Last fall, Premier François Legault asked Quebecers to give him a majority that would allow him to negotiate with Ottawa from a position of strength. They responded to his call by electing 90 members of the Coalition avenir Québec (CAQ) out of 125.
Mr. Legault says today that the support he has received from the population has not been sufficient to induce the Trudeau government to adequately increase its contribution to the financing of health care. What should she have done? Go out in the street ? Organize a new convoy to the Canadian capital?
It is true that the Canada Health Transfer (CHT) negotiations, like all federal-provincial negotiations, are often perceived as political bickering, in which taxpayers-voters have difficulty discerning where their interests lie. .
This is even a great success of federalism. The proliferation of clashes ended up trivializing the recriminations of the provinces. Equalization, infrastructure programs, tax points, and what else?
Quebecers tend to react when they feel that they are being treated unfairly compared to other provinces or that their identity is under attack. In the case of the TCS, everyone was mistreated equally by Ottawa and Mr. Legault was even happy that no attempt had been made to impose conditions on him that would not take into account the specific needs of Quebec.
That Ottawa has succeeded once again in imposing its will should surprise no one. The astonishing thing is that Mr. Legault could have thought that it would be otherwise, when he knew very well that the dice were loaded.
He converted to federalism because he came to the conclusion that he would not be able to become prime minister by remaining the hurried separatist he once was, but how could he think that federalism would change because that he himself had changed?
Could he really have had the naivety to believe that the common front of the provinces, which always crumbled like a house of cards, would hold out until the end this time simply because he had made friends with Doug Ford, who hastened to let him down?
Mr. Legault has been the victim of what philosophers call “self-deception”, a kind of willful blindness which, unlike involuntary error, consists in believing something that one actually knows is contrary to the truth because that we don’t like it. Mr. Legault points to the fiscal imbalance by trying to convince himself that it is not inherent in the centralizing dynamic of Canadian federalism.
It is true that its recognition of this imbalance has always been variable, depending on its political interest at the time. He had sharply denounced it in his study on the finances of a sovereign Quebec (2004), but it had suddenly disappeared when he founded the CAQ and put the constitutional question on the back burner, before reappearing when he felt the need to present his “new project for the nationalists of Quebec”.
Of course, the proposed solution was no longer independence, but rather the transfer of tax points and the control of the federal spending power as it saw fit in areas of provincial jurisdiction. Today, he no longer dares to offer anything.
Even a change of government in Ottawa, which he vainly called for in 2019 and 2021, hardly appears as a solution, insofar as the Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre seems very satisfied with the way Justin Trudeau has settled the TCS file.
With a nine-month delay, the Parti Québécois (PQ) will finally publish its update on Mr. Legault’s study on the finances of a sovereign Quebec at its next convention on March 11. While Quebec has just been denied $5 billion per year for the next 10 years, the moment is rather well chosen.
The Prime Minister repeats that Quebec receives $13 billion a year in equalization, whereas it received only $4 billion in 2004. In total, he estimates the financial advantage it derives from its membership of the federation. “It’s advantageous for the moment,” he qualified on Wednesday.
He never denied that an independent Quebec would be viable. “There is a level of wealth, when we compare ourselves to the average of countries in the world, which is quite high, even if we still have a wealth gap with Ontario,” he said last September.
Mr. Legault deplores that “the waltz of the billions” makes the debate on the financing of health care difficult to understand for ordinary mortals. He says he is eager to discuss the study of the PQ and he will probably not hesitate to waltz the billions in turn. There is nothing more difficult than recognizing that we are fooling ourselves.