ONTARIO ON A BENDER
LATEST LIBERAL BUDGET INCLUDES THE SORT OF PROMISE ANY ALCOHOLIC WOULD RECOGNIZE
Ontario’s Liberals brought down their latest budget Wednesday with the sort of promise any alcoholic would recognize.
They vowed to get off the sauce — in this case the addiction to deficit spending — but not just yet. Later … like, maybe six or seven years from now. In 2024, or 2025. That would be two elections from now, but no, really, they mean it. They really want to quit. They’ve tried so many times before … and last year they even managed to go 12 months on the wagon. Yes, when Finance Minister Charles Sousa finally swore off red ink last year he gave his word the province would stay sober for years to come. Then, just two weeks ago, he fell spectacularly off the wagon, admitting that — unable to kick the illicit thrill of spending borrowed money — he’d be back at the bar this year, sticking billions more on the tab. It’s not that he wants to, you see … he really, truly wants to quit. It’s that he has to. He has no choice. It’s not his fault. And if you’ll just listen for a moment, he has a really good reason to explain it all.
Alcoholics, gambling addicts, junkies … they’re all experts at defending their addictions. There’s always a good reason: stress at the office; troubles at home; a rotten break they didn’t deserve; the unfairness of life. Sousa the debt addict poured out the excuses like the best of them. “Balancing the budget is not an end in itself,” he declared, after years of insisting a balanced budget was the ultimate goal of a government dedicated to proving its fiscal responsibility. No, now there are other things that have to take priority: like free daycare, and more dental benefits, and pharmacare for seniors. And besides, it’s out of his hands: “economic uncertainty” made him do it.
As with so many addicts, the excuses are self- serving and full of holes. Unemployment is low and the economy has been on a growth spurt for several years. A responsible government would have used the opportunity to put aside money for leaner times. But not the Liberals — addiction is addiction, and even in the best of years Kathleen Wynne’s government found reasons to argue that ongoing deficits were absolutely essential. That’s how the debt was doubled over just a decade. Now that the cycle may be ending, they want to use the danger of a downturn to claim that, once again, there’s no option but to borrow. That’s the way it works: in good times you ought to borrow to celebrate, in bad times you need a loan to dull the pain. There’s never, ever a right time to get sober.
So off the Liberals will go, on a binge of heroic proportions. A daycare package that suddenly becomes affordable almost 15 years after the party came to power. A new drug and dental program that somehow never occurred to the finance minister until 10 weeks before the next election. Money for seniors to hire a cleaning lady or shovel their snow, because every caring government should shovel the snow for its retirees.
The “uncertainty ” t he Liberals foresee fits neatly into their need to disavow responsibility for their actions. It comes from factors no provincial government could control: higher interest rates; worries about trade, the chaotic political situation engulfing Canada’s giant customer to the south. Once again, it would have been nice for the government to have prepared for this sort of eventuality when it had the time and the opportunity — as any responsible administrator would have done — but somehow Wynne never got around to it. Now she plans to tackle these ambitious goals just when the capacity to handle them is looking strained.
Higher i nterest rates mean higher payments on that colossal debt. More bor- rowing means increasing the tab already causing so much strain. The trade dangers could hit the job market and affect investment decisions, weakening t he r e venue stream needed to carry the load. What the Liberals want to do is to double the bet at a time it’s already paying heavily to cover past losses; Wednesday’s budget calls for deficits of $ 6.7 billion this year, $ 6.6 billion next year and $ 6.5 billion the year after that. These are the same years Sousa claimed last year would absolutely, definitely be in the black. The debt, $ 325 billion this year, would hit $ 360 billion by 2020-2021. The cost of carrying it — the money Ontario would be spending on interest rather than hospitals, schools or transit — would grow to $16.9 billion, or $1.4 billion a month. Alberta’s NDP government is under fire because its own spending binge projects interest charges of $ 4 billion-$ 5 billion by 2024. Ontario would be spending that amount every 12 weeks.
Anyone will tell you it’s hopeless to try to reform an addict until they’re willing to face up to their problem, and the Liberals aren’t there yet. Deeply unpopular, down to potentially their last few weeks in office, they cling to their fantasies. “This is not election-cycle decisions that we’re making, these are longterm in scope,” claimed Sousa, as if a budget delivered just weeks before an election couldn’t possibly have anything to do with that election. No, no, seriously — the Liberals want you to believe that they’d have made this dramatic about- face, this retreat from previous assertions, even if they weren’t badly trailing the opposition and needed a near- miracle to survive. As if they won’t be touting these giveaways constantly on the campaign trail. And as if they weren’t thrown together precisely for that reason.
You’d have to be drunk to believe such piffle. If Wynne and Sousa believe it, they’re deluding themselves. This Ontario government is staggering around flushed, befuddled and red- eyed, claiming it’s stone sober and has every right to go careening down the highway at the wheel of the provincial money- wagon. It needs an intervention before it does more damage to the innocent.
SO OFF THE LIBERALS WILL GO, ON A BINGE OF HEROIC PROPORTIONS.