Controls the future:
As part of its campaign playing to fears of a weakening Quebec identity, the Parti Québécois government has singled out the teaching of history as an area in need of attention.
“Quebec culture and identity have their roots in our history, a facet of our identity that is not adequately valued,” Premier Pauline Marois said after her 2012 election. “A strengthening of the teaching of our history is long overdue.” Her education minister promised curriculum changes to ensure schoolchildren were being properly instructed on the “national question” and last year launched consultations.
So after decades of nationalist tinkering with the history curriculum, guess what young Quebecois think about their culture?
“A large proportion of young Québécois [around 40% of the total of answers collected] hold to a melancholic or sad vision of Quebec history and a perspective in which the history of Quebec is depicted as a struggle,” Mr. Létourneau writes in a summary of his book, titled Je me souviens?
While the struggle for survival has always been part of the Quebecois narrative, it's tone was quite different among previous generations. Pre-Quiet Revolution the emphasis was on heroic struggle and triumph. The continued existence of the French fact, the intransigence of the Church against heretical assault, were seen as proof of the unique strengths of Quebecois culture. A bastion of faith and truth in a sea of Protestant money grubbing. The key difference between these narratives was hope. The Church, for all its flaws, provided hope to the people. That's something the social democratic welfare never has and never could.
This heroic vision was dominant long before anyone in English Canada thought of bribing Quebec's loyalty. While the ROC complains bitterly about the free ride La Belle Province has been getting for half a century, we often overlook the devastation that this dollar bought patriotism has brought to the Quebecois. The real victims of equalization and other inter-regional welfare schemes aren't the suckers in Alberta, B.C. and Ontario who have been footing the bil. Nope. It's the ethnic Quebecois themselves.
It's a public policy truism, at least among those of us on the Right, that the real victims of the welfare state aren't the taxpayers, it's the welfare recipients. The cost of basic social transfers, divided among a large and wealthy population, is comparatively small. Perhaps only a few hundred dollars a year for every middle class taxpayer in the country. It's money that if left in the hands of those same taxpayers would likely be frittered away on amusement. The real victim is the welfare layabout.
There are few, outside of university faculty lounges, who have sympathy for the welfare loafer, the otherwise able bodied moocher who lives off other people's taxes. In fairness the loafer comprises only a portion of those on basic social assistance. Many recipients are in genuine need and are given a pittance by a bureaucracy that does little to help the weak and rather too much to help the clever and dishonest. The loafer certainly gets a free ride. But nothing in life is free. There's a high price for free money.
What does a man do who has no responsibilities? Nothing to fight for. Nothing to life for. Just an organism consuming and consuming. The "help" the welfare state provides is often to maintain a kind of living death among its recipients. It subsidizes negative behaviours, discourages initiative and promotes all manner of vice and violence. Those acquainted with the works of Anthony Daniels will have a very clear idea of what and who I'm talking about.
In the long ago days of the welfare state's early promise, it was hoped that a generous welfare state would lift the poor not simply materially but spiritually as well. So it did to an extent. You spend that much money over so many years its bound to have some positive impact. Clever young men and women were allowed to pursue their education. Abandoned single mothers could raise their children with some measure of security. The unfortunate could obtain basic medical care. The classical liberal will argue that all these things would have happened through private charity. More than this they would have happened with greater efficacy and compassion. But that's not what happen. The State happened.
For every clever young boy in need of a scholarship, for every abandoned housewife, there were hundreds more who were simply responding to incentives. If you pay me not work, I won't work. If I can get more money having children than getting a job, that's what I'll do. If you subsidize me spending years studying pseudo-subjects, that's how I'll spend my youth. When you subsidize short-sighted behaviour you get more of it. You also get more short-sighted people. What past generations have regarded as essential is destroyed: Family, work and some philosophy of life that sustains the individual past the given moment and pleasure.
The welfare state offers only money. It takes away almost everything else.
What is done at the individual level can be done at the level of an entire province. In transforming the second largest province in the country into a welfare scrounger, we have helped destroy traditional Quebec society more completely than the nationalists could ever have done on their own. Some of that traditional society had little place in the modern world, a series of pernicious anachronisms that held back the Quebecois. But there were also things of value. The good and bad were all subsumed. What's left is a embittered hulk.
The young Quebecois thinking that all their history has to offer is tragedy and defeat. That's the classic mentality not of the defeated but of the dependent.
Recent Comments