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Article Excerpt
THE POLITICS OF QUEBEC'S PATRONAT have remained on the periphery of academic attention for at least two decades. Much of the analysis of the patronat has taken the form of classificatory typologies and mapping exercises, sorting and counting organizations based on their characteristics as horizontal and vertical associations, or as business promotion organizations (e.g., Delorme et al., 1994). There are a handful of analyses of the discourse and policy prescriptions of leading employer federations, but most of these have remained as unpublished theses or as working papers (Hudon, 1976; Pratte, 1985; Grignon, 1998). It is worth underlining that the work of the early 1970s that portrayed the Montreal Board of Trade and the Montreal Chamber of Commerce as embodying the rivalry of English Canadian and francophone Quebec capital (e.g., Fournier, 1976) has not been updated to account for the 1992 merger of these institutions (to form the Metropolitan Montreal Chamber of Commerce), although William Coleman and Tim Mau (2002) argue that the defence and promotion of the city in the face of post-1976 capital flight, coupled with the gradual replacement of old-school anglophones by allophone leadership, has closed the ranks of Quebec's francophone and anglophone business communities.
An important exception to this point is the body of work coming out of the UQAM-based CRISES research group, which argues that Quebec's employers' associations have undergone a "modernization" over the past decade. This work argues that Quebec business organizations have jettisoned the close attachment to a neo-liberal strategy of state restructuring put forward in the mid-1980s, and now recognize the benefits of partnership institutions, associational economic development policies, and non-traditional banking institutions (Bourque, 2000; Levesque, 2001; also Guay, 1999). This is an important argument, which challenges conclusions from the comparative political economy literature that would expect Quebec's employers to become even more committed to neo-liberalism over the past decade. It also places Quebec's patronat on a different trajectory from English Canadian employers' associations, and opens the possibility of social democratic or associational development strategies.
This article considers the discourse of the patronat over the past thirty years and argues that it supports an alternative reading. If there has been a change in the patronat's outlook, it occurred in the late 1970s and early 1980s. This change involved the transition from defending profit within the context of full employment and high aggregate demand, to demanding the neo-liberal restructuring of the state. In contrast to the modernization hypothesis, the discourse of the employers' associations has varied little since that time in its embrace of neo-liberalism. While the patronat may in practice have been open to experimenting with forms of concertation, this has not shown up in the project advanced in its discourse. This experimentation may differentiate the Quebec patronat from employers in English Canada and lead to some minor corrections to the comparative political economy literature, but has not shifted the patronat's strategy and outlook in any way comparable to that of the late 1970s.
Defining the Patronat
The very term patronat speaks to a coherent and singular organization of management interests that is imperfectly translated into the term "employers' association." The number and diversity of organizations defining and representing business interests in Quebec nevertheless hinders attempts to operationalize the concept. If one includes local Chambers of Commerce, one can easily claim that there are about 570 organizations representing business interests in Quebec, with roughly 1200 full-time equivalent employees. Even if one excludes the Chambers, one is still left with around 200 associations, including 140 vertical or horizontal employers' associations (Delorme et al., 1994: 11, 22). These vary greatly in their size, structure, organization and interests.
The Conseil du patronat du Quebec (CPQ) is the most significant employers' association in Quebec, at least when treating broad issues that transcend the interests of individual sectors or industries, such as social policy, the place of the state in the economy, or the national question. Researchers therefore regularly treat it as the lead representative of the patronat, even while recognizing the importance of horizontal and vertical associations when dealing with issues specific to particular industries and sectors. The CPQ is a unique structure in Canada, existing as a federation of employers' associations along the lines of the British Confederation of Industries. By contrast, the closest Canadian equivalent, the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, is composed of the CEOs of the largest firms. While most of the organization's funding comes from corporate memberships purchased by large companies, member associations hold the power within the formal decision-making structures (Dufour, 1990: 148-49; 2000: 51-54). In its position as the association of the associations, it involves a further degree of business organization than found elsewhere in the country. This is reinforced by the organization's practices, including monthly meetings of the member associations, where the CPQ's representatives to different consultative and decision-making bodies report and discuss their files, thus investing these representatives with credible membership mandates (Dufour, 1990: 153).
Given its dependence on large companies for both funds and for time devoted to associational life, the CPQ has traditionally been portrayed as representing the interests of monopoly capital in Quebec, much of it foreign controlled. In the 1970s, Fournier argued that it therefore competed with Quebec-based capital, concentrated in small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), the co-operative sector, and state corporations. Quebec-based capital, and particularly the SMEs, organized through the Chambers of Commerce (Fournier, 1976: 63-66; Fournier et al., 1981: 40-43). However, with the merger of the Montreal Board of Trade and the Montreal Chamber of Commerce, and the more recent mooting of a fusion of the Quebec Chamber of Commerce (CCQ) and the CPQ, it would seem that the conflict between these fractions has diminished (Froment, 2000: 5; Dufour, 1990: 148-49). As leading Quebec-based firms look to continental and global markets, the projects of indigenous and foreign capital may be converging (Belanger, 1998: 180-81).
Almost from its inception, the CPQ has been considered by those both inside and outside the business world as the leading voice of business. Only seven years after its 1969 launch, Fournier (1976: 63) recognized it as "the most effective spokesman [sic] for management vis-a-vis the Quebec government and Quebec society as a whole." The president of the CPQ in 1990 could therefore make the self-serving observation that the CPQ was "le lieu de rencontre et de discussion par excellence du patronat quebecois," and the "veritable reflet, tout au moins au plan des structures, de la communaute patronale quebecoise, avec toute sa complexite, sa diversite, ses ideologies souvent differentes mais generalement convergentes" (Dufour, 1990: 149). Other organizations like the CCQ (the federation of local Chambers of Commerce) and the Alliance des manufacturiers exportateurs du Quebec (AMEQ), occasionally contest the CPQ's representational monopoly, for instance in the naming of representatives to the Commission de la sante et de la securite du travail (Froment, 1997: 2), but the CPQ's hegemony among organized business interests is generally unchallenged (Guay, 1999: 4). It is for these reasons of the CPQ's legitimacy and representativeness that this article will largely consider its positions as representative of the Quebec patronat, although we will enrich our discussion with occasional reference to parallel developments in the CCQ.
The Modernization Hypothesis
Much of the recent writing on the patronat emphasizes its "modernization." While this takes on different hues depending on the writer, the general idea is that the peak employer associations have moved from a radical neo-liberal position that left them outside the mainstream towards a more nuanced position that allows for compromises (if not necessarily consensus) with the state and other social actors, and for collective solutions to common problems. This shift is important for these authors, because they argue that contemporary capitalism has opened a series of spaces for positive sum co-operation between labour and capital, and for increased employee participation and democracy in the workplace (Belanger and Levesque, 1994; Bourque, 2000: 18). In other words, these authors believe that the crisis of Fordism provides room for development strategies that balance market and non-market relations, and provide space for non zero-sum co-ordination between social actors from the scale of the workplace, to the community, to Quebec as a whole. Modernization therefore involves a break with neo-liberalism in order to adopt more advanced forms of production that require more democratic relations between employers and workers, as well as between firms and other stakeholders. This result is contingent on the co-operation of social actors, and thus relies on the patronat's recognition that an alternative to neo-liberalism serves its interests (for instance, by ensuring the production of extra-economic goods like trust and learning).
This position has been elaborated forcefully by researchers in the CRISES research group at UQAM. Gilles L. Bourque provides the most sustained argument in his book on Quebec's industrial development policies. For Bourque, the patronat of the mid-1980s was tied to a pure market logic. This was made clear by three reports prepared in 1985-86 by the Liberal government, in close consultation with leading business representatives. In his view, these reports on deregulation, privatization, and the organization of government represented the patronat's attempt to install a new cultural model. They aimed to replace the collective values inherited from the Quiet Revolution with individual responsibility, entrepreneurship, and free choice based on market signals. The policy correlates were for far-reaching privatization, social and economic deregulation, and across-the-board cuts to the public service (Bourque, 2000: 78-96).
With time, the demands of competition pushed employers and their associations
away from this "sterile...
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