Ford pledges inquiry into Ontario finances
Doug Ford is not one for nuance and subtlety, and Thursday offered no exception as he sought to exploit a damning report from Ontario’s auditor general.
The watchdog’s conclusion a day earlier that the Liberal government had understated the provincial deficit by billions of dollars pointed to “the biggest financial scandal in Canadian history — that I’ve ever seen,” the Progressive Conservative leader said.
To address it, Ford promised to call a commission of inquiry to get to the bottom of the provincial accounts, saying its mandate would be similar to a 2004 investigation into the federal Liberal sponsorship scandal. “We cannot trust anything about the Liberal estimates or projections,” he told a news conference in Toronto. “Their budget is no longer worth the paper it is written on.”
But when asked about his own plans should he win the June 7 election, Ford was characteristically less explicit.
He revealed for the first time that he would not initially balance the budget if elected, but would move in a “modest and responsible” way to eliminating the deficit. Beyond that, he offered scant detail of how much his own platform would cost, or how it would affect the government’s bottom line.
“Until we get in there, we can’t start guessing, because every single day there is a new financial scandal with this government,” Ford said, before the media questioning was abruptly cut off.
His caution may be understandable — the Tories’ promise to eliminate 100,000 public-sector jobs in the 2014 election is widely seen as key to their loss.
The pre-election finance report auditor general Bonnie Lysyk issued Wednesday was, ironically, required under a “transparency and accountability” law brought in by the Liberals themselves in 2004. It concluded the deficit for this year and the following two had been underestimated by at least $5 billion annually, as the government employed unorthodox accounting methods and deliberately froze out the auditor.
On Thursday, Finance Minister Charles Sousa again dismissed her criticisms as another round in a long-standing dispute over how the books are presented to the public, and nothing scandalous. And he scoffed at Ford’s idea of a commission of inquiry.
“We have an independent auditor and now Mr. Ford is suggesting that we audit the auditor. She’s already done her job,” said Sousa.
Ford had already announced that he would order an external audit of the government’s books if he becomes premier, and struggled to explain how an inquiry would be different — or why it was necessary after the auditor general’s report.
He said his two promised reviews would operate “hand in hand,” and compared the proposed inquiry to one conducted by Sheila Fraser — who then held the federal equivalent to Lysyk’s job, and was not an outside investigator.
Fraser exposed the sponsorship scandal, where advertising contracts were awarded to Liberal-linked firms for minimal work. Her probe resulted in the much longer Gomery Commission, whose $14-million cost well exceeded the extent of improper contracts it identified.
A source in the Ford campaign stressed later his commission would be like Fraser’s, not a public judicial inquiry with witnesses.
Meanwhile, Ford has made some pricey commitments, including almost $2 billion in tax cuts and adding 15,000 long-term-care beds over the next five years, at an unspecified cost. He has also pledged to reduce provincial spending by four per cent — about $6 billion — but has yet to specify how he would do it.