Opinion: Wasn’t Pierre Fitzgibbon supposed to be good at this?

Here’s a political cliché I’d like to see launched into a thousand burning suns:

“We need someone to run Quebec like a business.”

No we don’t.

Like most political maxims, “run it like a business” fits nicely onto a bumper sticker. It conjures the image of a shark in a grey suit, slashing budgets, cutting taxes and putting billion-dollar deals together at the golf course.

At least, that’s how it happens in the movies.

I can understand that after years of the Parti Québécois’ soft socialism and the Quebec Liberal Party’s crony capitalism, Quebec was primed for a business-first government. And that’s exactly what they got. 

Coalition Avenir Québec leader François Legault ran on his record as the cool, calculating accountant who founded Air Transat and had a relationship with some of the greatest financial minds in Quebec. One of those minds, the millionaire venture capitalist Pierre Fitzgibbon, became Minister of the Economy and Innovation in 2018 before serving as Minister of Energy. The “super minister” was going to make Quebec a hub for electric vehicles and a one-stop-shop for foreign companies to set up here, take advantage of our cheap hydroelectricity and create tens of thousands of good jobs.

But after six years at the helm — and now that Fitzgibbon’s up and quit his job mid-mandate — it’s hard to quantify how badly he underdelivered.

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Look at what six years of cutting dead weight has done to Quebec’s institutions: a staggering healthcare system, an increasingly privatized school system, looming energy shortages and a homelessness population that doubled since Legault became Premier.

But even if we put those considerations aside, has the CAQ’s business-first approach really been good for the economy?

Not especially.

For starters, Fitzgibbon’s signature project — the $7-billion Northvolk battery plant on Montreal’s South Shore — may be dead in the water. Fitzgibbon sold the farm to get the Swedish manufacturer to build its plant here, offering billions in tax incentives, cheap electricity and ways to work around Quebec’s environmental laws. In exchange, the company would create 4,000 high-paid jobs in a rapidly growing sector of the economy.

There were, of course, detractors. The minister scoffed at criticism, from National Bank CEO Laurent Feirrera and other business leaders, that these jobs would cost billions in Quebecers’ money that would end up in the bank accounts of foreign investors. 

And after falsely claiming Quebec did not grant special treatment to the Swedish firm, Environment Minister Benoît Charrettee admitted, last May, that the province modified its own rules to help Northvolt avoid an environmental assessment when it builds the plant over 100 hectares of wetlands.

Experts also warned that, even with a massive investment of Quebec taxpayer money and hydroelectric power, Northvolt still has to compete with established EV manufacturers like Tesla and emerging Chinese firms like BYD and CATL in a market that’s still largely speculative. The company also got an assist from the Trudeau Liberals, who announced a 100 per cent tariff on Chinese EVs this summer. Still, the reality of auto manufacturing is that only a handful of companies on the planet can do it at an industrial scale.

But none of this will come into play if Northvolt — which already announced an 18-to-24-month delay on the construction of its Quebec plant — goes under. The company has burned through $15 Billion USD in funding since its 2017 launch and the Swedish government announced, on Monday, that it has no plans to bail Northvolt out of its current financial predicament.

Now that it looks as though Northvolt could fall apart, Fitzgibbon is leaving provincial politics with yet another stain on his record.

Much of the focus in his many political obituaries has (rightfully) been placed on Fitzgibbon reorienting Hydro-Québec to prioritize deals with big industry. The CAQ’s policy of setting aside massive blocks of cheap power now threaten to create an energy shortage of 100 terawatt hours by 2027, according to the Montreal Economic Institute.

The CAQ’s solution to the looming crisis? Double Quebec’s (already massive) energy production over the next 25 years by privatizing some utilities (practically a mortal sin in Quebec politics) and building more dams on Indigenous territory. The dam-building would put Quebec up against the Innu and Cree governments who have sworn to fight the projects all the way to the Supreme Court. And given the Court’s recent rulings on Indigenous land titles, this is hardly a slam dunk for the CAQ.

There’s also the six ethics investigations into Fitzgibbon over his ties to companies that have taken millions in Quebec money since he was elected. Setting aside the obvious conflict of interest, some of these investments show surprisingly little business acumen.

Montreal-based battery manufacturer LION Electric — which has benefitted from over $400 million in subsidies and tax breaks from Quebec — is partially owned by Fitzgibbon associate Michel Ringuet. In fact, Ringuet is also in charge of overseeing Fitzgibbon’s investments, which the minister placed in a blind trust during his first term cabinet.

Quebec gifted the company a huge advantage over competitors in 2021 when it created a $350 million fund to electrify the province’s fleet of school buses. The fund was designed for manufacturers that made 100 per cent of their vehicles in Quebec, a condition met by only one company, LION Electric.

They did this on the promise, from LION Electric, that by 2023 the manufacturer would be on pace to build and sell 20,000 buses a year. LION sold just 852 vehicles in 2023 and has laid off roughly half its workforce this year, securing a $7.5 million loan from Quebec to keep from going insolvent.

Even though we tend to overstate the influence that governments have on global economic trends, the CAQ simply hasn’t delivered on its promise of robust economic growth. Last year, the province’s real gross domestic product grew at a meager 0.05 per cent, placing it behind Ontario (0.65), Alberta (0.22), British Columbia (0.23), Saskatchewan (0.06) and Nunavut (3.4). 

And before you go blaming it on the pandemic, the rest of Canada had to deal with it too.

Say what you will about the slash and burn Couillard Liberals, at least they had a consistent economic policy. Sure, it involved whittling our healthcare system down to a nub, but Couillard’s balanced budgets were a factor in Quebec’s whopping 3.1 per cent GDP growth in 2017.

By contrast, Legault’s government has cut spending and slashed services, but has also lost $9.2 billion in revenue on tax cuts slated until 2028. The premier’s “gift” of $400 to $600 cheques to millions of Quebecers in Christmas of 2022 cost the province $3.5 billion. 

Now that bill is coming due, and Premier Legault has to actually start paying for all of this, he’ll exact a greater toll from working people. Fewer night buses to bring nurses home from their shift, special needs teachers burning out of the public system, universities pushed into financial ruin. 

And did any of these measures actually work? Well, in the year after the CAQ government’s cheques rolled out (2023), inflation shrank by 2.2 per cent in Quebec. In Ontario, where there were no cheques, it shrank by 3 per cent. 

Instead of being “rich as Ontarians” as Legault promised he would make us in 2018, Quebec has been left with some of the largest deficits in its history and an economy that’s deteriorated and stagnant, according to Moody’s and Morningstar credit rating agencies.

I thought they were supposed to be good this.