Tax cuts after budget is balanced: Marois
Half of surplus used to reduce taxpayer burden, half for services, PQ leader says
Parti Québécois Leader Pauline Marois told a Board of Trade of Metropolitan Montreal audience Thursday that when the province has a balanced budget again, she will cut taxes.
Marois made the commitment in a one-on-one conversation with board president Michel Leblanc, projected on a screen in the Bonaventure Hilton ballroom, for the audience of about 400 who had just heard her deliver a speech on the economic goals of her government.
Later, in a scrum with reporters, Marois would not put a figure on how much of a tax cut she planned, but suggested that once the budget is balanced in 2015-16 and the government is in a surplus position, about half that surplus would go to tax cuts.
The other half would be used to improve government services, she said.
The cuts would be in personal income taxes and payroll taxes that employers turn over for every employee on the payroll.
“The payroll tax is a good example (of a tax that needs to be cut) because when there are investments in enterprises that have a big impact on job creation, the company is at a disadvantage because of the payroll tax,” she said.
Days before the 2007 Que- bec election, when Mario Dumont’s Action démocratique du Québec was threatening to defeat his Liberals, former premier Jean Charest used a Board of Trade speech to announce that a planned $250-million tax cut would be a $950-million tax cut.
The added $700 million was from the federal budget, presented during the Quebec campaign, and intended to correct Quebec’s “fiscal imbalance,” sending the province extra money to pay for government services.
Charest won the 2007 election, albeit with a minority government.
When Marois called this election on March 5, the latest CROP poll indicated her PQ could win a majority.
Since then, the trend in the polls suggests the PQ leader and her government are heading for defeat on Monday. But Marois said she was not going to make promises she cannot keep.
“I will never lie to the citizens,” she said. But she did promise her government would not increase taxes or user fees.
And she will not eliminate the Health Tax, a commitment she made in the 2012 election campaign.
Instead, Marois’s government restructured the health tax, with lower-income Quebecers exempted, middleincome earners paying less and other taxpayers paying the basic $200 Health Tax or more, up to $1,000 a year, based on income.
Eliminating the health tax is “not in our commitments,” Marois said.
Both the Liberals and the Coalition Avenir Québec have proposed ending the health tax, with the CAQ also proposing elimination of school boards and drastic cuts in government spending.
Marois said the economic plans of the Liberals and the CAQ are “completely unrealistic.”
“They are promising tax cuts that will not happen,” she said. And the Liberal plan to restore $15 billion in infrastructure spending, on borrowed money, will lead to a downgrade in Quebec’s credit rating, she predicted.
The Board of Trade’s Leblanc said the province needs between 60,000 and 75,000 immigrants a year to bolster the economy, and the board wants the next government to grant Montreal, as Quebec’s “metropolis,” greater autonomy and new tax sources.
On granting Montreal more autonomy, Marois said there could be legislation, or at least a commitment to de- centralize power to the city in the next PQ mandate.
Marois ended her scrum abruptly without answering when a reporter asked whether the province’s permanent anti-corruption unit has been trying to speak to her since December.
After the Board of Trade luncheon, Marois and star PQ candidate Pierre Karl Péladeau boarded the campaign bus for Lachute, in Argenteuil riding, where PQ incumbent Roland Richer is in a tight race, after winning the longtime Liberal seat first in a byelection and again in the 2012 election.
“Things happen in threes,” Marois quipped in a speech aimed at getting out the PQ vote for Richer on Monday.
“I am convinced we can win,” Marois said, adding that after just 18 months out of power, she can’t see Quebecers returning to “the old team of Jean Charest,” referring to the Liberals and their former leader.
“It seems to me they deserve a longer penalty.”