Politicians extending holiday greetings are about as common as Santa sightings in December. It's not typically fodder for controversy. It can even offer a welcome respite from politics as usual.
Not for Martin Coiteux. When Quebec's hard-charging Treasury Board President extended glad tidings via Twitter and Facebook last month, his social media accounts had to be temporarily suspended to clean up the insults hurled back at him. Evidently, the good cheer was not mutual.
Mr. Coiteux may have been asking for it. In his holiday message, he called on Quebeckers to show "compassion toward the poorest and most vulnerable" among them – this only days after tabling the most Scrooge-like salary offers that public-sector employees have faced in years.
It's all part of Mr. Coiteux's plan to "renovate" the Quebec state, the most tentacular of any provincial administration. As Liberal Premier Philippe Couillard moves to eliminate Quebec's structural budget deficit, he has left the heaviest lifting to Mr. Coiteux. Employee compensation accounts for 60 per cent of program spending and reining in salaries and pension costs is the key to putting public finances on a sustainable footing.
The only hitch is that it's far easier said than done.
The last Liberal premier, Jean Charest, came to power in 2003 promising to "re-engineer" the state. That idea didn't survive the uproar from Quebec's powerful unions and the constant burning in effigy of the premier and his Treasury Board chief. During Mr. Charest's nine years in office, public spending grew by nearly two-thirds, or almost twice as fast as the economy.
The Liberals regained power under Mr. Couillard in April offering little hint of what they had in store. Plans to raise daycare fees based on family income and increase class sizes were nowhere in the Liberal program. Nor was an overhaul of municipal pensions that led Montreal police officers to ransack City Hall.
The biggest protests are likely yet to come, however, as Quebec's 540,000 public-sector employees enter negotiations to renew union contracts that expire on March 31. Mr. Coiteux is offering raises of 3 per cent over five years, with pay freezes in 2016 and 2017. He's also seeking to boost the retirement age to 62 from 60, increase the penalty for early retirement and base pensions on an employee's eight highest-earning years instead of the current five.
It sounds like a political suicide mission. Mr. Coiteux, 52, is already the subject of some the cruellest vitriol faced by any Quebec politician. When Mr. Coiteux likened his plan to yanking the helm to right a ship that had gone adrift, Le Devoir columnist Michel David compared him to the captain of the Costa Concordia. Mostly, Mr. Coiteux is accused of the cardinal sin of seeking to tamper with the sacrosanct "Quebec Model" of a bigger government and social safety net.
All in, Quebec's public-sector employees now earn considerably less than their municipal and unionized private-sector counterparts in the province. But because there are so many of them, the sustainability of Quebec's public finances hinges on their salaries and/or productivity.
"What we're doing now is not to jeopardize the [Quebec] model, but to make sure we're capable of financing it," Mr. Coiteux told Radio-Canada. His critics have their doubts. They suspect him of seeking to encourage a mass exodus as public employees rush to take early retirement before the tougher pension rules kick in.
Polls show little sympathy for public-sector workers among the broader electorate. That could change if protests disrupt the peace and public services start to suffer. But Mr. Coiteux insists there will be no backing down this time.
Quebeckers are unwilling to give up their perks of residency – Canada's cheapest daycare, most generous parental leave and universal drug insurance. But nor will they pay higher taxes than they already do to finance them. The only option is to make the public sector more cost-effective.
Others have tried and failed, but the polyglot Mr. Coiteux is said to have the solid backing of Mr. Couillard. A former economics professor at HEC Montréal, Mr. Coiteux ran the Bank of Canada's Quebec office before entering politics in 2014. He is a deep thinker whose economics blog was long required reading in Quebec academic and policy circles.
Unlike career politicians, one senses Mr. Coiteux doesn't care much about his own re-election (even though he represents a safe Liberal riding). He's only in politics, as he sees it, to right the ship.
Konrad Yakabuski