For 48 hours, Prime Minister Legault has been unrecognizable. He who is generally so quick to climb the curtains looks more like a boxer stunned by the modesty of the increase in the Canadian Health Transfer (TCS) that Justin Trudeau proposed to his provincial counterparts.
Mr. Legault certainly did not expect Ottawa to fully accept the demands of the provinces, which would have resulted in a catch-up of 6 billion for Quebec, but the small billion he will receive is more like a handout. Or a slap.
The interim leader of the Liberal Party of Quebec, Marc Tanguay, was sympathetic when he asked him to pull himself together and offered his support to “go get our loot”. He seemed almost on the verge of crocodile tears, unless it was joy, at the Prime Minister’s discomfiture.
The solidary Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois reminded him that during the last election campaign, he had asked Quebecers to give him a strong majority, which would give him a balance of power in his negotiations with the federal government. “Obviously it’s not working,” he said.
Certainly, Quebec is not the only one to find Gros-Jean as before. All Canadian provinces will have to deal with federal stinginess, argued Mr. Legault, but this equality in misfortune does not make failure less bitter.
Raising Ottawa’s contribution from 22% to 24% of the total cost of health care, when they required 35%, does nothing to solve the structural problem of financing the network across the country. The annual increase in the TCS of 5% will just cover the increase in “system costs” for five years, but the indexation planned for the following years will not be sufficient.
The Prime Minister assured that his government would invest all the sums necessary for the “refoundation” plan which was presented by his Minister of Health, Christian Dubé, but that supposes that it will be necessary to cut back on the budgets devoted to the other missions of the ‘State.
This will cause a lot of headaches for the Minister of Finance, acknowledged Mr. Legault. One solution would be to forgo the promised tax cuts, but that is out of the question, he said.
Above all, he must not imagine that the population will see in the absence of “conditions” imposed by Ottawa a great victory that would make it possible to protect the powers of Quebec. In terms of health, respect for the fields of competence provided for by the Constitution is not one of its priorities.
Mr. Legault seems to believe that Quebec voters will take advantage of the next federal election to punish the Liberal Party of Canada. This is what he invited them to in the last two elections, and they ignored it. Besides, a Poilievre government would probably not be more generous.
We may have seen and re-watched the old film of the negotiations on the TCS, which invariably ends with a diktat from Ottawa with which the provinces must content themselves with grumbling, the gap between what they demanded and the “final offer of the Trudeau government is such that it seems too ugly to be true.
It’s hard to believe that Mr. Legault could remain so placid if that’s really the end of the story. We tell ourselves that all of this is arranged with “the views guy”, that in the end, Mr. Trudeau, hand on heart, will improve his offer and that this psychodrama will end in a general embrace.
It is no less surprising to hear Mr. Legault come to the defense of federalism each time Quebec suffers a new rebuff. “You’d think you heard Jean Charest,” said Paul St-Pierre Plamondon.
Last week, in the wake of the Elghawaby affair, the PQ leader asked him what made him so “proud to be Canadian” after “all these setbacks and so much contempt”. The Prime Minister had highlighted the agreements on social housing, the funding of childcare services and even vocational training, in which he saw the prelude to another “good news” regarding the funding of health services.
Even if the “good news” has not come, he now maintains that Quebec still receives 10 billion more than what it sends to Ottawa. According to him, “one can be a sovereigntist for identity reasons, but certainly not today for financial reasons”.
Mr. Legault challenged the PQ leader to publish the updated version of the study on the public finances of an independent Quebec that he himself had carried out in 2004. The Parti Québécois had promised it last May, and we are still waiting. It would be high time.