The CAQ, having sung all summer, found itself very deprived when the budget came. Not a single small surplus, functional emergencies or new housing built. She went to starve at her neighbor’s house in Ottawa. Asking her to lend him some transfers to survive until the new election.
This paraphrase of The grasshopper and the ant – legendary fable by La Fontaine – wonderfully sums up the Legault government’s latest budget.
With its record deficit of $11 billion, we especially feel the cold wind of worrying cuts to come. As public health and education networks deteriorate, if true, this would be a worst-case scenario.
Lark mirror
As a diversion, the Minister of Finance, Eric Girard, promises “optimization” of the State. Or a “comprehensive review of government and tax expenditures”. Question of saving $3 billion over five years.
However, even these shots are a smokescreen. Blue or red, previous governments have all made the same promise. All failed. The reason?
The Quebec state being by far the most bureaucratized in the country, in its multiple Orwellian organizational charts, any downsizing operation is necessarily a mission impossible.
It’s the equivalent of looking for a needle in a gigantic haystack. Between now and the 2026 election campaign, what will be left then?
Referendum
The next election is already shaping up to be a referendum. Not on sovereignty, even if it will be discussed, but as usual, on the record of the outgoing government.
The primary concern of citizens is already known: they will judge the real state of public services in 2026. Will the Legault government, deficit or not, have succeeded or not in improving them significantly?
Many of them will also take note of what has or has not been done to try to alleviate a housing crisis whose effects on more and more Quebecers, it must be said, are dramatic.