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One of the knocks on Doug Ford is that he’s not a real conservative.
Just look at his spending!
Ford’s government has tabled another budget with “record setting” spending. They have another deficit; they are delaying their return to a balanced budget.
How is this different than the Liberals?
These are all valid questions, and I have often taken the Ford government and the Premier himself to task for their policies that I thought weren’t true to conservative principles and that includes on spending.
To be fair though....
The knock that some of my colleagues use that every budget is showing “record setting” spending is a bit of a cheap shot. Of course government spending is going up, the population is growing and so is inflation, just to keep services at current levels will require an increase in spending.
So, the question becomes has the government kept spending in check while allowing for growth in line with population growth and inflation. For the most part, the answer for the Ford government on non-COVID program spending has been yes.
Sometime in the last year I looked at the growth in health spending and found that it had gone up 34% since Ford took office. Turns out that population and inflation growth was about 31% in that time frame which meant that there was a small increase in health spending, the rest was just keeping up with increased costs.
What’s interesting about the Ford government’s handling of finances though is their ability to keep deficits and debt payments in check.
That may sound ridiculous considering that last October they were predicting a $1.5 billion deficit for the 2025-26 fiscal year and are now projecting a $14.6 billion deficit – just $12.6 billion if you take the contingency fund away. There have been a lot of changes since then though including the outcome of the American election, the tariff threats, the tariff arrivals, the trade war.
That’s all having an impact on the economy, so, as I wrote in my column for the Toronto Sun, things could have been a lot worse. Which led me to ask, what would the deficit and debt payments look like under Liberal rule?
We can’t say for sure what they would look like under the Ontario Liberals but if Ontario’s projected deficit was the same percentage of government program spending as the federal government’s deficit, then we’d be looking at an $18 billion shortfall.
On the debt charge front, Ontario is projected to spend $16.2 billion servicing the debt compared to the federal government spending $54.2 billion. If the provincial debt charge was the same as the federal percentage of program spending, 10.8%, then the provincial debt charge would be $23.3 billion.
Remember, the just elected Carney government has promised to spend even more money than the Trudeau Liberals and that means even bigger deficits and bigger debt payments in Ottawa.
Of course I’d like to see lower spending from Queen’s Park, but right now there is little appetite for balanced budgets and fiscal hawks. In a time of uncertainty, people want the government to spend, rightly or wrongly and governments that are successful at the ballot box listen to voters.
So for now, I’ll just have to be happy that Ontario has Peter Bethlenfalvy in charge of the finances. He may spend too much, like every finance minister, but he has never lost control the way they have in Ottawa.
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