First, a small point on style: ai think that, in English, we should speak of “Plan Nord”, not “the Plan Nord”; the omission of the definite article follows the style that has been established thus far in propaganda. Besides, in this case, two syllables craquent mieux que three, n’est-ce pas?

Anyways, ai don’t think it’s useful to organize against Plan Nord. Instead, we should organize against ecocide, against colonialism, against carbon-emitting industry, and so on and so forth. Even against “civilization”, if that’s your jam – but that word, of course, deserves its own post one of these days!

“But isn’t Plan Nord,” you might protest, “a very important local manifestation of all that bad shit you just mentioned in the last paragraph? Isn’t organizing against Plan Nord strategic and useful, as opposed to some weird abstraction that takes a long time to explain?”

Okay, yes, “Plan Nord” is definitely a manifestation of all this bad shit, and as folks living in territory that is administered by the Québécois provincial government, it definitely makes sense to target it. The thing is, though, that “Plan Nord”, the way we talk about it, doesn’t actually correspond with what Plan Nord really is.

We talk about Plan Nord as something material. Plan Nord is the damming of the Romaine River, Plan Nord is uranium mining, Plan Nord is a highway to a deepwater port in Ungava. None of this is Plan Nord, though. Plan Nord is a plan – or a proposal, or a blueprint, or a strategy, or all of these things. It is something virtual, not material, except to the extent that we might say that certain promotional materials and policy documents are material manifestations of it, as well as the occasional job fair at Montréal’s Palais des congrès.

A small amount of history is in order. In the latter years of his administration, Jean Charest was trying to establish a legacy project – the kind of thing that might award him veneration as a forward-thinking premier in the Québec of tomorrow’s civics textbooks and pro-capitalist histories. So he came up with an idea, which, from a capitalist perspective, made a fair amount of sense: attract as much investment as possible for an acceleration of resource extraction in the Labrador Peninsula, a huge landmass of Turtle Island that remains relatively unexploited by capitalist industry, despite great natural wealth. But, of course, to attract investors, you need to convince them that the investment is worth it, and for this reason, you need a promotional campaign. That’s basically what Plan Nord was when it was announced in spring 2011. Yes, there was a promise that the government in Québec City would provide financial incentives to investors, which could be considered policy as opposed to marketing, but it needs to be considered that this kind of incentivization is standard policy in this province for all relations between government and major industries. Like, literally all of them, with a great example being Montréal’s video game industry, almost entirely attracted here, and kept here, thanks to favourable deals negotiated with both Liberal and PQ governments.

We should, then, see Plan Nord as mostly comprising advertisements, websites, and Charest’s own speeches, which he delivered on multiple occasions in Europe, in Brazil, in the United States, and occasionally here too.

Now, this is the important part: for all the bluster and spectacle, the announcement of Plan Nord was not some great historical event. It did not mark any particular acceleration of the capitalist development of the northern four fifths of Québec City-administered territory. There was already a lot of development taking place up there before spring 2011 – and to name but one example, the damming of the Romaine River had begun in earnest in 2009. The announcement of the Québécois government that it would be supportive of any corporation that wanted to invest in the area did not necessarily speed up the development, either, to a particularly great degree. Certainly that was the intention, but it doesn’t seem to have panned out that way. Ecocidal development is happening, yes, and needs to be stopped, of course, but it more or less seems to be going on at a normal, sometimes faster sometimes slower pace. This is something that is obscured when all of our slogans are directed against Plan Nord.

If we consider the fact that there is also a lot of ecocidal development still taking place in the “south of Québec” (which, really, is just Québec), an area that is more heavily industrialized than the Labrador Peninsula but still pretty far away from the fucked-up ideal of total exploitation, then organizing against Plan Nord makes even less sense, at least for us down here.

Now, to be clear, when one of those job fairs comes to the Palais des congrès, ai think chanting PLAN NORD, PLAN MORT on the streets of downtown Montréal is perfectly appropriate. But if we are trying to develop some kind of green movement in this city, opposed to ecocide in general and active at other times than any reprise of April 20, 2012, then we should speak of ecocide generally.

If we want an anti-colonial movement in this city, our slogans should probably not mention Plan Nord, and rather than speaking about an unqualified “colonialism”, it would be good to go a bit NI QUÉBEC, NI CANADA, by which ai mean mentioning Québec and/or Canada by name in some way. We need the average pedestrian to get the message loud and clear, after all.

And finally, for an anti-civ movement, the banner should probably be something more creative/communicative than DÉTRUISONS LA CIVILISATION – but then again, such mystical banality has a certain forcefulness to it, no doubt. Ai guess ai’m of two minds on the matter.