Published in the Western Standard, September 5, 2005, p. 46.

The More Inefficient the Better
by
Pierre Lemieux

In a fabulous scene of Denys Arcand's film The Barbarian Invasions, a hospital bureaucrat with pinched lips and a nanny-state smile sprouts robot-like bureaucratic jargon to explain why a customer's demand cannot be satisfied. The Ménard report, issued by the Quebec government on July 28, reminded me of that scene. It spits a rapid fire of fashionable shibboleths and planning bureaucratese: "transparent multiyear plan," "integrated, transparent, and multidirectional approach," "collective wealth," "social equity," "solidarity," "initiatives citoyennes" (a way in French Newspeak to say something like: political initiatives transfigured by citizen mystique), "social entrepreneurship," "social economy" . . . Titled Pour sortir de l'impasse: la solidarité entre nos générations (Out of the Dead End: The Solidarity Between Our Generations), the heavy report (145 pages plus more than 200 pages of annexes) is the product of a taskforce created by the Quebec Liberal government, with the mandate of proposing solutions to "guarantee the everlastingness of the health and social services system." The committee was chaired by L. Jacques Ménard, Quebec chief of the Bank of Montreal. The report starts by asserting that the Supreme Court's recent Chaoulli judgment "offers a unique opportunity . . . to keep the door as closed as possible--given the [provincial and federal] charters of human rights--to private financing of the health system" (p. 10). Its recommendations are a smorgasbord of social incantations, meaningless wishes (how to resort increasingly to a more regulated private sector), planning illusions, and statist reactions (don't touch "existing collective agreements" and consider tax increases if required). One recommendation is to create a new insurance for loss of autonomy in old age. Since it is defined as insurance, the tax levied to finance it is, of course, not a tax. Isn't an insurance against the tyranny of the Nanny State more urgently needed? Another iconoclastic question is why the task force is so worried about the growing proportion of the provincial budget going to health care. At least, this will prevent the state from doing more harm--more surveillance and control--in other walks of life. Perhaps the state should spend virtually all its money on health care, provided that private alternatives are not forbidden, and bugger off and leave us alone for the rest. The committee had two sorts of members: compromise-prone statists, and extremists. As typical of government committees, the extremists were only statist extremists, there were no libertarian extremists among them. As a matter of fact, there were no libertarians at all. I can't find any classical liberals either. There were only conservatives--that is, people who want to conserve the monstrous state we have inherited. I am told that Mr. Ménard himself is a nice man who is not against liberty, but this does not show in his report. How could it? Two thirds of the committee's 18 members are statocrats, court intellectuals and trade unionists, not counting the supporting bureaucrats. As regularly happens in these cases, the token businessman presumed to represent capitalism has been eaten alive by big mouths used to intellectual discourse. I suspect that, aiming for a report that would rally the extremists on his committee, the chairman moved as far to the left as he thought necessary. But finally, the three trade union representatives refused to sign anyway (not counting the two poverty-industry activists who signed, but expressed their dissidence). Consequently, the task force ended up with two reports: a statist one and an extremely statist one. The committee's mandate asked for solutions "based on shared values of respect for the actual builders of Quebec as much as for the generations to come." The actual, badly written, French sentence can also be read as referring to "the values shared by the actual builders of Quebec as well as by the generations to come." How do the statocrats know that these future generations will not spit on their graves? What's nice about the Quebec government is its charming naïveté and inefficiency. The Ménard report has been laid out with no hyphenation at all, and the bottom margin is too small for the page numbers to print on some printers. Let's keep the state as inefficient as possible.