Marit Stiles and Bonnie Crombie need to come up with new attack lines for Doug Ford because claiming he is cutting spending just isn’t true.
The province released their full and audited spending documents Thursday and cutting is a word that simply doesn’t apply.
Total spending by the Ford government for the fiscal year that ended on March 31 went up by $7.8 billion compared to 2022-23.
Spending on government programs went up by more than $9 billion, including an extra $7 billion on health and an extra $2.7 billion on education. All of those spending increases were offset by the province’s debt charges coming in at $11.4 billion instead of the expected $14. 1 billion in interest charges.
In fact, Ontario spent $1 billion less in interest payments on provincial debt than was spent in fiscal year 2022-23.
Now, according to the province’s public accounts, which were signed off as accurate by the province’s auditor general, health spending went up by $7 billion or 8.9% while education spending went up by $2.7 billion or 7.8%.
The claims of Ford cutting core services, repeatedly made by Stiles and Crombie, and slavishly repeated by much of the media, simply aren’t true.
Health and education spending are both well above inflation and population growth combined. That doesn’t mean claims of cuts won’t be made – claiming Conservative politicians are cutting services is lazy, easy politics for left-wing politicians.
“Doug Ford’s cuts to education funding have led to larger class sizes, fewer EAs and support staff, a shortage of mental health professionals, and cuts to special education supports and programming,” NDP education critic Chandra Pasma said in a statement last week.
“Doug Ford has gutted our healthcare system,” Ontario Liberal Leader Bonnie Crombie said in a statement earlier this week.
Total spending between the time the Ford government took office and now is up by 34% at a time when the Bank of Canada tells us inflation is up by 20.6%. There are no cuts to spending by the Ford government and at this point in time, it has nothing to do with COVID-19 or pandemic spending – that is all long gone.
The idea that Doug Ford is some kind of fiscal conservative, someone who will slash budgets, is a laughable concept. Ford spends with the best of them, he just doesn’t get any credit for increasing the province’s annual spend.
This has been clear from Ford’s first budget in 2019 and all the way through until now. There has never been a desire to cut spending, especially in terms of core spending.
RECOMMENDED VIDEO
The best that can be said about Ford in terms of fiscal conservatism, and this is faint praise, is that at least he hasn’t raised taxes. In fact, Ford often brags about increases spending in this province by more than $50 billion without ever having raised taxes.
“We’ve never increased a tax in six years,” Ford said last week during a news conference in Windsor.
Ford likes to claim he runs the only government “that has never raised a tax.”
It’s not clear if that claim is true, but at least he can claim to have boosted spending without raising taxes and he’s come close to balancing the budget. Ontario logged a deficit of just $600 million in fiscal year 2023-24 or less than one-third of one percent of the total provincial budget.
Essentially, the current provincial deficit is a rounding error.
There is still room to improve and surely in a government spending more than $200 billion per year, savings of more than $600 million can be found without impacting core services. Let’s hope that a year from now, the government is announcing that the budget is balanced or in surplus and that taxes are coming down.
That’s something that would make real fiscal conservatives happy for a change.