If it is possible to be daringly conservative, then Finance Minister Raymond Bachand achieved that in the budget he tabled in the National Assembly Tuesday.
His budget is fiscally conservative, in that its priority is another reduction in the government’s annual deficit in its gradual pursuit of its objective of balancing next year’s budget.
And in its fiscal conservatism, it is politically daring. For in what could be its last budget before a general election, an unpopular government has chosen not to try to buy its way out of trouble with borrowed money.
The Wall St. bond-rating agencies might approve of the government’s staying the course toward a balanced budget. But Messrs. Moody, Standard and Poor don’t vote in Quebec elections.
And among the people who do, the course the government is following has brought it to record unpopularity in terms of durability and depth.
In the fourth year of the government’s term in office, a recent Léger Marketing-Le Devoir poll suggested that three-quarters of the French-speaking voters who decide most Quebec elections are dissatisfied with it.
What’s more, that high level of dissatisfaction appears solid. It’s been at about the same level for two years.
And still among francophones, the governing Liberal Party is in third place in popularity, with the support of only 20 per cent.
But Bachand’s deficit-reduction plan left him with little money for headline-grabbing eye candy, like the $1-billion income-tax cuts in the government’s first term, that might give the Liberals an immediate bounce in popularity.
In all, a relatively paltry total of $211 million in new revenue and spending measures is sprinkled thinly across the budget.
Most of it is targeted to benefit older people, who tend to turn out in elections and vote Liberal.
But for other Quebecers Bachand was, at best, “proud” to announce “no new taxes.”
Nor were there any of the new user fees at which the finance minister had hinted two weeks ago. The user-pay “cultural revolution” of which he has been speaking on and off since before his first budget three years ago will have to wait.
He took pains to argue that “Quebec families have more money in their pockets today than in 2003,” when the Liberals came to power.
That was even after the “effort” Quebecers have been required to make since two years ago to return to a balanced budget after the recession of 2008-09.
But Bachand didn’t say how much of the increase in disposable income over the past nine years was due to the government taking less revenue from them, and how much to their incomes rising even more.
Anyway, voters are more likely to remember the recent announcements of increases in hydro rates (which Bachand ignored in his calculations) and taxes, some of which have yet to come into effect.
And they think they’re paying their governments too much for what they’re getting in return. In the Léger Marketing-Le Devoir poll, 83 per cent of them agreed – and 54 per cent strongly agreed – that “income and other taxes are too high in Quebec.”
If there is a popular measure in the budget, it might be one that represents no change at all. The government holds its position on university-tuition increases, which is about twice as popular as the government itself.
But that might change if the student protests against the increases don’t fizzle out at the approach of final exams, as the Liberals hope, and public opinion turns against the government for not repressing the protesters’ disruptive tactics.
Bachand bluntly told reporters in the budget lockup on Tuesday that the matter of the increases is “closed.”
Infuriated at this “slap in the face,” the university and CEGEP student federations immediately fired off a press release vowing that on the contrary, the issue “will be settled in the street.”
dmacpherson Hbx montrealgazette.com
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