Article content continued

The Liberals face the immediate problem of a deficit of $3.1-billion for the year that ended March 31, $600-million higher than had been forecast in the PQ’s Feb. 20 budget. Mr. Couillard has announced a hiring freeze in the civil service and additional cuts will be announced when the Liberals table a budget next month, aimed at eliminating the deficit by 2015-16. But those immediate, across-the-board cuts will not address a more fundamental problem facing Quebec.

Mr. Coiteux said the problem is illustrated by the fact that Quebec, which makes up 23% of Canada’s population, accounts for 27% of public expenditures in the country (and only 20% of wealth creation). “We’ve got to narrow that gap …. We cannot balance the budget with that kind of a gap,” he said. That does not mean that Quebec cannot make “collective choices” to provide different services than other provinces, as it has with its heavily subsidized daycare, for example.

But some things – he is not yet prepared to say what – will be sacrificed following a strategic review of all government programs. “There will be a repositioning exercise in which some programs that don’t work will probably cease to exist,” Mr. Coiteux said. “Some programs that could deliver on their targets with fewer resources will be optimized, and perhaps, in some cases, we will provide more resources.”

Claude Montmarquette, Université de Montréal professor emeritus and president of the Montreal-based economic think tank CIRANO, co-wrote the April 25 report to Mr. Couillard calling for a “profound re-examination” of the government programs. He was also one of the signatories of the so-called “Lucides” manifesto, a 2005 call for change led by former premier Lucien Bouchard that went unheeded. The manifesto said Quebecers needed to snap out of a false sense of security. “They work less than other North Americans. They retire earlier,” it said. “They benefit from more generous social programs; both individually and collectively, their credit cards are maxed out.” That was nine years ago, and Quebec’s debt continues to climb.