The immediate costs of independence are difficult to assess. Larger, better integrated economies are usually more attractive to investors than smaller economies. Similarly, the political stability offered by a larger nation is often preferred to the greater political instability of smaller units. But the basic handicap which a post-independence Quebec would face lies in the very constitution of the Parti Quebecois.
DOMINATED BY INTELLECTUALS, the Parti Quebecois is an umbrella party which unites under its independentist banner people of both leftist and rightist persuasions. In its first cabinet, for instance, the P.Q. government had both a labor minister who fought for the highest minimum wage on the continent and for pro-union labor legislation, and a finance minister known for his conservatism. Until last year, the party was pledged to withdraw from NATO, but at its last convention, it reversed its policy so as not to antagonize the U.S.
The problem is not that the P.Q. has a pleasant or an unpleasant post-independence direction; rather, the problem is that it has no clear direction. The party's program promises such reforms as a guaranteed annual income and free post-secondary education, but its policies and its budget in particular have been remarkably conservative since the P.Q. took power. Unless the party can provide a clear post-independence direction, it threatens to subject the new country's economy to the economic pressures which invariably accompany political turmoil.
Economically, the province will have to pay for its formal independence. This does not mean that Quebec should not follow the separatist route if it expects substantial changes and benefits in other fields. The promise of real change, however, is lacking. It is by no means clear that formal independence for Quebec will do anything more than transform its highly nationalistic provincial civil service into a national bureaucracy.
Nevertheless, despite its questionable content, the independentist proposal is very attractive to the strong nationalist element in the province, and particularly to Quebec's youth. Nationalism is an old and prominent ideological component of French Canadian thought that reflects the national integrity and distinctiveness of the Catholic French Canadian population.
Although nationalism itself is as old as French Canada, its vehicle of expression has only recently become the provincial state. Traditionally, the dominant Catholic Church has been a far more important guardian of French Canadian cultural integrity than any government. But with Quebec's historic Quiet Revolution during the 1960s, which freed the state from the control of the Church and produced for the first time in the province's history a modern secular bureaucracy, the focus of nationalist sentiments finally shifted to the provincial government. In so doing, Quebeckers redefined the nationalist question in political and independentist terms.
NATIONALIST SENTIMENT is diffused in varying degrees throughout the French Canadian population. Nationalism has been exacerbated in Quebec because of the persistent confusion between class antagonism and linguistic and national divisions. The English Canadians have historically dominated the ranks of the business elite, so when French workers conflict with management, they conflict with an English management. Class antagonism assumes the form of national antagonism, and reinforces the already present nationalist element.
An important contemporary source of nationalism is the provincial civil service. Created rapidly during the Quiet Revolution, it has channelled the empire-building impulse common to most bureaucracies in a nation-building direction. Because of the language barrier separating French civil servants from the English corporate world, Quebec's bureaucrats are less immediately sensitive to conservative business influence than are most other bureaucracies. The consequence of rapidly creating a nationalist and non-business oriented civil service is that the bureaucracy itself is a powerful motor force for Quebec's independence.
Meanwhile, despite the focusing of political debate on the cultural question, the issue of the economic cost of independence will in all likelihood continue to be decisive. All the polls taken since the P.Q.'s election demonstrate a far higher degree of support for formal independence with close Canadian economic ties and few economic risks, than for a complete break with Canada.
Quebec's problem, like all longstanding historical ones, can not be reduced to any simplistic solution. Nationalism is still alive and well in Quebec, although it is not clear that independence of the P.Q. variety will in fact offer any substantive advantages to French Canadians that could not be obtained within the present federal system. Against the potential benefit arising from independence must be pitted the question of economic cost. That question has already received the bulk of Quebec's attention precisely because the substantive benefits of independence are far from clear. Unless these benefits can be clarified, it is doubtful that the independentists will win their bid for formal autonomy.