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The key to Duplessis’ success was in two strategies. By maintaining clerical personnel in most of the education and health-care systems, he saved an immense amount of money that would have had to go to secular teachers, nurses and administrators. This enabled him to balance the budget, reduce taxes and, along with the pre-emption of militant labour by generating improving wages, enabled Quebec to attract immense amounts of outside investment, especially in the natural resources and manufacturing sectors. This generated much of the huge rise in prosperity and Duplessis ensured that it was spread around the population generously. His second technique was to demand more for Quebec jurisdictionally. He adopted the fleur-de-lis flag and finally forced the St. Laurent government to concede Quebec’s right to a share of direct taxes. He thus achieved the dual political feat of securing the vote of the nationalists and the conservatives. This required great dexterity, not to be too nationalistic for the conservatives or too conservative for the nationalists. His formula was to demand with great vigour that Ottawa give way, but make the point that he was only calling for what the British North America Act provided: nationalist table-pounding to achieve the letter of the law.

He said, “The Quebec nationalists are a 10-pound fish on a five-pound line, you have to reel them in carefully and let them out carefully. I shut them up for 10 years with a flag. I’ll shut them up for another 10 years by opening relations with France” — with Gen. Charles de Gaulle, he declined to take the Fourth Republic seriously — “and for a decade after that with a World’s Fair.” And he told Montreal’s Cardinal Paul-Emilie Léger, in referring to the Quebec Church: “If you squeeze a fish hard enough, it will get away.” The cardinal replied: “I’m not squeezing the fish, you are.” Of course he was, and Quebec could not go on much longer as a priest-ridden society. But he, Paul Sauvé and Daniel Johnson would have provided a much more gradual and successful transition than the chaos of what has been pleased to call itself the Quiet Revolution.

The chief characteristic of this era has been the same personnel teaching the same students the same curriculum and caring for the hospitalized in the same edifices at 10 and then 20 times the cost to the taxpayers. Freedom of expression has been abridged in the name of culture, 425,000 French speakers and as many non-French have left Quebec, and the collapsed birthrate is being thinly disguised by Haitian, Lebanese, and North African immigration. Duplessis said: “You will take my place but you will not replace me.” He was right.

National Post

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