Quebec: La presse editorialist denounces Quebecers as “selfish”

[Hannah Bell]

For several months Quebec’s most important daily, La presse, and especially its lead editorial writer, André Pratte, have been aggressively arguing that the provincial Liberal government and the entire political establishment must make their next priority eliminating the provincial budget deficit, produced by the economic slump, and then systematically reduce the provincial debt.

Pratte has long been agitating for a “re-engineering” of government, that is the levelling of what remains of the welfare state. He was a signatory of the “Manifesto for a Clear-eyed Quebec.” Published in 2005 and signed both by prominent federalists and souverainists (supporters of Quebec independence), the manifesto decried the 'immobilisme' of Quebec society — that is, the widespread popular resistance to neo-liberal policies — and advanced a profoundly anti-working class agenda...

At the end of May, Pratte published two especially right-wing, cynical and tendentious editorials. The first titled “Selfish Quebec,” deplored the “selfishness” of Quebecers. According to Pratte, Quebecers have “developed a passion” for various public services, ignoring that there is insufficient government revenue to pay for all of them...

What Pratte deliberately omits to mention is that the desperate situation in the health care system and other public and social services stems from the right-wing policies advanced by the ruling elite, and that La presse has itself played an important role...

In the 1990s, the indépendantiste Parti Québécois (PQ) closed hospitals, eliminated tens of thousands of public sector jobs, and made dramatic across-the-board cuts in government spending in their campaign for a “zero deficit” budget. The Liberal Party, elected in 2003, has pursued the same right-wing course...

Under Jean Chrétien, whose daughter married into the billionaire family that owns La presse, the Demarais, the federal Liberals made especially deep cuts to the transfer payments made to the provinces to fund health care, post-secondary education, and welfare. The bourgeois media, including La presse, gave its full and enthusiastic support for this socially retrograde agenda.

There is evident irony in Pratte’s accusation that the Quebec working class is “selfish.” The reactionary politics pursued by the parties of the political establishment at the provincial and federal levels were the means through which the bourgeoisie snatched back a significant portion of the concessions they made to the working class in the 1960s and 1970s, enriching themselves fabulously in the process. In the last two decades, social inequality in Canada has risen consistently...

In 1998, the average salary of a CEO was 104 times the salary of the average Canadian worker. By 2006, the average salary of a CEO had risen to 218 times that of the average worker. From 1980 to 2005, the average Canadian income rose in real terms by just $53. Meanwhile, the income of the poorest 20 percent of Canadians workers fell by 20.6 percent...

Pratte’s argument, that the state has diminishing resources in the face of mounting needs and that the “Quebecers” must make sacrifices, is nothing but pure sophistry in service of the bourgeoisie.

Pratte is attempting to develop the pretexts that will serve to justify the next “even more painful” wave of reforms. The assault on the standard of living of the working class, ongoing for 30 years, has nothing to do with the aging of the population. Rather, it is a reaction of the bourgeois elite to the decline in the rate of profit and the crisis in capitalist accumulation that shook the capitalist system in the 1970s. Since the 1980s, the bourgeoisie combined its assault on the social position of the working class with the turn towards rampant financial speculation, the build-up of the militarism, and attacks on democratic rights.

While the overwhelming majority of the world’s population saw its standard of life stagnate or regress, the globalisation of the productive forces created the conditions for a vast increase in the wealth produced by the labour of the working class, an increase that could permit a bountiful social response to the problems of an aging population. This immense potential is strangled by the subordination of society to the profit imperative of a tiny minority of the population and the destructive competition between capitalist nation states.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jul2009/queb-j18.shtml

[Selatius]

1. I can't read through the whole thing. I just get too angry.

Watch. They will try to sabotage social programs and then later declare these programs as failures in a bid to privatize or junk them entirely in place of for-profit ventures.

Worse yet, the corporatists here in the United States are probably indirectly supporting them. Exporting corporate monopolism is America's past-time.

[Hannah Bell]

2. "the corporatists here in the United States are probably indirectly supporting them"

yes, they are. & not indirectly.

check out the fraser institute, for example.

it's a global attack on labor, & it's moving into high gear.