What Québec Wants™

Why Québec Inc. might be Ltd.

 

The Financial Post recently published a most interesting article on Wealth in Québec.

Here are some excerpts. The full article can be accessed here.

Per capita, there are far fewer rich people in the French-speaking province than in Ontario. Barely 3.9% of taxpayers earn more than $100,000 a year in Quebec compared to 6.3% in Ontario, according to 2008 revenue department statistics, which are the most recent available. The ranks of the truly monied are even thinner.

“We in Quebec have succeeded in various things. But we still have a problem with risk-taking and growing,” says Yves-Thomas Dorval, head of the Conseil du Patronat, a group that represents Quebec’s largest employer associations. “We elevate people who like to keep things small. And we decry companies that are becoming big.”

Quebec has the lowest entrepreneurial intensity, as measured by the ratio of business owners and self-employed workers to total employment, when compared to Ontario, British Columbia and Alberta. And that doesn’t appear set to improve, with one recent survey showing only 7% of Quebecers indicating they intend to start a new business or take over an existing business over the next 10 years, compared to a national average of 13%.

In his 2006 book Éloge de la Richesse (In Praise of Wealth), Montreal journalist Alain Dubuc writes that Quebec has a significant “ideological blockage” in which its citizens are deeply suspicious of richness and rich people in general. He says one of the main reasons is a widespread conviction that when someone enriches himself, “someone else, somewhere else, gets screwed.”

 

 

Self-fulfilling prophecy

The person greeting me at the front desk of the hotel I checked into last night in Quebec City was busy chatting about the economic “crisis” with a colleague. The folks sitting next to me at the airport this morning were talking about the Mazda dealer who’s offering a “buy one get another one for a penny” deal on brand new Mazdas.

Could it be that Quebeckers have a greater sense of doom and gloom in these troubled economic times than Canadians in the rest of the country?

A new Canwest News Service/Global National/Ipsos Reid survey released December 1, 2008 suggests they do.

Agreement with the statements:

From what I am personally seeing at work or in my community, the economy is grinding to a halt.

Atlantic 30%
Quebec 76%
Ontario 52%
Prairies 34%
Alberta 39%
B.C. 42%

 

I have pretty much stopped spending money on anything but the bare essentials.

Atlantic 32%
Quebec 60%
Ontario 46%
Prairies 42%
Alberta 42%
B.C. 54%

 

Perhaps more concerning is the fact that Quebeckers are least likely to feel they can do their part to improve the economy.

Consumers have to put aside their personal self-term interest and instead work as collective to spend in order to resuscitate the sagging economy.

Atlantic 71%
Quebec 44%
Ontario 65%
Prairies 60%
Alberta 62%
B.C. 64%