Bonjour à tous et toutes! It’s Quebec’s election day and so we at HESA Towers are here to provide our usual analysis of the party platforms.

It’s the first election in 50 years where sovereignty isn’t the main issue on the ballot, partly because PQ leader Jean-Francois Lisée got his party to promise not to hold a referendum if elected and partly because the PQ is so far out of the running – in fourth place, according to some polls – that the pledge is irrelevant.  And without that looming, you’d expect this to be a serious, policy heavy election, right?  Giving voters a real choice between left and right, between ideas that aren’t Ottawa v. Québec?

Unfortunately, this is 2018, so unfortunately we are mostly talking about immigration.  But beneath the headlines, there are some interesting things going on.

The two parties duking it out at the top – Philippe Couillard’s Liberals and Francois Legault’s Coalition Avenir Québec – have very few PSE-specific pieces in their platform.  The Liberals say nothing on tuition fees except for the abolition of some essentially meaningless fees in technical college education and their discussion on student aid is limited to something about “admission bursaries in study programs leading to non-traditional professions”.  The most remotely interesting thing about their platform from a PSE point of view is their offer of free public transportation for all full-time students.

CAQ’s response to this is…nothing.  Or close enough.  Under CAQs platform, CEGEPs will get “more freedom to develop programs suited to regional needs”.  The entirety of their universities platform is “to promote linkage between university research and innovative businesses”.  This is, essentially, pablum (arguably this is true of the rest of CAQ’s platform as well).

But, interestingly, both parties have put out financial projections which are very favourable to post-secondary education.  In effect, both parties are implicitly promising annual increases in institutional budgets of something on the order of 4% per year.  There are some minor differences – the Liberals are promising 4% every year while CAQ is something slightly more backloaded (3.7%, 3.5%, 4.9%), and the Liberals specify a 4% hike for postsecondary education while CAQ simply makes the promise to the education sector as a whole (which leaves open the possibility that more of it might end up in the K-11 sector).

From a funding standpoint, this is the best set of major party platforms we’ve seen in a really long while anywhere in Canada.  Add this to a policy of at least keeping fees in line with inflation, and I think I would go so far as to say Quebec universities probably have the best fiscal outlook of any province in the country.  Obviously, it would be even better if tuition would rise – preferably in conjunction with a re-jig of student assistance so as to create a Targeted Free Tuition program like Ontario’s – and I wouldn’t totally rule that out over the next four years.  But the important thing here is the Quebec government can do this without breaking the bank.  Thanks to 20 years of bipartisan commitment to rectitude in public finances, Quebec has the best long-term fiscal position of any province by far (for more details on this, see the Parliamentary Budget Office’s Fiscal Sustainability Report published last week).  Other provinces would struggle to match this.  Remember that next time someone tells you budget deficits don’t matter.

As one gets further from first place in the polls, election promises tend to get further from reality.  The PQ is promising “un veritable gratuité scolaire” (that is, free fees), though why anyone would believe them after three separate spells in government where they made no moves whatsoever in that direction is anyone’s guess.  And as for Québec Solidaire, the Green/Marxist/Feminist/Sovereigntist (sort of) party which seems to have now entirely consumed the PQs old urban leftist base, their policies are, well, ambitious.  As one would expect of a party whose co-spokesperson (individual leaders are out, gender-balanced spokespeople are in) Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois was the face of the 2012 student strikes.  To take a few examples:

• Free tuition at universities within five years (cost: $1 billion)
• Increase university and CEGEP budgets by an unspecified amount along with a change in funding formula
• End precarity in university employment (no details)
• Increase research budgets
• A series of proposals to reduce competition between institutions in urban areas in order to offer more post-secondary education in rural areas (i.e. make the system more expensive).  This includes a proposal to pay students from Montreal and Quebec to study in smaller towns.  Which has the virtue of never having been tried, I suppose.
• Re-write university and college governing legislation to mandate gender equality and give a majority to elected student and employee representatives

Whew!  Now you might think this is all nuttier than a five-pound fruitcake, but it’s worth paying attention because there is at least some possibility that by the end of the evening these guys are going to hold the balance of power (latest polls put about CAQ out in front but not by much).  And if so, some of these ideas are undoubtedly going to be in the mix as parties jockey for position.

Regardless, if you’re in Quebec – Allez voter!