In Wynne’s world, auditors are fools
Just as the Ontario election prepares to officially start next week ( as if the parties are not already campaigning hard) the incumbent Liberals and Premier Kathleen Wynne are getting slammed by the province’s auditor general. Bonnie Lysyk, a frequent critic of the government’s accounting practices, noted last week that the government’s claim that next year’s deficit would be only — only! — $ 6.7 billion, is utter bunk. The auditor general said the real number would be closer to $ 12 billion, with much of the added debt hidden on the books of various provincial agencies, rather than on the province’s primary balance sheet. All told, Lysyk found, the province would add a whopping $ 70 billion in new debt over the next three years, with no realistic plan back to balance.
It was damning stuff, from an expert, particularly since Lysyk also said that Wynne’s government had deliberately tried to deceive the auditor general’s office through chicanery. But the Liberals just brushed it off. It was an accounting dispute, they said.
The Liberals are increas-ingly desperate. Their recent taxpayer- financed spenda- palooza has generated no detectable improvement in their polling numbers. The campaign of Ontario Pro- gressive Conservative Leader Doug Ford has suffered a few missteps, but nothing near the disaster the Liberals must be praying for nightly. On the premier’s left flank, the affable Andrea Horwath of the provincial NDP seems energetic and determined. It’s bleak for the Grits.
Perhaps that’s why they increasingly seem to be campaigning in an alternate universe. The auditor general shows your budget to be a sham? Dismiss it as a minor disagreement. Doug Ford running a more stable campaign than expected? Take time out of a health-care announcement to warn darkly that he’s a clone of Donald Trump. This week, a union front group allied with the Liberals — Working Ontario Women — was called out for running an advertisement containing outright lies about the Conservative record. Yet the Liberals are presenting themselves as a trustworthy and transparent alternative to the Tories, apparently forgetting that just last month a senior Liberal staffer was sentenced to prison for helping arrange the destruction of public records that embarrassed the government.
That’s the reality voters are seeing, but no doubt Wynne sees it all very differently. Chalk it up to an accounting dispute.