Drug costs have undeniably risen more quickly than other health care costs. The share of drugs in overall Canadian health care spending went from 10.8% in 1988 to 15.7% in 2001. However, the higher drug expenses facing Canada’s health care systems are not due to price increases imposed by multinational pharmaceutical firms. Various factors explain the growth in drug spending.

Quebecers are the most heavily taxed citizens in North America. The top marginal personal tax rate is higher than in any other province, and hits the Quebec taxpayer beginning at the relatively low income of $53 405. In fact, the top marginal rate is reached faster in Quebec than in any of the G-7 countries. The promised reduction could correct this situation by reducing marginal rates by one third. The time is right to implement a real tax reform in Quebec.

A widely held view, disseminated by student associations in particular, suggests that improving access to higher education means students should pay little or nothing in fees. Despite this view, a growing number of university administrators and various people in academic and political circles are arguing in favour of higher tuition fees to deal with what they regard as underfinancing that is affecting the quality of higher learning.

Without fanfare, the Quebec government recently took a sharp turn towards implementing user fees for public services. Beginning with its first budget in June 2003, the government stopped reimbursing parents for fees required by elementary and secondary schools. Then it announced an increase in contributions to the drug insurance plan and lifted the freeze on electricity rate increases. In November it announced an increase in fees at childcare centres and allowed public transit corporations to hike fares. This is just the beginning.

The Report Card on Quebec’s Secondary Schools provides an annual, independent measurement of the extent to which each school meets basic needs. The Report Card thus serves several purposes. For one thing, it facilitates school improvement, and for parents who have a choice between several educational institutions, it can help them make an enlightened decision.

Although he died at the young age of 49, French journalist and politician Frédéric Bastiat wrote dozens of pieces and thoroughly demolished the economic fallacies that were in vogue in his country over 150 years ago. Some of these, like his Petition from the candle makers, are worth more than the hundreds of treatises that have been written on trade policies as an efficient and clear demonstration of the absurdity of protectionism.

Despite broad fears that turning more to the private sector would lead to a two-tier system, notions of profit and competition are not incompatible with the idea of health care for everyone. Sweden’s recent experience shows us that it is possible to increase the efficiency of the system by means of market mechanisms while maintaining universal care.

With the arrival in Quebec City of a new government that has declared its intention to review the so-called "Quebec model," the time for Public-Private Partnerships (PPP) may finally have come. The new president of the Treasury Board has announced a vast operation of reengineering of the state bureaucracy, among other things through a wider recourse to Public-Private Partnerships. Quebec has not so far used PPPs to the same extent as other OECD countries, or even other Canadian provinces.

In his inaugural address opening Quebec’s 37th legislature, newly elected Premier Jean Charest stated that taxes must be lowered not just for the pleasure of it but “because it is necessary, because our tax load is an obstacle to our development.” What exactly is the current situation? What is the weight of this tax and regulatory burden that people in Quebec are forced to bear?

A number of university researchers and pressure groups have suggested that the housing crisis affecting Quebec’s main metropolitan areas is caused by greater poverty among the population, reduced budgets for construction of social housing, or the inability of private business to adapt to new lifestyles in Quebec. The most recent data show us, however, that these explanations fail to stand up.