(Texte français disponible ici.)

The Habs are on fire.

Lane Hutson looks like a magician on skates. Jakub Dobeš is making us forget all about Carey Price. Alex Newhook thinks he’s Maurice Richard. Even Caufield and Demidov have finally found the back of the net.

Quebec has never been more blue, white, and red than in this glorious spring. It’s not me saying it—it’s the experts. The connoisseurs. The Hot Stove League, and those who were there even before that. Forget 1993 and 1986, and all the other cups.

When we sent Tampa Bay on vacation, the very serious Patrice Roy invited Réjean Tremblay and Pierre Houde to the no less serious Téléjournal. The journalist asked the two veteran hockey commentators what we were collectively feeling and expressing.

Réjean didn’t hold back: “It’s crazier than in Lafleur’s glory days.”

Wow. The Habs won four straight cups back then. And we’d only just won the first round. But then, we bottled the lightning. Bring on the buffaloes, the hurricanes, and the avalanches! “Ça sent la coupe!”

After years of watching her government rail against Montreal, the premier and the mayor appeared together wearing the most beautiful red jersey in the known universe. (No, it’s not the Blackhawks’.)

In Quebec City, the mayor of the former Nordiques also put on his Habs jersey. Twelve thousand enthusiastic fans paid to watch a Canadiens game on the giant screen at the Vidéotron Centre. Even a former Nordiques head coach agreed to cheer on his former enemies!

Federalists and sovereigntists form a distinctly Quebecois bloc behind the Canadiens. On social media, the leaders of the CAQ, PQ, Liberals, Solidaires, and Quebec Conservatives are celebrating the successes of the “Quebec team,” hoping that a few drops of the unconditional love we have for Les Glorieux will rub off on them.

Never have temporary immigrants and unilingual Anglophones been so popular in Quebec. Especially those who skate fast and put the puck in the top corner!

Our media professionals are giving it 110 per cent. No angle is overlooked: some journalists bravely don an opposing team’s jersey in a downtown bar, hoping to be heckled so they can report on it the next day; others, more cautious, are visiting schools to ask pupils which team will come out on top; others reached out to Habs fans watching live games from the other side of the world; in the face of the rapidly spreading illness, some have asked experts how you catch playoff fever.

Even columnists who got all worked up for the last 50 years over the impending demise of French have found a way to get excited about this team that’s more flying than Frenchmen.

As for those with no roof over their heads, no job, and no money, they forget their problems watching these magnificent millionaires skate. “It reminds us that we’re alive,” they say. You bet.

If anyone still doubts that hockey is a religion here, the city of Saint-Eustache broadcast a game in a church.

+++++++

In Quebec, spring is the season that brings us together, especially when the Canadiens’ spring doesn’t end too soon.

In La Belle Province, once the first round of the playoffs is over, the Canadiens become a social project that unites us under a single flag—one that we hang from our car windows.

I say this with a smile, but without cynicism.

And I find myself dreaming. Imagine if we channelled this incredible collective energy into finding solutions to our many problems.

Imagine if, instead of having 26 experts from the same newspaper racking their brains over whether it’ll be Buffalo in six or the Habs in seven—not to mention all the pre- and post-game shows—we devoted that same mental energy to anything that could improve our society.

If education were as important as the Canadiens in the playoffs, hockey analysts would remind us between periods that it makes no sense for Quebec to have the worst dropout rate in the country, and that all students should have access to engaging academic, artistic, or athletic programs that would encourage them to reach their full potential and pursue their dreams, regardless of their parents’ income or where they live.

If the next generation in our schools and hospitals were as important as those who will one day succeed Suzuki, Slaf, and Caufield, we’d make sure to give our young teachers and nurses fair playing time right from the start of their careers. And we’d prevent hundreds of these future star players from deserting our education and healthcare teams every year.

If healthcare were as important as the Canadiens in the playoffs, we’d be just as outraged that, sometimes, in order to avoid spending months on a waiting list for an imaging test or surgery, we have to pay more than a pair of tickets in the red section of the Bell Centre.

If the fate of our seniors were as important as that of the failing hands that carried the torch, thousands of us would be demonstrating every day on Saint Catherine Street so that our parents and grandparents could live out their last days with dignity, without having to be crammed two, three, or four to a room, staring at the walls while waiting to die. Because we have a moral obligation to do better.

If our collective prosperity were as important as the Canadiens in the playoffs, we would stop giving billions to corporations that pay armies of lobbyists to influence those in power, and we would invest heavily in ourselves—in the training and support of our workers and innovators—because a nation’s most precious resource will always its people.

If our collective solidarity were as important as the Canadiens in the playoffs, we would ask those millionaires we idolize on the ice to follow the example of P. K. Subban, who donated ten million dollars to the Montreal Children’s Hospital Foundation and improved the lives of more than 100,000 sick children and their families. Try to top that, Lane Hutson!

We would not just be satisfied knowing that the TV is on in homeless shelters when the Canadiens play; we’d make it our duty and a point of pride to put a roof over all those whom life has left behind and help them come back into society.

If democracy were as important as the Canadiens in the playoffs, we would change the way we do politics so that governments are always formed by the coalition of multiple parties representing a majority of us. And we would suspend for misconduct any politician that tried to force its obsessions and ideology down our throats against our will.

If making Quebec a better society were as important as the Canadiens in the playoffs, federalists, autonomists, and sovereigntists would focus most of their efforts on improving our lives, sometimes giving credit to their opponents, rather than spending their days trying to prove that their political adversaries are bad Quebecers. Because, in the end, we’re all playing for the same team.

If the French language were as important as the Canadiens in the playoffs, we’d be talking about Richard, Boom-Boom, Béliveau, Lafleur, Roy, and all those exceptional champions who helped us overcome our insecurities and showed us that we could aspire to the highest honours in the language of our ancestors. We’d celebrate every day the immense success of our distinct society, in which Quebecers of all backgrounds participate. And we would hammer home the point that success and survival come with hope and confidence, far more so than with defeatism and fear.

And, when a newcomer to Quebec hasn’t yet mastered French after six months, we’d accommodate them with a smile and kindness by handing them a copy of Charles Binamé’s The Rocket. Because, in North America’s first French-speaking city, we mustn’t treat our language as a punishment, but as yet another door opening onto the world.

If we did all that, we’d all be a little happier, even when the Canadiens don’t stretch their season into May.

And the collective euphoria that unites us behind these inspiring athletes would be a little less of an escape and a little more a source of real pride, because even if the Canadiens lost, we’d all know that Quebec has already won.

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My name is Patrick Déry. I write (mostly in French) for a living, and do my best to Quebecsplain in English in this space.

If you enjoyed reading this piece, you can encourage me by buying me a coffee. Comments, shares, and likes are always appreciated.

You can also subscribe to this media by clicking on the button below. Go Habs Go!

Yes please!

The headline in Le Journal de Montréal is morbidly eye-catching: five babies died during childbirth.

(One might wonder why a story about Renaud Lavoie, a sports journalist, having had “the scare of his life” is considered more newsworthy than the indescribable tragedy of babies who actually died, but let’s move on.)

Inside, the newspaper devotes a full spread to the tragedy of parents who lost children after a full-term pregnancy.

A requested C-section that was performed too late. Another that went wrong. A delivery whose induction was postponed by a week due to the lack of availability at the maternity ward. Another C-section that was performed after 30 hours. And yet another that never took place.

Five babies who should have lived. Five lives that will never be. Five mothers and fathers who will be haunted by that moment for the rest of their lives.

And all of this happened at the same hospital, in Valleyfield.

My first thoughts are for the parents. The birth of my daughter, now fifteen today, could have turned into a nightmare had it not been for the surgeon, who appeared out of nowhere when no one else knew what to do, and saved the day.

Each of these individual tragedies is indescribable. But are they exceptional, or even abnormal? Even in the world’s best healthcare systems, there are accidents and mistakes, and there is no country where newborn mortality is zero. Sometimes, it happens. We just hope it doesn’t happen to us.

What do the numbers say? The article from Le Journal de Montréal provides some data. From 2014 to 2024, between 210 and 250 viable babies—meaning 28 weeks of gestation or more—did not survive in Quebec.

At first glance, the numbers appear stable from year to year, except for 2019.

From here on, we’re going to go beyond the journalist’s work and make the numbers speak (this isn’t a criticism, much less a judgment). And I apologize in advance for the grim math. The subject is as sensitive as it is essential, and there is more than meets the eye, as we’ll see.

First, a reminder. There are about 110 hospitals with a maternity ward in Quebec. That works out to about two stillborn babies per hospital every year. Not all hospitals have the same number of births, so the figure can vary from one to another. Also, some hospitals are specialized in children’s care, like Sainte-Justine or the Montréal Children’s. Still, as incredibly sad as five stillborn babies over five or six years are, it does not seem to be that uncommon. In fact, it is likely that there are likely hospitals where such events occur more frequently.

That leads to two questions.

The first: Are 200 or 250 baby deaths too many? And is Quebec doing worse than other places?

The second: Are things moving in the right direction? Just looking at the table in the Journal, I’m already pretty certain they are not, because the total number of births in Quebec has been declining for several years. So if the number of deaths is stable…

In 2014, the first year of the data set in the Journal, there were 88,036 births in Quebec, according to Statistics Canada. In 2024, there were 77,052. So, ten years later, with fewer births, we end up with more deaths at 28 weeks or later. Something is wrong.

I expanded the series to the early 1990s and linked it to the annual number of live births. The result is the number of late fetal deaths per 1,000 births, or the stillbirth rate.

Plotted on a line graph, it looks like this:

In the early 1990s, the ratio of stillbirths to live births was around 3 per 1,000. Over the next two decades, it gradually declined, stabilizing at around 2.4. In 2019, it reached a low of 2.1, but this seems to be an anomaly.

And, surprise, surprise—over the past five years, it has begun rising again, quite steeply. A rise from 2.4 to 3.3 amounts to an increase of nearly 40% in newborn mortality. That’s 70 more babies dying in a single year.

It’s even more painful when you look at what happened in Ontario during the same period. Please see the orange curve on the chart below.

For about 30 years, Ontario had a higher stillbirth rate than Quebec. The trend then reversed. If Quebec had the same rate as Ontario in 2024, about 40 babies would still be alive today.

Even though Ontario is doing better than Quebec, our neighbouring province is not a model. In Northern European countries, the neonatal mortality rate hovers around 2 per 1,000 births. In Korea and Japan, it is even lower.

The conclusion is brutal: if Quebec performed as well as Northern European countries, every year, about a hundred more babies would have their whole lives ahead of them. Over ten years, that’s a thousand children. Enough to fill a few primary schools…

+++++++

What happened?

I haven’t seen anything that would indicate a change in methodology explaining the reversal of the trend. Quebec made a slight adjustment to its criteria in 2019, but that only affects mortality rates between 20 and 23 weeks of pregnancy, not at 28 weeks and beyond. And Statistics Canada and the provinces have ensured for decades that the data are comparable from one province to another.

There remains another explanation, unfortunately plausible, logical, and consistent with the many red flags our healthcare system has been sending us for years: vulnerable patients waiting for years for a family doctor; tests that take too long to be performed; pathology results that get lost in the system; cancers detected too late and that have become more severe, even incurable; dozens of patients dying while waiting for heart surgery; others dying after being completely forgotten in the ER; prenatal checkups skipped for two trimesters. And so on.

Quebec’s healthcare system, constantly stretched to its limits, has been failing Quebecers for some time. Now it’s the newborns’ turn to pay a gruesome price.

+++++++

When my daughter was born, delivery was supposed to be routine. The doctor who had been monitoring the pregnancy suggested letting the resident doctor handle it, as it was a textbook case.

Then, labour began. The baby wouldn’t come out. One hour. Two hours. My then-partner-now-wife pushed as hard as she could, but to no avail. Her face was covered in red spots because she had strained so hard and tiny blood vessels had burst. Labour dragged on, and nurses, orderlies, and others started filling the room. At some point, there were a dozen of us. Everyone was offering their opinion, trying to get the baby out any way they could. Pull, push, try again. Nothing worked. I had the agonizing feeling that we were living an episode of ER. But George Clooney was nowhere to be found.

The resident doctor did not know what to do anymore. My wife was exhausted. A nurse said that the baby’s heart rate was slowing down.

I turned to the resident: “I think you need help.” It seemed to snap her out of it; she rushed out immediately. A few minutes later, our family doctor was there. Eventually, she decided to call in the surgeon.

A man in his early sixties arrived. He took a look, asked for the vacuum extractor, inserted it where the baby needed to come out, gave it a twist, and pulled my daughter out in no time. Annabelle was born. With a temporary cone head, but she was breathing. And the surgeon was gone, as fast as he came in.

The whole thing took two or three minutes.

I turned to a nurse and asked her, “Who’s that superman?” She told me he was a top surgeon, fed up with the dysfunctionality of a broken health-care system, and that, at the end of the year, he intended to retire to play golf and be done with the nonsense.

That was fifteen years ago.

-30-

My name is Patrick Déry. I write (mostly in French) for a living, and do my best to Quebecsplain in English in this space.

If you enjoyed reading this piece, you can encourage me by buying me a coffee. Comments, shares, and likes are always appreciated.

You can also subscribe to this media by clicking on the button below.

Yes please!

________

Methodological note: Regarding the number of live births in Quebec, the Institut de la statistique du Québec and Statistics Canada report very similar figures; however, I have used Statistics Canada’s figures for the purpose of comparison with Ontario.

Gas prices are set to drop by ten cents a litre, courtesy of the federal government, which has suspended the excise tax for five months. Can you hear the sighs of relief from coast to coast?

What exactly are we talking about here? It must be a lot if the headlines in Quebec are to be believed.

“Respite at the pump,” said La Presse the day after the announcement.

Same headline for Radio-Canada.

Le Journal de Montréal, less enthusiastic, felt that the respite was “small.”

This is consistent with their coverage, since the Journal tends to always take the view that gas is too expensive. But overall, the tone remains positive.

A report in La Presse began as follows: “A breath of fresh air at the pump: after tightening their belts in the face of rising gas prices, the motorists interviewed see a return to normal, with the cost per litre expected to drop as early as next Monday.”

A customer met at the gas station, as delighted as he is relieved by the good news, is even considering resuming his in-person business meetings after having recently suspended them.

Everyone is happy. Just imagine: in the same week, Caufield reaches 50 goals, Suzuki hits 100 points, Céline starts performing again, and gas costs less. All our collective dreams have come true. Yay!

At the risk of being a party pooper, has anyone thought to calculate what the suspension of the excise tax actually amounts to? Just out of curiosity? Okay, let’s do it.

What is the average distance a car travels each year in Quebec? In 2023, according to the most recent data, it was 12,435 km.

What is the average fuel consumption of a car for the same year? 8.1 litres per 100 km.

How much will be saved as a result of the excise tax suspension? Ten cents per litre.

12,435 km × 8.1 L/100 km = 1,007.2 litres per year. At ten cents per litre, the savings amount to $100.72.

Plus the GST and QST, since the excise tax is subject to sales tax.

$100.72 + 14.975% = $115.80.

For every vehicle your household owns, you’ll save an average of $116 per year, and less if one of the cars is a hybrid. But the rebate will be in effect from April 20 to September 7—just under five months, or 140 days.

$115.80 x 140/365 = $44.42.

All this forty-four bucks?

If you drive 25,000 km a year—which is double the average—you barely reach $90. How much does a coffee at Starbucks cost again? Your streaming services, including the ones you don’t watch? Cable? Your last lunch at Subway? There are all sorts of ways to save $50 or $100 in five months if one puts their mind to it. Obviously, most of the time, we don’t.

What is it with gas that makes us so worked up?

Let’s get back to the guy who’s going to start seeing his clients in person again. If he drives 1,000 km a week, which is a lot, he burns a little over 120 litres a week. At ten cents a litre, the savings amount to $12.30.

I don’t know what he sells to his clients, but if he’s off for $12 a week, maybe he should switch fields and do something more lucrative, like collecting empty drink cans. (Don’t laugh—the deposit is now ten cents; it adds up faster than you think.)

In the same article, an Uber driver lamented that his earnings had dropped by $12 per hour since the start of the year. That’s huge when you’re making around $20 an hour. It’s understandable that he’d wonder if it’s worth continuing.

Still, on its own, that’s a lot. Gas prices rose from $1.50 in January to a peak of $2 in April—a 50-cent difference. To see costs increase by $12, our friend would have to burn through 24 litres every hour. Does he own a Hummer?

A very busy Uber driver can cover 50,000 to 60,000 km per year. Let’s say 60,000 km. That’s 1,200 km per week, or 240 km per day if he works five full days. Let’s also say he’s very efficient and manages to cover that in eight hours—that’s 30 km per hour. (Which corresponds to the order of magnitude for a taxi, for comparison.)

Since it’s 10 litres per 100 km, for 30 km it’s three. Let’s round that up to four, as we had a cold winter.

At 50 cents more per litre, multiplied by four litres, that comes to two dollars more per hour, not twelve. It’s unpleasant, but far from the “estimate” of $12 that the reporter took for granted.

Which gets me thinking. It’s nice to know how much we’ll save over the next few months, but how much more have we paid to fill up since the Donald decided to bomb Iran?

According to the Régie de l’énergie, the average price of gas was $1.80 in Montreal in March, 30 cents more than in February. Using the figures above for annual mileage, we arrive at 1,000 km per month, give or take, which is a consumption of about 80 litres.

In March 2026, filling up cost you $24 more (80 litres × 30 cents). Add the first two weeks of April and assume gas is $2 per litre, and that adds another $20 (40-litre × 50 cents).

Since the start of the war in Iran, you’ve paid $44 more for your gas.

(Which is precisely the average rebate Ottawa is offering over the next five months, as we saw above. Who would have thought?)

$44. Over six weeks. $7.33 per week.

Did you feel your belt “tighten” that much?

That’s not all. The federal government estimates that the tax holiday will cost it $2.4 billion. About half of that is for individuals and the rest for businesses, including the suspension of the excise tax on diesel.

So, no one is saving anything; we’re simply putting this on the collective credit card, which is already pretty full, since Ottawa is projecting a $65 billion deficit for 2026–2027.

This makes even less sense since the rebates will be an individual benefit, while the resulting debt and eventual repayment will be a collective responsibility, completely decoupled from individual consumption. In other words, if you drive little, own an electric car, or use public transit, you will—for the same taxable income—be liable for the same share of the repayment as someone who drives 50,000 km a year in a Cherokee.

We also know from experience that the freed-up tax revenue tends to be recouped by oil companies and retailers. That’s what happened in Quebec in 1984. So, there’s a risk of giving the oil companies a windfall. Some columnists who applaud the suspension of the excise tax actually see the danger and are calling for government intervention to prevent this from happening. Maybe keeping the tax as it were would not have been such a bad idea after all…

It also goes agains the objective of reducing gasoline consumption, pollution, and the global warming that comes with it. That used to be a goal most of us shared. Before it hit our wallets.

Canada alone won’t solve the planet’s environmental problems—and Quebec even less so—but it wouldn’t hurt to lead by example. When I die, I’d like to be able to look my children in the eye and tell them that I did everything I could to avoid leaving them a planet in worse shape, rather than having saved 50 or 100 dollars whenever possible.

Obviously, it will take some sacrifice on our part and some measure of political courage to lead the way. But perhaps the problem starts with us and the signal we send to our elected officials.

+++++++

Why do we get so worked up over gas?

I honestly can’t understand it any other way than that, collectively, we’re not very good with arithmetic.

I can’t help but think back to news reports which showed us some guy who took a detour to save eight or ten cents a litre, even though his tank is still half full, with a line of cars and drivers in the background waiting their turn for half an hour, and the engine idling if it’s winter.

Below is the price of gas in Montreal since 1990. It’s similar for the rest of Quebec unless you live in Kuujjuaq. The lighter line is the price posted at the gas station. The darker line shows the price adjusted for inflation. Or, in other words, the price a litre of gas would have cost five, ten, or fifteen years ago, if money had the same value then as it does today.

In real terms, the price of gasoline has remained roughly the same for the past twenty years. Before the war with Iran, it had been falling for a year and a half and had reached its lowest level in five years. In fact, to find a lower real price over a long period, one has to go back to the previous century.

Even during when gasoline briefly sold at $2 per litre, it did not cost more than it did at the peak reached in 2008, nor during the entire period between spring 2011 and summer 2014. It was also considerably cheaper than four years ago, when it rose to $2.41 (in current dollars) in June 2022. And we’re talking about the monthly average, not a single day.

Paying $1.50 or $1.80 a litre might seem like a lot, but our incomes have also gone up, and cars tend to be more fuel-efficient than they were ten or fifteen years ago. And if you lived in Europe, it would be $3 a litre and more.

But reality holds no sway when it comes gas prices. We’re not reflecting. We’re just reacting.

The best example is the federal carbon tax, which was abolished last year. (As a reminder, Quebec has its own mechanism, the carbon market, which is more effective at raising funds than at spending them efficiently. We’ll talk about that another time.)

The federal carbon tax was a model of elegance in terms of public policy: it encouraged behavioural change, it was easy to adjust, and it was fiscally neutral, since the government returned nearly all of the revenue (except in provinces where it didn’t apply, such as Quebec). For 80% of Canadians, the carbon tax was a net gain: Ottawa sent a cheque that exceeded the amount of tax paid during the year.

The problem is that those who put the carbon tax in place did a lousy job of selling it.

And since almost everyone sees red when it comes to gas prices, Pierre Poilievre and others seized the opportunity, by asking repeatedly that an unpopular government “axe the tax”. A majority of Canadians came to believe that the carbon tax was making them poorer, and wanted it abolished. The Liberals were headed for the slaughterhouse in last year’s election. Not just because of that, but largely because of that.

The carbon tax may be the biggest political communication failure in 50 years: a government was giving money back to almost everyone, and almost no one understood or believed it.

So what did Mark Carney, former UN special envoy for climate action and finance, do once he became leader of the Liberal Party of Canada? Did he explain that the carbon tax was the best policy to encourage people to reduce their carbon emissions? Did he point out that it made most Canadians richer and encouraged people to change their behaviour? Did he note that it had broad support among economists and that thousands of them had backed it in a public statement, including 28 Nobel laureates?

Of course not.

Mr. Carney promised to abolish the carbon tax because, as a pragmatic politician, he realized there was no room for rational discussion on the issue, since too many people don’t take the time to think things through and do the math—starting with those who report the news.

This column is taking a two-week vacation break. Thank you to everyone who reads and supports this space. See you on the other side!

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This text is 2,094 words long, or about nine pages of a book. The research, writing, and data crunching took me just under three days.

My name is Patrick Déry. I write (mostly in French) for a living, and do my best to Quebecsplain in English in this space.

If you enjoyed reading this piece, you can encourage me by buying me a coffee. Comments, shares, and likes are always appreciated.

You can also subscribe to this media by clicking on the button below.

Yes please!

(Texte français disponible ici.)

Quebec has a new premier, Christine Fréchette.

Don’t get too attached. This will be nothing more than a brief interlude before the next election, which will take place in October and could see the CAQ disappear. Ms. Fréchette is likely to have her Kim Campbell moment.

After an eight-year hiatus, it’s going to be a race between the Parti Québécois and the Liberal Party once again. Currently, the PQ has the best chance of forming a government—and getting a majority in the Salon Rouge, even if it wins just a third of the vote.

There’s much to be said about support for sovereignty, which has hit an all-time low after stagnating for 20 years. About what was essentially a generational project. And about the PQ’s stubbornness in confusing the political desires of its supporters with those of Quebecers.

But today, we’re going to talk about money. Not because material things are the only source of happiness, but because there is a cost to ensuring the best possible life for all our fellow citizens and the best future for our children. The present and the future are not made up solely of good intentions, but of resources.

Before we go any further, two things.

First, what follows is not a critique of the legitimacy of independence as a political project. We can revisit that later but, personally, I have never questioned it. Like many Quebecers, I voted Yes in 1995. Like many more Quebecers, I would vote No today. Sovereignty is an answer to a question. If the question changes, the answer may change as well.

Second, since I’m going to talk about numbers, I’ll ask for your patience. I promise to keep it simple, with visuals to help everyone follow along, even those who haven’t had their morning coffee yet. It makes for an interesting read, and in my opinion, it leads to a difficult but inevitable conclusion.

(Yes, I sold the punchline with the title, but stick with me—it’s worth it, and even more so for those who plan to vote Yes in a potential third referendum. And I have a surprise in store for you, just before the end.)

+++++++

Every year, Quebecers, like residents of all provinces, send significant sums to Ottawa. This mainly includes income tax, the GST, other taxes, and employment insurance contributions.

Ottawa also sends money to or spends for Quebec. This ranges from pensions to equalization payments, including employment insurance, child benefits, health-care transfers, national defence, interest on the federal debt, the portion of the federal government’s operating expenses that concern us, etc.

The difference between what we send and what we receive represents the financial contribution or cost of being part of Canada. It was recently discussed in La Presse. Others have done so before.

I crunch the same numbers from time to time in my Excel spreadsheet, and I’d like to delve a little deeper into the financial costs and consequences of sovereignty.

The principle behind the calculation is fairly simple arithmetic. The difficulty consists of correctly accounting for revenues and expenditures and allocating them in the right proportions to the right categories. There are different ways to calculate this. Statistics Canada, the Parti Québécois, and federalist economists have done so.

What interests me above all are the implications of the calculation. But first, let’s find the right figure.

The Statistical Method

Statistics Canada has been performing this calculation for several years, and the Institut de la statistique du Québec reproduces it in the Quebec economic accounts of income and expenditures, using data from Statistics Canada.

In 2024, Quebecers sent $84 billion to Ottawa and received $111 billion. In other words, Ottawa subsidizes us to the tune of $27 billion a year.

Why do we receive more from the federal government than we send? Essentially, because we are relatively poor. Quebec has a lower fiscal capacity than other provinces, for all sorts of reasons—historical, structural, but also related to our public policy choices. It is not a matter of tax rates, but of the size of the tax base. Ours is smaller, which means that, at equal tax rates, Quebec’s tax revenues are lower than Ontario’s.

Detailed tables are available at this link. If you look through them, you’ll eventually find the $27 billion in an Excel spreadsheet that looks like this:

This deficit that Quebec runs with the federal government is nothing new. Since the 2010s, the amount has fluctuated between $15 billion and $20 billion a year. In a way, it’s not that huge either. Quebec receives about $3,000 per capita. Saskatchewan and Newfoundland receive about twice that amount. The other Atlantic provinces receive three to four times as much. But since Quebec has a population of 9 million, that adds up to a large figure: $27 billion.

PQ politicians dispute part of the methodology, mainly the way Quebec’s share is determined. Other pro-sovereignty researchers, on the other hand, have found it a very good indication of reality, “give or take 10%.”

In a 2024 ad, Parti Québécois leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon noted that Quebecers receive “virtually no direct services to the public” for the tens of billions they send to Ottawa each year.

That’s not completely false. But not completely honest, either.

It’s true that most public services are provided by provincial governments (hospitals, schools, the administration of justice, etc.). But a large portion of these services is funded by Ottawa. In 2024, $30 billion spent by the Quebec government came from federal transfers, mainly equalization payments and health-care transfers.

The federal government is also responsible for national defence, the coast guard, customs, passports, immigration, broadcasting regulation, currency, and so on. All of these services would exist in one form or another in a sovereign Quebec. In 2024, these expenditures totalized approximately $22 billion, according to Statistics Canada’s methodology.

The calculation must also include funds sent directly to Quebecers, such as employment insurance, old-age pensions, and child benefits. That amounted to $37 billion in 2024.

Transfers payments to municipalities, nonprofit organizations, Indigenous communities, and others, as well as interest on the federal debt, must be added. That brings the total to $111 billion, which would also be spent by the Quebec government. Perhaps minus a certain amount due to eliminated overlaps, but that’s not guaranteed, as we’ll soon see.

So, when the PQ leader says that we’re sending (at the time) $82 billion and receiving “hardly any direct services for the public,” he’s playing semantics. The federal government isn’t burning through our billions. It funds indirect services (the military, defence, immigration, and so on). It funds part of the services provided by the provinces and cities. It also funds tens of billions in benefits of all kinds, which end up in our pockets.

The PQ’s Method

In its budget of a sovereign Quebec (of Year 1 budget), the Parti Québécois uses a different methodology to estimate federal spending allocated to Quebec. Basically, the PQ chose to account for spending based on the location of the recipients rather than the territory where the spending occurs. That’s a valid approach. Six economists verified the calculations.

Unlike the Institut de la statistique and Statistics Canada, the Parti Québécois does not explicitly state the amount of our deficit to Ottawa, preferring instead to calculate the budget balance of an independent Quebec by factoring in the benefits of eliminating duplication with the federal government, and the efficiency gains resulting from achieving independence. However, we can figure out their estimation of the deficit with Ottawa by reading between the lines.

Once separated from Canada, the Parti Québécois calculates that Quebec would recover $75 billion in revenue currently sent to Ottawa.

As for federal spending allocated to Quebec, the PQ estimates that it amounted to $99 billion that same year.

So, in 2021, our deficit to Ottawa—or the federal subsidy, if you prefer—was about $25 billion. However, that was a pandemic year, during which the federal government paid out billions in benefits to individuals and in business subsidies.

In the public accounts, the ISQ and Statistics Canada calculate that our deficit to Ottawa was nearly $32 billion in 2021. This leads to the conclusion that the PQ calculates net federal transfers to be about $7 billion lower than Statistics Canada’s estimates.

In 2024, using the PQ’s method, we would arrive at $20 billion, rather than Statistics Canada’s $27 billion. The PQ also believes we could achieve efficiency gains of about $9 billion. I’ll come back to that.

The Pessimistic Approach

While the Statistics Canada calculations reported by the ISQ are strictly accounting-based, the PQ’s budget is an eminently political document. This does not invalidate the approach, but just as an entrepreneur seeks to sell their business plan, sovereigntist politicians seek to sell their vision for the country. This influences perceptions, the analytical framework, and the choices they make.

Others dispute the PQ’s calculations, which they deem overly optimistic. They also assess that the Year 1 budget underestimates the repercussions and costs of separation, particularly the scale of the debt and the costs of financing it. This is the view of economists Robert Gagné, Louis Lévesque, Alain Paquet, and former editorialist and Senator André Pratte, who at the time was also chair of the Quebec Liberal Party’s national political commission.

On the issue of debt and payments, it’s hard to argue against them. It is almost certain that the interest payments on Quebec’s new consolidated debt (after adding its share of the federal debt) would be proportionally higher, for two reasons. First, because Quebec’s credit rating, while very good (Aa2 or A+, depending on the agency), is still lower than Canada’s, which remains exceptional (AAA). Second, because part of Quebec’s very good rating is linked to its membership in the Canadian federation and an implicit payment guarantee, which would disappear in an independent Quebec. The loss of this guarantee, which would result in higher interest rates, could add up to an additional $4 billion per year to debt service.

The analysis by Gagné and Co. also highlights other valid points, notably regarding the establishment of a Quebec army in light of NATO’s 2% GDP spending target, which would increase an independent Quebec’s expenditures by $8 billion. If you have heard about Greenland over the last year, you probably understand that it is in Quebec’s interest to remain within NATO.

In short, even starting from the Parti Québécois’s more optimistic scenario, we quickly reach $30 billion—and more.

+++++++

We’re left with a “hole” of 20 to 30 billion to fill in an independent Quebec.

As I mentioned, the Parti Québécois estimates it can achieve savings of nearly 9 billion by eliminating overlaps between the two levels of government. Given that federal program spending in Quebec is around $20 to $30 billion, depending on the methodology chosen (the one chosen by the PQ being more generous), that seems optimistic, especially since other factors will push spending in the opposite direction.

It’s hard to deny that debt payments would be higher. Other costs are also likely underestimated. Transferring programs from one jurisdiction to another is more than just an accounting exercise.

Currently, employment insurance and pensions are managed by Ottawa. In an independent Quebec, new programs—and, above all, new systems—would have to be built from the ground up. Imagine something like SAAQClic, but a hell of a lot more complicated than renewing driver’s licenses or license plates. (SAAQClic should have cost about $600 million, which was already expensive for an IT project of that scope. It is now set to cost over a billion.)

The same goes for passports, immigration or asylum applications, and everything related to managing land, sea, and air borders, as well as airports. The federal government isn’t particularly competent, but it’s been doing this for years, and processes and systems are already in place. Quebec has little to no expertise in these areas, except for the part of immigration it manages. Everything else has to be built from scratch.

As a former entrepreneur, I can confirm that anything that Murphy was right, and that everything that can go wrong usually does. Building new systems is complicated; it’s even more so if you have to hire tens of thousands of employees while developing and implementing new processes on a train moving at full speed. Broadly speaking, everything a government undertakes ends up costing more than expected—it’s almost a universal law.

And that’s not even counting the lack of technological expertise within the Quebec government, the fact that Quebec already has at least ten billion dollars in IT projects on its plate, and that, among those currently being rolled out, dozens are behind schedule. And we want to add more?

All of this makes me doubt that we’ll see significant savings, at least in the early years of a sovereign Quebec.

What is the true cost of independence?

All things considered, a revenue shortfall of $20 billion does not seem unreasonable in the aftermath of Quebec’s independence.

In practical terms, this would mean we would have to generate an additional $20 billion in revenue, take on $20 billion in debt each year, cut $20 billion from government spending, or any combination of these three factors that adds up to the same total.

What is $20 billion?

For the current year, it is equivalent to the total spending of the Ministry of Education—the amount the government plans to allocate for the operation of the approximately 3,000 elementary and secondary schools in Quebec.

It is one third of the budget allocated to health care.

It is the amount allocated to our universities (Ministry of Higher Education), daycare services (Family), the courts (Justice), municipalities, and housing (Municipal Affairs and Housing) combined.

Where do we cut?

Schools? Hospitals? Daycare centres? Long-term care facilities? Prescription drug coverage? Parental leave? Twenty billion dollars is one out of every seven dollars the Quebec government spends. That’s enormous.

In the current conditions, giving up the federal financial contribution—which ultimately comes from provinces wealthier than Quebec—would be like shutting down the Ministry of Education or cutting a third of the Ministry of Health. Those who think the period of “austerity,” when liberals were in power last time in Quebec—and which was really just a slowdown in spending growth—was painful, are in for quite a surprise when the real cuts come.

This is not a conclusion I reach lightly. We can certainly wish that our governments had managed our finances better so that this would not factor into the opportunity cost of sovereignty.

Personally, I find this embarrassing. But it remains the harsh reality, despite the fact that Quebec is the country’s largest province, the second most populous, that it is crossed by a vast waterway, that it can rely on abundant and inexpensive energy, that it is brimming with natural, human, and educational resources, that it is home to the most trilingual population in North America, that it boasts a vibrant and unique culture, and that it serves as a bridge between America and Europe.

Quebec’s GDP is barely higher than Alberta’s; we have twice the population. Is it oil? Undoubtedly. They’ve exploited it. Just like Norway, a social-democratic archetype.

It hasn’t always been this way. In the early 2000s, the net federal transfer balance to Quebec was nearly in equilibrium, give or take a few billion, as shown in the chart below.

(Note: I committed a “chart crime” by combining data illustrating the same phenomenon using different methodologies. But the common data—covering the years 2007 to 2009—leads me to believe that the orders of magnitude are sufficiently comparable for the exercise to be valid. If that still offends you, just pretend that there are two charts: one ending in 2009 and the other starting in 2007. And don’t tell my stats teacher…)

A few billion dollars is no small sum, but given the size of Quebec’s budget, it was a gap that could have been bridged. It wasn’t entirely far-fetched to argue that an independent Quebec, having gained full control over its own policies, could have benefited from an additional boost that would ultimately have offset the loss of federal funding.

It wouldn’t have solved everything, but we’d have been closer to something manageable. It wasn’t political, but factual. Of course, one might still prefer federalism over sovereignty, but that didn’t change the facts. And whatever one may say about Lucien Bouchard, he delivered on that account.

But today, for several years now and for the foreseeable future, there is little doubt that Quebec’s independence would represent an enormous financial risk in the short and medium term, and that those hit hardest would likely be those who receive the most services and support from the government: children, young families, seniors, the sick, and the most vulnerable of our citizens in general.

That is the true cost of independence. It’s not the billions. It’s the people.

We’re left with the impression that, for some, the end justifies the means, and that every cause, every revolution, must entail its share of sacrifices and victims. This is nothing new. The first victims of revolutions are often those we claim to be liberating.

The speck in the eye of the PLQ and the CAQ for having mishandled rather than intelligently transformed the delivery of our public services over the last 25 years or so should not make the PQ forget the enormous beam currently in their own eye.

Could Quebec and Quebecers recover from this? Undoubtedly. Perhaps after a certain number of years, we might even manage to make up for lost ground. But at the cost of how much suffering inflicted on our most vulnerable fellow citizens? At the expense of how many young people’s futures? In what (worse) state would we leave our healthcare system? Who believes we would take better care of the frailest of our seniors when we barely manage to give them a bath once a week or change their diapers, and the population will continue to age during this period of turmoil?

Regardless of the merits of sovereignty—which, in my humble opinion, have been significantly diminished for all kinds of reasons—our mismanagement over the past thirty or forty years has stripped us of the means to achieve it. This is not a detail to be dealt with later.

There are many reasons why Quebec is now subsidized by the rest of the country, and while the ultimate responsibility may certainly be debated, it does not change the reality.

I don’t know for whom the pro-sovereignty politicians want to achieve independence, but it is no longer for Quebecers—which we should understand to mean all the inhabitants of our province. It is for themselves first, and perhaps for a few others. The majority of us, who do not want it, will have to endure it.

To those who doubt it, here is what François Gendron, who was an MNA for the Parti Québécois for 42 years, had to say about the independence project a few months before his departure:

“Would we be capable of doing it? Yes. We just have to decide to live within our means. We just have to decide to tax according to our priorities. We just have to decide that, if we want a larger basket of services, by definition, taxes will be higher.”

Or we’ll go deeper into debt. Or we’ll have fewer services.

Some will see remarkable intellectual consistency in this. For my part, I see a kind of obsession and stubbornness that goes beyond the facts—and Mr. Gendron, despite his impeccable public service record, is not the only example of this.

When conditions on the ground change, policy must change too.

Still skeptical? Here is what the economist Vincent Geloso, one of those who reviewed the sovereignty budget, had to say at the time:

2. I became a sovereigntist in spite of the sovereigntists. I am simply convinced that Canada is a dysfunctional federation because of equalization payments and federal transfers. These mechanisms create perverse incentives for Quebec politicians, since they can promise levels of public spending that exceed Quebecers’ wealth. They can also afford to reject pro-growth policies, since the potential revenue associated with certain policies that are sacrificed is partially offset by these transfers. (…) A sovereign Quebec would be forced to slash spending and adopt pro-growth policies while inviting more private sector involvement in the provision of public services.

(…)

4. If you don’t believe that the sovereigntists will cut spending, that’s your prerogative. My role as an arbiter was not to judge whether I believed they would fulfill their promises. That said, it’s hard to believe otherwise given point 2, above. Sovereignty amounts to tighter budgetary constraints, and fiscal consolidation is inevitable. Many instances of sovereignty have been followed by such measures.

+++++++

I must say a few words in closing about Jean Charest, who has strangely become a point of reference for many separatists, since he argued that an independent Quebec would be economically “viable.”

Of course, there are plenty of “viable” countries—more than a hundred others less wealthy than Quebec. But do they all have universal health care, subsidized childcare, universal drug coverage, universal parental leave, and everything our very imperfect social safety net aims to provide us?

In a 2022 comparison, Quebec ranked 21st in GDP per capita among OECD countries, essentially developed nations. This is highly enviable, placing it ahead of the Czech Republic, Italy, Slovenia, and Spain.

But behind Ireland, Switzerland, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Australia, Sweden, Germany, Iceland, Belgium, and Finland, among others.

To put it bluntly, we are trying to afford a Northern European social safety net with the economy and productivity of Southern or Eastern Europe.

We might be better off choosing the efficiency of the former group to avoid ending up with the problems of the latter.

-30-

This text is 3,706 words long, which is roughly fifteen pages of a book. The research, writing, and methodological soul-searching took me a week.

My name is Patrick Déry. I write (mostly in French) for a living, and do my best to Quebecsplain in English in this space.

If you enjoyed reading this piece, you can encourage me by buying me a coffee. Comments, shares, and likes are always appreciated.

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Yes please!

(Texte français disponible ici.)

It was an “emotional farewell.” He had “a sense of duty to the state.” He “loved Quebec.” Tributes poured in after François Legault’s final speech in Quebec’s Assemblée Nationale. From his allies. From his opponents. From journalists.

“The entire nation is grateful.”

The “entire nation”? Really? With barely 10% of the vote for the CAQ, the party he founded, one might think otherwise.

And why exactly is he being honoured? For his accomplishments, or simply for having been there?

I won’t be praising François Legault for education, which he had made his priority. The number of Quebec teachers resigning has doubled since 2018. Every year, when school starts, thousands of classes have no teacher.

Young female teachers, in particular, continue to drop out en masse early in their careers. They asked for help and a slightly more stable and predictable work schedule. They were given money—which they deserved—but that didn’t solve any of the long-standing issues. Meanwhile, Quebec continues to have the worst high school graduation rate in the country.

I won’t be praising François Legault for the wait times in ERs, to see a family doctor or a specialist, or to undergo surgery—all of which have increased under his tenure. Our health-care system’s capacity to care for an aging population has declined, which spells disaster for the years ahead. A decisive shift toward home care for the elderly still has to happen. One might have hoped that a former Health Minister would have had time to reflect on what had and (mostly) hadn’t worked while he was in office. Instead of making the health-care behemoth more agile, he simply changed its name.

I won’t be praising François Legault for the doctors’ remuneration, which has risen yet again while our access to timely care is declining, even though he promised the opposite and lied to our faces multiple times about his recent failed reform. In Quebec, one in twenty family doctors now practices outside the public system. We could at least have regulated their fees and reimbursed the cost of the consultation for patients, as other provinces do. Apparently, it was too simple.

I won’t be praising François Legault for the thousands of seniors waiting for a spot in a long-term care facility. Nor for the Maison des aînés, a flagship promise of the CAQ which has become a costly and bitter failure. Seniors’ homes are currently unable to admit patients to full capacity due to staff shortages. Others have stayed empty since they were built. Meanwhile, many seniors are losing what little autonomy they have left, stuck in a hospital where they shouldn’t be, taking up already scarce hospital beds. The conversion of non-subsidized long-term care facilities is moving at a snail’s pace, adding the insult of financial ruin to the injury of old age.

I won’t be praising François Legault for early childhood services. Nearly 30 years after the introduction of the Centres de la petite enfance (or CPE), Quebec’s subsidized daycare services are still basically a lottery. If you’re lucky, your child will get a low-cost spot with qualified, stable staff. If you’re not, they’ll end up in a daycare that does the best it can with underpaid staff and the employee turnover that comes with it. Here too, the conversion into subsidized daycare centres is moving at the pace of bureaucracy.

Speaking of paperwork. The size of the government, in terms of the number of employees, has grown almost three times faster than Quebec’s population. In 2018, François Legault promised a leaner, more efficient government. Neither has materialized. We could also talk about the billion-plus dollars that SAAQClic will cost, or health-care IT projects, and the rest: of the 177 current IT projects the government is keeping track of, about a third are behind schedule, some for several years. Please say “hi” to cost overruns. I won’t be praising François Legault for that either.

I won’t be praising François Legault for the six billion swallowed up in corporate subsidies with no measurable results, and most of which were simply wasted: from Northvolt to Nemaska Lithium, including Lion Électrique, Recyclage Carbone Varennes, and the “flying whales,” to name just a few. In 2023–2024 alone, the Economy Ministry “invested” 2.5 billion in 1,850 projects. All this, of course, with minimal transparency, as if it were their money, and not ours.

I won’t be praising François Legault for our public debt, which is growing by about ten billion dollars each year, nor for the tax cuts while our public services are deteriorating and which even the Quebec Employers Council didn’t want. Nor for the flood of checks sent to nearly every taxpayer at a cost of several billion, which is the last thing to do if one wants to curb inflation. But then, maybe it was rather about the election than inflation.

I won’t be praising François Legault for our public infrastructure falling into ruin. For eight years, our bridges, roads, schools, and hospitals have continued to deteriorate faster than we repaired them. The asset maintenance deficit—that is, what it would take to fix everything up—is now $45 billion. Last week, we learned that this didn’t include our water infrastructure, which is literally leaking from all sides. That doubles the total to $90 billion. We could rebuild the pyramids of Egypt for less than that. Mr. Legault chose to have his own pharaonic project. Which leads us to…

I won’t be praising François Legault for staking a large portion of his political capital on a tunnel as useless as it is unrealistic. In its initial version, the proposed third link between Québec City and Lévis was the widest tunnel in the world, to be dug by a tunnel boring machine that had yet to be invented, in an area where soil stability was uncertain, to meet needs that are factually nonexistent and potentially worsen traffic congestion in the Québec City region—all without any studies to back it up. Six billion? Eight billion? Ten billion? It will cost whatever it costs. And as a CAQ minister famously said: “Lâchez-moi avec les GES !”. (Give me a break with the GHGs.) And with the data and the basics of urban planning, one might add.

The accursed tunnel changed from a single tunnel to a “bitube” before dying under the weight of its own indefensibility, only to be resurrected the day after a by-election in Quebec City, in which the CAQ took a beating. Yet, just a few months earlier, the deputy premier had explained, with a mountain of files, that the third link was unjustifiable and would never see the light of day. Unable to dig his tunnel, Mr. Legault has instead plowed a deep furrow of cynicism.

I won’t be praising François Legault for the 30% pay raise granted to our MNAs (which amounts to 45% after three years…), even though they were already the highest-paid provincial legislators in the country and enjoyed a particularly generous pension plan. But Mr. Legault had to placate the discontented members of the caucus after the third link project was scrapped, and one CAQ member complained that he didn’t see his mother often enough. Mr. Legault even had the nerve to say that it took “courage” to grant the unwarranted raise.

I won’t be praising François Legault for spending millions to bring in a hockey team to play two exhibition games in Québec City and announce almost at the same time that there wasn’t enough money for food banks, one of which is a stone’s throw away from the Vidéotron Centre, where the games would be played. One line for tickets, the other for food donations. This was all the more inept given that exhibition games were played elsewhere without any subsidies and that the NHL even scheduled regular-season games in Europe. But can we expect from a fanboy premier who appointed a minister responsible for bringing back the Nordiques?

I won’t be praising François Legault for reneging on his promise to reform the electoral system to make our democracy more representative and fairer to voters—a solemn commitment made with representatives from the other opposition parties, backed by photos and signatures. “You can count on us,” the CAQ leader had said at the time. Just like the rest.

I won’t be praising François Legault for having sabotaged more than 40 years of democratic consensus by butchering the Quebec Charter of Rights and Freedoms under a gag order. Before the CAQ’s arrival, Quebec’s MNAs managed to patiently evolve our charter through near-unanimous votes—always to add rights, never to remove them. This spring, Quebec could set a world premiere by adopting a constitution that will leave its citizens with fewer rights, rather than guaranteeing them.

I won’t be praising François Legault for using Quebecers from elsewhere as electoral fuel, or for describing as “suicidal” an immigration threshold that his own government ultimately exceeded anyway, or for repeatedly stoking identity-based fears, and for comparing Quebec—where nearly 94% of the population speaks French—to Louisiana, where French is practically extinct.

I won’t be praising François Legault for having deliberately and repeatedly trampled on the rights of religious minorities, without ever demonstrating that the Quebec women targeted had caused a single problem. At first, it was people “in positions of authority.” Today, it is cafeteria workers and library volunteers. A government should protect its minorities and its most vulnerable citizens, not turn them into political cannon fodder.

I won’t be praising François Legault in particular for the monstrous hypocrisy that consisted of portraying Quebec women wearing a hijab as an immediate danger to our children, yet tolerating their continued presence for decades via a grandfather clause, provided they do not change jobs. Was this an urgent matter or not? If you still believed there was a legitimate justification behind all this, this should dispel your last doubts.

I won’t be praising François Legault for having repeatedly cast doubt on the loyalty and love for Quebec of those who held different views from his own and who felt it necessary to contradict or criticize him. Or for having taken aim, in turn, at Anglophones, immigrants, “woke” people, Montrealers, mayors, journalists, and others, depending on who was the convenient enemy of the day. Or for repeatedly pitting us against one another, when his own primary duty was to unite us.

When you end up playing politics against just about everyone, it should raise a flag. Mr. Legault, for his part, was dreaming of a third term, even when most Quebecers wanted him out.

François Legault’s greatest merit is having been there when we were at our worst. It happened by chance, amid the COVID-19 crisis. The premier struck the right tone, which made him a sort of benevolent uncle to the nation.

But the decisions made by his government did not stand up to rigorous analysis. Over the course of numerous press conferences where the focus was mostly on his reassuring tone, it quickly became evident that Mr. Legault did not understand what was happening, misinterpreted the numbers and trends, and generally spoke nonsense. On at least 20 occasions, the premier told us that “it was under control.” This was almost always false.

Quebec is not the only place where the pandemic has hit hard, but some countries, proactive and at the forefront, have fared better. Quebec had the luxury of being at the tail end of every wave. Instead of learning from others’ experiences, our leaders generally sat on their hands longer, and the bulk of our government’s response consisted of repeatedly locking down and reopening, rather than using all the tools at our disposal and demonstrating audacity and imagination.

And then, there’s this picture, taken in January 2021 while dozens of Quebecers were dying every day, our hospitals were at breaking point, and it was clear that our leaders had screwed up big time once again. All that despite the experience of the previous spring and the multiple warning signs coming from Europe, elsewhere in Canada, and even from Quebec throughout the fall.

But Mr. Legault was somewhere else, in his own head.

In hindsight, it remains staggering to see how, after all his years in politics, Mr. Legault remains with such a limited and superficial grasp of the key factors shaping public policy.

He has made a habit of governing by intuition and slogans, rather than promoting the best policies and fostering the imagination and intellectual curiosity needed to develop and implement them.

Even today, he still defends the disastrous economic interventionism that marked his years in power and calls on his successors to double down. How many billions should have had to be wasted to snap him out of his denial?

Imagine what a competent CAQ government could have achieved, with a premier and ministers who had done their homework before coming to power, instead of the band of ideologues and disorganized populists who have steered Quebec for the past seven years?

Imagine if François Legault had truly set aside the national question, as he initially intended to do, and channelled all government action toward education, health care, improving family policy, elderly care, the environment, the transition to a society where we will have to provide more services with fewer hands, upgrading and maintaining our infrastructure, researching and actively identifying best practices from around the world, revitalizing our democracy, and implementing optimistic, unifying policies to promote the French language—and so on—rather than wasting so much time and energy brandishing bogeymen about the impending disappearance of the francophones or the supposed attacks on “our” values?

Imagine if he had fully committed to public transit as a sustainable solution to congestion and endless road expansion, instead of foolishly fighting with two successive mayors of his own capital over the modern public transit system Québec City still lacks?

Imagine if the former Health Minister that Mr. Legault knew what he was doing. That, instead of foolishly promising to reduce emergency room wait times to 90 minutes, he had realized that he was comparing Quebec to countries that have more doctors, more hospital beds, better incentives for their health-care facilities, better tools, and better policies—and acted accordingly.

Instead of having wasted eight years, we would be starting to see results. We could be hoping that things are improving, which would encourage everyone to pursue their efforts and sacrifices toward a common, worthy, inspiring goal. Instead, we find ourselves with almost everything still left to do, and less time and resources than we had.

You’re going to tell me that the Liberals didn’t do any better before? You’re not wrong. I wouldn’t have paid any more tribute to Jean Charest for his lost decade in power. But, with hindsight, experience, evaluation, and learning from mistakes, I was hoping for better this time.

During the Charest decade, Quebec stood still; during Legault’s eight years, Quebec sank deeper.

+++++++

Leading a state, a nation, is not a reward or a prize, but a heavy burden.

Founding a party and bringing it to power is certainly an achievement on a personal level and in terms of partisan politics. But it is by no means a sign of a society’s progress or an improvement in the lives of those who inhabit it. In fact, history has shown that the opposite is often true.

The near-unanimity in the tributes paid to a man who will go down as the worst premier in our modern political history reveals an uncomfortable closeness between politics and the media, or at the very least of a political culture that values persistence—even in mediocrity—more than results.

I know, we’re not supposed to say that when a politician is making his final exit. But if not now, when?

The CAQ is a meteorite that has streaked across our political sky before crashing and likely disappearing next fall, but not without causing a lot of damage.

As François Legault prepares to step down, and with elections just a few months away, it is necessary to remind ourselves that we no longer need this kind of politician, that we’d be better off without them, and that Quebecers of all stripes and origins deserve better.

Nothing defines short-sightedness and a lack of political imagination more than this 2022 CAQ campaign ad, in which an uneducated elderly woman was adamant that “no one could have done better.”

It is with this mix of arrogance, unabashed ignorance, and refusal to even acknowledge obvious missteps and blatant mistakes that we have been governed for eight years. And we’re supposed to say thanks on top of that?

It may have been “the greatest honour” for François Legault to have been premier. But if I were in his shoes, I would leave with my head bowed, ashamed of having squandered such an opportunity to improve the lives of millions of fellow Quebecers.

The length of a political commitment does not make up for poor stewardship.

Enjoy your retirement, Mr. Legault, and whatever you do, please don’t come back.

-30-

This text is 2,869 words long, which is roughly twelve pages of a book. My name is Patrick Déry. I write (mostly in French) for a living, and do my best to Quebecsplain in English in this space.

If you enjoyed reading this piece, you can encourage me by buying me a coffee. Comments, shares, and likes are always appreciated.

You can also subscribe to this media by clicking on the button below.

Yes please!

(Texte français disponible ici.)

Do you have a maple leaf engraved on your heart? Or, simply put, despite your love for Quebec, do you prefer to remain Canadian? Any one of those shades of red—and all the shades in between—makes you a federalist.

According to Bloc Québécois leader Yves-François Blanchet, that also means you’re not a Quebecer.

Blanchet really did say that in an end-of-year interview with La Presse, published on December 24th. It went relatively unnoticed, quickly buried by Christmas Eve and that we ate, drank and celebrated that evening. The news cycle came to a halt while we were serving tourtière. After the holidays, journalists and political commentators moved on to other topics.

I’ve been thinking what Blanchet said and the resounding silence around it almost every day for the past three months, because it’s so huge, so absurd, but also so revealing of the mindset of certain current sovereigntist leaders.

If a referendum on Quebec’s independence were held today, nearly 70% of us would vote “No.” So, according to Blanchet’s logic, 70% of Quebec’s inhabitants “are not Quebecois”.

Nor are the majority of those who have lived in Quebec for the past half-century.

Sovereigntist leaders from a bygone era—let’s say, pre-charter of values—would never have dared to say such a thing, out of respect for their fellow citizens whom they were trying to convince and whom they aspired to lead in the country they were proposing, but also because it is nonsense. Quebec’s status will be decided amongst Quebecers; those who prefer to remain in Canada are no less Quebecers than those who would vote to leave.

I cannot recall this ever having been called into question by a mainstream politician. The federal government and certain federalist politicians may well have come under fierce attack by sovereigntists. But they never attacked the whole of Quebec federalists.

Similarly, Robert Bourassa or Philippe Couillard never viewed sovereigntists as a subcategory of Quebecers. The federal government has never administered a test to determine whether you were sufficiently federalist to be able to vote or to be elected. A sovereigntist party has thus been sending MPs to Ottawa for over 35 years. It even briefly formed the official opposition.

Today, more and more sovereigntist politicians seem to think that Quebec is not inhabited solely by Quebecers. Since Mr. Blanchet’s statement three months ago, no prominent sovereigntist figure has contradicted him.

Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, the leader of the Parti Québécois, even went a step further recently, asking residents of the Outaouais region to “vote like a Quebecer” in the upcoming elections.

Yes, he actually said that.

One might assume that, for Mr. St-Pierre Plamondon, voting like a Quebecer means voting for the party he leads.

Currently, the Parti Québécois stands at 31% in the polls. So, 31% of us intend to “vote like a Quebecer”. How would the rest of us vote? Like a colonized person? A sell-out? An Anglophone? An immigrant?

Or, worse still, a Canadian?

Yuck!

One might think this trivial. For my part, I believe a significant shift is taking place in Quebec politics. A more accusatory discourse has emerged, perhaps influenced by a general deterioration of the political climate, first in the United States and then in Canada. Political thinking has also evolved in the same direction, and more radical rhetoric—previously on the fringes of the major parties—is now being adopted by their leaders.

In the past, sovereigntist leaders never attempted to draw a line between “real” and “fake” Quebecers. They sought to rally, to convince, to bring people together. Sometimes through criticism, but never through exclusion. Whether sovereigntist or federalist, we were not necessarily so far apart on the essentials; we simply hoped to change people’s minds and believed that dialogue was possible. This was also essential to winning an election, let alone a referendum.

For instance, in his often-quoted “Centaur” speech of 1998, Lucien Bouchard assured English-speaking Quebecers that their institutions, rights and way of life would be protected in an independent Quebec. Bouchard famously said that, “When you go to a hospital and you’re in pain, you may need a blood test; but you certainly don’t need a language test.”

But before Bouchard, René Lévesque had drawn the boundaries of the national debate in a far more explicit manner.

It was in March 1980, two months before the first referendum, during an address to representatives of the English-speaking community. The opening words left little doubt as to Lévesque’s intentions: “Dear Fellow Quebecers.”

This was not mere politeness. In his speech delivered in English, Lévesque sought to clear the air once and for all by addressing what “Québécois” or its English equivalent “Quebecer” meant in the eyes of his party’s members.

“I would like to try to get to the bottom of this rather tired question about who—in our view, supposedly—is entitled to call himself or herself a Quebecer. This very artificial, but also very insistent uncertainty even lies at the bottom of some concerns that have been voiced in several quarters that we would not consider the Anglophone vote valid than the referendum results come in. This is a sort of maximum variation of the notion that has been promoted and particularly in opposition quarters for over three years, according to which, for us, to be a Quebecer, one must be a French Canadian and even also a Catholic, whether practising or not. So, let’s come to grips, if possible, once and for all, with this business of who is a Québécois or a Quebecer.”

“‘Quebecer’ is a name that, to us, unites all those who were born or who live in Québec and it links together their many language, ethnic, cultural, religious, geographic and other differences. It is the mark of belonging to a people and to a land and the use of the word or its French equivalent ‘Québécois’ is in no way the exclusive property of one group and much less of one party.

(…)

Today, the word Quebecer is recognized and whether the term is used in English or in French, Quebecers in English may do things that are more or less intelligent or palatable and Québécois in French may act brilliantly or stupidly, but in no case could their title to their Québec identity possibly be challenged. I hope that’s clear!”

As a reminder, Lévesque was not keen on the name “Parti québécois”, because he felt that the politicization of the term might exclude those with other political preferences. Nearly 60 years after the PQ was founded, Lévesque’s most recent political heir demonstrated this when he called on people to ‘vote like a Quebecer’.”

As with the Bloc leader’s comments about federalists, it seems that no one is considering that PSPP might actually mean what he was saying and, if he does, that it is completely bonkers.

For some sovereigntists, English-speaking Quebecers have often been seen more as an obstacle than as fellow citizens exercising their democratic freedoms. Questioning the authenticity of their ‘Quebec-ness’ was a convenient way of pushing them aside and considering only the ‘real’ Quebecers. Without the “English,” Quebec would already be a country, wouldn’t it?

This mindset still exists today, but it has crept into acceptable discourse, or at least a discourse that has been accepted. Recently, commenting on a poll, a former PQ MNA pointed out that the Francophone vote is “the one that counts.” Sovereignist leaders go even further, encouraged by commentators who are increasingly uninhibited, even hateful, towards those who commit the crime of not sharing their vision of the national question.

It is no longer just the Anglophones who are an obstacle; it is all federalists. And, confusing their own political preferences with what they see as an obvious and inevitable conclusion, sovereigntist politicians have come to assert publicly and without any embarrassment that federalists are not Quebecers, do not vote like Quebecers, forgetting that these “non-Quebecers” represent the majority of the electorate whose support they seek.

It marks the emergence of a voice that has always existed amongst the most militant sovereigntists, but which had never reached the top of the movement. It also reflects radicalization—in the first meaning of the word—or, at the very least, a greater intransigence of the movement as a whole.

This shapes and influences the actions and priorities of pro-independence politicians and their advisers. If only 31% of Quebec’s inhabitants are Quebecois, why worry about what the others think?

+++++++

The more a party represents a broad coalition, the more compromises it must make. When Quebec was dominated by two parties—which was the case for almost our entire political history—virtually everyone wishing to engage in public life gravitated towards these two poles. First, it was the Liberals and the Conservatives, then the Union Nationale, and then the Parti Québécois.

The PQ has historically brought together both impatient and less impatient sovereigntists, as well as those further to the right and others very much on the left. The Liberal Party comprised supporters more enthusiastic towards Ottawa and others that saw themselves more as Quebecers than Canadians.

The fragmentation of our political landscape has multiplied the poles of attraction. Nationalist federalists and disillusioned sovereigntists have turned to the CAQ. Left-leaning sovereigntists, as well as supporters of the QLP, have swelled the ranks of Québec solidaire, which is now more of a left-wing party than a sovereigntist one. The right-wing and anti-establishment electorate, and even a somewhat paranoid fringe, who were previously scattered along the federalist-sovereigntist axis, have found a home with Éric Duhaime’s Conservatives.

Each of these five poles is ideologically ‘purer’ than the PQ or the QLP could ever have been when they each defined nearly half of the Quebec political spectrum.

Discussion within these new, narrower camps is easier. Each party increasingly resembles an echo chamber, almost unanimous within its own ranks, but divorced from the far more diverse conversation that animates the whole of Quebec society.

This ideological purity is also appealing because it can now be rewarded at the ballot box if a critical mass is reached, even if that mass falls well short of a majority.

In 1973, with 30% of the vote, the Parti Québécois won six seats. René Lévesque was defeated in his own constituency. Today, with 31% of the vote, the PQ would have a good chance of forming a majority government.

Why try to win over voters by making compromises if ideological purity is enough? Why adopt a moderate stance if accusatory rhetoric, bordering on paranoia and insults, manages to mobilize a sufficient base?

It’s much simpler. And too bad for the others.

Politicians of all stripes are often so convinced they are right that they can no longer see a legitimate point of view in their opponents. Being a federalist doesn’t necessarily mean you think everything that comes out of Ottawa is brilliant. For most of us, even if the federal government sometimes makes us roll our eyes, it just means that, at the moment, we generally feel we’re better off with Canada than without it.

Outside the political bubble, our day-to-day relationships—with colleagues, friends, family, even as a couple—aren’t determined by the national question. Some are federalists. Some are sovereigntists. Others are somewhere in between. All of this can change. It’s part of who we are. Like many Quebecers, I voted ‘Yes’ in 1995, and I’d vote ‘No’ today.

Daniel Johnson senior used to say that “every Quebecer is a separatist for at least an hour a day.” That sums up the general feeling quite well.

The new sovereigntist discourse sees things in black and white — or rather, in blue and red. Federalists are colonized, or even traitors. At best, they are being manipulated and are incapable of understanding what is good for them.

This can lead to being content to form a government with a third of the electorate. It can also justify holding a referendum when the other two thirds are not interested.

After all, they aren’t really Quebecers.

-30-

This text is 2,004 words long, which is roughly eight pages of a book. The research, writing and amateur artistry took me two days and left me homesick.

My name is Patrick Déry. I write (mostly in French) for a living, and do my best to Quebecsplain in English in this space. If you enjoyed reading this text, you can encourage me by buying me a coffee. Comments, shares, and likes are always appreciated.

You can also subscribe to this media by clicking on the button below.

Yes please!

The Fédération des médecins spécialistes du Québec (FMSQ) is angry.

Negotiations with the government have reached a deadlock. The FMSQ is now boycotting the system through which consultation requests are routed to specialists—the infamous CRDS, a centralized and inefficient system whose shortcomings have been detailed by the Auditor General. Some 300 appointments are reported to have already been cancelled, and more than 6,000 available slots were withdrawn.

The FMSQ has denied any responsibility. Santé Québec has called for sanctions to be imposed on doctors at fault in cases where patients’ health is at risk. The FMSQ has served a formal notice on Santé Québec, accusing it of creating a “climate of fear” and criticizing it for tactics “amounting to intimidation” and for “illegal reprisals bordering on bad faith.”

In short, things could not be better.

As with every round of negotiations with doctors, a medical federation insists that it’s all about access to care. But as usual, it always comes down to the money. The FMSQ was asking for a 17% pay rise. Québec is offering 11% over five years. The gap amounts to several hundred million.

Even in the FMSQ’s ivory tower, someone realized that a 17% increase was indefensible. Demands were scaled back to 14.5%, which is what GPs secured (following the recent debacle of Bill 2, which led to the Health Minister’s resignation and the Premier telling blatant lies).

The political and media skirmish between the government and the FMSQ is less interesting than the bigger picture. Once the ruling party and an interest group are at odds, the outcome is generally decided by leverage. Usually, this favours the doctors’ federations.

In this sense, doctors are no different from other union members, except for the figures, which are bigger. Quite bigger.

According to the RAMQ, doctors’ salaries cost $8.7 billion in 2024–2025. Of this, about $5.1 billion went to the 11,500 medical specialists who billed the government. If doctors were a ministry in the government of Quebec, it would be the fourth largest, behind Health, Education and Higher Education (universities). And ahead of Employment, Family, Municipal Affairs, Transport and the Economy.

Which brings us to the individual remuneration of a specialist doctor.

In 2024, in Quebec, specialist doctors received an average of $445,611, again according to RAMQ data. That’s not even for working full-time. According to a recent HEC study, the average full-time equivalent remuneration for a Quebec specialist doctor was $548,000 (in 2022).

The FMSQ disputes these figures, arguing that it is only $460,000. Cry me a river.

In some cases, practice and equipment costs must also be deducted from gross earnings. For radiologists, this can be particularly costly, at around $200,000 a year. But as the average radiologist earns $920,104, we won’t worry too much about them. And medical specialists working in hospitals (about three quarters of them) have no office costs.

Furthermore, in Quebec (and Canada), doctors can incorporate their practices. This allows them to pay taxes at the much lower corporate rate.

For example, an employee earning $500,000 a year would, in theory, pay an effective tax rate of around 47%, or approximately $235,000. For companies, the maximum tax rate is 26.5%, and can be as low as 12% on the first $500,000. Medical associations have already published material showing how their members can save money by incorporating their practice. (See “Optimisation de la rémunération” here, page 14.) There are even firms that specialize in tax planning for doctors. In short, all sorts of strategies are available for doctors to pay significantly less taxes.

But let’s go back to the remuneration of specialists, and take a moment to look at the following table.

As previously mentioned, a typical specialist doctor in Quebec earned $446,000 in 2024.

(Number crunchers will note that the median—the midpoint—is more representative than the average, which can be influenced by outliers. The median was not available, but I was able to determine from the distribution that it lies somewhere between $400,000 and $450,000 a year. So, we’re in the same ballpark.)

For a general surgeon, the average gross revenue is $500,000. For a cardiologist, it is $557,000. For an ophthalmologist, it is $715,000, or around $600,000 after expenses. And for a radiologist, around $700,000 after expenses. On average. In Quebec, hundreds of specialist doctors earn over a million a year. In 2024, there were 377 of them, twice as many as ten years earlier. Around ten earned over two million.

Why must it keep going up with every round of negotiations? In the name of what principle?

Specialist doctors in Quebec—like those in the rest of the country—are already among the highest-paid in the world, as demonstrated by a study by the Institut du Québec published a few years ago.

Countries such as France, Finland, Spain, Italy, Sweden and Norway manage to have healthcare systems that function better than ours—or, at the very least, are less dysfunctional—whilst paying their doctors half as much as we do. (In Europe, most doctors working in hospitals are employees.)

Quebec doctors were granted significant pay rises some twenty years ago, with the promise that this would encourage them to work more, thereby improving access to the healthcare system.

The opposite happened. The average number of procedures billed and days worked by a single doctor fell as many of them chose to buy themselves time, which makes sense when you’re already earning a small fortune. Yes, many specialist doctors still work very hard. But, on average and at the margin, they work slightly less than before. Pay rises, by discouraging work, have reduced access to care in Quebec.

Certain specialties are exceptions and have seen an increase in the volume of procedures due to technological advances (performing cataract surgery or interpreting imaging results takes less time than it used to). In any industry, a productivity increase would have reduced expenditure: for the same cost, one can produce more and sell a good or service at a lower price. It is through this economic mechanism that our standard of living has risen dramatically over the past 100 years. In healthcare in Quebec, the opposite has occurred, and the incomes of radiologists and ophthalmologists have skyrocketed.

One might add that specialties dominated by women—those that often require more time with patients—have benefited less from pay rises. No one is going to feel sorry for psychiatrists and geriatricians, who earn a very good living, but there is a major problem if incentives lead to these specialties being underpaid compared to others (or are the others overpaid?).

It is also telling that the lowest-paid specialty is public and community health. Good public health policies can have a significant multiplier effect on an entire population. (The reverse is also true; just remember how the first few months of the pandemic were managed in Quebec.) But in Quebec, prevention isn’t worth much. It is illness that is insured, not health. We say “assurance maladie,” and not “assurance santé.”

Such inconsistencies are possible because, strangely enough, the government has no say in the remuneration of individual specialties: the many associations of medical specialists, of which there are about three dozens, sort this out amongst themselves. Looking at the chart, one gets an idea of which groups carry the most weight. (For the record, Gaétan Barrette, a former Health minister in Quebec who was president of the FMSQ when the major “catch-up” in remuneration took place, is a radiologist by training.)

The solution is obviously not to give $600,000 or $700,000 to every medical specialist.

Quebec and Canada have chosen to have few doctors, but to pay them more than almost anywhere in the world. And Quebec and Canada remain among the places in the developed world with the fewest doctors per capita.

This is a resounding failure of public policy.

In recent years, Quebec’s government has (finally!) significantly increased the number of medical school places, but we won’t see the effects of this for at least a decade, especially as many doctors are due to retire soon. A quarter of Quebec doctors are over 60. Among cardiac and thoracic surgeons, who operate on the heart as well as cancers, the average age is 57.

Sooner or later, the government will end up giving in, as it always does, and hundreds of millions will be added to specialists’ pay, just as they were for GPs, with no benefit to patients. A rise of “only” 11 per cent in specialists’ pay would result in additional expenditure of around $600 million over the next five years.

As a comparison, in the latest budget, the government announced that $209 million would be allocated over the next three years to build 1,000 affordable homes.

What does Quebec need most in 2026? An additional 3,000 affordable homes, or to overpay certain medical specialties even more, without this making any difference to access to care?

Could it be that we are not putting the money in the right place?

+++++++

In the most recent negotiations, public sector employees secured a minimum of 17% over five years, rising to 20% depending on inflation. Teachers secured up to 24.5%. Construction workers received 22% over four years. Quebec police officers received 26 to 33% over six years, which sets the tone for Montreal, where the collective agreement expires this year. In short, everyone who can is pulling the blanket over to their side.

It must be said that the (bad) example comes from the top. In 2023, members of Quebec’s National Assembly voted themselves a 30% pay rise, even though they were already the highest-paid MLAs in the country, in addition to enjoying a more than generous pension scheme (MNAs from the Parti Québécois and Québec solidaire voted against it). Quebec’s MNAs received another pay rise last year, and they will receive another this year and next. In total, over five years, their salaries will have increased by 51%. I doubt that many Quebecers feel that they are better governed.

In some cases, it is deserved: Quebec’s nurses and teachers were among the lowest paid in the country. But what they were asking for above all was recognition, stability, support and slightly more predictable working hours or assignments. They were given none of that, which means the problems causing up to a quarter of young teachers and nurses to quit in the first years of their careers are still there.

In any case, we will not solve Quebec’s structural labour shortage through a bidding war on all sides.

The demands of the Specialist Doctors’ union are an example of union logic taken to the point of absurdity: everyone else is getting pay rises, so we want ours too, whatever the starting point is.

A lot of doctors feel uneasy about this, but few dare to speak out to tell their federation—and their colleagues—that perhaps a little soul-searching is needed regarding pay rises when the walls of Quebec’s hospitals are literally held together with pins and patients are dying on waiting lists.

A few years ago, a group representing several hundred family doctors, the Regroupement des omnipraticiens pour une médecine engagée (ROME), called on the government to take the money earmarked for pay rises and reinvest it in the healthcare system.

Do you know of any other sector where a professional association has campaigned against pay rises for its own members?

Dr. Simon-Pierre Landry, who was president of ROME, spoke of a “disconnect” between the leaders of medical federations and the majority of doctors, the former being caught up in a constant drive for pay rises, whilst the latter are generally more interested in improving working conditions and the healthcare network.

Dr. Landry felt that the situation had become awkward in the presence of patients and other professionals within the healthcare system. “If nothing is done, we believe we are heading towards a social and political crisis.” We are already well on the way there.

It is time for other doctors to stand up and bring their unions back down to earth.

-30-

This text is 2,214 words long, which is roughly nine pages of a book. The research, writing and creating the tables took me just over two days and left me feeling like I needed to see a doctor.

My name is Patrick Déry. I write (mostly in French) for a living, and do my best to Quebecsplain in English in this space. I also enjoy making numbers talk and putting together charts that you won’t see anywhere else.

If you enjoyed reading this text and if it did not get you sick, you can encourage me by buying me a coffee. Comments, shares, and likes are always appreciated.

You can also subscribe to this media by clicking on the button below.

Yes please!

If you’re reading this and you’re living in Quebec, I’m about to ruin your day. You’ve been warned.

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Quebec’s distinct society for drinking and driving

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