Fiscal Fear Mongering in Quebec or Separatist Number’s Lunacy?
August 7, 2012 Leave a comment
Earlier this month Ed Devlin the head of Canadian portfolio management at Pacific Investment Management Company warned Quebec politicians to be careful in the upcoming elections. Devlin an expert in fixed income market and liability-driven investing wrote a research note1 on Quebec’s debt dynamics and the possibility that talk of sovereignty had the potential to derail the province’s current virtuous debt dynamics as has been the case in parts of Europe in the last few years, most notably Italy.
The research note sparked indignation in French language media and in separatist circles. PQ economic critic Nicholas Marceau was ‘shocked’ by the scare tactics employed by Devlin and Martin Aussant head of the party Option National, an ex-economist himself, stated that the head of PIMCO Canada’s analysis wasn’t credible. Even the federalist Parti Liberal du Quebec felt the need to chip in, with finance Minister Raymond Bachand saying that Quebec and Italy were not comparable as they were not in the same ballpark.
It would seem that the lively reactions from the political sphere have proved Devlin right, Quebec politicians just don’t get it. The Liberals and the Option National seem to agree, Italy and Quebec cannot be compared. Martin Aussant actually went on record saying that Quebec was in the average of OECD debt to gross domestic product (GDP) percentages. The question now is whether Aussant wants to plead guilty to ignorance or deceit has he is wrong about Quebec’s relative average debt load.
If one were to take Quebec’s provincial ‘net debt’, which measures the provincial government’s debts minus the province’s assets, Aussant would be right, Quebec is just slightly below average in terms of debt to the size of the economy with a debt of 47% in 2010 versus 56% on average in the OECD. The conversation might have stopped there if Aussant had done his economic homework, but having been in politics for much too long it would seem that his professional due diligence might have slipped a little. Quebec’s net debt measure doesn’t use the same methodology as the OECD, one would have to add all provincially guaranteed debts to the equation to properly compare with the OECD’s numbers.
Thankfully the provincial Auditor General wrote a 2010 study attempting the exercise of comparison. He came up with another net debt number 53% of GDP. While this number is higher it remains squarely in the OECD average, this was surely the number that separatists like Aussant think about when talking debt dynamics. However it still isn’t the same number the OECD uses. The OECD calculates total debts not net debts. Using that number Quebec jumps straight to the top and comes in just shy of the podium in fifth place of most indebted jurisdictions in the OECD. Not really close to the average as certain like to claim.
But all this fails to take into account that separatist want to separate from Canada, hence the Canadian debt proportion that an independent Quebec would certainly have to assume. Adding today’s Quebec gross debt to its proportional share of the federal debt, an independent central Quebec government would have a whopping debt load of 135%. There you have it folks Quebec would take the bronze medal for national debts if independent, right behind gold winning dysfunctional Japan and bankrupt and bailed out Olympian Greece with silver.
Some might ask how is it that Quebec can be one of the most indebted jurisdictions in the world and not go bankrupt, while even the United States is quietly considering2 State bankruptcy legislation for its lesser indebted local jurisdictions. The answer is hotly debated in Europe right now, and was correctly pointed out by Devlin in his research paper. Europe and even the US to a lesser extent are monetary unions without fiscal unions; they share currencies without sharing fiscal resources much to the contrary of the Canadian federation.
Through the equalization formula Quebec receives a fiscal top up (worth over 10% of its provincial budget), effectively buffering it against the reckoning of financial markets. While Europe dithers on the question of bailing out its member States, every year ‘have-not’ provinces get a mini bailout. Without assurances that this money stream is permanent international investors would drop Quebec debt securities so fast Spaniards would thank financial markets for having gone easy on them.
Another rationalization separatist economists like to use to explain why Quebec is much stronger than the rest of the worlds is that when looking at net debts Quebec’s finances are resilient. That could be true if there actually were assurances that those assets that can be sold off to pay debts were worth what Quebec’s balance sheet says they’re worth. Unfortunately, that never seems to be the case. Just before Iceland got into trouble and got bailed out by the IMF it had one of those on paper fortress like balance sheets. It actually had a much lower net debt ration than Quebec does today. Unfortunately when a country gets hit by a deep recession, increasingly likely nowadays, asset values tend to drop and net debt ratios tend to shoot up. Since the Caisse de Depot et Placement du Quebec (a huge chunk of Quebec’s assets) has already proved it’s capable of loosing 40 billion dollars in a single year, what assurances remain that those losses won’t repeat themselves. And If Quebec were to separate who exactly would like to swoop in and buy Quebec’s crown corporations? Greece has been selling its State owned enterprises for pennies on the dollar in its crisis, what assurances are there that Quebec’s assets will sell for much more? Using accounting valuation to describe the worth of a government’s assets is quite the precarious game and it takes a lot of optimism to believe those numbers as credible.
Another favourite retort against Devlin’s research note is that Quebec doesn’t have the fiscal evasion problems that Italy and its ilk have. While this is true, Quebec has a much lower proportion of taxable wealthy citizens than Italy does. Given wealthy anglos historical propensity to leave in times of separatist pressures, the issue in Quebec shouldn’t be whether we have a tax evasion issue come separation but rather will Quebec have a wealth migration issue if that time comes. All in all separatists may continue to find tricky accounting techniques to rationalize separation economically, but at the end of the day numbers and facts can only lie so much. The separatist project remains far from credible economically.
If separatist political parties want to head out the door of Confederation giving up equalization payments and accepting a whopping debt bill on the way out of the restaurant maybe a little more fear mongering is in order. Let’s hope that cooler heads prevail in this election campaign and that market rattling talk of separation can go back to were it’s been hiding for the past two decades: the dust bin.