Market Scene : Voice of Business Speaks Loudly for Independent Quebec : The Canadian province churns out new enterprises and boasts of robust growth. Some think it could do even better on its own.

The last time the French-speaking province of Quebec preoccupied itself with thoughts of independence, back in the 1960s and ‘70s, it was the labor militants, the flower children, the politicized teachers and the intellectuals who pressed the case for a break with English Canada. Missing were the business people.

But today, one can hear the independentiste message by visiting some of Montreal’s soaring post-modernist office towers and getting the word from titans of Canadian industry.

“I think the majority of people here would give themselves autonomy” if offered the chance to vote on it, said Claude Beland, president of a huge network of Quebec credit unions, the Mouvement Desjardins. Speaking in a plush-carpeted executive suite with an astonishing view of the St. Lawrence River, he added, “We will govern ourselves by our own laws, levy our own taxes and try to make a country by ourselves.”

Not every business person in Quebec is as bent on sovereignty as Beland, whose credit unions do business mainly within the province and probably would be little affected by a split from the nine Anglophone provinces. The heads of firms that trade nationwide or internationally tend to be more cautious. Still, in 1990, there are enough like Beland to have captured the attention of social commentators across Canada.

“Today, the business community . . . has emerged as the most potent and reliable voice for Quebec’s aspirations,” wrote Toronto financial journalist James Fleming.

Sovereignty for Quebec has been debated with rising ardor--and across the social spectrum--for the first half of this year. And as corporate annual meeting season rolled around this past spring, executives started turning up at podiums carrying nationalist torches.

At his organization’s annual meeting, Beland, for one, said that if “Quebec must go it alone, it has the economic muscle to survive.” He got a standing ovation.

So did grocery and shipping executive Michel Gaucher at another business forum. “Our future, like never before, is in our hands,” he told about 1,000 executives.

Meanwhile, pulp and paper manufacturer Bernard Lemaire, president of Cascades Inc., showed up at the University of Montreal to tell about 300 students that the province is ready for independence, calling outright for “political autonomy and an economic union with the rest of Canada.” The Quebec Chamber of Commerce, more comfortable with a hedge, commissioned a comparative analysis of the economic benefits accruing to Quebec as a member of the Canadian confederation and as a semi-independent state.

In addition, three major financial institutions have put out reports on Quebec’s potential for healthy independence, publishing findings in such rapid succession that some observers wondered whether the deluge of goodwill had been orchestrated by some behind-the-scenes agitator.

“The talk of independence these days in Quebec is not of a socialist, French-speaking country,” observed one report, written by an analyst at the Bank of Montreal. “Rather, (it is) of a pro-business enclave in North America.”

What has turned the conservatives of yesteryear into outspoken nationalists? In part, it has been the same force that has reawakened Quebec separatism outside the business community: the nationwide debate over whether to amend the national constitution and cede additional legal powers to Quebec. The issue, which dragged on for three years, took on a deep symbolism in Quebec as Francophones began to link the question of whether the constitution would be amended with whether English Canadians could ever understand Quebec.

When the amendments finally died because two English-speaking provinces failed to ratify them, Quebecers of all stripes and stations concluded that there was no point in further discussions with English Canada.

“If it had taken me three years to convince my wife to get married, and then she said, ‘OK, but we won’t share the same room,’ I don’t think I’d enter into another round of negotiations,” said Beland.

But there is more than the question of Quebec’s honor weighing on the minds of the province’s business people. There is also the possibility that independence would be good for business. The federal government has been keeping interest rates high to cool the overheated and inflationary economy of Quebec’s neighbor, Ontario--particularly southern Ontario, Canada’s industrial heartland. Those steep interest rates have hurt business elsewhere in Canada, including Quebec.

As Quebec’s economy has suffered the side effects of Ontario’s strong medicine, some in business have inevitably begun to think they’d be better off if Quebec were autonomous, setting its own interest-rate policy.

When Quebec’s premier, Robert Bourassa, recently made nationalist pledges that he would put the province’s economic well-being above all other considerations, it was music to the business community’s ears.

“I personally prefer that Quebec stay in Canada,” says Pierre Ducros, head of DMR Group, a multinational computer-services firm. “But Quebec now has the maturity to choose.”

A quarter-century ago, no one talked about the “maturity” of Quebec’s economic elite. There was no Quebec business elite to speak of, at least not a French-speaking one. Until about 1960, Quebec--especially rural Quebec--was a traditionalist backwater in Canada, where the Roman Catholic Church encouraged the most favored young men to shun commerce in favor of the bar, medicine or the priesthood. (Women were urged to become mothers; Quebec’s birthrate was one of the highest in the world.)

As a result, English Canadians controlled commerce and industry throughout the province. Many Quebecers today recall with bitterness that their parents were told to “speak white” when they tried to shop or order restaurant meals in French in their hometowns.

A reformist government took office in 1960, and many of the province’s social and economic policies were recast or abandoned. Even those reforms weren’t enough for the awakened Quebecers, though, and in 1976 a separatist government was installed in Quebec City. The success of the Parti Quebecois alarmed the province’s minority Anglophones, and many of them--including the barons of commerce and finance--moved out of the province.

The exodus of the English-speaking business people left a vacuum that the Francophones filled with a vengeance. Today, Quebec, with just 25% of the Canadian population, turns out 40% of the country’s business school graduates. In 1988, the province was home to 26 of the country’s 50 fastest-growing publicly held companies. The government, which years ago embarked on a dirigiste course of pro-business interventions, helped nurture new business; 30% of all net small-business creation in Canada takes place in Quebec. From 1983 to 1988, the province’s economic growth routinely outstripped the national average in an era of countrywide prosperity.

The new Francophone business class’ economic success has contributed to its sense of nationalism.

“You can really see it in the people who have graduated in the last five to 10 years and gone into business,” said Robert Mansell, economics professor at the University of Calgary. “They see that they can go out there and succeed, and it changes their whole attitude.”

The question now is whether the businessmen will stand by their guns as the sovereignty debate turns ever more serious this summer and fall. Premier Bourassa has already impaneled a commission to study options for Quebec’s political future; as those options gradually come into focus, the economic costs will become easier to measure.

Mansell, for one, thinks that once the price tag of separation is visible, Quebec business people will lose their taste for nationalism. He recently added up all the subsidies, transfers and other payments that Canada’s 10 provinces get from the federal exchequer and subtracted from them the total taxes and other payments the provinces pay. Quebec, he maintains, benefits handily from its membership in the Canadian family. In 1988, the most recent year he studied, he found that Quebec had a net benefit of about $4 billion, or $609 per person. The amount has been growing steadily since the 1970s; before that, Quebec paid in more than it received.

Business people benefit from today’s federal largesse, which stimulates the private economy, Mansell says. Once they see that their enterprises will suffer if the payments are lost, he says, their ardor will fall off.

Bertin Nadeau, chairman and chief executive of Unigesco Inc., a grocery and hardware-distribution concern, is already thinking along those lines.

“If you ask me, ‘Are you a nationalist?’ I’ll say yes,” he said. “We are all nationalists. But that doesn’t mean that tomorrow morning, people are all going to walk out of the system. We have too much to lose.”

Does it Pay to Be in the Union?

Net amount each person in each province and the territories received from or paid to the federal government in 1988. Except in three provinces, Canadians received more in benefits that they paid in taxes and other payments. Alberta: --$626.45 Britich Columbia: --$0.85 Manitoba: $2,075.70 New Brunswick: $2,738.70 Newfoundland: $3,433.15 Nova Scotia: $3,048.10 Ontario: --$232.90 Prince Edward Island: $3,983.95 Quebec: $609.45 Saskatchewan: $2,096.95 Territories: $14,191.60

SOURCE: Robert Mansell, economics professor at the University of Calgery