Published on this site, September 22, 2007

 

A CRTC for Québec Groceries
by
Pierre Lemieux

Québec events sometimes suggest a prediction: in a few decades, the province will have imploded, merged into Ontario, or Vermont, or New Brunswick. The guy who said that prediction is difficult especially with regards to the future was obviously right, but a story in Montréal La Presse makes the implosion prediction extremely tempting. The president of the Québec farmers’ trade union (UPA) appeared before a Québec government inquiry commission on the future of agriculture and agri-food. Interesting commission: Why not a background theme like, “Québec potatoes in the Internet age”? But what is even more fascinating, from a dinosaur hunter’s viewpoint, is what the UPA wants: nothing less that a CRTC-like state bureau which would “regulate and monitor Québec content in grocery stores,” just as the CRTC imposes Canadian cultural contents on the air. I am quoting from the UPA’s brief, and the CRTC comparison is theirs, not mine. La Presse’s title is itself significant: “Les agriculteurs québécois veulent un CRTC alimentaire”. For any practitioner of Molière’s language, the meaning of the definite article “les” is clear: all Québec farmers want a food CRTC. So, here is my glimpse into Québec’s future. When the Québec food content goes down in a local Loblaw, the Québec Food Distribution Commission (QFDC) calls a public hearing. The quasi-judge commissioners hear serious representations from Loblaw, Loblaws’s competitors, and a host of self-appointed guardians of food morality. Loblaw is enjoined to mend its way, or else. After a second hearing, one year later, the QFDC decides not to renew the store’s licence. A large customer demonstration is held in Québec City. An appeal is launched before the Superior Court. And so forth. Until, a few years later, the store is sold to a more obedient owner (just as happened in the case of CHOI-FM and the real CRTC). But wait! What do you do with specialty shops – like, say, Bucarest Delicatessen on Décarie Boulevard in Montréal, which sells East European and other exotic groceries? (I recomment their Turkish olives.) Don’t worry, Ivanov, we live in a democratic country: the QFDC holds a hearing in each case, determines if there is a market for such a multicultural venture, and – often – magnanimously grants a special permit, renewable every three years. In fact, there are indications that Québec’s implosion has already started. Every single year for the past 35 years, more people have left Québec for other Canadian provinces than the other way around. Young Quebecers get out of public schools speaking a mix of French patois and Internet English: like Jean Chrétien, they speak two second languages. One often gets the impression that nobody wants to live in Québec except, on one hand, people who can’t live elsewhere and, on the other hand, mad dinosaurs who believe the place will be a paradise as soon as they have imposed their values on everybody else. I don’t want to overdo it. Québec is not such a bad place. The problem with Québec statists, whether in the government or in the UPA, is not their originality but, on the contrary, their tragic lack of imagination. They just import the worst liberticidal ideas from Canada, the U.S., the U.K., and France. Hopefully, another scenario is possible. Laws continue to be enforced more haphazardly in Québec than in self-righteous America and Canada. In a sea of soft Orwellian totalitarianism, Québec becomes a nice little banana republic where eccentrics are able to carve a life outside of the CRTC’s “Canadian values” and the UPA’s Québec potato values.