Québec is a developing province masquerading as developed. Take away Toronto, Vancouver, and Calgary, and all of Canada looks like a U.S. satellite with natural resource and product sales dependent on a foreign navy.
You'd have to be a fan of Marquis de Sade--the receiving end--to want to live in Quebec, so of course this is where the Canadian government placed many of its Syrian refugees. The weather gets colder and more intolerable as you move farther Northeast, making Quebec City less hospitable than Montreal. One local artist remarked, "It's a freezer and it's raining ice cubes."
He wasn't kidding. Imagine a third-tier San Francisco, just as expensive (except for housing) and colder--that's Quebec most months out of the year, thanks to onerous taxes and regulations. See this convoluted Uber receipt in Montreal?
A twelve minute ride anywhere will cost about 10 USD, higher than most major metropolises. In Quebec City, I was charged 55 Canadian cents because the driver waited less than one minute while I put my backpacks in the trunk of his car. (It's automatically added as a "waiting fee.") Where do these taxes go? As far as I can tell, to white residents so they can have government jobs. 100% of the police officers, 90% of the bus drivers, 90% of Montreal's Metro workers, and 100% of the school crossing guards I saw were white.
Despite aiming for égalité, the Québecois lack a single distinguished author or director. David Suzuki is from British Columbia; Anna Porter, Alice Munro, Robertson Davies, and Margaret Atwood are from Ontario; and Jacques Poitras and Charlotte MacLeod hail from New Brunswick. Who's Quebec's best-selling international author? Here's the blurb from one of his latest books:
For fans of Stephen King’s Misery and Jo Nesbø’s The Snowman comes an engrossing thriller about a monster who becomes a victim and a victim who becomes a monster. From Patrick Senécal, the Quebec author who has sold over a million books worldwide.
Sigh. (If you argue Wajdi Mouawad, Jean-Marc Vallée, Chrystine Brouillet, and Simon Boulerice are Quebec's artistic "heavyweights," you've lost the debate--none of them have created anything memorable and widely distributed. As for Leonard Cohen, he achieved success only after moving from Montreal to New York in 1967. He died in the United States.)
How is it that every other country with Muslim or African immigrants can claim credit for producing some of the world's best literature and art? Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie attended three American universities. The U.K. has Zadie Smith, born in London to a Jamaican mother. America has Dominican-born Junot Diaz. We haven't even discussed sports (the 2018 French soccer/football team, coached by Zinedine Zidane) or music (Senegalese-American Akon), and we won't, because it would take too damn long to list all the accomplishments.
You'd think a province with so little going for it would at least be dignified, but the Quebécois can't manage even that simple task. As far as they're concerned, they're bloody victims: "[T]here is an understandable strain of anger running through much Quebecois writing—an anger arising out of more than 150 years of oppression and marginalization at the hands of a dominant culture and language."
To summarize, they believe being forced to speak English is an affront worse than slavery that justifies millions of taxpayer dollars to support Francophone culture. (Pro tip: you can't buy class or culture, but that hasn't stopped anyone yet.) Sadly, tax dollars promoting Francophone culture seem wasted because they boost only French-speaking collections rather than bridges towards a truly bilingual society.
When not discriminating against English speakers, Quebec taxpayers also enjoy financing the translation of works from other countries into French but not English, sowing the seeds for future civil war--or separatism. Unsurprisingly, Quebec has tried to separate from English-speaking Canada two times: in 1980 and in 1995. In 1980, PM Pierre Trudeau, current PM Justin's father, negotiated an uneasy peace. In 1995, Quebec narrowly avoided secession when 50.58% voted to remain.
Today, Quebec's economy is tied to the aerospace (aka military-industrial complex)
and finance sectors, plus its ports.
Quebec City's Museum of Civilization discusses its economic history of making shoes,
guns, then--I kid you not--a scientific Golden Age from 1990 to 2000: "Several large biomedical companies called Quebec City home from 1990 to 2000... Today, the life science industry consists of more than 100 companies providing nearly 6,000 jobs... with sales [not profits!] of 1.3 billion dollars." (For comparison purposes, Eli Lilly & Company, just one American life science company, generates about 20 billion USD in annual revenue.)
What brilliant innovation occurred post-2000 in Quebec? Video games, and the local museum showcases American-distributed Guitar Hero. (I swear I am not making this up.) Quebec does indeed invest heavily in the video game sector--it provides tax credits up to 37.5% of employee salaries to attract talent. One major recipient of the tax credit is formerly France-based Guillaume Provost, who returned to Quebec: "native to Montreal, he has lived anywhere but..." If it sounds like Quebec has to pay millions not to lose its best people to other countries and to Toronto, you're not wrong.
As for finance, the sector's influence is particularly interesting because it helps prove the West's economic development as historically driven by military and banking alliances. Murals of fallen soldiers in WWI and WWII are solemnly displayed in large banks, and justifiably so.
Without war, capture of other countries' resources, and the implementation of legal and insurance systems designed to guarantee profits, modern Western governments seem flummoxed in having to adapt to other, more sustainable methods of economic development.
"All the colonial wars for the last 25 years have been fought in the interests of capital; fought to ensure markets that would guarantee more profits for European capital. Capital has become very powerful, all-powerful. Capital decides the fate of humanity." -- Pramoedya Ananta Toer, This Earth of Mankind (translated from Indonesian in 1980)
"The United States is now the number-one producer of oil and natural gas anywhere in the world — and now, for the first time in 65 years, we are a net exporter of energy." -- USA President Donald Trump, February 5, 2019
Regardless, Quebec's economy continues to be tied to America's, for better or for worse.
Such dependency explains why Canada could not decline the U.S.'s demand to arrest Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou in a brazen attempt to influence U.S-China trade negotiations. Her arrest could be a nearly fatal self-inflicted wound, because most Canadian apparel products are manufactured in China or Cambodia, and Canada's major housing markets west of Quebec are propped up by Chinese investors and Chinese foreign exchange students paying rent (and outsized tuition).
Moreover, due to its vast size and few heavily populated cities, Canada's mobile and physical infrastructures are underdeveloped. Though competition does exist between domestic mobile providers, no foreign companies--not even global behemoth T-Mobile--have bothered to set up shop. Consequently, if you're a tourist, basic service will cost you a frostbitten arm and a leg, and only Canada among developed nations sells prepaid monthly plans offering meager starting packets of 2GB to 4GB. (I considered a roaming package from Britain's Vodafone before seeing a bonus deal from Koodo Mobile.)
In short, it's not a good time to antagonize Huawei Technologies, but that's exactly where Canada is, courtesy of the United States. A smart PM would invite Chinese, European, and American mobile companies to invest and compete subject to data localization requirements; however, without subsidies possibly banned under WTO rules, Canada might be worried its domestic mobile companies are so weak, they'll all fold against outside competition.
The entire situation reminds me of the Amana Colonies in also-freezing Iowa, where a culture of communal re-distribution of wealth worked well for one generation, but not two or three.
Perhaps good times can survive more than three generations if funds are used for long-lasting physical infrastructure (trains, roads, etc.), but when you've reached the third generation in a non-innovative economy, there's a sense someone else--anyone but you, really--will handle things.
Service in all areas declines, then impacts the credibility of tax-receiving entities, who resort to propaganda to maintain funding. Immigrants are usually blamed, whether refugees or illegal, and if they're smart, they take their talents elsewhere.
A steady injection of well-targeted venture capital will improve prospects, but such economic weapons are rarely welcomed in a collaborative fashion (witness the worldwide struggles of Uber, Airbnb, Lime, etc.). Conflicts between newly funded players and established interests, while essential to progress, tear the social fabric. Worst case, Holocaust; best case, walls.
Even where collaboration is present, scaling a business without increasing segregation remains a challenge. Governments have yet to learn that neither laws nor taxes promote good behavior; the key is whether residents, citizens and non-citizens alike, feel connected to each other. The law, and its power to tax, are merely heavy tools to build--or break--social cohesion.
Luckily for Quebec and other sub-zero locales, harsh weather provides perfect opportunities to establish credibility through the provision of public services, including transportation and snow shoveling.
Each potential voter who wakes up and sees cleanly swept streets has less incentive to demonize governmental action. At that point, it's up to each politician to build on the credibility established by its winter crews, and some obviously do a better job than others.
Speaking of social cohesion, I've yet to discuss Quebec's most horrific incident: the January 29, 2017 mosque shooting, where blue-eyed Quebecer Alexandre Bissonnette, a former Royal Canadian Army Cadet, used a rifle to murder six praying Muslims and to wound eight others.
Ibrahima Barry (aged 39), Mamadou Tanou Barry (aged 42), Khaled Belkacemi (aged 60), Aboubaker Thabti (aged 44), Abdelkrim Hassane (aged 41) and Azzedine Soufiane (aged 57), all Canadian citizens, are no longer with us.
The judge could have issued a sentence of 150 years but chose 40 years instead, meaning the children the shooter orphaned may once day walk the same streets as their parents' killer. Meanwhile, Canada's other Muslims aren't faring well, either. According to journalist Nadine Yousif, "three years later, Alsaleh’s story, and that of other [refugee] families, is of feeling stuck. In Arabic, Alsaleh told me she misses her home in Syria, but that home is no longer there, and Canada still feels like a strange land, 'like you’re in a country that isn’t yours.'"
F*ck you, Quebec. F*ck you and this whole province and everyone in it. F*ck Justin Trudeau, who still hasn't visited paralyzed shooting victim Aymen Derbali. F*ck your ice sculptures and your ice hotel, one-offs in a land otherwise culturally bereft. F*ck your failure to create a truly sovereign country, despite your ample natural resources. F*ck your judges, who give white terrorists lenient sentences. F*ck your fancy restaurants serving overpriced food in Montreal. F*ck your failure to innovate--you can't even manage conveniently located food trucks for snowed-in residents. F*ck your lack of African restaurants. F*ck your NYC-copied bagels. F*ck your sh*tty Tim Horton's coffee. F*ck your maple syrup, for which you haven't negotiated a TSA exemption under NAFTA or USMCA's carry-on rules. F*ck your six months of winter. F*ck this whole province and everything in it.
© Matthew Mehdi Rafat (2019)
Bonus: Quebec can claim one writer: Mordecai Richler, who publicized a study claiming "over 70 percent of Quebeckers fall into our highly anti-Semitic category." Because Richler doesn't speak French, he was not considered a true representative.
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| At Winter Carnaval, an enjoyable annual event |
For fans of Stephen King’s Misery and Jo Nesbø’s The Snowman comes an engrossing thriller about a monster who becomes a victim and a victim who becomes a monster. From Patrick Senécal, the Quebec author who has sold over a million books worldwide.
Sigh. (If you argue Wajdi Mouawad, Jean-Marc Vallée, Chrystine Brouillet, and Simon Boulerice are Quebec's artistic "heavyweights," you've lost the debate--none of them have created anything memorable and widely distributed. As for Leonard Cohen, he achieved success only after moving from Montreal to New York in 1967. He died in the United States.)
How is it that every other country with Muslim or African immigrants can claim credit for producing some of the world's best literature and art? Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie attended three American universities. The U.K. has Zadie Smith, born in London to a Jamaican mother. America has Dominican-born Junot Diaz. We haven't even discussed sports (the 2018 French soccer/football team, coached by Zinedine Zidane) or music (Senegalese-American Akon), and we won't, because it would take too damn long to list all the accomplishments.
You'd think a province with so little going for it would at least be dignified, but the Quebécois can't manage even that simple task. As far as they're concerned, they're bloody victims: "[T]here is an understandable strain of anger running through much Quebecois writing—an anger arising out of more than 150 years of oppression and marginalization at the hands of a dominant culture and language."
To summarize, they believe being forced to speak English is an affront worse than slavery that justifies millions of taxpayer dollars to support Francophone culture. (Pro tip: you can't buy class or culture, but that hasn't stopped anyone yet.) Sadly, tax dollars promoting Francophone culture seem wasted because they boost only French-speaking collections rather than bridges towards a truly bilingual society.
 |
| Available only in French |
Today, Quebec's economy is tied to the aerospace (aka military-industrial complex)
 |
| At Fairmont Le Chateau Frontenac hotel, often featured in Hollywood movies |
 |
| From the small Bank of Montreal museum |
What brilliant innovation occurred post-2000 in Quebec? Video games, and the local museum showcases American-distributed Guitar Hero. (I swear I am not making this up.) Quebec does indeed invest heavily in the video game sector--it provides tax credits up to 37.5% of employee salaries to attract talent. One major recipient of the tax credit is formerly France-based Guillaume Provost, who returned to Quebec: "native to Montreal, he has lived anywhere but..." If it sounds like Quebec has to pay millions not to lose its best people to other countries and to Toronto, you're not wrong.
As for finance, the sector's influence is particularly interesting because it helps prove the West's economic development as historically driven by military and banking alliances. Murals of fallen soldiers in WWI and WWII are solemnly displayed in large banks, and justifiably so.
"All the colonial wars for the last 25 years have been fought in the interests of capital; fought to ensure markets that would guarantee more profits for European capital. Capital has become very powerful, all-powerful. Capital decides the fate of humanity." -- Pramoedya Ananta Toer, This Earth of Mankind (translated from Indonesian in 1980)
"The United States is now the number-one producer of oil and natural gas anywhere in the world — and now, for the first time in 65 years, we are a net exporter of energy." -- USA President Donald Trump, February 5, 2019
Regardless, Quebec's economy continues to be tied to America's, for better or for worse.
 |
| When your economy revolves around your neighbor... |
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| Alan Phillips, Nat'l Geographic, December 1961. Majority-USA owned cos "control more than 70% of Canada's oil industry." |
Moreover, due to its vast size and few heavily populated cities, Canada's mobile and physical infrastructures are underdeveloped. Though competition does exist between domestic mobile providers, no foreign companies--not even global behemoth T-Mobile--have bothered to set up shop. Consequently, if you're a tourist, basic service will cost you a frostbitten arm and a leg, and only Canada among developed nations sells prepaid monthly plans offering meager starting packets of 2GB to 4GB. (I considered a roaming package from Britain's Vodafone before seeing a bonus deal from Koodo Mobile.)
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| The modern U.K. economy, like many developed countries, seems dependent on surveillance capabilities. |
The entire situation reminds me of the Amana Colonies in also-freezing Iowa, where a culture of communal re-distribution of wealth worked well for one generation, but not two or three.
 |
| No employees at a busy Metro station in Montreal |
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| National Geographic, January or February 2019 |
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| From museum in Stockholm, Sweden |
Luckily for Quebec and other sub-zero locales, harsh weather provides perfect opportunities to establish credibility through the provision of public services, including transportation and snow shoveling.
 |
| Outside McGill University, Quebec's top university |
Speaking of social cohesion, I've yet to discuss Quebec's most horrific incident: the January 29, 2017 mosque shooting, where blue-eyed Quebecer Alexandre Bissonnette, a former Royal Canadian Army Cadet, used a rifle to murder six praying Muslims and to wound eight others.
 |
| At the Islamic Cultural Centre of Quebec City |
© Matthew Mehdi Rafat (2019)
Bonus: Quebec can claim one writer: Mordecai Richler, who publicized a study claiming "over 70 percent of Quebeckers fall into our highly anti-Semitic category." Because Richler doesn't speak French, he was not considered a true representative.
