What are five million in Quebec’s budgetary ocean? Very little or a lot, depending on whether we position ourselves on the side of the sender or the recipient. In the outrageous arbitration that the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) has just carried out, it is the Los Angeles Kings who have drawn the winning ticket and will receive this small change to come and kick the puck in an otherwise empty Videotron Center. Sound governance is an art that requires common sense and respect for the population. Here, the CAQ lacked these two essential assets and sank into nothing less than indecency.
The coincidences of the calendar added spice to this improbable announcement. On Tuesday, Finance Minister Eric Girard confirmed with a smile a subsidy of five million dollars, “at most 7 million”, to absorb the excess expenses caused by the arrival of the Los Angeles Kings in Quebec next October. Four days of training camp and two preseason games will cost at least $9 million to $10 million. Quebec has offered to extend its assistance for the arrival of this club whose value exceeds 1.3 billion dollars.
At the same time, the unions representing the 650,000 public sector employees are polishing signs in preparation for strike days which will paralyze part of Quebec next week, with the aim of obtaining better working conditions. At the same time, organizations supporting populations increasingly affected by a demanding economic situation are taking stock and not arriving: needs supersede resources, by far. At the same time, businesses and individuals are still simmering with the words of the same Minister Eric Girard who, barely 10 days ago, forecast with a somber but responsible air of “very difficult” months to come.
This is where this indecency that is loudly criticized by the Legault government comes into play. It’s not so much the amount that shocks as the conscious choice we made to invest it there, in the rowdy exuberance that surrounds everything related to hockey, in the empty shell called the Videotron Center that we are trying to always desperate to fill, in the obsessed hope of one day bringing the Nordics back to the fold. Even hockey fans are shocked: this support is not coming to the right place, at the right time.
Besides that, what are the shares of Bouchée generous, a food bank located just one kilometer from the Videotron Center worth? Our journalist Sébastien Tanguay received the outraged reaction of its leaders, for whom this hockey celebration while people are struggling to eat is akin to “a slap in the face”. In the latest economic update presented by Quebec, the Food Banks of Quebec received a little more than half of what they requested to honor the effects of the increase in applicants and the drop in availability of food. Ten million dollars are still missing from their financial statement.
We do not deny that it must sometimes be laborious for a government to diligently arbitrate a batch of financial requests. But there is evidence: subsidizing the arrival of the Los Angeles Kings in Quebec in the current context is purely unjustifiable. The CAQ has just counted in its own goal.