HENRY AUBIN - Mario Polèse, a well-known urban economist in Montreal, has just written a book warning that a Yes vote in a future sovereignty referendum might backfire on sovereignists. Quebec sovereignists' anticipated increase in power over the economy and language, he writes, are mostly illusions.
The argument commands attention for two reasons.
First, Polèse focuses on the ignored half of the sovereignty-association formula - that is, the association that Quebec would try to negotiate with the rest of Canada after a Yes vote. Sovereignist leaders avoid discussing the nature of such an association - or "partnership" as the 1995 referendum question called it. Still, the concept is very much in the picture: Polls suggest that a referendum would never pass without the prospect of a close future relationship with Canada. Polèse casts overdue light on this murky but all-important area.
The book is also a grabber because of the author's credentials. In 1977 the Lévesque government hired Polèse, then a sovereignist, to help define what an association with Canada should involve if the Yes side were to win the 1980 referendum. He spent two years poring over such a relationship's plumbing. At the Institut national de la recherche scientifique, where he has been ever since, he has continued to explore the matter.
His book, [Serions-nous plus libres au lendemain d'un Oui?->18320], predicts what would happen in the aftermath of a Yes vote. It assumes for the sake of argument the best of all outcomes for sovereignists - that the referendum passes by a large majority, that no discord breaks out with the rest of Canada, that both parties agree on how to split the Canadian debt and that the Montreal area's partition movement fizzles.
The next step would be negotiating a treaty on partnership between the two sovereign states. Polèse says Parti Québécois leaders avoid the subject and focus on utopian new powers because a treaty would involve compromise and reduce those powers.
What powers? Former PQ premier Bernard Landry, among others, has said that Quebec would seek four "liberties" from Canada: the free circulation of goods, services, people and capital between the two countries. That would mean no customs stations along the Ontario and New Brunswick borders. It would also require an economic union and uniformity between many of the countries' laws and practices.
This would go beyond having a common policy on commerce and tariffs. Take guns: Quebec might want to ban more kinds of guns than Canada, but enforcing the ban would entail border stations. Or take drugs: Quebec might want liberalization, but Canada would need border stations to hinder smuggling. Immigration law would also have to be on same page if people admitted by one country could live in the other.
The treaty "would be as complex and arduous as a federal constitution," Polèse says Of course, the PQ could jettison the association idea, but that would mean a deeply isolated Quebec. Most Quebecers would not accept that.
With or without an economic union with Canada, the sovereignist premise that Quebec would be more French than ever with independence is also doubtful.
Polèse says that the world's eyes would be on the new country's respect for rights. Quebec might well have to allow the equivalent of the "Canada clause" - that is, the right (resented by many nationalists) that lets children go to English school in Quebec if they have a parent schooled in English in another province. Some sort of "formal recognition" of English might even be needed.
I would go further than Polèse. Already, as things stand, this province has to pay back the highest public debt (as a share of GDP) of any province. The size of its workforce - provider of most tax revenues - will start to shrink in five to 10 years. Quebec will also have a huge population of retirees soaking up public money.
If it's hard to recruit new workers to the province today, think of what it would be with the economic turbulence of the republic's early years. Quebec would be competing against other parts of North America with lower taxes. Quebec will be so desperate to make itself attractive to foreign workers it would have little choice but to loosen today's language constraints.
Polèse says he doesn't "viscerally" reject independence, but he'd vote No in a future referendum because a victory might well weaken Quebec.
Polèse has courageously defied Quebec academia's taboo against a critical analysis of independence. The intellectual elite will surely ignore his apotasy. That's the best way to deal with an unpalatable argument that's hard to refute.
haubin@thegazette.canwest.com