The Liberal Party of Quebec (PLQ) accuses the government of having “disguised” the real deficit which is more likely to be $15 billion.
“This government is fooling us,” said Liberal MP Frédéric Beauchemin.
Interim Liberal leader Marc Tanguay criticized the Legault government’s spending choices, notably the “$6.7 billion in electoral checks” as well as the “$1.1 million per door for seniors’ homes.”
“François Legault is criticized for wasting like a sailor on the run,” he said.
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The PLQ remained vague on what it would do to restore public finances if it ever took power. “During the election year, we will see the extent of the damage that François Legault will have left us and we will arrive with a financial framework which will hold up and which will allow us to have a plan which will ensure improve services, but also to regain control of our public finances,” argued Marc Tanguay.
“Austerity”
Québec solidaire (QS), for its part, affirms that what the government is proposing in its most recent economic exercise is “starting to resemble austerity.”
“Every day, new groups say: ‘we are being cut, we are being asked to reduce here, to reduce there’,” argued MP Vincent Marissal.
According to him, the growth rates of program spending will be further revised downwards, which will undermine the provision of services to the population. The supportive MP affirms that the government “lacks the audacity to increase its revenues”.
“This is not a political debate, it is an arithmetic debate. If you do not have enough money in your budgets for the state missions that you must finance, necessarily, you will have to cut somewhere,” he explained.
“Frivolous spending”
The Parti Québécois (PQ) claims that the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) is “one of the biggest spending governments in the history of modern Quebec” which has made plenty of “frivolous expenditures”.
MP Pascal Paradis denounced “budgetary restriction measures that we are starting to feel everywhere in the network”.
“The CAQ has created new structures, such as the Santé Québec agency, with senior employees. We create more paperwork and more controls that everyone complains about. You have to do the opposite. We need to be more efficient to be able to deliver more services to the population,” he said.
Remember that the PQ has not closed the door to abolishing Santé Québec if it took power.
