The project of the century

On September 2, 2025, Québec officially buried Northvolt. Christine Fréchette, then economy minister, announced the end of all public funding for the battery plant planned in the Montérégie (The Canadian Press, September 2025). The $270 million invested in the Swedish parent company had already been lost when it went bankrupt in March.

The Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, which invests, among other things, contributions to the Québec Pension Plan, lost another $200 million (Benefits and Pensions Monitor, September 2025). Nobody received a bill. No Quebecer found a line reading “Northvolt” on their notice of assessment.

The money left the way it came: under the vague name of “government money.” This essay starts there.

In Québec, people talk about $9.65-a-day daycare, “free” health care, electricity “among the cheapest on the continent,” “strategic” investments. Each time, the word hides a bill. Someone always pays it: the taxpayer, the patient who waits, the retiree whose savings were invested, or the business that never got started because the money had already gone elsewhere.

This essay does not, first of all, ask for less government. It asks for the bill. A people that cannot see the price of what it buys is not choosing; it is consuming whatever it is served.

The invisible bill

In 2024, the three levels of government collected $237.8 billion in taxes and contributions in Québec. That is 38.6% of GDP, or roughly $26,000 per resident, infants included. No other province carries a tax burden this heavy; among 32 advanced OECD economies, Québec ranks 11th (CFFP, 2026).

Almost no one sees this number. Wage earners receive a paycheque that has already been cut: income tax is withheld at source, along with contributions to the Québec Pension Plan, the Québec Parental Insurance Plan and Employment Insurance. They never write a cheque to the government. They look at their take-home pay and end up believing it is their salary.

The rest is paid elsewhere, a little at a time. At the till, where GST and QST add almost 15%. At the pump. In the rent, which absorbs property tax. In the raises the employer doesn’t give, because it already pays payroll taxes. Each levy is small and scattered; together they are enormous.

Yet the most hidden price is not the amount. It is what the system does to work. For a couple with two children, the effective marginal tax rate reached 90.5% in 2025 at certain income levels: of each extra dollar earned, the family kept less than ten cents. With the abolition of the tax shield announced for 2026, that peak rises to 97.5% (CFFP highlights).

This is not a tax on the rich. These are families of modest or middle income who lose almost all the fruit of an extra hour, a promotion, a second job. They never see it on a bill. They only feel it as a kind of fatigue: you work more, and nothing changes.

What is seen and what is not seen

A French economist explained it all in 1850, better than any auditor general’s report. In What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen, Frédéric Bastiat introduces a citizen, Jacques Bonhomme, whose son has broken a pane of glass. The glazier earns six francs, and the onlookers console him: at least it gives someone work.

What is not seen are the worn-out shoes Jacques Bonhomme will not replace, since his six francs went into the window. Henry Hazlitt, who popularized the fable a century later, drew the lesson: the crowd forgets the merchant who would have made the sale, because it never catches sight of him. He does not protest either; he has no idea what he missed. The whole politics of subsidies fits in that scene.

We see the plant being announced, the minister in a hard hat, the “jobs created.” We do not see the businesses that received nothing, the tax that did not go down, the nurse who was not hired. The gain has a face and a press conference; the loss has neither.

On June 10, 2026, Québec’s auditor general reviewed 29 files in the battery sector: 11 companies, about $2.2 billion in authorized assistance. She described a “poorly planned” approach, without objectives or timelines. Four of these companies, authorized to receive $760 million, ended up under creditor protection (Noovo, June 2026).

Losses were estimated at $375 million as of March, and could rise. Three companies authorized to receive $1 billion saw the cost of their projects more than double. After the report, the premier herself acknowledged that it is not necessarily the government’s job to inject funds directly into start-ups.

Lion Electric had received up to $177 million in support from Québec. In May 2025, François Legault acknowledged the province would lose about $140 million; the leader of the opposition accused the government of handing Lion a monopoly on the electrification of school buses (Noovo, May 2025).

That companies go bankrupt is no scandal. It is the normal price of innovation, and the market pays it every day. The scandal lies elsewhere: the venture capitalist chooses to risk his own money; the taxpayer was never asked.

The price of monopoly

When money no longer sets the price, the price does not disappear. It changes currency. We pay it in hours, in waiting, in choices we no longer have.

Care is “free” at the point of service. In 2025–2026, a patient on a stretcher in the emergency room waited on average 16 hours 46 minutes before being admitted or sent home. At Lakeshore General Hospital it was nearly 31 hours, and close to half of the visits involved people over 75 (Noovo, April 2026).

Those hours are a price, paid in lost wages, in pain, in worry. Back in 2005, in Chaoulli, a case that concerned Québec itself, Chief Justice McLachlin and Justice Major put it in their reasons: “Access to a waiting list is not access to health care” (2005 SCC 35, para. 123).

Daycare follows the same logic. At $9.65 a day, a subsidized spot is a bargain, for those who get one. As of May 31, 2025, 30,688 children were still waiting for a spot, subsidized or not, while some families pay more than $60 a day elsewhere (Narcity, March 2026).

The low price did not abolish scarcity; it turned it into a lottery. The winners pay $9.65. The losers pay for their own daycare, partly refunded through a tax credit, and, through their taxes, for their neighbour’s spot.

Then there is the SAQ, the provincial liquor monopoly, which describes itself as owned by its “nearly 9 million shareholders,” Quebecers. Dividends and taxes included, it sends nearly $2.1 billion a year straight to the Québec treasury (SAQ). But a shareholder who can neither sell his shares nor shop elsewhere is not a shareholder: he is a captive customer.

The SAQ’s dividend is a tax paid at the counter, without a single line on the receipt naming it. And there is something more serious here than price. Albert Hirschman distinguished two ways of responding to a disappointing service: exit, going to a competitor, and voice, complaining.

Monopoly abolishes exit. Only voice remains, and for most people voice comes down to a vote every four years. What competition offers the ordinary consumer is not perfection. It is the door.

Why we don’t see the bill

We don’t see the bill because everything pushes toward hiding it. It is not a conspiracy. It is a slope, and every actor has an interest in going down it.

The economist Mancur Olson showed it in 1965: a small group that gains a lot always organizes better than a crowd that loses a little. A company hoping for $200 million hires lobbyists. Nine million taxpayers who each lose about twenty dollars don’t even leave the house.

As early as 1903, the Italian Amilcare Puviani described “fiscal illusion”: the state prefers levies the taxpayer does not feel. Withholding at source is its masterpiece. Milton Friedman, who helped design it in the United States during the war, told Reason in 1995 that it was “a great mistake for peacetime” and that he wished “there were some way of abolishing withholding now” (Reason, 1995).

Vocabulary does the rest. “Québec invests $500 million,” “the government offers,” “state assistance”: these sentences have a subject who gives and no subject who pays. At the Conservative Party conference on October 14, 1983, Margaret Thatcher put it bluntly: “There is no such thing as public money; there is only taxpayers’ money” (Margaret Thatcher Foundation). One can loathe Thatcher and still admit that, on this point, grammar is on her side.

The word “free” is the most effective of all. It turns a collective purchase into a gift. And one does not haggle over a gift, nor ask whether it was worth the price.

Some will object that Quebecers get back a good share of what they pay, through benefits and credits. The tax research chair at the Université de Sherbrooke even notes that once benefits are counted, the picture is more nuanced: applied to Québec households, the tax-and-transfer systems of four other provinces would actually be heavier.

That is true, and it is precisely the problem. A dollar that leaves as tax and comes back as a benefit makes no one richer. It passes through an administration that counts it, attaches conditions to it, then claws it back as soon as you earn a little more. This back-and-forth is the direct cause of the 90% marginal rates described above: the state returns your money on condition that you don’t work too much.

The short memory of the twentieth century

Sympathy for socialism is first a matter of memory, and the memory of the twentieth century is fading. In the fall of 2022, a Léger poll commissioned by the Fraser Institute found that 42% of Canadians favour socialism. The figure rises to 50% among 18-to-24-year-olds and falls to 38% among those over 55 (Toronto Sun, February 2023).

One may distrust the sponsor. But among the results the Institute highlights, the most revealing concerns the definition: only 25% of respondents understand socialism as the state taking control of companies; 65% see it simply as more public services.

And when asked who will pay, 72% support a wealth tax on the richest 1%, but only 31% a general income tax increase, and 16% a GST increase. The study’s authors, Jason Clemens and Steven Globerman, draw their own conclusion: Canadians want more services, provided someone else, the wealthy, pays for them (Wealth Professional, February 2023). That is the reading of a free-market think tank; if it holds, this kind of socialism is nothing but a bill you cannot see.

Nobody in Québec is calling for collective farms. But the starting intuition is the same: that a price can be abolished by political decision. The twentieth century ran that experiment to the end.

In the Soviet Union, cheap bread was paid for in hours spent in line. In China, the Great Leap Forward caused a famine that killed tens of millions, according to most historians. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge abolished money and the market; they caused the deaths of at least one in five inhabitants.

The difference with today’s Québec is immense, but it is a difference of degree. There as here, when the price is abolished by decree, the queue replaces it. Sixteen hours on a stretcher are not a Soviet bread line; they obey the same law all the same.

Montréal is home to people who know all this without ever having opened an economics textbook. In 1979 and 1980, Canada took in some 60,000 refugees from Southeast Asia, many of them Vietnamese boat people driven out by a regime that had just confiscated their businesses. Families who came from Poland, Romania, Cuba, China and, more recently, Venezuela carry the same memory.

That memory is rarely invited into Québec’s public debate. It is suspected of exaggerating, or of being “right-wing.” Yet it is the only direct experience Québec has of what waits at the bottom of the slope.

Young people who dream of more services are not naive by nature. They have simply never seen the bill arrive. An honest debate shows it to them in advance, instead of letting them learn it the way others learned it elsewhere.

The bill first

A grown-up democratic debate begins with the bill. On October 5, Québec changed governments. The question of the bill remains wide open.

I am not proposing a program. I am asking for something simpler and harder: to see the price. In practice, it could look like this:

  • a notice of assessment that says, in dollars, where its recipient’s taxes went, like the annual tax summary the United Kingdom has provided to its taxpayers since 2014;
  • a daycare receipt that shows the real cost of the spot, next to the $9.65 paid by the parent;
  • a statement telling patients what their emergency room visit cost the public;
  • a subsidy announcement that states its cost per taxpayer and the risk of loss, like any prospectus.

None of this takes away a single service. It only takes away the illusion.

Some will say that showing the price is laying the groundwork for cuts. If a service cannot survive the sight of its price, it was not worth it. If it is worth it, Quebecers will pay for it knowingly, and that, at last, will be a real choice.

Northvolt’s $270 million had no face. Neither did those who paid it. Consent without knowledge is not consent; a society that wants to be one of solidarity must first agree to look at what its solidarity costs.

Sources

Further reading: Frédéric Bastiat, What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen (1850); Amilcare Puviani, Teoria della illusione finanziaria (1903); Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson (1946); Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action (1965); Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (1970).