Quebec Budget 2024 | The CAQ has “lost control of public finances,” says the opposition

(Québec) Les partis d’opposition dénoncent les mauvais choix du gouvernement Legault qui ont mené à un déficit « historique » de 11 milliards de dollars.

« Quand le Parti libéral a quitté le pouvoir [en 2018], we left them with a surplus of $7 billion. This is a change of 18 billion in six years. The CAQ has lost control of public finances,” denounced Liberal MP Frédéric Beauchemin.

He rails against the lack of a plan to return the CAQ to a balanced budget, and believes that the minister’s “rose-colored glasses” are back.

“The CAQ spends without limits, it spends poorly, and Quebecers are not satisfied with the services provided,” he said.

He cited as an example the “electoral checks” from the Legault government, and the subsidy to the Los Angeles Kings, a grievance also taken up by the Parti Québécois.

Leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon does not understand that Quebec’s debt/PUB ratio risks approaching 41%, while “the worst case scenario” predicted by the CAQ in the previous budget, in the event of a recession, estimated that this ratio would not exceed 38.9%.

“In no case can we accept the explanation that it is due to the pandemic. But the situation has changed completely in one year,” he stressed. He blames the bad decisions of the CAQ, a “government which felt very comfortable agreeing to tax cuts, which wrote very generous checks to families who did not necessarily need them,” he said. he says.

As bad expenses, he also pointed out 4-year-old kindergartens, blue spaces, seniors’ homes “which are empty” and studies on the third highway link between Quebec and Lévis, and studies on the tramway.

But it is because of François Legault’s failures to recover the sums he requested from Ottawa that Quebec’s public finances are in this precarious state, according to him. “When we try to quantify the extent to which the CAQ has failed to obtain legitimate amounts for Quebec, we exceed the 10 billion mark,” he said.

For his part, Conservative Leader Éric Duhaime also denounced “the worst deficit in the history of Quebec”. “The Quebec government has lost control of spending,” he denounced.

However, he welcomed the announced exercise to review tax expenditures, and the announced end of the subsidy program for the purchase of electric cars.

On the side of Québec solidaire, the party was rather concerned about the CAQ’s lack of vision to “prepare the future of Quebec”. “It’s terrifying to see the extent to which the CAQ acts as if the challenges of climate change and the aging of the population did not exist,” denounced MP Christine Labrie.

The party criticizes in particular the lack of investment in housing, and believes that the government is not doing enough in the fight and adaptation to climate change.

They said