The Lost Massey Lectures (35 page)

An important practical virtue of diversity is this: many independent institutions, even those with similar purposes, are bound to develop different aims from one another too. Under uniform control or centralized control, experiment increasingly comes hard, and eventually improvements come not at all. The chance of hitting on fresh ideas and fresh methods is thus the chief value of the Lévesque proposals for economic sovereignty; or at any rate, that is the chief value of them for the rest of us in other parts of Canada.

Almost all Lévesque's proposals for economic sovereignty concern investment, ownership and control. He wants Quebec savings and other capital to be invested in Quebec's own development. He would thus apply to Quebec much the same rule for control of banks that is now applied by Ottawa to Canadian banks. That is, he would like to allow non-residents of Quebec to hold no more than 25% of the voting shares of a bank operating in Quebec. Similarly, Canadian law now requires Canadian insurance companies to reinvest fixed proportions of their incomes in Canada. Lévesque would leave the ratios undisturbed, but the insurance companies operating in Quebec would have to reinvest in Quebec. By these means he would attempt to stem what he calls the haemorrhaging of Quebec capital. His name for this policy is repatriation of the Quebec economy.

Behind that idea are many specific worries. He worries over Quebec's huge borrowings from outside the province and the country, and the huge costs of servicing those debts. The interest payments drain money away. He worries that so many Quebec industries and resources are owned and controlled from outside.

He also worries over Canadian agricultural policies, about which he has this to say: “The Federal Minister of Agriculture very often follows policies which to us are undesirable and which sabotage the Quebec agricultural markets. This is the case very frequently in the milk industry, which is traditionally the backbone of Quebec agricultural production and which feels itself literally strangled.”

As a consumer of Ontario's excellent and varied cheddar cheeses, I worry about the milk board, too. Its policies, the press informs us, are destroying all but the largest Ontario cheese producers. I will not be happy with nothing but Kraft and Borden Ontario cheeses.

Many people in other parts of Canada are, of course, worried about some of the same things that worry Lévesque. They worry that Canada has become perhaps the largest borrower of foreign funds in the western world; that almost half of Canadian manufacturing capacity is owned by U.S. companies; that Canada lacks venture capital or else does not know how to use it; that Canada's share of manufactured goods in world trade keeps dropping.

Lévesque's proposals for economic sovereignty are not concerned with concrete questions or issues of how economies develop. I have commented that Norway takes a creative approach to development and that Canada, with its fixation on the exploitation and export of resources and the attraction of branch plants, does not. Lévesque seems to take for granted the traditional Canadian idea that wealth is based on natural resources, not on the inventiveness of people. His notions about development seem to be essentially the same as Ottawa's. Nor am I impressed by the Lévesque government's pronouncements on scientific and technological research.
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They sound just like every other bureaucracy's pompous nonsense on that subject.

In that case, we may well ask, what is the point of having two economic sovereignties where there was one before? Is there any value in this possibility, at least for those of us outside Quebec?

There is practical value. In the first place, Quebec's repatriation of banking and capital actually could amount to significant change in Quebec, and in economic life when any one thing changes, other things start to change too. In the second place, just the fact of different people being in charge in the two different sovereignties, and having two different constituencies, would increase the chances for fresh judgments and fresh approaches. And finally, the fact that Quebec really does have a different culture means an increased chance that things might be done differently there. At worst, we would learn nothing useful from Quebec's experience
with economic sovereignty. At best we might learn a good deal. The milk board might learn something.

Now we come to political sovereignty. With one exception, Lévesque's proposals on this subject are easily stated. He would like the Quebec National Assembly, which is the provincial parliament, to be a national parliament with all the usual powers over taxes and laws that national parliaments have. He would like Quebec to have a seat in the United Nations, and probably membership in the Commonwealth. He would like Quebec to take its place as a nation on appropriate international commissions, and to cooperate with Canada as an equal on joint scientific projects or other joint ventures of mutual interest.

All that is straightforward, and simple and normal enough, at least in concept. But whenever Lévesque touches on the subject of a political structure to handle customs union and a common currency, his proposals become tortured. His usual lucidity turns muddy and his usual eloquence flounders.

On the one hand, he expresses fears that direction of Quebec's affairs might revert back to Ottawa. And as a general principle he fears that associated sovereignties face the danger of falling into what he calls “merely a multinational, multicultural federalism.”

On the other hand, when he attempts to describe joint management of the currency and matters affecting the currency, he conjures up exactly the sort of centralized power structure that would make his fears come true. He proposes joint Canadian-Quebec bodies at what he calls the technocratic level; and centralized special ministries; and possibly also, in his words, “a delegated parliament to which both sides would delegate members who are already elected to their parliaments, and which would meet once or twice a year. . . .”

And then he adds, “It could go further if necessary, but on one condition: that, when the time comes, sovereignty in all its defined
dimensions is neither affected nor restricted by exterior structures.” Indeed? Then why have all those exterior structures?

The Quebec government's white paper conjures up an even more elaborate superstructure: a joint council of ministers for the two countries, Canada and Quebec, plus a commission of experts to act as a general secretariat for both countries, plus a monetary authority to coordinate some of the policies and actions of the two countries' central banks, plus a court of justice to interpret the treaties setting all this up and to keep both countries in line. The court's decisions would be final and binding on both Canada and Quebec. If Canada would like to have, besides all this, a super-interparliamentary assembly for the two countries, Quebec would be willing to consider it a matter for negotiation.

Two of Lévesque's aspirations for Quebec—sovereignty and a shared currency with Canada—are not reconcilable, for reasons I have explained. Here we see that same contradiction rearing its head again. The elaborate super-government would leave Quebec with only a pretense of economic and political sovereignty. It would be a fancy way to construct “a multinational, multicultural federalism,” to use Lévesque's own description of what should be avoided. And it would saddle us all with additional layers of bureaucracy and with a new layer of central government and centralized control even more remote from us than what we have now. This would be a high price to pay for what I can only understand as Quebec's timidity about a currency of its own.

In sum, then, looking at sovereignty-association as a whole, Lévesque's concept seems to offer much that would be advantageous to both the rest of Canada and Quebec, but because of the illogical and unworkable proposal for a shared currency, the concept is flawed. The flaw is so serious that it would undercut all the potential advantages of sovereignty-association for Canada and most of the advantages for Quebec.

Does this mean, then, that sovereignty-association should be dismissed out-of-hand? No, not at all. Here I will offer a fable which happens to be true. Some years ago, the Ontario government joined with a West German corporation to try to develop a new form of transit—quiet, very rapid and efficient in its requirements for energy and space. Electromagnets were used to move the vehicles without friction on a cushion of air above a narrow, elevated track. Unfortunately, the thing wouldn't work on curves. After some $25 million had been spent, Ontario and its German partners dropped the project. Who wanted a train that can't turn corners?

The Japanese did. Japan Airlines took up the idea and spun off a new organization to work on it, under the premise that even if the system's track had to be straight there were plenty of good uses for it. This was reported in the Toronto press, along with the comments of an Ontario transportation expert who had visited the first Japanese test track. He said it was “so straight it's almost unbelievable,” and that the absence of curves “simplified the project enough to enable the Japanese to get going.”
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Soon afterwards further word reached Toronto from the head of the Japanese project's engineering group. He reported that they had finally found a way, after all, to overcome the trouble at the curves. Test vehicles in Japan, he reported, were now running successfully on two curvilinear sections of track.
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The moral of the fable, of course, is that you don't start with what you cannot do. You start with what you can do, if the doing has worthwhile advantages. Then if you can, you evolve improvements on that foundation. This is the commonsense approach to all creative endeavours of any difficulty. Indeed, it amounts to virtually a law of development, whether we are thinking of the way things are successfully developed by human beings or of the way development happens in Nature.

René Lévesque's concept has a flaw. It doesn't turn corners. But it can do other useful and worthwhile things. There is much to be said for it, both from Quebec's viewpoint and from the rest of Canada's. In any case, independence or sovereignty for Quebec would have to be introduced in stages and steps. By the time it became necessary for Quebec to confront the need for its own currency, it would likely have built up the necessary self-confidence, and a way of introducing the change could be worked out—either by means of a two-stage process like Ireland's or some other device. The problem is not nearly as difficult, technically, as putting those curves in the track, nor is the introduction of a new currency for a new sovereignty an unprecedented sort of problem. It has often been done successfully.

One of the hang-overs of the Enlightenment is the notion that immutability is natural. Of course it isn't; everything changes. No governmental arrangements last forever. The best we can hope for is that changes be constructive and flexible. We might think of sovereignty-association as an experiment, rather than as a solution for all time.

All of us, if we are reasonably comfortable, healthy and safe, owe immense debts to the past. There is no way, of course, to repay the past. We can only pay those debts by making gifts to the future. We are all worried, I think, about our bequests to the future, worried that we may be presenting the generations to come chiefly with heavy burdens and terrible unsolved problems, rather than new gifts.

Among the burdens we have contrived are the stifling, wasteful and all but uncontrollable centralized bureaucracies that have proliferated so wildly and rapidly in our time—even in Canada. What a mess. What a load for the next generation to bear.

Perhaps right now, and right here, we can do a little something to lighten that burden. If we were to work out a kind of sovereignty
for Quebec, and a kind of association that really does combat centralization instead of increasing it, that would be a presentable gift to the future.

Nobody has quite done what we would have to do. Sort out and keep only the connections Quebec and the rest of Canada would need to trade with each other and cooperate on projects of mutual interest, and discard the connections that would require Quebec and the rest of Canada to try to run each other's governments as well as their own. If we could do that, we could say what people say of the gifts they're proudest to give: “We made it ourselves.”

It could be our Canadian way of answering a question that Virginia Woolf has posed like this:
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“Look at ourselves, ladies and gentlemen! Then at the wall; and ask how's this wall, the great wall, which we call, perhaps miscall, civilization, to be built by orts, scraps and fragments like ourselves?”

Williamsburg provided, as Professor Abraham Rotstein has pointed out, an excellent metaphor for dealing with concerns that have engaged me since the Honourable Walter Gordon's budget of June 13, 1963—the vulnerability of the Canadian economy and the recognition that our status, in American eyes, was simply that of an economic and political satellite.
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While I had vigorously opposed the minister's budget, it became clear to me in December, 1965, when the United States government imposed guidelines on their subsidiaries operating in Canada, that Mr. Gordon had been right to express his anxieties. For the guidelines had involved a principle—the principle that the American government had the right to dictate the investment and reinvestment policies, the purchasing practices, and the financial operations of Canadian companies in which Americans had more than a 10 per cent interest. What price Canadian sovereignty and jurisdiction in such a state of affairs?

Canada was later granted an exemption from these particular directives by a foreign government, but this is beside the point. The brutal fact of Canada's vulnerability to a neighbour's economic and political pressures had been bared for all to see. Henceforth the issue became—“Is Canada sovereign or is it not?”