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COMMENTARY
May 26, 2012
The latest rage
People get bored with rioting after a while. Bad as things may appear to be, in the streets of Montreal, 15 weeks into what started as a student protest against modest tuition hikes, and has become a general leftish demonstration against reality - the boredom will show. Dan Gagnier, the new Quebec government point man for negotiations, has been appointed just in time to take credit for ending what might have blown over in a fortnight, had student demands been totally ignored.Bill 78 from the National Assembly stirred things up. The premier, Jean Charest, proved himself even more a fool for bothering to introduce it, than he did earlier by buckling to every student demand - in return for nothing. The powers needed by the police were already there, had the government the guts to use them against the more violent and intimidating protesters. Tailoring new law to the passing event only put some wind back in their sails. Those who'd forgotten what they were protesting, are now protesting the government's anti-protest legislation. Charest is a politician for whom I have long felt contempt - a coward under pressure and a bully when not - but in the present circumstances, he is not worth much ink. The mess on the streets is the product of a long history; this generation of politicians arrived late in the day. Like the last nine premiers of that unhappy province, Charest did not launch the Quiet Revolution, did not evacuate the old moral order, did not invent the entitlement culture, did not pull the lever that left the province dangling over bottomless debt. He merely piled on, recklessly - as every politician does in his turn, who does not wish to be eaten. And now he has the ill luck to be in office, when all the chickens have come home to roost. That he has no idea what he is doing, is almost beside the point. We can't blame him for what he inherited. For all practical purposes, Quebec is Greece. It would be equally pointless to blame the students, or even the union leaders who have smelled their chance to capitalize on the disorder, by joining the melee to insinuate their own demands. I feel disinclined to blame even the older people, around the periphery of the marches, banging their pots and pans in encouragement - often perfectly nice people, who had their turn at the entitlement trough, and may now be enjoying their indexed pensions. Why shouldn't these kids get what they had? Because we have run out of money. In fact, we ran out decades ago. Quebec also ran taxes up to the point of diminishing returns, where the more productive people live to pay them. It is decades, too, since Quebec entered the demographic death spiral, and began needing immigrants to pay for retirees. Here is a huge truth, which I believe helps explain everything. The radicalism, progressivism, linguistic chauvinism and separatism of Quebec, is so much spilled religion. It is less the cause than the consequence of the collapse of a religious order. Quebec got it worse than the rest of Canada, because its Catholic order was stronger, and burst all at once, like a great dam. English Canada, with its Protestant order already half secularized, has endured instead a shallower, gentler slide. Readers in Quebec will tell me this is irrelevant, that the event I am referring to happened a long time ago, that I should look for more proximate causes. But the Quiet Revolution defines the province, and will continue to do so. Catholicity, though a skeleton, remains in the closet. To this day, many people in Quebec, Montreal especially, choose to do things specifically because they are the precise opposite of what the Church teaches. To my mind, we are not dealing simply with the collapse of the old order. It is compounded by the inversion of that order. The alternative religion does not own to a name, but is in every sociological sense a religion. "Secularism" may replace, but does not easily forget Christianity. Rather, it turns the religion upside down, in ways that constantly remind of the original. A nexus of duties is replaced by a nexus of "rights." Entitlements are themselves the reverse of charity. A "culture of life" that was full of children, for whom adults made sacrifices, becomes a "culture of death" in which children are sacrificed, and every progressive social development contributes to demographic decline. The rage against "authority" is itself an expression of the new authority, of radical fashion. The protesters must set up a straw man - must cast Charest as their "authoritarian," when he is a political reed, bending to every passing breeze. Their protest will also pass, like the wind; but like the wind, it will keep returning, over a landscape blown sterile and dry. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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