Sovereignty's Dirty Propaganda War

Two weeks ago Quebecers were treated to another rather obvious propaganda attack by French language militants, a completely dishonest and manipulative poll, published in l'Actualite magazine, an effort conceived in dishonesty and dedicated to the principle that Quebecers are dumb enough to believe anything, as long as it is wrapped up, packaged and presented as the real McCoy.

The manipulation was so blatant that the author more or less admitted as such in an article in the Montreal Gazette, but made no apology for the underhanded motives.

The questions in the poll were so designed to elicit certain responses, thus adding 'scientific proof' supporting the authors perverted and dishonest position that anglos are aloof and arrogant.

Unfortunately, this is no isolated case in the ongoing fraud to slander Anglophones and misrepresent the facts.
It has become the game plan of sovereigntists to use a relentless and deceitful propaganda campaign to convince brainwash Quebecers into believing that culturally and linguistically, they are in dire straights.

Long ago sovereigntists gave up the economic argument as a means to promote sovereignty. After the Quiet Revolution of the sixties, Quebecers recaptured the instruments and tools of their economy and became masters of their own economic fate, for better or worse. (Insert comment here)
There's nary a separatist today who would seriously promote a sovereignty campaign based on the idea that Quebec would be better off economically outside Canada, especially with the annual 8 billion equalization payment hanging over the province's head like the proverbial Sword of Damocles.

And so a new narrative was invented, one where Quebec is desperate to achieve sovereignty as the only remedy to save the French language and culture, doomed to extinction because of the relentless and inevitable creep of Anglicization.

But Quebec francophones are a hardy bunch, not overly prone to blindly agree with what they are told by politicians or by so-called intellectuals, at any rate much more so than anglo Canadians.

Consider that after forty years of relentless propaganda by sovereigntists, a media full of sympathizers hammering home the separatist case on a daily basis, there remains enough francophone federalists non-separatists to doom any chance that a sovereignty referendum will succeed.

And so in an effort to ramp up the pressure on these recalcitrants, sovereigntist strategists have descended into using deception and outright lies in order to get them on board, it's all that's left to them after forty years of failure.

Front and center in propaganda campaign are Pierre Curzi and Jean-François Lisée, who pump out alarmist drivel, misinformation and outright leaps of fantasy on an ongoing basis, with the charm, poise and confidence of a con artist like Earl Jones.

Mr. Lisée uses his blog to propagate a steady stream of nonsense, describing Quebec as rich, solvent, well-run and fairly taxed, where citizens are well-rewarded for their taxes and where the deficit is but a trifle.
His fantasies are so badly contrived that its hard to believe that a fair-minded and honest editor would allow such drivel to go to Press, but when the editor is a separatist too...well.

He has even written a book consisting of fifteen arguments which as he immodestly proclaims, 'puts a 'KO' on the right.'
His cherry-picked statistics and theories don't stand up to the most rudimentary of critiques and his laughable attempt to blatantly mislead would be sad, were it not so widely distributed.

The very able blogger DAVID has over the last few weeks,  demolished every one of Mr. Lisée's flights of fancy.
In the latest round, DAVID puts paid to the ridiculous notion advanced by Mr. Lisée in his treatise that redefines the notion of debt.
There, Mr. Lisée proposes that since Quebec owns Hydro-Quebec and other money making state corporations, the value of those assets should reduce the provinces 'net' debt.
In other words, if Hydro Quebec is worth 100 billion and the Quebec government owes 225 billion, than the 'net' debt' is $125 billion.
According to DAVID, this is like buying a half a million dollar home and declaring the transaction neutral because the value of the asset is equal to the debt.
Well and good says DAVID, but you've still got to pay off a mortgage that you can't afford!! Read more blog pieces demolishing Lisee's 15 arguments{Fr}.

Such is the nature of sovereigntist purveyors of snake oil, shucking and jiving around the facts with the sole purpose of confusing the public, by muddying the waters.

As for Mr. Curzi, no brainiac to begin with, his modus operendi is to build sovereigntist arguments based on, as the lawyers say,  'facts not in evidence.'

I've written about Mr. Curzi and his reliance on studies created by other fantasists in a blog piece entitled- English Cegep Study - A Case of Weird Science

In that piece I expose the separatist propaganda organ known as the "Institut de recherche sur le français en Amérique (IRFA) as a group less worthy of its moniker than 'Institute of Hair Replacement''

Let's just say that with no fixed address or employees, it is a sham created  by a tiny group of separatist volunteers, closely aligned to the OQLF and radical French language positions, to pump out sovereigntist propaganda under the pseudo-legitimacy of a real think tank.

Only Mr.Curzi and the separatist Le Devoir newspaper dare to maintain the fiction that the 'Institute' is in any way something more than a separatist propaganda front.

Now before I go on to expose the newest fraud perpetrated in the propaganda war, I'd like to share something that I became aware of since writing the aforementioned blog piece.
It illustrates perfectly the depths of dishonest deception that these separatist propagandists will go to in order to manufacture dissent.

In an article in Le Devoir, written by the IRFA's president, Patrick Sabourin, the author  does a magnificent job trying to discredit a very well prepared and researched study by the very reputable Institut de la statistique du Québec, (Quebec's version of Statistics Canada) exposing the lamentable graduation rate of francophones from Quebec universities.

Mr. Sabourin presents readers with a smorgasbord of statistical nonsense meant to create an alternate universe, one where any fact or figure can be interpreted to Quebec's advantage.
In that article, in which he tried to prove that Ontario francophones don't have a higher university graduation rate than francophones in Quebec, he admits to the fact that when it comes to being highly educated, Quebec francophones lag Quebec anglophones by 7.9%.

"......à celui des francophones au Québec, dont la proportion d'individus fortement scolarisés demeure 7,9 points de pourcentage inférieure à celle des anglophones du Québec." 

He doesn't back up that figure or describe how he came to this number, probably because it is by any stretch of the imagination, a complete misrepresentation.
The real number is almost five times as high!

Now I've reprinted this table from the report I mentioned earlier, which shows that in the 25 to 44 years old category, 31.3% of Anglos are highly educated, while francophones have a rate of 22.4.%

Perhaps if all demographic age groups were taken into consideration the difference would narrow down to where Mr. Sabourin could make the outrageous claim that the difference between English and French is 7.9%

But is the difference between say, 30% and say 22.1%, just 7.9%?
Any statistician, would laugh at the contention.

Let us consider a company which has a million dollar payroll and pays one of its employees, John Smith, $100,000 a year or 10% of it's entire payroll.
Pierre Paquette, another employee is paid $25,000 a year or 2.5% of the entire payroll.

According to voodoo statistics, one can say and perhaps Mr Sabourin would agree, that Paquette makes 7.5% less than John based on the math (10% minus 2.5% equals 7.5%)
But the reality is that John makes four time as much as Pierre or 400%!

At any rate, if you made 25K a year and your co-worker made a 100k a year, would you have the audacity to contend that he made just 7.5% more than you?

Now look at the graph above to see how one can come to the conclusion that Anglos are only 8.9% more highly educated than Francophones. (31.3% minus 22.4% = 8.9%)

The reality is that when proper math is used, Anglophones are more highly educated to the tune of 40%.

By the way, Mr. Sabourin claims in the article that francophones aren't really undereducated, it's just that anglophones are over educated.
Maybe.
Perhaps that may be why he conveniently forgets to include statistics on those pesky ethnics who out perform even the Anglos.  Comparing the graduation rate of ethnics to francophones would be utterly humiliating!

And so we go round and round the merry-go-round of statistical manipulation and misinterpretation, until we are too dizzy to realize that we are being utterly conned.

Now as I promised, let me introduce you to the latest player in the sovereigntist propaganda war.

A while back I was reading an article in the Globe and Mail about the incredible opportunities and the untold riches to be mined in Quebec's north and the benefits of Premier Charest's Plan Nord, an ambitious 30 year program conceived to upgrade the infrastructure in order to allow the exploitation of the mineral wealth;

"Think of the Quebec economy, and the traditional drivers are energy, forestry and manufacturing. But there’s a new engine in Quebec – mining – and it’s reshaping the economy of both the province, and the country.

Investment in the province’s mining industry is expected to reach $4.4-billion this year, up 62 per cent from 2011. That’s nearly equal to the capital that will be poured into manufacturing ($5-billion), a remarkable 27 per cent of all business investment in the province and represents half of all mining investment in the country, according to a National Bank of Canada analysis of recent Statistics Canada figures.

“That’s never happened before,” National Bank of Canada chief economist Stéfane Marion said in an interview. “It’s a huge growth driver for the province this year, and in the future.”

It’s not the only first. Quebec will lead the country in mining investment this year, outpacing Ontario, Mr. Marion said.

Mining investment is expected to hit $3.7-billion in Ontario, $2.8-billion in B.C. and $500-million in Alberta.

For Quebec, the money pouring into dozens of iron ore, gold, copper and other mining projects could add a full percentage to GDP this year and cause an unexpected boost in royalty revenue for the cash-strapped government. It will also have spinoff benefits for Montreal-area manufacturers, who will help supply mining-related equipment. Globe and Mail

This on the heels of a government report by SECOR describing the Plan Nord in some very glowing terms:

"The primary authors of the study, Jean-Pierre Lessard and Guillaume Caudron, both managers at SECOR, estimate that these projects will generate $148B in economic benefits over 25 years.

Wealth creation stemming from the Plan Nord will reach about $5.9B per year, or 1.8% of Quebec's GDP. The projects could sustain 37,000 jobs per year, at an average annual salary of $65,000. Each job created in the North should result in another being created in the South." Link

Now I'm a cynic by nature and don't have much faith in the contentions above, conceived by so-called experts, the same people who told us that the Metro extension to Laval would cost 190 million, only to find out a few short years later that the true cost was over 800 million. Link.
It seems that Quebec uses the same planners and experts as those who built the Titanic.

Predicting what will be in 25 years is an exercise in wishful thinking. The exercise a laughable attempt at political manipulation.
Let's just say that it's a crapshoot, but one which I support and you should too, because if it pans out, it will be a Godsend for the Quebec economy, which is deeply in trouble.
Let's face it, we are in desperate need of a 'Jed Clampett' type of windfall.

Of course this automatically means that the PQ and other separatists are deeply opposed to the project.
A meaningful and perhaps highly successful project led by Jean Charest and the Liberals could prove disastrous at the polls and so the propaganda machine is wound up, disparaging the project with warnings of the dire consequences of selling out Quebec's resources to big bad business.
Rinse, Repeat, Rinse.

Leading the attack on the Plan Nord, is a relatively new player, an organization that's been around for a while, but which is making waves of late.

It too is another phoney-baloney "Institute,' another group of sovereignty/socialist propagandist volunteers, this time with the very weighty name of 'Institut de Recherche et d’Informations Socio-économiques'

The group put out it's own report describing the Plan Nord as a disaster. Of course it's anti government message got a big play in Le Devoir.

“In our most optimistic scenario, the shortfall between revenues and expenditures by the government is 2.3 billion over 25 years, calculated Bertrand Schepper, author of this analysis and a degree in business administration at HEC Montreal. Link

Bernard Schepper...err..."No Comment"

There's an easy explanation for the discrepancy between the glowing reports above and the "Institute's" gloom and doom report.
How the press could give credence and publish a report prepared by a lowly graduate student from UQAM, Quebec's very own version of Greendale Community College, is beyond belief, especially considering that the author, Bertrand Schepper, is a radical Quebec solidaire militant and close associate of Amir Khadir.

Publishing the report without challenging Mr. Schepper's bone fides over his limited credentials and failing to mention his close and active connection to the Quebec Solidaire political party is an act of journalistic fraud laxity.

"Who still believes in the American dream? Who still believes that all citizens are born equal and have the same opportunities in life? Surely not Bertrand Schepper." Link{Fr}

Mr Schepper was a senior member of Khadir's Mercier re-election committee and once actually defended a robo-call campaign on Khadir's behalf, one that broke CRTC rules. Link{Fr}

In fact the whole" Institut de Recherche et d’Informations Socio-économiques' is but a Quebec Solidaire adjunct, where almost all the researchers are active members of the radical socialist/sovereigntist Quebec solidaire, a party that promotes all manner of pie-in-the-sky socialist fantasies.
For a good laugh, read about Quebec Solidaire's fantasical political positions HERE.

While nobody denies Quebec Solidaire the right to create it's own reports and studies, when its studies are quoted, it should be treated as the product of ultra partisan left-wing/separtists.

Many questions arise over the Institut de Recherche et d’Informations Socio-économiques' and  exactly who it represents and who is behind its financing. 
Unfortunately, it falls to bloggers to expose the truth and ask the hard questions.
Read this excellent blog piece entitled  Plan Nord: quand l’IRIS ne voit pas clair{Fr}

The saddest aspect in all this, is the creeping acceptance of the above-mentioned 'Institutes' as legitimate sources of research.
The latest pearl from IRIS is a paper warning that Quebec is heading towards a debt bubble because of increased student loans, which will trigger a financial meltdown as seen in the United States over the sub-prime mortgage crisis.
I first thought it was an April Fool's joke, but apparently not. Have you ever heard such drivel?

The real problem is that mainstream newspapers EVEN THE MONTREAL GAZETTE are giving credence to these nonsensical ideas.
In an article written by Karen Seidman and Kevin Dougherty in the Gazette, they repeat the monumentally cretinous idea of a student loan debt bubble that threatens the financial stability of the province, without describing the true nature of IRIS, the radical unofficial propaganda arm of Quebec solidaire. 

It's like writing a newspaper article quoting a report which finds no link between cigarettes and lung cancer, without mentioning that the story was commissioned by a think tank owned by a tobacco company!

 If ever sovereignty is achieved, Quebec's new propagandists will serve the new country of Quebec well, where they will quickly be hired by the new Department of Information and where they can put their consummate skills at twisting the facts to good use.

When Quebecers find themselves being flushed down the toilet, it will be described by the spinners as a delightful 'bain toubillion.'

Good night and Bonne Chance!