Neo-Laurentianism: Mario Dumont in the Guise of Maurice Duplessis

The new star of Quebec politics is Mario Dumont, the leader of the ADQ, who left his opponents Jean Charest and Andre Boisclair in the dust in last week’s election.

Generally speaking, Quebeckers give their premiers two majority mandates before they think carefully about throwing them out. Liberal leader Jean Charest failed this test by barely clinging to office as leader of Quebec’s first minority government in over a century. Charest, an unsuccessful former leader of the federal Tories, goes down in history as one of Quebec’s most unpopular premiers, a man who never understood the social or nationalist aspirations of Quebeckers.

Andre Boisclair has been a catastrophic leader of the PQ, so much so that he has left the sovereignist cause in worse shape than it has been in since Rene Levesque founded the party.

The collapse of the PQ and the rise of the ADQ raises the question whether Quebec nationalism has entered a new phase.

Since Confederation, Quebec nationalism has gone through three lengthy phases. The first phase, more appropriately called French Canadian nationalism, endured from 1867 to the First World War conscription crisis of 1917. During this era, French Canadian nationalists, the most important one being Henri Bourassa, the founder of Le Devoir, fought to advance the cause of French speaking minorities outside Quebec and to limit Canadian participation in the wars of the British Empire.

They struggled to sustain the educational and linguistic rights of Francophones in bruising battles in New Brunswick, Manitoba and Ontario. Under Bourassa’s leadership, they opposed Canada’s participation in the South African War 1899 to 1902 and combated the imposition of conscription during the First World War.

During this first defensive phase, French Canadian nationalists fought their important battles in Ottawa, determined to uphold the position of Francophones that had been established with Confederation. The 1917 federal election gravely split the country on the conscription issue, with English Canadians voting for the pro-conscription Unionists (Conservatives and pro-conscription Liberals) and French Canadians (in Quebec, New Brunswick and Ontario) voting for the anti-conscription Liberals under Wilfrid Laurier.

The conscription crisis effectively ended the first nationalist phase, which was followed by a second phase which has been called Laurentianism. This brought to the fore intellectuals and politicians who sought autonomy for Quebec and who had little use for the earlier struggles in Ottawa.

The great intellectual leader of the nationalists during this era was Abbe Lionel Groulx, the cleric and historian, who rallied Quebeckers around the goal of reviving the values of the golden age of New France. Groulx believed in a staunchly Catholic Quebec in which church and family were the central institutions. His conservative nationalism warned against the dangers of pluralist politics and too much contact with the commercialism of English speaking North America.

The politician who rose to dominance during the Laurentianist era was Maurice Duplessis, a lawyer from Trois Rivieres who had been leader of the Quebec provincial Conservative Party, a hopeless political job if there ever was one. During the terrible years of the Great Depression, at a time when the ruling provincial Liberals were riddled with scandal, Duplessis found a new party, the Union Nationale which established an alliance between himself and a group of idealistic young Liberals who were fed up with their party’s corruption.

Duplessis led his party to power, ditched the young Liberals and went on to dominate Quebec for a quarter of a century. Duplessis became the master of a Quebec nationalism of the right, a nationalism that was heavy on symbolism. During his rule, Quebec established its provincial flag, and fought dogged battles to prevent Ottawa from invading areas of provincial jurisdiction. At the same time, Duplessis opened the door to outside investment, running ads in New York newspapers that invited corporations to take advantage of the low royalty rates the province charged mining companies and to enjoy the labour peace (weak unions) that prevailed in Quebec.

Warning Quebeckers that the federal Liberal government of William Lyon Mackenzie King was soft on Communism, Duplessis passed the so-called Padlock Law, an act that gave the province the power to padlock the doors on the halls (or even private homes) where Communists and Jehovah’s Witnesses held their meetings. Duplessis sent in provincial police goons to attack strikers, most famously in the Asbestos strike in 1949. His government fought to suppress progressive figures in the church and the universities.

In 1959, Duplessis died while he was still premier. By the time of his death, the new forces that would usher in a new age in Quebec were already making their presence felt. In 1960, the Liberals swept to power in Quebec under the leadership of Jean Lesage. The modern era of Quebec nationalism, the third phase, began with the remaking of Quebec society during the Quiet Revolution. In the Lesage cabinet was Rene Levesque, the former broadcaster, who went on to split with the Liberals and found the Parti Quebecois.

The new nationalists represented both organized labour and the rising Francophone bourgeoisie whose members were determined to take their place alongside the Westmount English who had dominated the executive offices of Montreal for decades. When Levesque established the PQ, it was not until the party’s third election that it found its formula for success. In 1976, the party told Quebeckers that a vote for the PQ did not constitute a vote for Quebec sovereignty but simply for a new provincial government. Once in power, the PQ would call a referendum on the constitutional question.

Twice the PQ held referenda, losing widely in 1980 and narrowly in 1995. In effect, every bid for office by the PQ involved a pledge to hold a referendum on sovereignty. Boisclair made this a central promise in his recent campaign. But he was the victim both of “referendum fatigue” and of the rising appeal of Mario Dumont.

Mario Dumont is more than a little reminiscent of Maurice Duplessis, not as an authoritarian to be sure, but as a right-winger seeking to redefine Quebec nationalism. Dumont, who hails from Riviere du Loup, a town on the St. Lawrence River, is putting together a constituency of small city, town, and rural voters who are not comfortable with leaders who look like they belong in the salons of Montreal.

Dumont, who supported the Yes side in the 1995 referendum, has now said he opposes a future referendum and wants to see an autonomous Quebec within Canada, a Quebec that will have its own constitution and citizenship. Like the old Union Nationale, Dumont will wave the Quebec flag, but he is determined to drain Quebec nationalism of the progressive social content that it has displayed in recent decades. Dumont favours a two-tier health care system, with a strong private component, lower taxes and an end to the notion of an inclusive social model for Quebec. He exudes a populism of the right that features nostalgia, weaker government, and anti-intellectualism. Like Duplessis, he will accept a Quebec whose economy is run by the large corporations as long as the Quebec flag flies overhead. He fits ideally with Stephen Harper’s vision of a post-welfare state Canada in which Ottawa withdraws from social programs and allows the provinces to chart their own course.

Whether a fourth phase in the history of Quebec nationalism is underway remains to be confirmed in the next few years. But the signs are certainly there that Neo-Laurentianism has found its champion and its historical hour.

The Quebec Election and Harper's Grand Bargain of the Right

One the eve of the Quebec election, Prime Minister Stephen Harper has made a proposal that has a shelf-life that expires on election day, March 26, but that also has fateful, long-term implications. Along with delivering so much money to Quebec in the budget that the Bloc Quebecois has decided to support it, Harper has declared that if Quebeckers elect a federalist government, Ottawa will negotiate a deal with Quebec that would severely restrict the power of the federal government to undertake spending initiatives in areas of provincial jurisdiction.

The federal government’s right to spend on whatever it likes, the so-called “spending power”, has underlain Ottawa’s initiation of national shared-cost programs, the classic case being medicare. Another case is the Trans Canada Highway. These programs, in areas of provincial jurisdiction, were launched when the federal government enunciated the principles on which the plans would be based and offered money to those provinces that agreed to set up such programs on their territory.

In return for Quebec’s acceptance of this version of a dramatically de-centralized federalism, Harper would either legislate (or seek a constitutional amendment) to remove Ottawa’s right to make such initiatives in the future. The new rules would apply to the federal government’s relationship with all the provinces, not just with Quebec. This Grand Bargain would fundamentally remake Confederation.

Such a change in the basics of Canadian federalism would, for instance, bar Ottawa from launching the kind of national early childhood education program to which both Liberals and New Democrats are pledged. In a more distant future, it would block any attempt on the part of Ottawa to substantially lower the cost of tuition for colleges and universities in an effort to prevent post-secondary education from again becoming the preserve of the privileged.

With his proposed Grand Bargain, Stephen Harper would bring his over-arching objective of a Canada, not only with a market economy but with a market society as well, much closer to fruition. Gone would be the potential to establish national programs to create common standards across the country. At the federal level, progressive liberals and social democrats would be blocked from undertaking initiatives to advance the cause of greater social equality.

Harper’s Grand Bargain, the re-casting of Canada according to a right-wing agenda, was implicit in the election in 2006 of a parliament in which neo-conservatives and sovereignists held the majority of seats. If it were consummated, the Grand Bargain would complete the work begun with the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement and NAFTA in the 1980s and 1990s. It would constitute the social counterpart to the economics of free trade. Not coincidentally, it would rest on the Quebec-Alberta alliance that gave birth to the FTA and NAFTA.

There has always been a potential progressive alternative to this Grand Bargain of the right. It would rest on Ottawa making a deal with Quebec to establish an asymmetrical federalism in which federal initiatives would be carefully circumscribed in the case of Quebec but not in the cases of the other nine provinces.

Over the past two decades, progressives have repeatedly failed to see and act in terms of the larger strategic picture. They have allowed themselves in their shortsightedness to be defeated piecemeal by the right, in battle after battle. Progressives have not yet lost the battle over the Grand Bargain. But they are well on their way to losing it.

Stephen Harper’s Grand Bargain with Quebec would place the capstone on the edifice of a right-wing Canada, which neither Quebeckers nor English Canadians want. Progressives who reject the idea of a stripped-down market society need to understand the stakes in the next federal election. It is one they cannot allow the Conservatives to win.

The Accouterments of Imperial Leadership

Even though the American Empire differs enormously from its imperial predecessors, one ubiquitous attribute of empire is the perceived need to vest imperial leaders with accouterments that set them apart from mere mortals. One of the ways this is achieved is in the ways leaders travel, and in this respect the President of the United States has means of transportation at his disposal that would have made the emperors, czars and pharaohs of the past green with envy.

Visits abroad by the President are constructed as photo-ops for the White House media corps. The panoply of an American presidential visit enhances these results. The choreography of these visits is designed to enhance the imperial stature of the President while sheltering him almost completely from foreigners or foreign ways of doing things. Imperial leaders have always traveled in ways that enhance their image of potency, an image designed to fill the populace with awe. Alexander the Great rode Bucephalus, a great black stallion with a white star on his forehead. Bucephalus lived to the age of thirty, dying at the end of one of Alexander’s battles. The stallion was buried with full military honours. In the nineteenth century, Queen Victoria traveled in her own carriage accompanied by footmen in full regalia. The royal crest emblazoned the door of her carriage.

What is new is the unequalled splendour of the transportation arrangements of the President of the United States who flies in one of two specially remodeled Boeing 747-200B aircraft. When the president is on board the aircraft is known by its radio call sign, Air Force One. The aircraft is outfitted with more than 238 miles of electrical wiring, more than twice that found on a normal 747. The more than 4000 square feet of floor space inside the aircraft harbours a presidential stateroom. The president also has a bedroom and a full bath. There is a presidential office, a conference/dining room, two fully equipped kitchens, a medical treatment room, and secretarial offices. Up to seventy people can fly on the aircraft so that the President can transport cabinet secretaries, top aides, security personnel and favoured media people. On board there are six lavatories and eighty-four telephones. The Presidential jets, which can fly half way around the world without refueling can be refueled by military aircraft while in the air. The two aircraft, whose combined price tag was $650 million, are outfitted with a classified, anti-missile defence system, as well as having a protective shield against the energy waves emitted by a nuclear blast. The shield is in place to protect computers and other electronics gear, including a communications system that boasts secure voice terminals and cryptographic equipment for sending, receiving and deciphering classified messages.

Another aircraft accompanies the Chief Executive on these trips, a C-5 Galaxy heavy transport aircraft that flies to the destination in advance of Air Force One. The cargo plane delivers the President’s bullet proof limousine, a stand by limousine, a fully equipped ambulance, and in some cases, an armoured helicopter, which when the Preisent is aboard is called Marine One. The limousine, Cadillac One, is a specially designed and equipped version of the Cadillac deVille, whose exact dimensions are a state secret. The automobile’s five inch thick armour is able to withstand an attack by rocket propelled grenades. The vehicle, which has an armour-plated underside, is able to keep passengers safe in the event of a biological or chemical attack.

When the President lands at the airport in a foreign country, his advance security team has already been long on the ground, informing the locals about what will and will not be tolerated. For instance, in London, one of only fifteen cities outside the U.S. where there is a permanent U.S. Secret Service Office, a Presidential visit is planned by American operatives who have an intimate knowledge of the setting. As soon as a visit by the President is announced, the Secret Service team begins its muscular negotiations with local authorities, deciding which sites the President will visit and laying down requirements for his protection. No other leaders’ functionaries are allowed to take such an active part in laying on security on foreign soil in the way the Americans do. A trip abroad by President George W. Bush, such as the President’s visit to England in November 2003, is classified in the U.S. as a “national special security event.”

When Bush traveled to London, although the exact details were kept secret, it was revealed that the Americans brought about two hundred and fifty armed agents to the British capital to provide protection for their leader. While the Americans worked with their British hosts a gray area of uncertainty was created, as with all Presidential visits abroad, about who was ultimately in control of the deployment of force. Even though the British Commander in charge of providing security in London deployed a force of 14,000 police, he had to cope with the potent fact that the President would be surrounded by his own armed guards. To try to clarify this murky issue, the British Home Secretary stated that although the American agents could be armed that they would enjoy no immunity from prosecution in the U.K. if they used their weapons. Trying to exercise control over armed American agents whose internal rules of engagement are not disclosed to them is one of the conundrums with which foreign authorities must wrestle in age of the American Empire.

The Bush visit to London took place in the aftermath of the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq in the spring of 2003, and tension surrounding the visit was extremely high. On this occasion, in addition to normal security for the President, additional hardware was deployed. Twenty armoured vehicles and a specially converted Black Hawk helicopter were laid on to get the President to Buckingham Palace where he and his wife Laura were staying and to Number 10 Downing Street for a meeting at the residence of Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Adding to the standoff that was expected between British protesters and the American President was the fact that the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, saw the visit to his city as a virtual invasion. He was on record as saying that George W. Bush was “the greatest threat to life on this planet.” The highlight of the peaceful demonstration involving tens of thousands of people in the streets of London was the pulling down of a statue-effigy of George W. Bush, modeled after the pulling down of a statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad the previous spring.

When the President visits a foreign city, the right of way on the thoroughfares he traverses is commandeered so that all means of entry onto the routes used are blocked off. Domestic air travel in the affected areas is banned in the airspace surrounding the President. When the President reaches a point where he must emerge from his limousine, the surrounding area is completely blocked off and barricaded and local police and military are beefed up with the presence of American agents and sharpshooters who are fully armed and ready to take action should they feel it necessary. If the visit is to proceed, the host country has no choice but to accept these unique impositions, which include violations of the country’s sovereignty which normally includes control of security on its own soil.

On foreign soil, when George W. Bush travels, his exposure to the host country’s people, media, and political leaders is very carefully controlled. Protesters are held at a distance so that they are rarely seen or heard by the U.S. President. The foreign media is kept at bay so that only a few questions are permitted at very brief press conferences when the President appears in tandem with the leader of the host country. Guests who are to attend dinners with the President are subjected to a lengthy process that is designed to protect the imperial visitor. Guests are required to assemble at a facility several hours ahead of the dinner. They are searched and then directed to waiting buses that take them to the site of the dinner. Roads and bridges surrounding the site of the dinner are closed down. Only after everyone has been scrutinized and transported to the location with massive security surrounding the building does the President’s motorcade arrive, driven as always through empty streets. The time of the President during such visits is rationed to the minute. The leader of the host country and a few of his top officials are granted the greatest access and time is usually provided for the leader of the major opposition party. Heads of other levels of government, leaders of other political parties and other figures are granted “face time”, a few minutes with the President at a reception or in the lead up to dinner.

When the President makes a major address on foreign soil, as George W. Bush did in Halifax, during his two day visit to Canada four weeks after his re-election in November 2004, the address was carried live on CNN. Meanwhile, the Prime Minister’s speech introducing Bush was not carried by the network. What Americans saw on their television screens, as is typical, was their President speaking to them with a foreign backdrop. In the case of the Halifax speech, Bush’s advance team even picked out the backdrop itself with pictures on it of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, an image designed to evoke memories of the close alliance between the United States and Canada during the Second World War. The communications generated by the foreign visits of the President are designed as self contained feed back loops in which Americans see and hear from their leader, through the medium of a crew of media people to whom they are habituated.

The American leader goes forth from the heart of the Empire, but he never really leaves the American heartland. This style of communications is as old as empire itself and is one of the ways in which empires inflict damage on themselves, damage that can ultimately lead to their demise. Vibrant and rising political entities are alive to the changes taking place in the world, and they ride the wave of those changes. They imbibe the knowledge and insights of others, making use of them to pursue their goals, whether those goals are ultimately judged to have been for good or ill.

Imperial rulers, however, are typically surrounded by those who tell them what they want to hear. And in some cases, where the leader is mentally lazy or not particularly well informed and thoughtful, they are surrounded by people who guide them and who shelter them from other influences. George W. Bush is that curious case---a ruler who is surrounded by those who tell him what he wants to hear, but also those on whom he relies to tell him what he ought to think and do. The President is the point man in an administration which is unusually ideological and non-pragmatic in its approach. The neo-conservatism that is the dominant mode of thought of the key members of the administration makes a virtue of not listening too much to others.

Washington’s office-holding neo-conservatives are a self-referential coterie, much as were the gang that surrounded Stalin, Hitler’s intimates, or those who are in daily contact with the Pope in the Vatican. Not only do members of such groups take pride in not paying serious attention to those outside the circle, to sustain their own positions within the fold they must not be seen to be open to the opinions of those on the outside. In the manner of fervent ideologues, the members of the Bush inner circle believe that they are in possession of truths that have escaped others and that only by holding firmly to the tenets of their faith can they achieve the radical transformation they seek. In fact, evidence of widespread external disagreement with what the group thinks has the effect of reinforcing the intensity of its members’ convictions. Self-appointed vanguards, champions of a “master race”, those who are divinely inspired and super-individualists in the Ayn Rand mold anticipate that their success must be achieved at the expense of lesser thinkers.

There is one crucial difference between the Bush crowd and the members of the other groups mentioned above. In each of the other cases, the leaders have been self-made men who have had to display ruthlessness and courage in their ascents to supreme power. In sharp contrast, George W. Bush came to power as the heir to his father’s amply connected friends with their access to large pools of capital. In this way, Bush is rather typical of other emperors or kings who inherited their positions. Lazy self-satisfied, self-made leaders may be rare, although Ronald Reagan may have been one, but these qualities are commonly encountered among emperors and kings.

A disease which afflicts emperors and those in their immediate entourage is their incapacity to see the external world in a reasonably objective way. The old axiom can be reworked in the following way: All power distorts and absolute power distorts absolutely. The Chinese rulers in the fifteenth century who ordered that the great ships the Chinese had constructed never be sent on another voyage of discovery and that the fleet be destroyed because as the Middle Kingdom, China had no need for the outer world, were applying the dictum with a terrifying literalism. Their arrogance was so great that they felt no need to know about the rest of the world, which in any case would never affect them in any important way. Similarly, when the German army was thrown back from the gates of Moscow on December 6, 1941, and Adolf Hitler was informed that the Soviets were deploying whole new units whose existence had hitherto escaped the notice of German intelligence, the Fuhrer flew into a foam flecked rage. And when to this report, came another that the Soviets were deploying thousands of new tanks, some of types not seen before, the German leader simply refused to accept the information as fact. Information that did not fit within the confines of his weltanschauung was no information at all. It could be discarded.

The American imperial mindset, despite the billions of dollars spent of collecting and sifting intelligence annually, is equally blinkered. Consider a few palpable examples. During the Vietnam War in the 1960s, it was inconceivable to U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and President Lyndon Johnson that the armed forces of North Vietnam and of those of the National Liberation Front could long resist the mightiest, most technologically advanced power on earth. It would be decades before McNamara, the former Ford executive, who was a devout technocrat, would begin to understand how wrong his calculations had been and how powerful a mobilizing force Vietnamese nationalism was, even in the face of the armed forces of the United States. Similarly, the intelligence that contributed to the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 was extravagantly in error. Here, I am not referring to the commonplace observation that Saddam Hussein’s regime possessed no weapons of mass destruction and had no links to Al Quaeda. At least as important, and highly revealing of the blinkered vision that is characteristic of imperial regimes, was the assumption that the U.S. forces would be welcomed by the Iraqi people as liberators. Even those in the U.S. intelligence community who were not as sure that flowers would be strewn in the path of the advancing U.S. military, did not conceive of the possibility of a sustained insurgency on the part of those who were opposed to the occupation. What the Pentagon and the CIA and the White House could not contemplate was that occupation by a foreign power itself would become a deeply mobilizing fact for tens of thousands of Iraqis.