J’ai lu récemment un volume sur l’histoire économique du Québec par Robert Armstrong: Structure and Change. An Economic History of Quebec, 1984. Tout le livre, mais en particulier les pages 276 à 283, contiennent plusieurs passages intéressants qui montrent bien que la tradition québécoise n’est pas du tout celle d’un État plus socialiste et plus interventionniste que nos voisins, mais bien, pendant longtemps, le contraire.
Sur la taille du gouvernement et l’interventionnisme économique
Throughout the first four decades of the twentieth century, the government of Quebec occupied a unique position among provincial governments in Canada. Provincial government intervention in the regional economy lagged behind all of the other provinces; the Quebec government practiced the strongest of laissez-faire strategies. This attitude was partly in reaction to the exceedingly rapid growth of provincial borrowing to finance railway building during the 1870s and 1880s. Debt charges rose from nil to 33 percent of total provincial expenditures between 1873 and 1900. The Quebec government was not alone in endeavoring to control spending in the 1890s, but unlike the other provincial governments, Quebec maintained this restraint during the first three decades of the twentieth century.
Between 1900 and 1910, the Quebec government contributed less than ten percent of gross provincial government investment in capital formation across Canada. Canadian provincial government spending was especially high in the western provinces; the newly settled regions required transport infrastructure, public buildings, schools and hospitals. Quebec, on the other hand, enjoyed a series of government surpluses in the pre-war years. After the war, Quebec continued to spend proportionately more of its revenues on traditional public goods such as the administration of justice and civil government, and proportionately less on economic development, education, health services and social welfare, than in the other provinces. Although Quebec contained about 28 percent of the Canadian population in 1930, Quebec’s share of gross provincial investment in capital formation amounted to 13 percent. Provincial and municipal expenditure on education stood at $7.15 per capita in Quebec, as opposed to $14.03 in Ontario. The Quebec government therefore possessed a comparatively small net provincial debt at the onset of the Depression. Debt charges (less interest received) amounted to only 6 percent of provincial expenditures in 1930, substantially below that of the other Canadian provinces.
The Great Depression pushed the Quebec government along the road already travelled by the others. Spending on social welfare services and road construction increased substantially, and the provincial debt rose dramatically. Of the provincial debt outstanding in June 1937, almost 60 percent had been added since 1930. The depression years marked the beginnings of a slow trend toward rattrapage or catching-up with the other provinces in the realm of provincial government spending and debt financing.
Sur les programmes sociaux
Throughout the first four decades of the twentieth century, the Quebec government left the provision of basic social welfare, health and educational services to religious and other private sector organizations. The provincial government made annual grants to mental institutions, as well as to certain health and welfare organizations, but did not attempt to direct policy in these areas. The Public Assistance Act of 1921 provided for one-third of the health care costs of the chronically ill hospitalized in public charitable institutions. But the strenuous denunciations of government health care funding by the Catholic press of the time (Le Devoir, l’Action catholique, etc.) obliged the Taschereau administration to concede several amendments to the Act in 1924 and 1925. When the federal government offered grants-in-aid to the provinces through the Old Age Pensions Act of 1927, the Taschereau government declined on the grounds that the requisite tax increase would be too great, that pensions should be left to “individual responsibility,” and that the central government’s proposed scheme derogated the province’s constitutional powers. […] Even though health, welfare, and educational institutions generally remained exempt from government regulation, adherence to the federal government’s Old Age Pension scheme in 1936 signalled a wider recognition of social welfare as a legitimate concern of the state. The election of Maurice Duplessis’s Union Nationale government in August 1936, however, put a damper on depression-era initiatives in this domain.
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