Miracle Grow

Existential pessimism is in vogue in Quebec. Consider François Legault, who defends his government’s new language legislation by saying that French is at risk of disappearing over the next half century. He has even dismissed the story of one immigrant — a Liberal member of the Assemblée nationale — who speaks Spanish at home but French in the workplace as nothing more than “an anecdote.”

With Le miracle québécois, the economist and regional planning expert Mario Polèse has written an impressive correction to such dour views. If the premier and his nationalist supporters see a glass that is not only half empty but leaking, Polèse sees a glass that is filling up constantly. His book is a carefully documented and sometimes passionate tribute to Quebec’s successes and a study of some of the paradoxical factors that led to them.

The miracle that he describes is “the passage of a people who were previously closed, worried, full of self-doubt, to a people...