Former Finance Minister Carlos Leitão blames the errors in the liberal financial framework on his party’s lack of resources and a very “complex” calculation that “probably” was done “too quickly”.
“We have not forgotten 12 billion dollars,” defended Mr. Leitão during a press scrum on Wednesday.
In the morning, a columnist from La Hurry revealed that the financial framework of the Quebec Liberal Party (PLQ) underestimated Quebec’s debt by $12 billion. The party documents, presented last week, based their calculations on a debt of 240.6 billion, whereas it amounts rather to 252.6 billion.
How to explain such a blunder? Mr. Leitão mentioned that the PLQ campaign team did not have the same resources as he did when he was minister. “I don’t have thirty-five officials to manage to do that,” he said.
“Calculating Quebec’s debt is probably the most complex thing there is,” he also justified.
“His increase or decrease defends against a whole series of factors. It’s not just the accumulated deficits. It also includes infrastructure spending, loans and advances. […] I do not have access to this documentation. So I take the assumptions that are presented in the pre-election report. After that, we make the adjustments and the calculations to arrive at the public debt. »
No changes to the program
Carlos Leitão also indicated that the correction of this error did not result in any change in the expenditure foreseen in the financial framework.
He believes he can afford it in particular because despite the corrections, the ratio of debt to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) decreases from 2022 to 2027. “The deficits that we will produce are all in all modest, around 1%, and we will continue to make full payments to the Generations Fund,” he said.
Before entering politics, Mr. Leitão spent twenty years in the banking sector, at the Royal Bank of Canada and the Laurentian Bank in particular.