Levesque Checked

The man who wants to lead 6 million Quebeckers out of Canadian confederation made a spirited appeal to the hearts and pocketbooks of U.S. businessmen last week. Diminutive, chain-smoking Quebec Premier Rene Levesque, 54, flew into New York City to sell financial institutions on separatism ("almost as inevitable as it was for the American states of 200 years ago") and the respectability of his left-of-center Parti Quebecois government. During a day-long tour of banking houses, and again in an address before 1,700 members and guests of New York's blue-chip Economic Club, Levesque did his best to persuade businessmen that his government would take a sober approach to finance and had "no intention of picking fights with private enterprise." Nor, he insisted, was there any intention of nationalizing American-owned business --with one exception: the province's valuable asbestos industry, dominated by U.S. and British firms.

Levesque (pronounced Lay-vek) had good reasons for wanting to reassure the money people. Last November he inherited a government that was drifting woefully close to financial disaster. There was a deficit of $1 billion--partly produced by skyrocketing public sector wage settlements--and a crippling unemployment rate, now projected at 10.2%. In 1976 Quebec was the largest single Canadian borrower of U.S. funds, soaking up $1.4 billion. The province will need to borrow billions more to pursue, among other things, ambitious schemes for hydroelectric development, though Levesque has promised a strict re-examination of priorities.

For all his speaking skills, Levesque drew a less-than-enthusiastic public response. At the Economic Club, executives first greeted him warmly as a friendly next-door neighbor, then lapsed into disapproving silence as the Premier argued his separatist pitch. At times --notably when he described the Canadian confederation as an "obsolete contraption"--Levesque drew ripples of derisive laughter, and when he finished there was merely polite applause. The fact is that the businessmen, like most other Americans, are opposed to the breaking up of workable political institutions. While it is, of course, not their affair, they see no reason for dismembering Canada.

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