Jean Charest, prospector – by Paul Wells (Macleans’s Magazine – March 21, 2012)

http://www2.macleans.ca/

It was a tweet yesterday from Andrew McIntosh at QMI that finally got me thinking about what Jean Charest’s government is up to in Quebec’s north. I’ll cut to the chase: basically he’s turning it into Alberta.
 
What Andrew noticed was that, while most of the reporters in Quebec City were safely tucked away in the provincial budget lockup, Charest’s former chief of staff announced he will become an executive at Canada Lithium, which means he’ll be spending a lot of time in Abitibi setting up a mine that will provide 12% of the world’s lithium and, in return, make everybody rich as thieves.
 
There’s not a whiff of scandal to this. It’s good to see former government people getting honest work. (And the guy involved has been out of government for five years.) But Stéphane Bertrand’s new line of work reflects where things are going in Quebec these days. The whole province — or at least its teetering Liberal government and its investment community — is going resource-crazy.
 
I had heard, vaguely, about Charest’s “Plan Nord,” which he seems to spend a lot of time talking about, and which I mostly took to mean “don’t look at the construction-industry corruption scandal.” But as I may be the last to figure out, it’s actually a big deal. “Plan Nord” translates as “North Plan” — stop me if I get too technical — and it’s about developing the astonishing mineral wealth in the northern two-thirds of the province. As Charest puts it on the dedicated Plan Nord website, “The advances made by the emerging countries are shifting major economic corridors… The North’s mining potential affords us an opportunity to capitalize on the development of the emerging countries by ensuring the responsible development of the territory’s resources.”
 
There’s a bunch of other stuff about the environment and sharing the economic benefits with First Nations, but I stripped it down to the bit that sounds eerily like everything Stephen Harper has been doing since December. China needs stuff! We have stuff!
 
For a hint of the economic potential, check out how cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs the good folks at PriceWaterhouse Cooper have gone over the whole idea: “unique business opportunities for various organizations… help from our global network of industry specialists… position your business to benefit.” Multiply that by an awful lot of consulting, engineering, mining, construction and marketing talent. And good for the First Nations too! Apparently!

For the rest of this article, please go to the Maclean’s Magazine website: http://www2.macleans.ca/2012/03/21/jean-charest-prospector/