What Should Be Done with a “House in Order”? An Economic Perspective on Post-Liberal Quebec

ABSTRACT

The Quebec provincial election of October 2018 marked the end of an era. It saw the Quebec Liberal Party (QLP) suffer the worst defeat of its history and the election of agovernment, the first in a half century, not headed by either the Liberals or the Parti Québécois. The election of the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) suggests a political realignment. Yet, whether or not the 2018 vote also ended the era of budget austerity remains uncertain. Combined with a modest growth in program spending, public-sector reforms and cutbacks might, under the new administration, affect public services and once again generate opposition and resistance to budget austerity. In this article, we address this question of change versus continuity in three steps. First, we provide a retrospective account of budget policies under recent Liberal governments in Québec. Second, we present and discuss the CAQ’s evolving views on public budgeting and economic policy. Finally, we analyze the new government’s actions in its first year in office. While it is hard to discern a clean break in budgetary policies, the CAQ government might surprise us yet: it has a leader largely unconstrained by his party and whose ideas about budgeting and the public sector depart from neoliberal mantras. In addition, he has nationalist policy ideas, particularly around economic development, that might spur significant departures if they are aggressively implemented

KEYWORDS:

• Coalition Avenir Québec
• public sector
• budget
• austerity
• spending

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank Stéphan Gervais, Christopher Kirkey, Stéphane Paquin, the late Jarrett Rudy and the journal’s reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. This article was written many months before the start of the COVID crisis. Some of the figures and arguments presented might thus appear a bit out-of-date, but overall, the picture we draw and the differences between the CAQ’s approaches to budgetary and economic policy and those of previous administrations remain accurate and relevant.

2. The 2014 provincial election was held in April, so the Couillard government benefited from a mandate of 54 months.

Additional information

Funding

The authors have no funding to report.

Notes on contributors

Peter Graefe

Peter Graefe is an Associate Professor of Political Science at McMaster University. His research interests include social and economic development policies in Quebec and Ontario, as well as federal-provincial relations in social policy-making.

X. Hubert Rioux

X. Hubert Rioux is a chargé de projet at the Institut de recherche en économie contemporaine. At the time of writing, he was a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow (2017-2019) at the École nationale d’administration publique (ÉNAP). His latest book is Small Nations, High Ambitions: Economic Nationalism and Venture Capital in Quebec and Scotland (University of Toronto Press, 2020).