Published in The Gazette, December 4, 2003, p. A-29.
It's in the State's Interest to Retain Megacity
by
Pierre Lemieux
"If the opponents to the Montreal amalgamation believe that Jean Charest will just rescind the law," I wrote on March 2, 2002 in Le Québécois Libre, "they are in for a rude awakening." My prediction is, alas, being realized.
I got my crystal ball in the economic analysis of politics. Politicians have little incentive to fulfill their electoral promises because voters in the next election will be presented with a new, muddled package of incomprehensible policies with unforeseeable consequences. In politics, individuals usually remain "rationally ignorant" and "rationally apathetic," as public-choice theorists say.
However, politicians do have an incentive to respond to powerful special-interest groups - like trade unions, for example. Moreover, bureaucrats are likely to prefer large, centralized structures, where they have more power, more recognition and more perks. At the provincial level, politicians and bureaucrats have good reasons to prefer dealing with one subservient, closely regulated entity, rather than with many, unruly, small powers.
Hence, one would naturally expect the Quebec state to favour municipal amalgamations. Municipal decentralization provides annoying obstacles to the social engineers. Whether politicians are blue, red or turquoise makes no difference.
The logic of the state is to grow. In countries where traditions are by and large illiberal, such as France, the state is traditionalist. The 36,000 French municipalities are mostly untouchable. In countries such as Canada, where traditions are more liberal, the state stands against traditions.
This is the story of the 20th century, "the century of the state," as Mussolini called it. In the 19th century, all Western countries were liberal in the classical sense, at least in the sense that they tended toward increasing liberty and individual sovereignty. Watch My Father's Glory, the fabulous film made by Yves Robert, based on Marcel Pagnol's novel, and you will see what I mean: In 1900's France, the sentiment of the free man reigned everywhere.
Like most statocrats, Jean Charest, even if well intentioned, doesn't understand any of this. It sounds like pure Chinese, like the word "liberty" in Newspeak. He still holds to the naïve political theory according to which the state is the submissive servant of mankind (it has always been, hasn't it?), everybody is happy under it (as in The Prisoner's village), and its enemies can only be fools or criminals.
The municipal mergers show how arbitrary our "totalitarian democracy" (to borrow a term from French political scientist Bertrand de Jouvenel) really is. As public-choice students know, the "democratic" state basically can get the democratic results it wants, if only by deciding which alternatives are put before the voters. In the municipal mergers case, not only did the state arbitrarily fix the territory over which "democracy" applies, but it also changes the rules of democracy when it becomes more convenient.
In fact, the supporters of municipal freedom had already lost the crucial battle even before the war was waged. They are not trying to reclaim rights that provide some barrier to the steamroller of the state. No, they destructively support "demerger," and want to go back to the past - imagine, back a couple of years ago.
I stick to my prediction that the Quebec state will not let voters, under usual election rules, liberate their enslaved local governments and reclaim the little autonomy they had before. I hope I am wrong, because if we could force Leviathan to retreat from this battlefield, its power could start unravelling. Even only intuitively, state rulers know this, and will do anything to prevent it.
It's the Sûreté du Québec that was right: the demergerites are enemies of the state.