Is Ontario becoming the new Quebec? – by Konrad Yakabuski (Globe and Mail – June 9, 2014)

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It was le monde à l’envers – the world upside down – last week as Quebec’s Finance Minister broke with a long tradition of tabling a budget and immediately accusing Ottawa of shortchanging the province. This stunning about-face came during an Ontario election campaign in which the Liberal Premier has been running almost as much against Ottawa’s equalization cuts as against her Tory rival.

As a weaker Ontario sheds its nation-builder role for have-not status, it risks falling into the trap that Quebec fell into five decades ago. It’s developing the knee-jerk reaction of looking to Ottawa to mitigate its fiscal woes, fostering a culture of dependence that will be difficult to break.

The new Quebec government of Liberal Premier Philippe Couillard has signalled a desire to try anyway. “The federal government ultimately decides how it transfers its revenue to the provinces,” Finance Minister Carlos Leitao, a former bank economist, said after tabling his budget. “How the federal government will choose to use its surpluses is its choice.”

Perhaps he recognizes that the province’s fiscal persecution complex is a form of denial that distracts it from tackling real economic challenges and undermines the collective self-confidence that will be critical to its success.

Indeed, we may be witnessing a fiscal spring – a printemps fiscal – in Quebec. Parties of the centre-right captured almost two-thirds of the popular vote in April’s provincial election. Mr. Leitao’s tough budget slashed business subsidies and imposed a hiring freeze in the public sector.

It’s now even possible to question the “Quebec model” of development without being laughed out of the province. Federal Small Business Minister Maxime Bernier, whose political brand is slowly being rehabilitated, received a virtual hero’s welcome in Quebec for a gutsy speech he delivered last month rejecting the province’s old “never enough” attitude toward Ottawa.

“It’s not the rest of Canada’s fault that we are a poor province,” he said. “It’s because of bad economic policies that make Quebec’s economy less productive.”

Contrast that with the crusade Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne has been on. She accuses Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government of “willful indifference” toward Ontario as it reels from the erosion of its manufacturing base, a decline she compares (wait for it) to the early 1990s collapse of the Newfoundland cod fishery.

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