(Quebec) Accused of being the “King of deficits”, Prime Minister François Legault replies that the hole of 11 billion dollars for 2024-2025 is “reasonable” compared to the size of Quebec’s economy. Among other things, he undertakes to clean up the “bureaucracy” to reduce it, such as by reducing the number of civil servants which has increased under his leadership.
When tabling his sixth budget on Tuesday, Finance Minister Eric Girard acknowledged that the deficit of 11 billion – four times larger than expected – is the highest in history in absolute terms.
What you need to know about the 2024 Quebec budget
During a press briefing on Wednesday, François Legault worked to put the weight of this ball into perspective while the Liberal Party accused him of having lost control of spending and of being the “King of deficits”.
If we do not take into account payments to the Generations Fund which is used to reduce the debt, the accounting deficit – therefore income minus expenses – amounts to 8.8 billion, argued Mr. Legault.
“It’s 1.5% of GDP, I think it’s something reasonable,” he argued. “We cannot look at this in absolute value, we must take into account inflation or GDP. »
“I saw a lot of people saying: record deficit. In the history of Quebec, there have been five times governments that had a bigger deficit than the rest of us,” he added. “We had two PLQ governments which had deficits of 3.1% and 3.3% of GDP,” he argued. It was in the 90s. “And three PQ governments had deficits of 1.7%, 3.8% and 4.7% of GDP. » It was in 1980-1981 in the last case, during the recession and the oil shock.
As for his own government’s deficit, “we must take into account that there is an economic slowdown, that there is a special situation at Hydro-Québec because of the water levels which is causing us to lose a billion,” said -he recalled. “And we are in the process of restoring the two important networks (health and education) and, for that, we also need to invest. And it was time to give money back to taxpayers with last year’s tax cut.
“With these two choices that we made last year and this year, we accept a deficit, but we will restore budgetary balance gradually over five years. I am very confident that we will get there,” said the Prime Minister.
He has already undertaken to clean up tax credits for businesses. And it’s not over. “Given that we are now at full employment, there are a lot of tax credits which are given on the basis of salaries, on the basis of job creation, whereas today, what we “What’s missing is not jobs, it’s employees, or we’re missing well-paid jobs,” he said. He also intends to “accelerate economic growth”, neutral for the moment.
“The other thing we are going to do is we are going to review spending to reduce bureaucracy, to be able to remove spending that is not effective. »
In two years, the number of civil servants in ministries and agencies jumped 7.6% to reach 78,456 “full-time equivalents” (FTE). François Legault intends to reverse the trend by eliminating positions through attrition, thanks to retirements. “There are places where we can make gains,” he said without giving details.