Federalism for sale

My experience as a Liberal guinea pig

COMMENTARY by MICHAEL DEBBANÉ

Somewhere out there is a knowledge broker who will purchase 90 minutes of your time--if you meet the desired demographic criteria--to pick your brain for information someone else needs in order to get you to buy something you might not need. In my case, that knowledge broker just happened to be my Québécois girlfriend.

"Hey Mike," she enthusiastically bellowed over the phone one day from her marketing research phone station. "I have the perfect focus group for you: anglos with no future." Wow, I thought, 50 bucks for pretending I'm hanging out on the Main on a Friday night.

As French post-modern guru Jean Baudrillard once wrote, "The masses no longer express themselves, they are surveyed." The focus group is not used merely to find out what kind of person licks the centre of an Oreo cookie before eating it. They also measure how various types of people might react to certain sensitive political issues--in this case, the devolution of power over job training to the province of Quebec.

As an anglo with no future, I was expecting to find myself in a room full of squeegee people. But then it dawned on me that squeegee people might see themselves not as hopeless charity cases, but as happily self-employed entrepreneurs. They certainly fulfill one of the most basic criteria of employment--a uniform.

As it turned out, anglos with no future are uniformless, ordinary people down to the core--all nine of us. Sitting around the table in a medium-sized conference room, our facilitator--an anglo with a future, judging from her attire--encouraged us to be as candid and uninhibited as possible, then launched into the group discussion.

"Do you know what the eligibility rules are for job training programs?" she asked. "Oh, and by the way, don't pay any attention to those three large microphones hanging above us."

Typical response from the group: I'm not sure what the eligibility rules are, but English is a dying language in this province and I feel oppressed. I would really hate to have to move.

"Ooookaaayy... next question. So, in your opinion should job training be provided by the federal government, the provincial government or a combination of both? Oh, and by the way, that wall of mirrors over there, well, our clients are behind it observing this session. But don't feel inhibited in any way."

Typical response: less bureaucratic overlap is a good thing, but you know, I have a friend who was visiting from Toronto and she can't believe how much English is a dying language in this city.

"Yes, well, since we're on the topic of language, is access to services in both official languages important to you in terms of your identity as a Canadian?"

Typical response: of course it is. It shows that we are educated and tolerant people, but English is a dying language and I feel like a foreigner in my own province.

On and on it went, with the imminent death of the English language occuping most of the focus group's time. The issue of devolution, on the other hand, was rarely discussed. Neither the participants nor the facilitator seemed too concerned with that, which in retrospect makes sense. The decision to devolve had already been made for us.

So, what were the clients behind the mirror looking for? Clearly they had no interest in what we actually thought about job training; rather, they wanted to know how to package and sell a job-training program that was already a done deal.

My suspicions were confirmed when I watched the news last week and witnessed first-hand how our focus group discussion became part of Liberal spin-doctor strategy. Since the agreement to transfer control over job training was signed, all we've heard about is how flexible federalism can be, how the French Language Charter and the federal Official Languages Act have been skillfully side-stepped in order to guarantee services in English--only on demand, of course.

Meanwhile, serious questions about the rest of the agreement remain unanswered. Will Quebec demand a minimum residency requirement for eligibility to job training programs, the same way B.C. just tried to do with welfare? No one is talking about this, or about the other possible consequences--aside from language, that is--of transferring these powers to the provinces. And the federal government isn't asking.

As a result of our focus group, the federal government did not build a better job-training program. It did, however, figure out how to use the emotionally charged topic of language to sell us a "federalism that works." The irony is that, in the process of pitching "federalism that works," federalism itself is being dismantled.