CAQ’S so-called green budget has no tax on gas guzzlers
To the Coalition Avenir Québec government, the austerity of its Liberal predecessor has been a recurring gift.
If it can be bad luck for a party to win an election, then that’s what happened to the Liberals in 2014.
Whichever party formed the government would be under pressure from credit-rating agencies to eliminate the annual budget deficit. That would mean spending cutbacks, increases in taxes and fees, or both. That task fell to the Liberals.
Their resulting unpopularity was successfully exploited by the opposition parties, including the CAQ, which could criticize every choice the government made without having to say how they would have balanced the budget instead.
Due in large part to that unpopularity, Philippe Couillard’s Liberal ministry became the first Quebec majority government elected since 1970 to be defeated after a single legislature, losing the 2018 general election to the Coalition.
The Liberals’ generosity to the CAQ didn’t end with the election, however. Thanks to the Liberals’ frugality, the new Coalition government inherited not only a balanced budget but the luxury of a recurring surplus.
While it was in the opposition, the CAQ was right of centre. In government, however, it has been pragmatic, non-ideological and populist. It’s a government of firefighters that responds quickly to media headlines to douse controversies before they have time to inflame public opinion.
And, as Finance Minister Eric Girard’s second annual budget showed this week, it can afford to smother every flare-up with money.
With the next general election not due for another two years, Girard presented what looked like an early version of a traditional Quebec pre-election budget, favouring spending increases over tax cuts.
It commits spending to increase in the 202021 fiscal year at a rate more than double that of the province’s economic growth in 2020 and 2021. That’s without taking the economic effect of coronavirus into account, since the budget was essentially written before the crisis began.
There’s money for everything and everybody, or almost. The budget featured an additional $6.2 billion over the next six years for a new “plan for a green economy.” The Coalition showed little interest in the environment before it came to power, but in the last six months, it has realized that climate change is an issue it can no longer ignore.
The greening of the CAQ only goes so far, however. While the plan promises new incentives for us Quebecers to buy electric vehicles and heat our homes with renewable energy instead of fossil fuels, it ignores one of our major contributions to greenhouse-gas emissions.
For all our conspicuous support for Greta Thunberg and opposition to a pipeline for “dirty” Alberta oil, we love gas-guzzling light trucks, including SUVS and minivans as well as pickups.
In fact, says a report published in January by the Université de Montréal business school, HEC Montréal, if we keep buying so many of them, we’ll fall well short of the government’s 2030 target for greenhouse-gas reduction.
From 2012 to 2018, we spent more than twice as much to buy light trucks as cars. We bought 61 per cent more light trucks in 2018 than in 2012, and 31 per cent fewer cars, which are more fuel-efficient.
The Legault government, however, has ruled out a gas-guzzler tax as a deterrent to the purchase of light trucks. Energy Minister Jonatan Julien refused to criticize us for buying them. Environment Minister Benoit Charette said Quebecers are ready to make sacrifices for the environment, just not before the next election.
Perhaps not coincidentally, the HEC researchers found that light trucks were significantly more popular in outlying rural regions (which support the CAQ) than in Montreal and neighbouring Laval (which don’t). And, in addition to everything else they’ve given the CAQ, the Liberals taught it an object lesson: Voters don’t reward a government for imposing sacrifices on them, even if it’s for the greater good.