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Quebec will provide as much as $30-million worth of financial support to back the construction and operation of the new centre, not including the preferential electricity rates Ericsson will receive, Premier Pauline Marois said at a news conference Monday. The company could also be eligible for a 10-year income-tax holiday under a special program announced in the last budget for companies that make a minimum $300-million investment in the province.

Quebec has vast reserves of hydro power that it makes available to certain industrial customers at special rates. The province’s public utility, Hydro-Quebec, currently has a surplus of electricity that Ms. Marois’s government is using to stimulate private sector spending and stoke economic growth above the 1.2% expected this year by RBC Economics.

“We’ve never shied away from saying that Quebec’s clean, renewable power should be used for economic development,” Quebec Finance Minister Nicolas Marceau said.

Quebec competed with China, other Canadian provinces and Ericsson’s home base – Sweden – for the centre, Ms. Marois said. Critics decried the government’s financial backing as yet more unnecessary corporate welfare, but the premier insisted “Quebec ends up a winner here” on a net basis.

Ericsson employs some 1,450 workers in Quebec and the province is one of its largest R&D sites globally with several sizable test facilities. Ms. Marois said the government’s aim was to protect those jobs over the medium term and generate new ones.

Sixty new engineering positions will be created with the investment, she said, adding Ericsson has pledged to maintain the jobs related to the centre for four years after it opens in 2015.

Ericsson’s investment follows that of OVH, one of Europe’s major Internet service and hosting providers, which announced in January that it completed the initial phase of a major data centre in Beauharnois, just south of Montreal. Data warehousing companies need significant amounts of electricity to cool the servers and other equipment on site.