An "economic note" from the Montreal Economic Institute of Laval University concludes that the Canadian province of Quebec's subsidies for the aluminum producer Alcan add up to $300,000 CAD per job each year for 35 years.

In February, the Quebec government initiated a subsidy to Alcan as part of an aluminum smelter project in the Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean region. To create 740 jobs, the government is giving up $2.7 billion in revenues in exchange for a $2-billion investment by Alcan, according to the study's authors, Gérard Bélanger and Jean-Thomas Bernard. This support to Alcan fails "to take account of basic economic logic and will harm Quebec's economic development for decades to come unless the government follows a different path," say the authors in a press release.

The authors note that Quebec has offered the subsidies in the hope that it will result in economic spin-offs; however, they counter that the same money would pay higher dividends if invested in other ways, such as Quebec's highway network, which they estimate would generate far more in direct and indirect economic spin-offs than the $2 billion pledged by Alcan. The study is available on-line in French from Laval University.