For French Canada, the tertiary sector of the economy, which includes finance, trade, and services, continues to bloom, while the agricultural sector of the economy continues to shrink as a smaller and smaller portion of the whole French Canadian economy. How French Canadians can expand trade and services to areas of their region that are impoverished will be discussed.
Quebec’s gross domestic product (GDP) is about 300 billion Canadian dollars (265 billion U.S. dollars), which makes it the second-largest economy of all Canadian provinces, second only to Ontario, which has a GDP almost twice that of Quebec. Of Quebec’s GDP, 70% comes from the service sector of the economy – making Quebec another among the post-industrial societies of the world. 75% of their export market is comprised of trading goods on the world market, with the trading of services taking up the rest of the export market. The United States is the biggest import and export trade partner with Quebec, with about 70% of Quebec’s exports coming to the United States, primarily paper products and metal alloys mined from the ground, and over 30% of the imports coming into Quebec coming from the United States, primarily being motorized vehicles and fuel. This international trade accounts for 60% of all the trade that Quebec does, with only about 40% being interprovincial, making foreign trade very important to the French Canadian economy.
Montreal is the largest city in Quebec, boasting a population of 3.5 million inhabitants in its metro area. Half of Quebec’s total GDP comes from the Montreal metro area, being about 139 billion dollars in 2007. The largest sectors in Montreal’s economy continue to be aerospace, finance, aluminum manufacturing, paper products, pharmaceuticals, electronics, clothing, and engineering services. It continues to be the headquarters for many large firms dealing with many different sectors, including banking and finance, railways, airline travel, paper product production, and aluminum manufacturing. Add to this the city of Quebec, the capital of the province of Quebec, with its own population of over 680,000 people, with the smaller cities of Trois-Rivieres, Sherbrooke, Drummondville, Saguenay (formerly the three cities of Chicoutimi, Arvida, and Jonquiere), each with their own populations over 100,000 people, and you have a central axis of urbanized areas that goes southwest-to-northeast, where most of the population of Quebec lives. These other areas have their own share of the economy, including the manufacturing of different goods such as electronics and parts supplies to automobile manufacturers, as well as having their share of banking and finance.
The problem of economic disequilibrium is probably exacerbated by the fact the 2/5th of the population of Quebec lives in the Montreal metro area, and that a vast majority of the population lives in that central southwest-to-northeast axis, motivating businesses to locate in population centers. This causes other areas, such as the Gaspe peninsula, the coastline across the St. Lawrence from the Gaspe peninsula, as well as the population clusters around Rouyn-Noranda northwest of Ottawa, to remain ignored, when, in fact, they need help.
French Canada’s agricultural sector still has approximately 400,000 farmers, who are involved primarily with growing feed grains and producing diary products. Tobacco used to be grown in the sandy soils north of Montreal, vegetables in the thick, mucky soils south of Montreal, and apples on the slopes of hilly terrains, but tobacco is no longer grown, and the growing of vegetables and apples seems quite minimal at the moment.
How can the French Canadians expand the sectors of their economy that are providing a future for more and more francophones to those areas of their region that are becoming more and more economically impoverished? There are several things that the residents and government of Quebec could do to help out those other areas of their French-speaking region.
- Invest in building better roadways to the more impoverished outlying areas so that any goods manufactured, extracted, processed, or traded can easily make its way to the more populous markets in the central axis area, as well as to get to the ports of Montreal for shipment to other areas of the world.
- Provide tax incentives, grants, and other means to motivate businesses and people to invest in building manufacturing facilities in those more impoverished areas, and for already-established businesses to expand into those areas.
- Get banking institutions to provide lower-interest loans to businesses that are willing to expand into areas that need more economic help.
- Provide a mortgage moratorium for homeowners and business owners in those more impoverished areas for up to a year, where they don’t have to pay their mortgage payments, but instead, can save up that money to pay off other debts, or to put in savings. This may sound antithetical to the previous point, but it can do a lot to help stimulate the economies of those areas.
- Monetize investment in human capital – motivate people with money to invest in higher education of other people in the economically impoverished areas, allowing them to take 10% of any increase in that person’s income, over a period of time, or for the rest of that person’s life, caused by the receiving better employment from that higher education, which they, personally, couldn’t have afforded without the help of that investor’s patronage.
- Invest in tourism in those more outlying areas, helping to bring tourist dollars to those areas. Besides that, investment can be made into new resorts that are away from everything, so people can get away from the hustle and bustle of city life in Quebec’s central population axis.
These are only a few of many ideas that could be used to help expand their trade and services to areas of the Quebec region that are more economically impoverished, and help to reduce the economic disequilibrium that they have.
