For eight budgets in a row, Finance Minister Éric Girard has stood at the podium and asked Quebecers to trust him. After what we now know, that trust is long gone. When the CAQ came to power in 2018, Quebec was sitting on a $4-billion surplus. Radio-Canada What happened next is a story of spectacular fiscal irresponsibility dressed up in reassuring language. The province is now staring down a $9.9-billion deficit for 2025-26 CBC News — a jaw-dropping reversal from the cushion the government inherited. The latest budget, tabled March 18, was sold as proof of discipline. Girard called it “an excellent management of public finances” Le Devoir — which is the kind of thing you say when you’ve spent years doing the opposite and hope nobody checks the receipts. The numbers don’t lie. The deficit in 2026-27 is projected at $8.6 billion after payments to the Generations Fund, with “gaps to absorb” of $750 million in 2027-28 and roughly $2 billion per year for the rest of the financial framework Radio-Canada — gaps, by the way, that the Auditor General flagged as deeply concerning when they first appeared. To close them, Girard is limiting spending growth to just 1.5% in 2026-27, even as inflation is expected to run at 2.3% Radio-Canada. That’s austerity. Call it “rigour” if you want, but Quebecers are the ones who will feel it. And the credit agencies noticed long before voters did. Quebec’s infrastructure spending was so bloated that S&P Global downgraded its credit rating from AA- to A+ Radio-Canada — a direct consequence of CAQ overspending that will cost taxpayers for years in higher borrowing costs. Perhaps most brazenly, this budget sets aside $250 million per year over five years for the CAQ’s next leader to spend on electoral promises CBC News. Read that again: a government that ran up billions in deficits is pre-loading a slush fund for its successor to hand out during campaign season. Québec solidaire called it exactly what it is — a “prepaid credit card” for leadership candidates to tour the province and hand out money over the summer Le Devoir. The opposition wasn’t kinder. The Parti québécois declared the budget would “self-destruct in the coming weeks” because it’s incoherent with the daily promises being made by CAQ leadership candidates Le Devoir. The Conservative Party of Quebec simply called it flat, poor, and lazy. Quebec is projected to rank last among Canadian provinces in economic growth in 2026 Radio-Canada, largely because of American tariffs on aluminum, lumber, and manufactured goods — external pressures the CAQ neither anticipated nor prepared for during the fat years. The TVA Nouvelles headline said it plainly: the Liberals accused the CAQ of having “cochonné” — that is, trashed — the public finances. That’s a hard word. It’s also accurate. This isn’t about Quebec. Quebecers didn’t vote for deficits; they voted for promises. The CAQ government made those promises, broke the bank delivering them unevenly, and is now asking you to accept austerity as the cure for a disease they caused. Don’t let them rewrite that history.