Depending on the Prime Minister we elect in Quebec, our relationship with Canada becomes a matter of the heart, of reason, of money or even opportunism.
Jean Charest deeply loved Canada. No matter what region he was in, he felt at home. Sometimes even a little too much. In 1998, he arrived in Quebec with death in his soul, precisely because he was asked to save the country, but above all he would have wanted to lead it.
Philippe Couillard was also a Canadian first and foremost, but his attachment was essentially rational. Like Pierre Elliott Trudeau, he was suspicious of Quebecers and he saw in belonging to Canada the assurance that individual rights would be protected against the excesses of nationalism.
Robert Bourassa found Canada rather boring, but he considered it “profitable” for Quebec. However, we will never know what he would have done following the double constitutional failure of Meech and Charlottetown if his health had allowed him to remain in office. He probably didn’t know it himself.
François Legault chose Canada simply to be elected prime minister. He embraced federalism by default, because Quebecers had rejected sovereignty. He discovered the merits of equalization only after the fact, when it became clear that the autonomist pretensions of the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) were nothing but hot air.
If Quebec ever becomes rich enough to no longer be entitled to equalization, it will not be for 25 or 30 years, and Mr. Legault will have long since retired. For the moment, he should rather be concerned to see that it is not his economic successes which are causing a drop in federal transfers to Quebec, but the new demographic trends within Canada, which are largely determined by immigration.
According to documents from the Federal Ministry of Finance obtained by The Press under the Access to Information Act, a sum of 87.3 million will be subtracted from the sums paid to Quebec under the Canada Health Transfer, already considered very insufficient by the Legault government, and the Canada Transfer in terms of social services, which are calculated in proportion to the population. Conversely, Ontario, which welcomes a much higher proportion of immigrants, will be entitled to additional payments of $91 million.
Even if we made a big deal about the 5 to 7 million paid to the Los Angeles Kings, a drop of 87 million may not seem like much, given that federal transfers to Quebec will total 31.5 billion in 2023-2024 , but it risks becoming more and more important as the gap between the number of immigrants welcomed in Quebec and in the rest of Canada continues to increase.
While it is true that more and more Canadians, from coast to coast, are concerned about the economic consequences of excessively high immigration thresholds, in particular the worsening of the housing crisis, the Trudeau government maintains still an annual target of 500,000 permanent newcomers over the next few years, while Quebec has set the threshold at 56,000. At this rate, the percentage of approximately 22% of the Canadian population that it represents today will fall quickly.
The formulas that determine federal transfers to the provinces are based on calculations that do not take into account considerations such as the capacity for integration, which is very difficult to evaluate precisely, or even the protection of identity.
We should probably not see the reduction in amounts paid to Quebec as a Machiavellian strategy to force it to align its immigration policies with those of Ottawa, under penalty of being penalized, but the effect is the same.
The law of numbers is implacable. It was already clear that Quebec’s desire to maintain immigration thresholds at levels compatible with its reception capacity led to a reduction in its demographic and political weight within the federation. It now appears that it also has a financial cost.
It is significantly more difficult to integrate a newcomer into a society whose language is as marginal as French is in North America, and the federal government pays Quebec substantial sums for this purpose, but we cannot ask him to compensate him for the immigrants he refuses to welcome or to adapt his objectives according to the interests of Quebec. Rather, it is up to Quebecers to judge whether all these aspects are compatible.