Pensée économique au Québec: The economics of survival

Pensee economique au Quebec: the economics of survival R. F. NEILL, c.s.b. Introduction The economics of Quebec, in large measure, has been the economics of survival, perhaps even of despair. It has been the economics of a people forced by circumstances to deny the existence of certain economic problems. The situation of Quebec has been, properly speaking, tragic; for the necessary means to a solution of economic problems would have re-introduced the very problems needing solution. It has been the rapid economic advance of her English speaking neighbours that has threatened the survival of Quebec's culture. At least until very recently, the tragedy has been that the means to an economic counter-attack all seemed to be elements of the threatening culture. The means to victory implied defeat. Under these circumstances economics tended to become a desperate assertion that mere, .undirected increase in effort would issue in the desired self-realization. Regardless of how ineffectual such an economics was, and had to be, it still existed, reflecting the peculiar circumstances of the French-speaking population. The intellectual tools of this economics were deliberately borrowed or they infiltrated from the threatening culture. Once indigenized they became instruments of idealism rather than description. As often as not they became merely points of departure for purely politicial assertions. The economics of Quebec has been most markedly an economics engagec. Quebec is both a young and an old country, much more like the underdeveloped areas of Asia than is English-speaking Canada. Analysis of the Quebec case is more likely to throw light on the meaning of underdevelopment in the midtwentieth century. Assuming that economic thought is admissible objective evidence of the persisting problems in a society, the economic thought of Quebec provides excellent material for a sort of inside out (and, perhaps, upside Journal of Canadian Studies down) approach to modem economic development . Quebec has the characteristics of the underdeveloped areas of the mid-twentieth century in so far as it has been a traditionalist society with semi-colonial, semi-feudal institutions. At the same time it has had marked similarities to English-speaking Canada, particularly Ontario, in regard to geography and technology, and in its relations to the rest of the world. The situation invites comparisons. Most important for the present study, Quebec has been sufficiently well developed in the Western sense to have recorded its own experience over a long period of time. For this reason it is possible to make valid comparisons with regions of different cultural and historical dimensions. The present study is not such an explicit comparison. It attempts merely to express the character and to some extent the implications of economic thought in Quebec. Nonetheless it has been influenced at every point by a previous knowledge, however faulty, of economic thought in English-speaking Canada. PART I TO THE END OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY Prior to the Conquest Two books constitute New France's contribution to economic thought before the Conquest: H istoirc ueritable et naturelle des productions de la Nouvelle France (Paris: 1664) by Pierre Boucher and The Description and Natural History of the Coasts of North America (tr., Toronto: 1908, Paris: 1672) by Louis Athanase Denys. For the most part these works are descriptions of soils, vegetation and wild animals, but in both volumes some light is thrown on the basic economic problems of settlement in a new country. Boucher, a one time Governor at Three Rivers and a seigneur, listed the problems: the winter, the Iroquois, the lack of settlers. Denys, an Acadian with a claim to vast tracts of land, pressed the point that settlement would be profitable if agriculture and the dry (land based) fishing technique \Vere combined. (The French, for the most part, carried on a "wet fishery" from ports in Europe.) The problems of heavy overhead 7 connected with dry fishing could be solved if there was an alternate occupation. The success of the combined operation, so Denys claimed, would require settlement on a sufficiently large scale. He failed to convince anyone of the value of his scheme and eventually he was manipulated out of his land titles. What Boucher and Denys were pointing out was...