{"id":170,"date":"2011-07-05T16:35:57","date_gmt":"2011-07-05T20:35:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sdaconseil.com\/blog\/?p=170"},"modified":"2011-08-11T23:09:01","modified_gmt":"2011-08-12T03:09:01","slug":"slowly-sinking-can-we-go-beyond-rationing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sdaconseil.com\/?p=170","title":{"rendered":"SLOWLY SINKING: CAN WE GO BEYOND RATIONING?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

(05 July 2011)<\/em> We have been rationing budgets for the last 20 years in three of the pillars sustaining the progress of our province:\u00a0 Education, health care and transport & infrastructure.\u00a0 Rationing has been our strategy to put a cap on the budgets of these three large spending ministries and contain the threatening consolidated deficit of the province.\u00a0 The result is today troublesome:\u00a0 Not only have we failed to square off the deficit, but quality of services in the three pillars has suffered to the point of putting into jeopardy our own progress.<\/p>\n

In the critical sector of education, standards have gone down from prep schools to universities. \u00a0We are levelling off from the bottom and allowing an easier graduation flow through.\u00a0 Yet dropout rates in high schools remain scary.\u00a0 From misguided reform to another, citizens are losing trust in the public education system and the ability of politicians to fix it.\u00a0 In the public health arena, we are wondering whether we will ever truly shorten the waiting lists in surgeries, waiting times in urgencies, and the list of people without a family physician.\u00a0 It seems we can’t see the light about this.\u00a0\u00a0 Despite additional billions pumped into the health care systems, the performance needle hardly moves at all.\u00a0<\/p>\n

After health care and education, we are now seeing the ramifications of our rationing model applied to the third pillar in transport & infrastructure.\u00a0 Evidence is currently spreading about another terrible mess:\u00a0 A long practice of lousy patching in highways and roads, extensive collusion in the construction industry, mismanagement at municipal and provincial levels, questionable short term planning by an overstretched bureaucracy.\u00a0 Infrastructures have been the playground of politicians:\u00a0 You could hear party insiders state that a promise for a bridge could last for four elections.\u00a0 Infrastructures have not been perceived as fundamental and necessary economic building blocks.\u00a0 Rather, they have been more important to milk as contributions to political parties.\u00a0<\/p>\n

We are now caught in a bind.\u00a0 Rationing is a losing proposal even if politicians mask it as rational management.\u00a0 In the long run, we are cornering ourselves. The trouble is that rationing is winning over deep changes in practices because vested interests have learned to protect their turf in the face of mild political courage. \u00a0We are entering an era of defensiveness, in which lobbyists and interest groups of all shades will hold the high ground. \u00a0In a background of limited wealth creation, high public debt and budget constraints, everyone will want to protect its piece of the cake.\u00a0 Resistance moves up and mobilisation requires unusual leadership.<\/p>\n

Behind rationing and political tepidity, hides the root of our predicament:\u00a0 The management of our economy. \u00a0We have been content to ride on the American economy for the second half of the 20th century.\u00a0 It brought us enough prosperity to modernize the state of Quebec, and to crank up borrowing to sustain a social model copied from the French.\u00a0 It has been a comfortable ride for the baby boomers.\u00a0 In fact it was all about managing<\/em> wealth, easily acquired.\u00a0 We built a social model we can’t afford to pay today, even under our rationing model.\u00a0 As Warren Buffet says, it is under low tide that we see who is swimming naked.\u00a0 With the rise of Asia, the tide is pulling back.\u00a0 Creating<\/em> wealth will be much harder in the 21st century.\u00a0 Our chronic level of unemployment is hurting, entrepreneurship is dwindling, the technology wave of the late 1990s was wasted, our manufacturing firms are struggling to catch up to a strong dollar and we are losing more R&D capability than we are creating new ones.\u00a0 No wonder we are once more turning to natural resources, to play our best card, the ‘Plan Nord’. \u00a0The ‘Plan Nord’ would have looked visionary ten years ago, today it is a fine and safe initiative. We will come down to either implementing deeper budget cuts, or else lifting our economic growth.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Quebec exited the last financial crisis in good shape, protected by the Canadian shield in banking.\u00a0 The auto crisis did not hit Quebec, since it had already lost its small position in that industry.\u00a0 Local banks held up reasonably well, but not without significant losses, picked up by Ottawa.\u00a0 The financial crisis did not reach and poke<\/em> at our treasure of debt in Quebec.\u00a0\u00a0 Luckily, we were given a reprieve, some additional time to sort out our problems, push up competitiveness and boost our economic engine.\u00a0 In the last 20 year we have been managing a gentle decline, soft, impervious and treacherous.\u00a0\u00a0 Rationing might extend the ride for another 10 years, but our political masters would be leading us towards closer to bankruptcy.\u00a0\u00a0 We feel desolate about extreme partisanships in the United States, but we witness the same stubbornness here in Quebec:\u00a0 The PQ blinded by independence at all costs, and the Liberals afraid of their shadows.\u00a0 When are we going to see a real ‘plan Montr\u00e9al’?<\/p>\n

What could possibly lie beyond rationing?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Quiet Revolution\u00a0gave birth to a new local enterprising business class. \u00a0The voice of the business executives has been too quiet for its own good, much too reactive to the siren calls of the government. \u00a0If we can’t trust our politicians and bureaucrats on the three basic pillars, we ought to require a greater involvement from the business class about a stronger economy and a strategic response to the economic challenges of this new century.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The economy must rise on the political agenda.\u00a0 It is now up to this Business Class to show the way in shaping a stronger vision for our economy, in finding new growth paths, and in raising expectations on government policies and practices affecting business.\u00a0 Business must pressure Government, not the other way around.\u00a0\u00a0 Some recent initiatives have sprung up and \u00a0are noteworthy:\u00a0 The Ecole d’Entrepreneurship de la Beauce, the Secor Strategic Forum on Quebec 2010, etc. \u00a0\u00a0Yet much more must be done.\u00a0 Absence of true leadership from the business community will condemn us to a landscape of competing interest groups in the face of continuous decline. \u00a0Once that landscape sets in, reversal will be much harder.\u00a0 Then, we might very well find out, like Greece, that our list of friends is rather short.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Andr\u00e9 Du Sault<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(05 July 2011) We have been rationing budgets for the last 20 years in three of the pillars sustaining the progress of our province:\u00a0 Education, health care and transport & infrastructure.\u00a0 Rationing has been our strategy to put a cap on the budgets of these three large spending ministries and contain the threatening consolidated deficit […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4,6],"tags":[62,17,61,60,63],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sdaconseil.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sdaconseil.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sdaconseil.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sdaconseil.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sdaconseil.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=170"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/sdaconseil.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":195,"href":"https:\/\/sdaconseil.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170\/revisions\/195"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sdaconseil.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=170"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sdaconseil.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=170"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sdaconseil.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=170"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}