MONTREAL - Reactions were predictably mixed to Premier Jean Charest’s announcement of details of his government’s Plan Nord for the development of Quebec’s territory above the 49th parallel.
Business groups were supportive. “An immense potential for the entire economy of Quebec and for Montreal in particular,” said Michel Leblanc, head of the Board of Trade of Metropolitan Montreal, anticipating a boon for the head offices of exploration, engineering and exploitation firms located in the city.
Environmentalists, meanwhile, were typically hostile. “The plan has set the bar still far too low for the conservation of intact forests, which are among the most precious forests in the province,” said Nicolas Mainville, who heads Greenpeace’s forest-preservation campaign.
The signal reaction, however, was the endorsement from Matthew Coon Come, grand chief of the northern Quebec Cree, a longtime staunch defender of his people’s interests who in the 1990s led the successful battle to stop Hydro-Quebec’s Great Whale power project. “This is new era,” he said in reference to the care the government has taken to include northern aboriginal communities in the planning of the project.
It is an ambitious undertaking, on a par with the landmark James Bay and Manicouagan northern power developments in decades past. It calls for the investment of $80 billion in both public and private funds over the next 25 years in energy development, mining, forestry, transportation and tourism in the 1.2-million-square-kilometre region, which is twice the size of France.
The anticipated returns are equally prodigious: the creation of some 20,000 jobs a year, generating $162 billion in growth of the province’s gross domestic product and $14 billion in tax revenues.
A critical part of the first five-year phase of development is the investment of close to $400 million for housing, health, education, culture and cost-of-living offsets for northern communities. The plan includes the construction of 840 new houses and the refurbishment of another 480 in Inuit communities where chronic social problems are attributed to an acute shortage of adequate housing.
True, the plan as it is still lacks detail, notably as to which tracts of the territory will be left undisturbed by development; the government has promised half the land will be preserved in its virgin state.
It will also be a formidable challenge to balance and satisfy the interests involved – those of the entrepreneurs, the aboriginal residents of the region and the environment. However, the north represents a great and abiding source of prosperity that Quebec, with its colossal accumulated debt, can’t afford to pass up.
It’s hard to say at this point what it will do for Charest’s legacy, or his survival as premier. But as a project for enhancing Quebec’s future, the Plan Nord certainly beats fomenting a constitutional crisis and applying repressive new language laws, as some others have in mind.