What type of economy does quebec have

So much research has had the effect of boosting this industry in the region, which has culminated in the establishment of a wide variety of expertise and businesses. In addition to this, it fosters the creation of innovative solutions. Do you find this captivating? Recognized for its expertise in this sector, it is home to many research centres and innovative companies working on various world-class topics: biopharmaceuticals, medical technology, cosmeceuticals and nutraceuticals, etc.

Are you passionate about food and nutrition? You should know that the region is on the cutting edge in this are, with very fertile research. Its companies excel, among other things, in processing functional foods and organic and local products. Do you want to know more? Do you like video games and digital technology? Formally, the loan should be repaid to the government by the end of However, as in the past, this loan is renewed from time to time, and is occasionally increased. In other words, the CLD has 6,4 million 9,5 minus 3,1 of working capital.

Each year, the amount of loans paid back is reinvested in new loans. This situation is similar to the other CLDs and the accumulated deficits are not a surprise to anybody. In fact, considering the risks involved, this is considered a good result. Jobs are created, people pay income tax, and there are fewer people unemployed or on welfare.

This increase was especially important for young entrepreneurs, according to the Press release:. The clientele of young entrepreneurs now represents Besides the Even if new start-up projects are still about half Projects to acquire a business were 3. It represents them in negotiations with the government; for example, it was involved in negotiations with the government for the last three year renewal of funding.

It organises training sessions, exchange knowledge on practices, agrees on common tools for evaluating the work and of course represents its members in coalitions or networking with other national provincial associations. In , on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the CLDs, an important survey was carried out, with government support, concerning the governance of the CLDs.

The Association was especially interested in examining the results of the change in the law decided in The law creating the CLDs was abolished and the responsibility of local development was transferred to the municipal authorities. In particular, they wanted and analysis on the impact on the boards of local CLDs since municipal authorities were now responsible of deciding how the boards would be made up.

The study also examined practices on budgeting and financial reports, on internal management and staffing and other related subjects. The survey found that in practically all the CLDs there was no change in the balance between elected municipal delegates and other delegates over time.

Since 97 of the CLD who were members of the Association at that time responded to the questionnaire, the study group was able to find the exact explanation for the small overall increase. The study group identified some situations that were problematic and felt they required attention:.

After analysis of the results, the study group decided not to propose a unique model for all the CLDS. The guide should include, amongst other things, a history of local development and of the CLDs, the mission of the CLDs, the legal and legislative aspects, the mode of governance, the role and responsibilities of board members and of the management, etc.

They also suggested that the ACLDQ reach out to the two different federations of municipalities one of small municipalities and one of large urban areas so that in their training for newly elected people in municipalities a section is added on local development.

Even if no survey has been done since then, the association knows that the Guide of best practices has become an important tool, in particular for new members of the board and new staff of CLDs. Previously, there were more or less two approaches, in practice totally independent of each other.

The first was the traditional private business only approach with no links to social economy or civil society. In most cases, this type of local development was not active in poor urban neighbourhoods or in regions with high unemployment; or, put differently, it was more active in more prosperous places. The other type of local development, initiative not by the business community, but often by community organisations civil society was concerned with high unemployment, lower income communities, younger generations moving out, etc.

However, there are still are problems and challenges. For instance, in a minority of cases CLDs are not very open to social economy. They still see entrepreneurship as a question of the individual entrepreneur.

They do not regard collective entrepreneurship - cooperatives or non-profit enterprises - as good as private business. In other cases, there is a lack of trust in civil society and the municipal authorities want to control the whole process. Two other factors have an influence: the ability to sustain a longer term perspective and the balance between municipal leadership and how well civil society is organised. Municipal elections are held every four years and it is not always easy for mayors or councillors to imagine the long-term perspective needed for local development.

Anyway, there are cases where the population expects the municipality to take the lead and when there are close links between a municipality and its population this can work well. This can also be explained by the fact that civil society is disorganised in some areas. There are also many places where the CLD is the tool for all actors in a community to organise.

As in many countries, rural communities have difficulties to retain their population, especially the young people. This is even truer in remote regions far away from the large cities. Nevertheless, there some good examples of real successes in local development work in such regions, involving in practically all cases CLDs, social economy initiatives and local authorities. One example is the creation of over 50 health cooperatives that have been able to attract or retain medical doctors instead of local residents having to travel to large cities.

Another example is the creation of solidarity coops multi-stakeholder or multipurpose cooperatives in small towns and villages see The social economy and municipal authorities in Quebec. Because of different legal restrictions, each can only tap funding from its own government, provincial or federal. However, in practice, this is not a big problem and there is even an advantage since there are two investment funds for local enterprises and projects to apply to! In many case, in a same territory, many members serve on both boards and in some of the faraway places most people know each other anyway.

For reasons of convenience and travel costs both organisations hold meetings the same day, with most people attending both meetings. A deal was almost struck between the two administrations, provincial and federal in when the CLDs were set up but finally, because of politics, there was no deal.

From to , the rate of unemployment for Quebec province was always about 2 percentage points higher than the Canadian average. In the last years, including the downturn of the economy since , the average rate in Quebec province is the same as the Canadian average.

Even if impossible to prove, one of the explanations for this is certainly the social economy and the local development policies decided by the government, in agreement with the social partners.

A change of government came about last September. This type of approach would create a more holistic approach to local development. This had been proposed by many people at the parliamentary commission in , including the author of this article. Its installed generating capacity is 36, MW, or more than 30 per cent of the Canadian total, more than 99 per cent of the production is hydraulic. In the s, the province tried to reduce its dependency on petroleum products. In petroleum accounted for 74 per cent of all energy used in the province.

In , it was The hydro main project of the s was the James Bay project. It produces over 10, MW of electricity. A large portion of this electricity is exported to Ontario, New Brunswick and the northeastern United States. French and English merchants dreamed of a commercial empire along the St.

Although the North American commercial empire never materialized, the St. The opening of the St. The opening of the seaway in , while contributing to the development of North Shore ports, also led to the rapid growth of Ontario ports on the Great Lakes. In the mids, The railway network was mainly developed in southern Quebec, though the National Transcontinental Railway was an expensive, failed effort to open up frontiers in the north.

The construction of the Mirabel airport in the s was very controversial. Today, in retrospect, it seems that the detractors of the project were right: in , international flights were all dispatched back to Dorval airport, leaving only air freight to Mirabel. Almost 85 per cent of the 10 million passengers who annually used Quebec's airports passed through Dorval and Mirabel. The province has 55, km of roads and 2, km of superhighways. More than 3. The political institutions of the province of Quebec have not fundamentally changed since Initially a French colony, Quebec was later administered directly by British authorities.

In it became part of a legislative union, and in a member of the Canadian federation. In Quebec did not sign Canada's repatriated Constitution, although it did sign an accord in to enter into Canada's constitutional agreement see Meech Lake Accord ; Meech Lake Accord: Document and another, the so-called Charlottetown Accord see Charlottetown Accord: Document , in However, neither of these was ratified and the latter was overwhelmingly rejected in a national referendum.

The evolution of Quebec's institutions has thus not been marked by any legal discontinuity. The most important institutions are the central political institutions.

Quebec, like all constitutional regimes with a British tradition, has no rigid division of legislative and executive functions among its various agencies. Its political system is based on co-operation rather than on a separation of powers. In the s, efforts were made to ensure an equal number of voters per riding around 34, voters. The National Assembly has the power to pass laws in areas defined as provincial jurisdiction by section 92 of the British North America Act.

The political party with a majority of seats in the National Assembly forms a government. The leader of the party becomes the premier of the province see Quebec Premiers: Table. The Queen's representative in the province is the lieutenant-governor.

He or she is appointed by federal authorities in consultation with the province. The role is mainly symbolic, but in some situations the lieutenant-governor may be called upon to settle a parliamentary issue. As the sovereign's direct and personal representative, the lieutenant-governor ensures the continuity of government.

It is the Conseil executif that decides on the general orientation of government action. The 27 or so Cabinet ministers are appointed by the premier and are bound by the principle of ministerial solidarity. Since the s, major reforms have transformed the operations of these central bodies.

The National Assembly's rules of procedure were modernized and adapted to Quebec's circumstances: a total of 11 parliamentary standing committees have been established and debates are now televised.

The Conseil executif is operating more and more with the assistance of departmental standing committees, each headed by a minister of state.

A priorities committee provides better planning, and a treasury board, headed by a minister, is responsible for formulating and implementing the government's financial policies. From the Conquest of and the Royal Proclamation of , and basically until , Quebec was a British colony.

In , with the Constitutional Act , the frontiers of the colony were reduced to what is essentially southern Quebec today. The colony was also granted an elected Assembly. But the territory, like any other British colony, was directly and undemocratically governed from the metropolis through a governor named by London and a body of Councils also composed of non-elected members. The Assembly had limited powers. Because French-Canadians had developed a distinct identity by the end of the 18th century, the struggle for democracy became, at least for half a century, synonymous with nationalism.

After the Rebellion of , Quebec was amalgamated with Upper Canada Ontario in and became part of a legislative union. After the failure of that union, Quebec became in a province of the Canadian federation.

For many French-speaking Canadians who supported the British North America Act of , Confederation was based on the principle of a federation of nations, namely the British and the French both the French and the British excluded the First Nations.

But that interpretation of Confederation was never shared by a majority of English-speaking Canadians. They tended to see Canada as a homogeneous nation composed of different regions represented by the provinces. This unresolved debate about the nature of the federation has been at the core of every political and constitutional crisis in Canada and the province of Quebec since Two years later a major crisis in Quebec-Canada relations occurred when Quebec did not sign Canada's repatriated Constitution initiated by Pierre Elliott Trudeau government.

The second crisis occurred between and during the debate about the Meech Lake Accord. In the Charlottetown was rejected, although for different reasons, by both Quebec and the rest of Canada. In , a second referendum in Quebec on sovereignty was barely won by the federalist side After the Conquest and during the 19th century, the French referred to themselves as "les Canadiens" and described the "others" as "les Anglais.

This contributed to the emergence of a separatist movement and a "Quebec only" identity. From to provincial politics were dominated by the Conservative Party. The conservatives ruled for all but five of those years, and from to The power of the Conservative Party symbolized the alliance between the Church and business, and a commitment to a socially conservative society led by private enterprise. Wilfrid Laurier 's victory at the federal level in propelled the provincial Liberals to power in They remained in power for half a century, except between and , until The Liberals maintained the alliance between the Church and private enterprise.

The Church was given a free hand in social affairs and education while the political and economical spheres were left to politicians and businesspeople. The domination of the Liberals was interrupted in when Maurice Duplessis and the Union Nationale party took power.

That party resulted from the merger of the provincial Conservative Party and a group of young Liberal dissidents active during the Depression. The Godbout government was perhaps the most socially progressive provincial government of the century in Quebec. But its accomplishments were overshadowed by Second World War when the federal government used its special wartime powers to intervene in provincial affairs.

In the domination of the Liberal Party since really came to an end. With only 35 per cent of the popular vote, Maurice Duplessis was re-elected and this time governed until The Duplessis government was characteristic of the Cold War, right wing and vehemently anti-Communist. Opposition to his extremely conservative style of government in the s prepared the field for the reforms of the s.

When a group of young liberals led by Jean Lesage took power in it was the beginning of a new era and the period of reforms known as the Quiet Revolution. The Church was replaced by the provincial state in social affairs and the state intervened in the economy to promote the interests of French-speaking business.

The emphasis on the provincial state corresponded with a change in the self-identification of many French-Canadians in Quebec. Historians still debate the nature and effects of the Quiet Revolution.

For some experts, the Quiet Revolution was a period of immense change that at last brought Quebec into the modern world. For others, the alliance of the Church and business, beginning from at least the second half of the 19th century, was a typical contradiction of modernity. To these observers, the changes of the s, despite their magnitude, were simply a realignment of political and social forces in an already modern society.

Ironically, a few months before the provincial election in Quebec, Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau had proclaimed the death of 'separatism' in Quebec. Others have argued that it was a form of secession. Despite the fact that the question seemed moderate, the federalist No side won convincingly by almost 60 per cent to 40 per cent. It was thus a government of the PQ in power in when Pierre Elliott Trudeau patriated the constitution from Britain.

Robert Bourassa , who had patiently rebuilt his control over the provincial Liberal Party after his astonishing defeat in , became once again the premier of Quebec in But this second mandate was also very controversial, with the Oka crisis in the summer of , just after the failure of the Meech Lake Accord, and the no less catastrophic failure of the Charlottetown Accord in Inflation is around two per cent, so Quebeckers appear to have a decent supply of disposable income to keep their local economy humming.

Full employment. Yes, angry westerners, Quebec is a recipient of equalization payments, its economic renaissance is still young, and its population remains poor relative to the other major provinces. The turnaround is the result of steady economic growth and spending cuts by former Liberal premier Philippe Couillard. Quebec benefits from keeping ideology away from economic policy.

When the invisible hand was slow to guide money towards startups, the government and local financial institutions stepped in to ensure there would be a pool of capital from which the next generation of entrepreneurs could draw. The province was also ahead of its time in realizing that the upfront costs of a proper subsidized daycare program would be more than covered by stronger economic growth over the longer term.

Some 87 per cent of Quebec women between the ages of 25 and 54 are in the labour force, compared with 93 per cent of its men, the lowest gap in the country. The participation rate of women of prime working age in B.

Bottom line: Quebec is getting more out of its residents than any of the other big provinces because it has given women the flexibility they need to be mothers and economic agents at the same time. Bureaucracy is a pain, individual tax rates are high and there still is a tendency in Quebec City to think that companies must be lured with handouts. Boyko grumbles about watching his taxes used to subsidize the labour costs of international competitors that set up shop in the province.