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Farewell to a most expensive separatist

By: Mark Milke

Posted: 01/31/2012 2:15 PM | Comments: 0

Former Bloc Québécois leader Gilles Duceppe has had his Richard Nixon moment. Last week, Montreal’s La Presse reported on the scandal of how the Bloc Québécois broke parliamentary rules when it paid its party’s general manager out of House of Commons funds for seven years.

This happened even though the Bloc manager, Gilbert Gardner, worked on party and not parliamentary affairs. The House of Commons has launched an investigation and expects to report back soon.

Duceppe denies any wrongdoing. In a Nixon-like exit from public life — "you don’t have Nixon to kick around anymore, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference" said Nixon in 1962 after he lost the California gubernatorial race — Duceppe just declared he won’t seek public office again. (He coveted the leadership of the provincial Parti Québécois.)

Duceppe said that he would now devote himself full-time to "defending my integrity and re-establishing my reputation." The La Presse allegations made it "therefore impossible to envision a return to active politics."

It’s never too late to thank the Deity for small blessings.

If Duceppe truly does leave Canadian politics for good — this time forswearing provincial politics — so much the better. After all, separatists have been costly for Canada. The decades-long kowtowing to successive Quebec governments occurred in part because of pressure from Quebec sovereigntists.

Then there is the little issue of the expensive subsidies for the Bloc Québécois itself. Between 2000 and 2010, the Bloc took in $37.5 million in federal taxpayer subsidies and raised just $7.6 million from individual donors.

That was a five-to-one dependency ratio on the public purse. During that time, no other party was as dependent on tax dollars. (The Liberals were the closest, at just under two dollars in public subsidies for every dollar raised from individuals).

And there’s this: Duceppe’s personal federal pension for his years of "service" in Ottawa, at $140,765 annually according to the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised by such takings from Canada’s public purse. Earlier in life, Duceppe was a Marxist so he likes taking and spending other people’s money.

Duceppe was described in a 2004 Globe and Mail profile as having "spent his young adulthood closeted inside the totalitarian ideology of an extreme-left group, the Parti Communiste Ouvrier Marxiste-Léniniste."

The Globe writer, Lysiane Gagnon, reported the group lived with "rigid, puritanical rules" such as how members could have their choice of a spouse vetoed by the collective, that they shared their salaries, and that any spare time "was devoted to militancy."

Gagnon also wrote of how the collective infiltrated hospital unions and Duceppe himself worked for several years as an orderly at Montreal’s Royal Victoria Hospital. The result was that many Quebec hospitals in the 1970s were devastated by wildcat strikes due to the radicalism of what Gagnon labelled "extreme-left militants."

Duceppe was a committed Marxist until some point in his thirties. At age 33 he even spoiled his ballot in the 1980 referendum on sovereignty. Presumably, he was more interested in "class" struggle and not what Marxists thought was petty bourgeois concerns, such as nationalism.

I met Gilles Duceppe once, back in 2005. He showed up to a Calgary Herald editorial board meeting and I sat in on the discussion. The Bloc Quebecois leader informed us that as with Albertans, Quebecers paid more into federal coffers than they received back.

When I pointed out that anyone who ever read a federal budget or even Quebec’s provincial numbers came to an opposite conclusion, Duceppe said his party had numbers that proved the opposite.

I asked Duceppe and his staff to send me such "proof." They never got back to me. That wasn’t a surprise. Quebec has long been a massive recipient of massive federal transfers that dwarf what that province’s taxpayers send to Ottawa.

Duceppe’s fib was an insight into the mind, character and propaganda of the then Bloc Québécois leader. It was precisely this sort of nonsense that Duceppe and other separatists had long fed to Quebecois and. It helped create the mistaken notion inside Quebec that Quebec was short-changed. It also helps explain why Duceppe was Canada’s most expensive separatist.

Mark Milke is a syndicated columnist with Troy Media.

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