EDITORIAL: It's Not the Taxes. It's What We Get for Them.

"We're the most taxed people in North America"

You hear it every election cycle, in every tavern, in every comment section. And it is not false. Quebec's total tax pressure, meaning every dollar of tax, duty and contribution collected by all levels of government as a share of the economy, sits around 38.6% of GDP. That is higher than Ontario. That is higher than every American state. That is a fact, and anybody who tells you otherwise is selling you something.

So let's concede the point right away, because conceding it is what makes the rest of this text credible. Yes, we pay a lot. Yes, more than our neighbours. Yes, a welder in Sainte-Martine hands over a bigger slice of his cheque than a welder in Plattsburgh.

The question was never whether we pay a lot. The question is what comes back.

What a tax is, stripped of the sermon

A tax is not a gift to the government. It is the price of a shared bill. Hospitals, schools, roads, bridges, water treatment, the inspector who checks the meat you feed your kids, the clerk who processes your claim after you fall off a roof. You can argue about the size of that bill. You cannot argue that it exists.

Which means the honest fight is not "lower taxes" versus "higher taxes." The honest fight is: are we getting our money's worth, and if not, who is eating the difference?

Nobody minds paying for a meal. People mind paying for a meal they never got served.

One billion one hundred million dollars for a website

SAAQclic. The digital transformation of Quebec's auto insurance board. Budgeted at 638,000,000 dollars. Landed at roughly 1,100,000,000 dollars. A public inquiry, the Gallant Commission, wrote in black and white that the SAAQ misled the government and the legislature about the state of the project.

Write those numbers out in full, the way I just did, because "1.1 billion" is four characters and sounds like a rounding error. 1,100,000,000 dollars is a number you can feel.

That is not a tax problem. That is a management problem wearing a tax problem's coat.

Four hundred seventy million dollars that walked out the door

Northvolt. The Swedish battery champion Quebec was going to build a green industrial future on. The company went into bankruptcy proceedings. Quebec's 270,000,000 dollar equity stake plus the related exposure put the public loss around 470,000,000 dollars, and the minister responsible said out loud that this money would not be seen again.

Across the whole battery sector, Quebec committed close to 2,000,000,000 dollars, including roughly 676,000,000 dollars placed in companies that have since sought protection from their creditors. The Auditor General found that the risks attached to several of these commitments were not properly analyzed before the cheques were signed.

They did not cut the fat. They cut the muscle, and they handed the fat to their friends.

Five hundred eighty-one thousand dollars at the top of the health agency

Santé Québec, the agency created to fix the health system, pays its chief executive a total compensation package reported at roughly 581,741 dollars. The agency's senior leadership runs to about a hundred executives, with a vice-presidential tier on top of that.

My father was a civil servant. He worked at the CSST, the workers' compensation board, processing the files of people who got hurt on the job. He made in the neighbourhood of 38,000 dollars a year doing it.

I want to be clear about what that comparison is and is not. It is not proof that the executive is overpaid or that my father was underpaid in some technical sense. It is a picture of where the money sits inside the same system. One number is the person who designs the org chart. The other is the person the org chart was supposed to help.

When the public complains about "the bureaucracy," it is almost never the 38,000 dollar job they are picturing. But it is always the 38,000 dollar job that gets cut.

Who actually gets cut when you cut

Quebec's public sector is roughly 608,000 people. The overwhelming majority of that payroll is nurses, teachers, orderlies, janitors, inspectors, clerks. The growth of the last year originated in health and education, about 6,000 additional positions in exactly the places where people were screaming for help, while central ministries shrank.

So when a party promises 20,000 fewer public employees with no effect on services, the only honest follow-up question is the one nobody asks in an interview: which 20,000? The nurse? The school custodian? The clerk at Revenu Québec who processes your refund? The inspector who checks your ground beef? The CSST analyst handling the welder who burned his hand?

There is exactly one place you can remove 20,000 people and nobody notices: a campaign brochure.

A 33.6% cut to the thing everybody says they want

Every party in Quebec says it supports childcare. Then look at the infrastructure line. The capital budget for childcare construction was reduced by about 33.6%. And of roughly 5,000 new spaces created in a recent period, close to 4,500 were in the private, non-subsidized or partially subsidized network rather than the public CPE network parents actually wait years to get into.

That is the mechanism in miniature. The public system gets a press release. The private operators get the volume. The parent gets a waiting list and a bill.

You can tell what a government believes by reading its capital budget, not its speeches.

Seventy-eight percent, and a fund with 2,300,000,000,000 dollars in it

Norway taxes petroleum production at a combined marginal rate of 78%, which is the ordinary 22% corporate rate plus a 56% special petroleum tax. Norwegians did not do that because they hate business. They did it because the oil under the North Sea belonged to them and they intended to be paid for it.

The result is the Government Pension Fund Global, which has grown past 2,300,000,000,000 dollars. That is on the order of 355,000 euros per citizen, held collectively, invested in global equities, paying for a welfare state that consistently ranks ahead of ours on waiting times, education outcomes and child poverty.

And here is the part that should sting: Norway's tax burden is comparable to ours. Norwegians are not taxed less than Quebecers. They are taxed at a similar level and they get a functioning health system and a sovereign wealth fund with two point three trillion dollars in it.

Same tax bill. Wildly different receipt.

What we charge for our own rocks

Quebec collected roughly 477,700,000 dollars in mining royalties and duties in 2024. That is not nothing. It is also not Norway. Place that figure next to the 2,000,000,000 dollars committed to the battery sector and the comparison makes itself: we paid more to subsidize the processing of the resource than we collected for the resource.

I want to be honest about the limits of this comparison. Oil is not lithium, a sovereign fund built over fifty years is not something you conjure in one budget, and Norway's fiscal regime was designed around a single, enormously profitable commodity. The comparison is not a technical equivalence. It is an illustration of a political choice: who gets paid when a resource leaves the ground.

Norway sold its oil. We seem to be giving away our rocks and then paying someone to take them.

Six hundred eighty-two billion dollars in fifteen jurisdictions

Canadian corporate assets parked in the top fifteen tax haven jurisdictions have been estimated at roughly 682,000,000,000 dollars. Canadians for Tax Fairness and the Tax Justice Network both estimate the annual revenue loss to Canada from corporate profit shifting in the range of 15,000,000,000 dollars a year, with the two organizations using different scopes and methods, so treat the figure as an order of magnitude rather than a line item.

The Canada Revenue Agency's own tax gap work points at where the problem concentrates: a small fraction of large corporations accounts for the overwhelming majority of the corporate tax gap. Roughly 1% of corporations accounts for something close to 70% of it.

The gap is not a nation of cheaters. It is a very small room of them, with very good accountants.

Deduction at source versus an accountant in Nassau

Here is the asymmetry that explains everything. If you work for a salary, your tax is taken off your cheque before you ever touch it. You have no timing strategy, no structure, no jurisdiction shopping. You have a T4.

If you own the structure, you have transfer pricing, intercompany debt, royalty flows to a holding company in a jurisdiction with a 0% rate, and a treaty network built over decades.

Same law. Completely different relationship to it.

The wage earner does not have a tax strategy. The wage earner has a pay stub.

Three thousand sixty dollars versus ninety thousand

Undergraduate tuition at UQAM for a Quebec resident runs around 3,060 dollars a year. The equivalent four-year degree at a private American university routinely clears 90,000 dollars in tuition alone, before housing, before books, before the interest on the loan that follows the graduate for twenty years.

Your kid's pediatric appointment did not come with a bill. Your mother's chemotherapy did not come with a deductible that bankrupts the family. Your neighbour's broken leg did not end in a GoFundMe.

You can have every one of those things and still be furious about SAAQclic. In fact you should be. Those are two separate arguments and the right answer to both of them is yes.

You did not succeed despite Quebec. You succeeded because Quebec paid for the road you drove out on.

Don't spit in the plate you ate from

I have watched people who went to a 3,060 dollar university, got treated in a free hospital, grew a business on a subsidized hydro rate and a trained local workforce, and then went online to explain that Quebec is a welfare state full of parasites.

Be angry at the waste. Be angry at the billion-dollar website, at the 470,000,000 dollars that evaporated, at the gap between the top of the org chart and the bottom. Be angry at the 15,000,000,000 dollars a year that leaves the country through a treaty loophole while your tax comes off your cheque automatically.

But do not stand in a country that paid for your education, your medicine and your infrastructure and call it theft.

Pay for a meal you never got, that is robbery. Eat the meal and then refuse the bill, that is something else.

Three questions instead of one slogan

Not "are taxes too high." That question has no answer, because it has no unit of measurement. Try these instead.

First: for every dollar collected, how much reaches the service and how much stops at a consultant, a sole-sourced contract or a management layer? SAAQclic is the test case and the inquiry already told us the answer.

Second: who is actually paying? A system where the salaried worker pays at source and the large corporate structure pays what its advisors negotiate is not a high-tax system. It is an unevenly enforced one.

Third: what do we charge for things that are ours and cannot be moved? The ore, the water, the hydro, the land. Norway answered that question with a number: 78%. We answered it with 477,700,000 dollars and a subsidy program.

Cut the right thing and the service improves. Cut the easy thing and you just make the waiting room longer.

And the question you should actually ask at the door

When the candidate knocks and promises you the biggest tax cut in the history of Quebec, don't argue about ideology. Ask one thing: what did I pay in provincial income tax last year, and what does your plan give back to someone who paid that amount?

Roughly a third of Quebec filers pay no provincial income tax at all, not out of laziness but because they earn too little. Of about 7,200,000 filers, roughly 4,000,000 report under 50,000 dollars a year. For those households, the biggest tax cut in history is the biggest cut of nothing in history, because a percentage cut is mathematical: the more you pay, the bigger the gift.

Then ask the second question, the one that actually determines whether your life gets better: what are you doing about the billion-dollar website, the offshore 15,000,000,000, and the hundred executives?

If the candidate has a crisp answer to the first question and no answer at all to the second, you now know exactly whose bill they are trying to lower. Is it yours?

By Maxime Marquette, columnist

Editorial stance

I am not a journalist but a columnist and analyst. My expertise lies in observing and analysing the geopolitical, economic and strategic dynamics that shape our world. My work is to take political strategies apart, to understand global economic movements, to put the decisions of international actors in context and to offer analytical perspectives on the changes that are redefining our societies.

I do not claim the cold objectivity of traditional journalism, which stops at reporting facts. I claim analytical clarity, rigorous interpretation and a deep understanding of the complex issues that concern us all. My role is to give meaning to the facts, to place them in their historical and strategic context, and to offer a critical reading of events.

Method and sources

This text keeps the basic distinction between verified facts and interpretive analysis. The rule never changes: a factual claim is published only when a verifiable source supports it, and the sources this article actually used are listed under Sources, never here.

Primary source families used by the publication, when the story has them: official statements from governments and international institutions, public statements by political leaders, reports from intergovernmental organisations, dispatches from recognised international news agencies.

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Nature of the analysis

The analyses, interpretations and perspectives in the analytical sections of this article are a critical, contextual synthesis based on the information available, the trends observed and the expert comments cited in the sources consulted.

My role is to interpret these facts, to set them in the context of today's geopolitical and economic dynamics, and to give them a coherent meaning within the larger story of the changes shaping our time. These analyses reflect expertise built through continuous observation of international affairs and an understanding of the strategic mechanisms that drive global actors.

This article describes a documented state of affairs on its publication date, not a prediction: later developments may shift its outlook. No update is promised in advance; when an article is corrected or completed, the change is dated in the text.