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MONTREAL – What kind of person, groggy after a long trans-Atlantic flight, takes pleasure in the announcement that his connecting flight home will be stuck on the tarmac for a while?

Someone like Quebec Finance Minister Carlos Leitao.

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Leitao was recently passing through Toronto on his way home from a European trip combining meetings with bankers and investors and a vacation in his native Portugal.

“We taxi out of the gate, we start to go, and then the plane stops. Why did it stop? They were put aside because there was traffic congestion around Montreal — air traffic!” Leitao recounted in an interview.

Photo by Dario Ayala / Montreal Gazette

“We’d never heard of this in Montreal. Too many planes in Montreal?”

He was an hour late getting off the ground, but he took comfort in having experienced first-hand one small indicator of what economists are calling a remarkable turnaround in Quebec’s economic prospects.

For decades, Quebec was seen as a laggard, trailing the rest of the country in economic growth and job creation while amassing substantial public debt. The province was a champion when it came to subsidies to business and layers of bureaucracy, but Quebecers’ standard of living was sliding. In 2012, a report by Montreal’s HEC business school warned that Quebec was en route to becoming the poorest province in Confederation. (The economist who wrote the report, Martin Coiteux, ran for the Liberals in 2014 and as President of the Treasury Board for the government’s first two years played a central role in controlling government spending.)