Dropping out of school, violence, drugs and alcohol, family separations, homelessness, sex changes, we can surely speak of a societal crisis that generates a lot of anxiety. In this context, it is difficult to deny that public spending with a social vocation has not kept up with needs over the last two decades. Despite the financial crises, the short recessions and the pandemic which have fueled a pessimistic discourse, Quebecers are significantly richer today than at the end of the 1990s and could afford public services as satisfactory as at that time. . Unfortunately, since that time, budgets for education and health, including mental health, have not been allocated to needs, immigration has not been controlled and public investments in housing have been poorly planned.
However, we are in a democracy, we are proud of it, and there are limits to blaming the leaders. For twenty years, we have elected and re-elected governments which announced their desire to reduce social spending by eliminating waste, in order to be able to substantially lower taxes. We have all seen the quality of public services deteriorate for years, it was increasingly difficult to find traces of waste, but we lived in denial.
We accepted the deterioration in the quality of life of seniors in residence, as demonstrated by discouraged families. The scandalous practice of compulsory overtime for nurses has been tolerated for years, while the lives of patients were put in danger, not to mention the agonizing, and even deadly, waiting times for a large number of surgical procedures. In education, the budget obsession compressed everything that cost more than the average student, and we could see the students with the greatest needs suffering the repercussions of the lack of resources.
The population has blissfully swallowed countless promises of technocratic reforms.
The tax cuts were first demanded by the business community and high-income taxpayers. The business community believes that it is they who create wealth for the entire population and wrongly believes that taxes harm business growth. Most well-off taxpayers, denying a social responsibility, think that they do not have to pay dearly for public services that they hardly use, since they pay privately for education and health.
Our modern governments, connected to the business community, have adopted tax cuts as their priority, which implied a reduction in current public spending.
The austerity imposed, without naming it initially, was not applied to infrastructure spending, a boon for business, nor to subsidies to businesses, nor to the salaries of specialist doctors, for example. Austerity has contributed to the development of private health and education services, which are very profitable and which allow the better off to avoid being affected by the deterioration of public services. In order to allow tax cuts, we even claimed that it was necessary to reduce Quebec’s debt, although it was completely acceptable, and we twisted the accounting to make contributions to the Generations Fund for current expenses, thus further compressing other social spending, supposedly to leave future generations a better society.
Growth at all costs
Despite everything, the Quebec government has not succeeded in significantly reducing taxes for twenty years. First, social spending is partly irreducible, with Quebecers still not accepting to see their neighbor in poverty. This is why poor and petty long-term planning results in crises that force costly adaptations linked, for example, to the lack of workers in public services and the lack of affordable housing.
In addition, overly ambitious economic growth objectives lead to massive spending by the government in subsidies, public infrastructure and, in a context of moderate growth in the local workforce, spending related to hosting immigrants and other foreign workers, not to mention refugees.
Finally, the Quebec government and taxpayers have benefited, indirectly, from the tax cuts granted over the years by the federal government. A few decades ago, a consensus emerged in Quebec regarding the existence of a fiscal imbalance. The revenues collected by the federal government were too high compared to those of the provinces, given their constitutional responsibilities, particularly in health and education, for which expenses were increasing rapidly.
The federal government decided several years ago to significantly reduce the growth of transfers to the provinces and also announced a significant tax cut. Logically, Quebec should have taken the opportunity to increase provincial taxes, with no overall effect on taxpayers, and compensate for the effect on public networks of the reduction in federal transfers.
No Quebec government has dared to propose such a solution. Governments know how to read public opinion well and they have understood that the middle class also dreams of these tax cuts requested by the wealthiest. This is the choice that Quebecers have made, consciously or not, for trips abroad, expensive vehicles, dinners in good restaurants, subscriptions to the sports center, and other completely legitimate needs, rather only good quality public services.
There is a lot of talk about the need to reinvest in public services during this period of negotiations. Both sides are trying to gain the support of citizens, the union is taking advantage of the poor state of services to make gains, the government is calculating, in the proposed salary increases, the cost of increasing the number of employees.
However, Quebec’s future political orientations will not be decided within the framework of a negotiation, an agreement will eventually be reached, and our governments will pursue their dream of unlimited growth, and catastrophic for the planet, unless there is a message very clear from the population.