Quotulatiousness

October 3, 2018

Quebec election results – Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) majority

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Global News rounds up the final poll results from Monday’s Quebec election:

After a 39-day election campaign, voters in Quebec headed to the polls Monday and elected the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) to power.

The CAQ, headed by François Legault, won a majority of seats delivering a crushing blow to the Quebec Liberal Party, who had held power for 13 of the last 15 years.

The CAQ was elected in 74 of the province’s 125 ridings, compared to 32 for the Liberals.

The Parti Québécois (PQ) suffered a double blow going from 28 seats to 9 and is once again without a leader, after Jean-François Lisée announced he was stepping down after losing his riding of Rosemont.

I really haven’t been following Quebec politics at all, so I didn’t know much about the CAQ’s stance on the issues. Here, cribbed from the Wikipedia page are some of their issues gleaned from the party platform (selective emphasis mine):

  • CAQ Leader François Legault has promised to reduce the tax burden of Quebecers. A CAQ government, he says, will further harmonize school taxes across the province, a tax cut valued at $700 million.
  • A long-standing party proposal is to create a Quebec version of Silicon Valley, which they’ve dubbed “The Saint-Laurent Project”. It envisions turning the Saint-Lawrence Valley into a hub of innovation and entrepreneurship, with the collaboration of universities.
  • Hoping to eliminate tens of thousands of jobs from the province’s civil service.
  • As premier, Legault says he would temporarily reduce the number of immigrants Quebec accepts annually from 50,000 to 40,000.
  • To qualify for a Quebec selection certificate, the CAQ wants immigrants to pass a values and language test. Immigrants would also have to prove they have been looking for employment. Some experts have questioned the legality of the plan.
  • The party favours decentralizing health-care administration, while maintaining a universal free public health care system, Legault was quoted saying “The important thing is the universality of care. … I do not want more private. Our public [health care] is a jewel of Quebec.”
  • Like the PQ, the CAQ also vowed to renegotiate with the Quebec’s medical specialists in order to cut their compensation by an average of $80,000 per year. Legault believes the specialists will be open to striking a new deal.
  • Would overhaul the province’s longterm care system (CHSLDs) with a new network of smaller, more “humane” homes at an initial cost of $1 billion.
  • Wants to abolish school boards and replace them with service centres that would provide administrative support to schools. The party believes this would give schools greater autonomy and make the education system cheaper to run.
  • Wants to increase the mandatory age of staying in school to 18, to reduce the drop out rate.
  • Wants added homework help, extracurricular activities (sport and culture), additional funding for career guidance and tutors assigned to more vulnerable students.
  • The CAQ is also proposing to do away with progressive daycare pricing, though over a period of four years. All Quebec parents would be charged the same daily rate, regardless of their annual income.
  • Opposes the wearing of religious symbols, including the hijab, by police officers and others who wield coercive state power. The party would also ban school teachers from wearing religious symbols.
  • Would pass a “Secularism Charter” to reduce the scope of religious accommodations available to civil servants.
  • Calls itself nationalist. It wants more power for Quebec, but within Canada. Legault, a former PQ cabinet minister, has promised a CAQ government will never hold a referendum on Quebec sovereignty.
  • Legault wants to seek additional powers for Quebec, including control over immigration, increased fiscal capacity and a say in the nomination of Supreme Court justices. Some of these measures would require re-opening the Constitution.
  • Supports international greenhouse gas reduction targets and would promote “technological innovations to ensure their achievement”.

October 1, 2018

The rebirth of Quebec separatism?

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Conrad Black wants to provoke clinical depression in anyone who was around for the last round of Quebec separatism, and warns that we’ve been ignoring the issue while it’s been reviving in La Belle Province:

Canada is very late and very laconically beginning to consider the implications of the Quebec election on Oct. 1. If, on Monday night, as polls indicate, 40 per cent of Quebecers have voted for overtly separatist parties (Québec solidaire and the Parti Québécois) and 30 per cent for a party that declines to say separation is undesirable, only that it will not hold a referendum (Coalition Avenir Québec, or CAQ), no one should imagine that this is not a threat to this country. I have written here before that Canada would regret the refusal of Stephen Harper and Justin Trudeau to discuss methods of reintegrating Quebec into the Constitution, which would not have solved the problem permanently, but would have greatly strengthened federalism.

The issue of separatism appeared to die, but that is the nature of Quebec nationalism: it never dies, it just becomes comatose for a time. And though almost no one yet describes this Quebec election in these terms, the governing Liberals of Premier Philippe Couillard seem to be about even at 30 per cent with François Legault’s moderate left, constitutionally ambiguous CAQ. Legault was long an explicit separatist, and has not renounced that view (and his wife, Isabelle Brais, thinks English Canada has no culture and should have no status in Quebec). The Quebec Liberal party, like the British Columbia Liberal party, is really a Liberal-Conservative coalition. It governed very efficiently these past four years, but became an ecologically obsessed and eccentric regime. While it retains the support of most of the non-French, it is now pulling only a very unfeasible 17 per cent of the French Quebec vote.

Though the CAQ has been slipping, it has been losing ground to Québec solidaire, a rabidly separatist party that proposes immediate, unconditional secession. It is led by a declared Marxist who opposes the right of the State of Israel to exist, and, astonishingly, it may hold the balance of power in the National Assembly. It threatens to pass the original separatist PQ of former premiers René Lévesque, Jacques Parizeau and Lucien Bouchard, which hasn’t changed its tune but is whistling it more softly. The independence of Quebec has not been much raised in the campaign, but the implications of the emerging voting patterns assure that it will re-emerge.

And no discussion of the separatism question is complete without at least a nod in the direction of the Charlatan Accord:

The Charlottetown agreement on a substantial decentralization, put to a countrywide referendum in 1992, was defeated by 54 per cent of Canadians, though it had been approved by the federal parliament and all the provincial legislatures. Bouchard, Mulroney’s most prominent Quebec MP, deserted the government, founded the separatist Bloc Québécois, and led the 1995 referendum campaign in Quebec after Parizeau was elected premier. It was a slightly more explicit separatist question than Lévesque had posed 15 years before. Chrétien was over-confident, mishandled the campaign, and gave a slightly panic-stricken appeal to Quebec voters on referendum-eve. It was 50.6 to 49.4 per cent for the federalists, a clear separatist victory for the French Quebecers, and the turnout was 93.4 per cent.

Chrétien somewhat redeemed himself with the Clarity Act of 1999, based on the results of a Supreme Court referral, which held that any secession had to be on the basis of a substantial majority supporting a clear referendum question to secede. (I was one of those who urged that the Act also provide that any county in a seceding province that had voted not to secede and was contiguous to another province, should secede from the province and remain in Canada. My precedents, though I never got to cite them, were West Virginia and Ulster.) Lucien Bouchard lost interest in the idea of independence, and the Liberal party has governed in Quebec for 13 of the past 15 years. The present premier, Couillard, is the most unambiguously federalist Quebec premier since Jean-Jacques Bertrand in 1970, and it will not be long before he is missed by those in Ottawa who declined to discuss these issues with him. If he is out on Monday night, Couillard’s successors will blow a cold wind on Ottawa and across Canada just as the Trudeau government appears to be set to break up the relationship with the United States, and our automobile industry prepares to repatriate to the U.S. Justin might do better as the next leader of the Quebec Liberals.

July 20, 2018

No end in sight for our national fake poutine crisis

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Food, Humour — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 06:00

A few key posts from the Twitters to illustrate the problem:







July 6, 2018

Lac-Mégantic, five years on

Filed under: Cancon, Railways — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Five years ago today, we learned of the tragedy that had struck the Quebec town of Lac-Mégantic in the small hours of the morning:

Updates as they came in: initial post, locomotive fire, media access, still questions more than a week later, first anniversary, and the Transportation Safety Board report.

Earlier this week, Asad Iqbal reported from Lac-Mégantic:

Rail safety advocates say that five years after the Lac-Mégantic train derailment, not enough has been done to prevent similar tragedies from happening elsewhere in Canada.

On July 6, 2013, 47 people died when a train loaded with 7.7 million litres of fuel rolled unmanned into the downtown core and exploded in the middle of the night.

Commemorative events honouring the victims will take place throughout the day on Friday.

Meanwhile a citizens’ committee for rail safety and surveillance will mark the disaster by heading north to the neighbouring town of Nantes, where the train started rolling down the steep hill toward Lac-Mégantic in 2013.

“Five years after the tragedy we have not seen a significant improvement of rail safety measures,” said Robert Bellefleur, a spokesperson for the Coalition des citoyens et organismes engagés pour la sécurité ferroviaire.

The federal and provincial governments announced in May a bypass would be built around the town of Lac-Mégantic, Que. (Julia Page/CBC)

Tanker cars carrying dangerous goods are regularly parked at the top of this steep hill above the town, Bellefleur said, a disturbing image for people who drive past.

“The main risk factor that contributed to the tragedy is not even solved,” said Bellefleur.

June 14, 2018

The economic idiocy of Canada’s supply management system

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:03

Andrew Coyne, who finally seems to have weaned himself off the PR voting jag, explains the Canadian government’s idiotic yet deeply entrenched supply management bureaucracy:

How did supply management, of all things, come to be at the centre of everything?

The policy, under which farmers in a number of sectors — milk, cheese, eggs, poultry — are organized into government-approved price-fixing rings, enforced by a complex system of quotas and protected by prohibitive tariffs on imports of the same goods, has been in place since the early 1970s. It affects fewer than 15,000 farmers nationwide, who between them account for less than one per cent of Canada’s GDP.

Yet it has somehow become the central issue not only of our domestic politics, but of international trade talks. It was the pretext for Donald Trump’s decision to impose tariffs on imports of aluminum and steel, and is his most-cited grievance with Canadian trade policy. As such, it has become the rallying cry of preening political patriots, each of the parties seeking to outdo the others in defence of a policy whose avowed purpose, let us remember, is to make basic food items more expensive for Canadians.

It has also become a source of deep division within the Conservative Party. It was already, of course, thanks to last year’s leadership race, in which Maxime Bernier made its elimination the central plank in his campaign, as Andrew Scheer made its retention the key to his. Indeed, Scheer’s narrow victory was directly attributable to the votes of thousands of Quebec dairy farmers, who took out party memberships for the sole purpose of ensuring Bernier’s defeat. It is even possible the Scheer campaign encouraged them in this endeavour.

[…]

There is no serious case for supply management — a policy that is is as unjust, inasmuch as it imposes the heaviest burden on the poorest families, as it is inefficient; that locks out new farmers and deters existing farmers from seeking new markets; and that makes us look utter hypocrites in free-trade talks, not only with the U.S., but the rest of the world — and no serious person whose livelihood does not depend upon it would make it.

And yet every member of every party is obliged to swear a public oath of undying fealty to it. That all do, but for one, is a sign of the institutional rot in our politics. For they do so not in spite of its awfulness but because of it — because the willingness to say two plus two equals five has become the ultimate test of loyalty.

On other issues, that might be because of genuine agreement. But a willingness to sign onto a truly hideous policy like supply management — that’s certain proof an MP is a “team player.”

April 15, 2018

Stalin in WW1 – Quebec – Scottish Home Rule I OUT OF THE TRENCHES

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, History, Military, Russia, WW1 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Great War
Published on 14 Apr 2018

Chair of Wisdom Time!

April 12, 2018

“Bernier was accused, variously, of naivete, hypocrisy, vanity, divisiveness and sour grapes”

Filed under: Books, Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Andrew Coyne covers the “revelations” (that anybody who’d been paying attention already knew) about how the federal Conservative leadership race was won and lost from Maxime Bernier’s upcoming book, Doing Politics Differently: My Vision for Canada.

You would think this would be something of a scandal. The leadership race was hijacked by members of a vested interest who not only had no prior involvement with the party, but most likely wished it ill: what in civilized countries are called “entryists.” The winner of the race, the party’s current leader, sold himself and the party, not just to the highest bidder, but to a particularly venal bidder at that, with a direct financial interest in the outcome.

The result was to leave the party hitched to what is widely acknowledged as an indefensible policy, one that takes food off the table of the country’s poorest families for the benefit of a dwindling number of wealthy quota-owners. That the policy — combining internal supply quotas, sky-high external tariffs, and heavy doses of government regulation — makes a mockery of every principle for which the party allegedly stands is probably worth mentioning as well.

So naturally the response of party supporters, on being lately reminded of all this, was fury … at the guy who pointed it out.

That would be Bernier. In his forthcoming book, the plangently titled Doing Politics Differently: My Vision for Canada, a chapter of which was released this week, the former industry minister recalls how Scheer’s campaign courted the dairy industry’s “fake Conservatives,” who were “only interested in blocking my candidacy and protecting their privileges.” He notes the ballooning of party membership in Quebec just before the vote, from 6,000 to 16,000, and its collapse back to 6,000 shortly afterward.

And that’s about it. He does not attribute his defeat solely to his stand on supply management: indeed he thinks he won more votes than he lost over it. Neither does he question the legitimacy of Scheer’s victory — indeed he acknowledges that Scheer’s tactic is “fair game in a democratic system.” He merely points out that this sort of squalid trading of votes for favours is “why so many people are so cynical about politics.”

January 9, 2018

The Seven Years War: Crash Course World History #26

Filed under: Africa, Americas, Britain, France, History, India, Military — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

CrashCourse
Published on 19 Jul 2012

In which John teaches you about the Seven Years War, which may have lasted nine years. Or as many as 23. It was a very confusing war. The Seven Years War was a global war, fought on five continents, which is kind of a lot. John focuses on the war as it happened in the Americas, Asia, and Africa. the “great” European powers were the primary combatants, but they fought just about everywhere. Of course, this being a history course, the outcomes of this war still resonate in our lives today. The Seven Years War determined the direction of the British Empire, and led pretty directly to the subject of Episode 28, the American Revolution.

December 9, 2017

The unique culture that is Quebec

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Paul Wells on the latest blow struck in the never-ending battle against the English language in La Belle Province:

This is the thing about language politics in Montreal. It’s a game with many participants but few spectators. It’s addictive fun to play and unbearable to watch. If you’re not arguing about the state of the fragile equilibrium — standoff? Cold war? — between the local francophone majority and the continental anglophone majority, then you’re just living your life. And living your life is almost always very different from whatever the current argument is about.

The latest argument is so stupid I have avoided it for a week. Probably you have heard anyway. Quebec’s National Assembly passed a unanimous resolution urging merchants to greet customers with a hearty “bonjour!” The unstated subtext was that they should stop there and not add an incriminating “Hi!” in English. In fact, in the motion’s original wording, as presented by the Parti Québécois leader Jean-François Lisée, it wasn’t even unstated. The frequent use of “Bonjour-hi” by Montreal merchants was described as an “irritant,” until Quebec premier Philippe Couillard sat down with Lisée and haggled over the motion, line by line, eventually removing the bit about “hi” being an irritant.

Thus amended — essentially, Say ‘bonjour!’ to customers, because the English language is… well, you know — the motion was adapted unanimously by the National Assembly.

Unanimous motions of the National Assembly are believed, by its members and by about three staffers at Le Devoir, to carry a particular weight, because they mark occasions when the representatives of the Québécois nation put aside their differences to speak with one voice in sacred defence of the besieged descendants of France on American soil. Unfortunately, the rush of passing such a motion must be intense to the point of addiction because for many years now, the members of the National Assembly have been passing so many that by now the effect is ruined.

Here is a partial list of unanimous motions going back to 1960, including 15 so far this year alone. Five in November. On Nov. 14, the representatives of the Québécois nation put aside their differences long enough to demand a share of federal subsidies for electric-car recharging stations proportional to Quebec’s share of Canada-wide electric car sales. Come on. I’m a big fan of the National Assembly, but these days, it’s precisely at its most solemn moments that it’s the biggest farce.

December 6, 2017

The RCN doesn’t need a second supply ship, says Transport Minister Garneau

Filed under: Cancon, Military — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

David Pugliese on the latest military inanity from the federal government:

Pre-completion illustrations of the Resolve Class AOR conversion of MV Asterix

Politicians and unions in Quebec are turning up the heat on the Liberal government, questioning why Davie shipyards in the province isn’t getting any more work from the federal government. Davie converted a commercial container ship into a supply vessel for the Royal Canadian Navy. It was on time and on budget. The ship, the Asterix, goes into service early next year and under the agreement will be leased to the RCN.

Davie is ready to quickly convert another vessel into a supply ship.

But Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government has said thanks but no thanks.

Transport Minister, and former navy officer, Marc Garneau said the federal government doesn’t need another supply ship.
” We cannot artificially create a need for something that doesn’t exist,” he told reporters on the weekend.

An artificial need?

Seaspan shipyards in Vancouver and the Department of National Defence don’t project the first Joint Support Ship (being built by Seaspan) arriving until early 2021. But that ship would still have to undergo testing, etc. So, let’s say that the first JSS is ready for operations by the end of 2021.

That means that the RCN will have one supply ship to support its fleets operating on two coasts. How is that going to work?

October 29, 2017

The Poutine crisis – “Toronto is living a cheese curd lie”

Filed under: Cancon, Food, Randomness — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Toronto loves to adopt anything trendy and try to claim it as its own. Poutine, an imported delicacy from Quebec, early on was lovingly described as “the culinary equivalent of having unprotected sex with a stripper in the parking lot of a truck stop in eastern Quebec”, yet has been culturally appropriated as part of Toronto’s myriad of “local” dishes. Yet, according to this explosive investigatory report by Jake Edmiston, the so-called poutine that Toronto loves is … falsely labelled, inadequate, lacking a key component:

Some time ago, I realized that in Toronto, the cheese curds do not squeak. And cheese curds that do not squeak are a dangerous thing. They can trick you into thinking that cheese curds are just chopped-up cheese. The whole idea, to those unlucky enough to have never had a good one, must seem absurd: Eating cheese by itself, piece by piece in the same compulsive way that someone eats more chips than they need.

Think of the nightmare lived by a man scouring a city for chips that crunch but finding each bag stale. I am him.

As food-obsessed as it is, Toronto is living a cheese curd lie. It’s not always a popular assessment, though. One local cheesemonger took it rather badly.

“Who said that?” Afrim Pristine, the maître fromager at Cheese Boutique, demanded over the phone earlier this month.

“I say that,” I replied.

“You say that?” he said, confused. “Have you been to the Cheese Boutique?”

“I haven’t had your cheese curds yet.”

“So why would you say that?”

“I haven’t said it in print yet. I’m just saying that.”

“Okay. Um, I think you’re very, very wrong,” he said. “I think you’re incredibly wrong. To say that you can’t find good cheese curds in Toronto, I think, is crazy, actually.”

[…]

Curds are the butterflies of the cheese world — beautiful, transcendent, but only for an instant. They offer the rare example of cheese reaching its full expression as a snack unto itself, so airy and texturally complex that it is liberated from the usual dependence on crackers or bread or wine. Curds have been spared all the pressing and squeezing that occurs in the late stages of the cheddar-making process. They’re pulled right from the vat before any of that happens, still full of air and whey. That’s what makes them so much different than the cubes of mild cheddar beside the slices of salami on your cheese tray. Not for long. As that moisture seeps out over time, they inch closer to their cubed cousins, closer to ordinary. The squeak is, really, the only thing separating the two.

H/T to James Bow for the link.

October 24, 2017

More on Quebec’s niqab ban

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Ted Campbell is emphatically against Quebec’s attempt to ban facial coverings for Islamic women:

These laws are stupid … but they are worse than stupid, they are an assault on individual liberty by a bunch of political nincompoops.

Now, there are a number of variants of head and face coverings, they are especially common among some Muslim women …

… and some restrictions on some of them in some situations are, pretty clearly, justified on common sense or security-identification grounds. We, most of us, can probably agree that a lady should not wear a burqa or chador or even a niqab when she’s driving a car (it might restrict her vision) or when she is applying for a driving licence, which is a pretty common form of recognized identification … and it seems pretty clear that airport security should insist that a burqa or chador must be removed for security screening (to permit positive facial recognition).

But, why the hell does the state ~ the BIG, collective, state ~ care what any individual wears when (s)he boards a bus. It ought to care that she deposits the correct fare, of course, or taps her card to pay, but why does the state care if her face is covered? It’s arrant nonsense, and it is an infringement on a fundamental right.

    Reminder: you (and I, and Muslim women, too) have lots of rights but four of them are quite fundamental: life, liberty and property as defined by John Locke in 17th century England and privacy, as defined by Brandies and Warren in 19th century America. These rights all accrue to all individuals, only, and they, those individuals, need to have their fundamental rights protected against constant threats from collectives including religions, societies and states, themselves. These new laws, passed by big, collectivist states, are threats to individual liberties and must be challenged and overturned. Liberals, like Justin Trudeau, will not do it because they are progressives, not liberals, and because people like Justin Trudeau cannot think about fundamental rights … only about partisan, short term, political advantage.

Let me be clear about my own position:

  • Women may wear whatever they want for their own (good or not so good) reasons; but
  • It is wrong for anyone (including any father or husband or rabbi or provincial premier) to force women to dress in some certain way for social (including political) or religious reasons.

Your religion is a wholly private matter between you and your gods … you may never try to impose your beliefs on others, including your wife and children.

October 20, 2017

Quebec’s niqab ban

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Chris Selley on the Quebec provincial government’s latest anti-Muslim legislation:

It’s mostly about the Quiet Revolution. That’s what we’ve been assured by wise owl pundits about all this intolerant-looking rigmarole in Quebec. When polls show far more Quebecers than other Canadians hesitant to vote for a turban-wearing Sikh like NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh, the owls exhort us to contextualize: Quebecers’ rejection of the Catholic Church’s outsized role in their society left them suspicious of all public displays of religiosity (except Catholic ones, weirdly). This explains higher levels of antipathy toward other religious symbols as well, we are told: kippas, kirpans and hijabs. Hijabs specifically are antithetical to a uniquely French brand of feminism, the owls explain. We must understand that French Canadians, like the French, simply do not believe in multiculturalism; other cultures must adapt to and exist within the dominant one. Without understanding all this, we cannot comprehend what’s really happening.

Well, here’s what really happened Wednesday: after years of dithering, the Liberal government in Quebec City made it illegal to provide or receive government services with one’s face covered — which is to say no niqabs on university campuses, no niqabs at the police station, no niqabs on the bus or on the Métro. Not even the Parti Québécois’ much-loathed values charter proposed the latter. So what are we to make of this, owls? Was the Quiet Revolution, this proud rejection of church influence over the state, really about bestowing upon the state the power to tell religious people what they can and cannot wear on buses and trains? Shall we sing Gens du Pays?

How stupid do the Liberals think people are? How stupid do they think Canadian judges are? Stupid enough, apparently, to believe that this isn’t really about niqabs, but about a general outbreak of people riding public transit without their faces showing. Justice Minister Stéphanie Vallée said the rule applied equally to niqabs, balaclavas, dark sunglasses and anything else that might obscure all or part of the face. It’s a simple matter of “security, communication and identification.”

August 27, 2017

NDP leadership hopeful says no government can tell a woman what to wear … except in Quebec

Filed under: Cancon, Politics, Religion — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The federal NDP have gotten themselves knotted up over Quebec-specific conflicts between their rhetoric and political reality in La Belle Province:

One wonders what Jack Layton would make of his party nowadays — of the trajectory it has taken since his untimely passing and of the battle to replace his successor, who seemed like such a good idea at the time. The party’s new support in Quebec had been by design: the 2005 Sherbrooke Declaration essentially argued Quebecers should be free to secede from Canada with a simple 50 per cent-plus-one-vote, and in the meantime offered them a seat at the table in a social-democratic government in Ottawa.

Alas, hitching your wagon to Quebec nationalists only works so long as the horse doesn’t spook. In recent years, Quebec’s politics has become more and more seized with “religious accommodations” in general, with Islam specifically, and with niqabs very specifically indeed. Such is the state of play that the Liberal government’s Bill 62 is considered moderate: it would ban providing and receiving public services with one’s face covered. Justice Minister Stéphanie Vallée won’t even say whether women in niqabs would be allowed to ride the bus.

This is something you might expect the left-most candidate to lead the left-most party in the House of Commons to oppose unambiguously. Niki Ashton’s campaign promises to end “the oppression of racialized communities,” tackle “Islamophobia, anti-black racism, and violence towards Indigenous peoples” and address “intersecting oppressions” as well.

But no. In a statement to Huffington Post this week, Ashton said “there is no justification where (sic) a government should tell a woman, or anyone, what they should wear and what they shouldn’t wear.”

“That being said…”

Those three words lit a match, and the tire fire is still burning. (Ashton was not available for an interview on Friday, according to her campaign.)

“There is a consensus in (sic) Quebec’s political leaders emerging on secularism,” the statement continued, “and the Canadian government should respect the will of Quebecers on this matter.” It must also “respect” the “widely different … place” religion has “held in Quebec since the Quiet Revolution.”

July 23, 2017

Canada won’t give up on supply management, for fear of Quebec backlash

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Government — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Pierre-Guy Veer provides a guided tour of Canada’s supply management system, with appropriate emphasis on the role Quebec dairy producers play in keeping the anti-competitive system in place:

Spared by the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994, the Canadian milk supply restrictions are “in danger” again. Because of trade negotiations with the US and Europe, foreign farmers want better access to the Canadian market.

However, hearing complaints from the US about unfree dairy markets comes as paradoxical. Indeed, since the Great Depression, the dairy industry has been anything but free. It profits from various subsidies programs including “the Dairy Price Support Program, which bought up surplus production at guaranteed prices; the Milk Income Loss Contracts (MILC), which subsidized farmers when prices fall below certain thresholds, and many others.” It even came close to supply management in 2014, according to the Wilson Center.

But nevertheless, should US farmers ever have greater access to Canadian markets, it won’t be without a tough fight from Canadian farmers, especially those from the province of Quebec. Per provincial Agriculture Ministry (MAPAQ) figures, the dairy industry is the most lucrative farm activity, accounting for 28% of all farm revenues in the province, but also 37% of national milk revenues in 2013. “La Belle Province” also has 41% of all milk transformation manufacturers in Canada.

As is almost always the case with “protected” domestic markets, the overall costs to the Canadian economy are large, but the potential benefit to individual Canadian consumers for getting rid of supply management is relatively small (around $300 per year), but the benefits are tightly concentrated on the protected dairy producers and associated businesses.

But even though the near entirety of the population would profit from freer dairy markets, their liberalization will not happen anytime soon.

Basic Public Choice theory teaches that tiny organized minorities (here: milk producers) have so much to gain from making sure that the status quo remains. A region like Montérégie (Montreal’s South Shore) produced over 20% of all gross milk revenues in 2016. There are 23 out of 125 seats in that region, making it the most populous after Montreal (28 seats). So if a politician dares to question their way of living, milk producers will come together to make sure he or she doesn’t get elected. Libertarian-leaning Maxime Bernier learned it the hard way during the Canadian Conservative Party leadership race; producers banded together – some even joined the Conservative Party just for the race – and instead elected friendlier Andrew Scheer.

On the provincial level, all political parties in the National Assembly openly support milk quotas. From the Liberal Party to Coalition Avenir Québec and to Québec Solidaire, no one will openly talk against milk quotas. However, and maybe unwillingly, separatist leader Martine Ouellet gave the very reason why milk quotas are so important: they keep the dairy industry alive.

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