At the very beginning of the 2022 Pre-Election Report (PER), we are told that the Ministry of Finance is responsible for the information included in this document. In fact, he is also responsible for the information that he has chosen not to include in this report and that could have been useful in better understanding the budgetary and financial situation of the government.
Posted at 11:00 a.m.
The most important information that is not included in the RPE is a minimal description of the state of services in the main missions of the government, in particular those of health, education and personal assistance. and to the family. Very little is said about the state of the supply of government services, currently and for the next five years, particularly in the areas of mental health, care for the elderly, emergency services, accessibility to a family doctor, surgeries where the delays will persist, the quality and speed of follow-ups from the DYP as well as assistance for students who have huge learning delays to make up for.
One of the government’s main messages is that there is “no gap to fill” in all of its missions.
By these remarks, he gives the impression to the population that the projected service expenditure budgets will be sufficient to enable Quebecers to receive the services he himself had undertaken to provide.
A period of high rationing
The fact that the government can adjust the costs of renewing its services to ensure that the level of its budgetary envelopes for its expenditure on services is consistent with the monitoring of budgetary constraints that it has imposed on itself does not mean no way that the supply of services will be close to the demand for them.
In fact, in the budgetary plan included in the RPE, we have on the one hand the possibility of coping with an increase, from year to year, of the gap between the population’s demand and the government’s supply in due to the imposition of budgetary constraints in an environment where there are sharp increases in the cost of producing services. On the other hand, there is the possibility of having service production below demand due to lack of workers.
Currently, there is a significant gap between supply and demand for services in the current fiscal year 2022-2023, mainly in the health and education missions.
We are in a period where rationing is high and risks being even more so. To say that “the financing of expenses corresponds to the cost of the advertised services” is not enough.
Similarly, the Minister of Finance must not only say what is the size of his investment expenditures in community infrastructure, but also what will be the evolution of the proportion of infrastructure that is in good condition. Will this proportion (currently around 70%) increase, stay the same or decrease over the next five years? To say that the investments included in the Quebec Infrastructure Plan (PQI) “will be high” is not enough.
pink glasses
The government had to better describe in its RPE the state of the services that the population will receive over the next five years. We had to avoid wearing rose-colored glasses as we did in the 2018 pre-election report where the government said that the budget projections for the next five years would exceed the renewal costs and would allow additional investments “in new technologies and the intensification of health care and social services”.
These optimistic remarks were made when there were already, well before the arrival of the pandemic, many problems of lack of resources and under-investment in the provision of health care.
In its budget plan published on March 10, 2020, just before the start of the pandemic, the government also provided for an additional increase in the annual budget of the Health and Social Services mission to allow for an intensification of care, particularly for the elderly. And we now know that the budget projections were largely insufficient to simply provide an acceptable level of services that the government had itself previously committed to providing, without adding new services.
And in February 2022, Mr. Legault finally agreed to conclude that the Quebec health care system needed an overhaul.
For years, we therefore closed our eyes and wrote reports saying that there was no shortfall to be absorbed or, worse, that additional sums had been included to improve the offer. Services. The government must therefore say more about the state of the services it plans to offer the public over the next five years.