Bring back Drummond
Doug Ford, the new leader of the Ontario Progressive Conservative party, is brimming with determination to bring Ontario back to fiscal health and prosperity. In contrast, Kathleen Wynne, the current Liberal Ontario premier talks about voters facing a stark choice in the next election and her different vision for Ontario consisting of “investment in people,” which in earlier times was simply called government spending.
In setting out these contrasting visions, the premier may have forgotten some inconvenient facts — such as how the Ontario Liberals had a policy of eliminating two regulatory requirements for every new one ( introduced before Donald Trump introduced a similar type of policy last year in the U.S .). She also seems to have forgotten a report once commissioned by the Ontario government to set Ontario on a path to fiscal sustainability and economic growth.
In 2011, the Ontario Liberal government, l ed by Dalton McGuinty and with Wynne in cabinet, tasked the Commission on the Reform of Ontario’ s Public Services with producing a report that commonly became known as the Drummond report, named for the highly respected economist and civil servant that led the team that created it. Despite its age, the report still has a lot of relevance to what Ontario needs today.
The report, released the following year, included recommendations in just about every area of public service in Ontario including power infrastructure, labour relation, liability management, health and social spending. There was emphasis on accountability and value for money, which could perhaps helped prevent some of the billion- dollar spending boondoggles that emerged later in the Ontario liberal government’s reign.
Drummond was a longtime federal civil servant who had served both Conservative and Liberal governments, and so the report was pragmatic rather than ideological. Nevertheless, the document largely set out a plan to restore Ontario’s fiscal finances, including eliminating the deficit and improving future economic growth rates. Balancing the budget would require tough decisions on spending including reduced benefits for some. Given that many benefit programs were not sustainable in their current form, the government would need to decide how best to target benefits to those who need them most.
The report recognized that after a few years of significant fiscal restraint that would be required for deficit elimination there might need to be some reprieve, given challenges such as weak productivity growth. But not much of a reprieve: Spending simply could not return to recent trends and public services would need to be affordable.
Despite commissioning the report, the Liberals subsequently essentially put the recommendations deep in the storage vaults of Queen’s Park, never to be consulted again. Six years later, if a different government takes over, it should dig the report out and dust it off. It would be better late than never, and Ontarians will be better off for it.
Of course, the challenge for returning Ontario to fiscal health and prosperity are now that much greater. Ontario’s public debt is projected to be more than 30- per- cent larger in 2018 than in 2012. The province’s credit ratings have been repeatedly downgraded since then. Business costs have been rising, due t o new taxes and costs like the significant minimum- wage hike, and regulators in areas such as financial regulation have been stretching their mandates.
Mr. Drummond did not believe Ontario’s finances yet constituted a crisis back in 2012. His view may have changed. The real difference in vision voters will see between the Liberal government that commissioned the report and the Liberal party running in the upcoming Ontario election is that Wynne is clearly afraid of making the tough decisions she knows must be made.
A NEW ONTARIO GOVERNMENT SHOULD DIG THE REPORT OUT AND DUST IT OFF.