The main feature this week’s back-to-back Quebec and Ontario budgets have in common is that they are both pre-election Hail Mary passes.
Premiers Philippe Couillard and Kathleen Wynne’s backs are against the election wall. This was their last best chance to reverse a trend that will otherwise see them in opposition and – potentially – out of politics altogether later this year.
In each province, a considerable amount of money is backing the effort. In Quebec, the government is increasing its program spending by more than five per cent this year. That’s more than double the average rate of increase of the first three years of the Liberal mandate. Ontario, for its part, has returned to deficit financing.
One collateral consequence of fixed election dates is that they provide incumbents with a strong incentive to allocate every public dollar in sight so as to constrain their rivals’ capacity to make promises. The trick is to force the opposition leaders to tell voters what popular government measures they would sacrifice on the altar of implementing their own election platforms.
The similarities between the deathbed budgets of the two Liberal governments mostly stop there for the pre-electoral dynamics in the two provinces are strikingly different.
To avoid defeat, or for that matter a crushing third-place Liberal finish in June, Wynne needs the non-conservative vote to coalesce behind her party. Her big-ticket promises of more affordable social programs in the form of free child care for toddlers and free prescription drugs for seniors are designed to woo as many progressive voters as possible, starting with those who may be attracted to the NDP.
In Quebec, on the other hand, there are slim pickings for Couillard’s Liberals on the left.
Not only are three parties – the Parti Québécois, Québec Solidaire and a nascent NDP provincial wing – already competing for the left-leaning vote, but it is also a rare progressive sovereigntist voter who will shift to the most federalist option on the provincial ballot.
And so Couillard’s budget was mostly aimed at cutting the grass from under the feet of the right-of-centre Coalition Avenir Québec.
It featured no new round of individual tax cuts and broke no particularly ambitious new ground on the social policy front.
But it did include a small business tax break designed in part to make up for the government’s decision to legislate more sick and vacation days in the province’s labour code.
The central theme of the government’s bid is that it is dedicated to making the life of suburban families easier. In that spirit, one of the fattest spending envelopes is the one devoted to road and public transit infrastructures.
If either of the two budgets is to work some magic on the flagging fortunes of its authors, each will have to overcome some distinct but equally significant challenges.
In Ontario, many of the progressive voters targeted by the Liberals are bound to wonder why it took almost 15 years for a succession of Liberal governments to make big moves on the child care and prescription drugs fronts.
The test of the Ontario budget stands to be one of credibility.
As for Couillard’s budget, it is at risk of crashing into a wall of public cynicism.
His government spent more than half of its mandate slowing down the rate of increase of its social spending, at a cost to the child-care, education and health-care systems; now it is promising to reinvest billions in those same areas.
The widespread suspicion is that Couillard recklessly damaged the province’s social safety net to accumulate a campaign war chest designed to ease his party’s re-election.
The back-to-back presentation of the 2018 budgets of Canada’s two largest provinces comes a little more than a month after Justin Trudeau’s government underwent a similar exercise.
Of the three Liberal fiscal plans, the Quebec budget ultimately comes across as the outlier.
In contrast with the federal and Ontario budgets, it is deficit-free, a state of affairs that Couillard says he is committed to maintaining over the second mandate he is seeking.
It includes dispositions to force digital giants such as Netflix to collect the Quebec sales tax.
The move is in response to the Trudeau government’s refusal to similarly force the collection of the GST. As a means to level the playing field with domestic digital content purveyors, the move enjoys all-party backing in the national assembly.
Finally, the Quebec budget comes free of the virtue-signalling language that was such a defining feature of Bill Morneau’s latest federal instalment. That’s an absence that few of the province’s commentators were inclined to lament.
Chantal Hébert is a national affairs columnist.