It costs Canadians approximately $12 billion every year to keep Quebec in Canada, and that’s just in transfer payments. Is it worth it? In a word, no. Canada is broken and it needs to be fixed. Either Quebec starts paying its own way or moves out of the folk’s basement and makes its own way in the world. But that will never happen as long as the Liberals are in power.
There will always be a lot of numbers swirling around any discussion of Canada’s equalization system — the federal scheme that gives billions and billions of tax dollars each year to “have-not” provinces so they may offer “reasonably comparable levels” of health care, education and welfare to “have” provinces.
The formula for calculating which provinces give and which receive, alone, involves more than 30 variables.
But the next two paragraphs contain all the numbers anyone needs to know.
This year Ottawa will send almost $19 billion in equalization to six have-not governments. Of that almost $12 billion (62%) will go to Quebec.
And there are 78 seats up for grabs in Quebec in next fall’s federal election.