstrued? Which is the case for pretty much everything we say in any meaningful conversation, isn’t it? I mean beyond “pass me the salt” or “two plus two equals four”, that is. Or maybe Mr Murphy was making some implicit reference to a way more dangerous kind of roulette playing, associated with yet another nation on the other side of the arctic. Certainly in this case though, the barrel is rolling for more than one perspective on our collective future.

Now, I don’t agree with much of the general rhetorics on either side of the battleground, personally. The idea that Québécois, Quebeckers, Québec - all of which I feel a sense of belonging to - form, are, is, have or quacks like a nation, troubles me no more than my choice of a brand of margarine. Yet I really can’t see why this needs to be construed as implying that Québec should necessarily be either an independent country or have some special status as a province in Canada. If having a Fête nationale or an Assemblée nationale in this province was such a menace to keeping the Rockies united with the Laurentides, somebody somewhere would have taken this up with the courts.

To me anyway, the important confusion is not between various Q-words or different definitions of a nation, but between the more or less (un)disputable objective fact that Québec is a nation, and the totally subjective reasons for this fact to be so. In particular the whole civic versus ethnic nation debate, or political versus sociological (as if some actual thing, apart from a theory or a hypothesis, could be “sociological”, like what? a sociological tree? a sociological poem?), this debate thus makes the kind of distinction without a difference that you would make if you spoke of a kitchen table that you can eat on, as being oh so very different from a table that has four legs.

Actually, if this civic/ethnic distinction is at all meaningful, it is only with respect to one’s own completely subjective sense of belonging to one or many nations. It’s his or her very personal nationalism, then, not his or her nation, that can emphasize his or her attachment to some civic or political contract beyond all “sociological” differences, as opposed to a loyalty to some or other shared historical and cultural background. In both cases yet again though, such emphases are somewhat artificial as on the one hand, the civic pluralist doctrine is in fact a product of a particular historic and cultural background, which one could easily argue belongs to all of humanity, and as on the other hand, the absence of more focused histories and cultures would make it completely incomprehensible that there would be individual nation-states in the first place. You can’t just have a particular nation because you want to. If your “wanting to” has anything to do with it, then there must be some reasons for your choice of belonging to a nation and not to another, and one doesn’t find this in outer space but in his own culture, for crying outloud. Unless I got it completely wrong, the same applies here to Canada as a whole, as to Québec as a part of it. As a nation within another that is; not necessarily as one province among ten.

That is another distinction that is not done properly either, in my view, as if we dealt with solid objects that can’t occupy the same physical space. The territory and people of Québec can very well constitute a nation while the Canadian national deal gives equal provincial status to a part of their political institutions. As a province in fact, Québec is certainly no more different from the other nine than its people are from other Canadians when it’s time to wait for surgery, to get a good job or to trust no overpass will fall on their car. Yet as a nation, one should not be surprised to see its representatives, both at the federal and provincial levels, gang up together sometimes to play the political game the way their shared history and culture tell them they should. What’s so weird about that?

In the end, there might be a relatively simple explanation for all the commotion, which is a pretty common interpretation here: that many Canadians actually fear that Québec, like some old-world dinosaur isolating itself from the grand destiny of truly modern Canada, is killing the dream for the perfect country. Whether this is right or wrong, we should discuss it calmly and respectfully. What does Canada really want, after all? An all-out honest and open conversation has been long overdue in this country, beyond the linguistic divide. Let’s just hope the “semantic roulette” can stop on the right number this time.

Fuzzy? Why fuzzy?

November 24, 2006 (16:01) | This and other blogs | 4 Comments | french

Well first, welcome everyone. Or anyone. We’ll see. This blog is thus the english-language unidentical twin of, you guessed it, Gauche floue. I consider myself, in fact, somewhat of a political left-winger, but it’s fuzzy. I’m also a liberal, in the political, philosophical, social and economic senses, but here also this is very fuzzy, for all sorts of reasons probably just as fuzzy. And I’m a Québécois, a Canadian, a North-American consumer with a judeo-christian background, and it would just get fuzzier if I went on.

Now, in my mother tongue at least, we speak of “artistic fuzziness” when we want to discredit a point of view as not being clear enough, but there’s nothing artistic here. I even believe, on the contrary, that fuzzy logic - yes, there is such a thing - is actually the best weapon there is against intellectual confusion and improvisation. It is rather, in my view, our over-simplification of the very idea of clarity which leads us much quicker to the worst logical mistakes. Because nothing requires that all things be either this, or either that. Most things are more like, a little this and a little that, yet this is what makes cogent distinctions so vulnerable to the pseudo-clarity offered by grossly exaggerated opposing perspectives, which are the bread and butter of what’s called demagoguery. The law of least effort doesn’t only apply to celestial bodies…

A little reminder, at this point, of the basic concept of fuzzy logic: the fuzzy set. The set of cats, in conventional logic, implies an unequivocal distinction between what is part of the set and what isn’t. It’s all or nothing, it’s a cat or a non-cat. No doubt, if it is one, you should, as we say in french, call a cat a cat (I wouldn’t bring you exactly where I’m going with a spade, as you’ll see). But what if it isn’t so clear that it’s a cat - should you forcefully deny this ambiguity? What if the set of cats was a fuzzy set? Isn’t a lion a cat, yet is it? A little? A lot? Completely? Not at all? Assign a probability between 0 and 1 to the fact that a lion is part of the set of cats, and you’ll have admitted that the lion can be a bit of a cat and a bit of a non-cat, depending on the context of a conversation, on the definitions implied by the speakers, and so on.

Here, I’m speaking of cats. We can agree that dilemmas of that kind can be easily clarified. But in this blog, I will want to discuss economic issues, ethics, politics, areas where, obviously, fuzzy concepts in this technical sense, abound literally everywhere. The ambiguities that such concepts can hide are a lot deeper and more complex than the mere confusions that natural languages will generate without much consequence, when it comes to domesticated felines for example. So there you have it. Fuzzy left. This is the perspective I intend to adopt, in a history of what we are that relies only on ourselves, without any hope for the helping hand of a God or a Nature that would have already decided what such a history should become, as is proclaimed by the right, again clearly or not. Yet this attempt can only be coherent, it seems to me, if it rejects outright any new paralysing metaphysics. We must renounce the false clarity of casual radicalism, and have the courage to search in the shade. I can be so full of myself sometimes… Then again, would I be blogging if I weren’t?

By the way, anyone remembers the joke about the economist who was looking for his keys under a streetlight? Well, some passer-by who just wanted to help asked to be shown exactly where the man thought he had lost them, and the economist gestured towards the end of an alley, far over there in the dark.

- ‘Cos here at least, he says to the incredulous passer-by, there is enough light to look for them…