The Québécois Élite: Patriots or Scoundrels?

Jeffrey J. Cormier is a Ph.D. candidate specializing in Canadian society
at McGill University.

Robert Sauve was provoked into writing this attack on Quebec
nationalists, journalists, and politicians by the publication of the
1994 report of the Manitoba Legislature Committee on Compensation.
According to that report, the Quebec government paid 25.2 percent less
in welfare benefits than did the Ontario government; by contrast, it
paid its MPs some 26 percent more. The disparity so enraged the retired
electrical engineer and sometime historian that he decided to put the
Quebec elite on trial, metaphorically speaking. In this book, he uses
statistical data from a variety of sources to argue that Quebec’s
economic and educational systems seriously lag behind those of Ontario.
The numbers reveal, he contends, a seriously undereducated Quebec
population living in an unstable political environment that discourages
the private business investments necessary for job creation

For Sauve, the major culprits in this courtroom drama are members of
the Quebec elite—politicians, journalists, and nationalists. These
groups, he says, are the major beneficiaries of government policies and
actions (such as tough language laws and threats of secession) that have
left the majority of Quebecers in a state of relative poverty. Before
the Quiet Revolution, Sauve asserts, it was the Catholic Church that
took advantage of a gullible Quebec population. Since then, the secular
nationalists have assumed the initiative. This is an extremely odd book.
While the statistical analyses and argumentation are more or less sound,
the mostly colloquial language makes the book inappropriate for an
academic audience. Yet Sauve’s observation that an aging and bloated
Quebec bureaucracy is responsible for at least some of the province’s
woes seems right on the mark.