“When we compare ourselves, we comfort ourselves,” goes the saying.
Do you want to comfort yourself? Read the headlines of the French newspapers every morning: you will notice that our cousins on the other side of the Atlantic complain about the same problems that we complain about.
Labor shortages, school bullying, lack of momentum among teachers and health workers, impact of aging population, crime and incivility on the streets, universities plagued by woke cancer, poorer academic results, housing crisis, pressure from mass immigrant influx of social safety net etc.
And the bureaucracy.
The damned bureaucracy that stifles entrepreneurs and discourages initiative.
The cursed machine
Certainly our paperwork problems are not as acute as those plaguing France.
When it comes to bureaucracy, the French are world champions in all categories. Thanks, among other things, to the stupid demands of the European Union, which, if this continues, will soon force all citizens to fill out a form in triplicate in order to go pee.
But we too are drowning in paperwork.
Over the last few months I have interviewed many retailers and small business owners in the QUB.
They agree: they are suffocated by bureaucracy and rules of all kinds and shapes.
The same goes for doctors (this is one of the reasons why they are leaving the public system in such large numbers).
While the government allows foreign multinationals to get around the rules (think Sweden's Northvolt, which benefited from a “furlough” from BAPE), SMEs in Quebec are not entitled to a break.
Result: Instead of encouraging our entrepreneurs, the administrative machinery discourages them.
“We are not asking for checks or cash financial support, but rather a reduction in the rules,” a representative of a small business association told me. “Give us more freedom and more autonomy, we’ll do the rest!”
The madhouse
“Our daily lives are increasingly overwhelmed by administrative problems of all kinds,” writes American anthropologist David Graeber in his essay “Bureaucracy,” which won the best foreign essay award in France in 2016.
As soon as we have to ask for information, we end up in Asterix's madhouse.
“Do 1, do 3, wrong department, you have to go to that other person, etc.”
Without forgetting the legendary “Your call is important to us…”, a supreme insult that should earn its author the torture of the drop or that of the wheel.
“No population in the history of the world has spent so much time on paperwork,” Graeber continues. Bureaucracy has invaded everything and the phenomenon is far from disappearing but is increasing.”
For this anthropologist (who created the Occupy Wall Street movement), the tyranny of rules and judgments is a form of violence that occurs daily at all levels of society, both public and private. The bureaucrats, he says, have set up a system of arbitrary extortion that, instead of encouraging innovation, creativity and imagination, is drying them out.
No wonder small businesses are dying!