Opinion: A welfare state Quebecers cannot afford

Montreal Gazette

4 days ago

School boards, teachers and parents reacted with fury when François Legault's government announced last month it was cutting $570 million from the province's current-year education budget.
Services to students, they argued, would inevitably suffer. The cutbacks having been announced without warning, the anger was understandable — and the government took note. On Wednesday, the Education Ministry responded by promising up to $540 million toward student services.
'We have listened to the concerns and needs,' Education Minister Bernard Drainville posted on X. 'Today, we act.'
However, Quebecers would do well to get used to more financial restrictions: the province's fiscal situation is dire, and at this stage, there is no other choice but to slow the rise in expenditures, especially for the two largest parts of the budget by far — health care (44 per cent) and education (15 per cent).
The effect of Drainville's olive branch remains to be seen. But several school boards had already announced layoffs of much-needed support staff, notably remedial teachers and speech therapists. Extracurricular activities have also been cancelled. A petition to the National Assembly demanding that last month's spending cuts be reversed gathered more than 150,000 signatures in two weeks.
The government argues that, in fact, spending on education this year will be five per cent higher than in 2024-2025. This is true only according to clever calculations by Finance Ministry officials. If you compare the moneys actually spent last year to the amounts planned for this year, the increase is only 2.1 per cent. This is much less than what is needed to compensate for inflation and the generous pay increases negotiated with the teachers' unions. Consequently, school boards have no choice but to cut somewhere.
The Coalition Avenir Québec government argues that since it was first elected in 2018, it has increased the education budget by 55 per cent. Exactly! Therein lies the problem: in education as in other fields, the province's expenditures have risen much too fast, so that the deficit is projected to reach a whopping $13.6 billion in 2025-2026.
This has led Standard & Poor's to downgrade Quebec's credit rating, citing 'a confluence of factors including slowing population growth, higher remuneration spending, and lower revenues' that will produce 'persistent operating deficits and large after-capital deficits — even before heightened economic uncertainty related to tariffs.'
The future is bleak, to say the least.
Last spring, Finance Minister Eric Girard introduced a five-year plan to balance the budget. The strategy requires a drastic slowdown in expenditure increases. Even so, the government will have to find a yet unidentified $6 billion in expenditure cuts or additional revenues to reach its objective.
In an editorial published this month, the Wall Street Journal noted that 'the crisis of the welfare state — fiscally unaffordable but politically unreformable — afflicts nearly every 21st century Western democracy.' This is certainly the case of Quebec, where the welfare state has become larger than in any other jurisdiction in North America.
Of course, this is a policy choice Quebecers have made beginning with the Quiet Revolution in the 1960s: carry a heavier tax burden in order to benefit from more generous public services. Unfortunately, those services have become grossly inefficient while requiring ever increasing amounts of money — money the province simply does not have.
That being the case, expect budget cuts like those announced in the education sector to be just the beginning. Such restrictions contribute to the current dissatisfaction toward the Legault government — and deservedly so, considering that the CAQ inherited a significant surplus and transformed it into a gaping deficit.
However, even if the October 2026 elections were to deliver a new government, Quebecers will face the same intractable problem that for years they have sought to avoid: How to preserve the large welfare state they hold so dear if they cannot afford it?