<i>If the government invested all that money in small to middle sized local companies instead the province would be so much more prosperous.</i><p>How exactly is anyone helped by money taking a round trip through the government rather than the same thing happening through free markets?  You&#x27;ve made the cycle slower, you&#x27;ve made the recipients dependent on government bureaucratic decisions (who are not well-incentivized to decide well), and have reduced incentives for efficiency.  And you&#x27;ve gained nothing.<p>Don&#x27;t get me wrong.  Government has important roles to play in our economy and society.  We need government to create basic infrastructure, create regulations encouraging public goods, provide a stable system of law, and so on.  But unless you are serving some legitimate purpose, channeling daily economic activity through the government is a net loss compared to doing the same through private enterprise.<p>Quebec being full of people who believe that the economy <i>should</i> go through the government seems to be its second largest economic mistake, and one it is still making on a large scale.  People like you complain about the predictable results of this mistake, but don&#x27;t see that it is a mistake.<p>Quebec&#x27;s largest mistake was, of course, Bill 101.  That made your province so hostile to anglophones that 1&#x2F;3 of them &quot;voluntarily emmigrated&quot; within a few years.  (The ones I know are inclined to dispute how voluntary that emmigration was...)  They took with them the headquarters of many major companies, the associated jobs, and the general economic activity that would have come from those professionals spending locally.  This is why, for example, The Bank of Montreal is now headquartered in Toronto.<p>There is a collective blind spot in Quebec to the true cost of this for your society.  Major companies need to have a stream of professionals moving to their headquarters from elsewhere because that is how you move up in the hierarchy.  If you have made professionals unwilling to move to Quebec (for instance by forcing their children to receive education in a language they don&#x27;t speak), companies have to choose between moving headquarters or losing their most valued employees to competitors.<p>It proved to be cheaper to move headquarters.  And they did.  Quebec&#x27;s economy has never recovered from this.  (Though you did adjust your ethnic ratio by enough that you nearly managed to get a 50% vote to secede in the 90s...)