PCs ask public for some advice on money

Survey asks for suggestions on how to cut about $20 billion in spending — but not jobs

The Ontario Progressive Conservatives are facing up to the need to cut billions in spending to keep their campaign promises, appealing to the public for ideas through an online survey.

They’re calling it A Consultation for the People, open now until Sept. 21.

The Tories and Premier Doug Ford were elected on pledges to spend more and to cut taxes, and to balance the budget before long without cutting any public jobs, and the math on that’s hard to square. Like, maybe $20 billion worth of hard.

The previous Liberals admitted to a deficit of nearly $7 billion. The auditor general said that’s about $6 billion short, because she disputed an accounting manoeuvre the Liberals used that made the books look better. The Tories appointed that “commission of inquiry,” led by ex-B.C. premier Gordon Campbell, to see whether there was anything else like that; the Campbell panel’s report was due Thursday, though the Tories say not to expect to see it publicly until they’ve fully grasped it over the next couple of weeks.

Then there’s the spending on nursing homes, mental health, transferring costs from electricity bills to the provincial treasury, and on and on.

“It is important that Ontarians have a direct say in how government can improve the effectiveness and efficiency of provincial programs and services, while avoiding job cuts,” Treasury Board president Peter Bethlenfalvy said in launching the survey.

The meat of the thing is a page inviting you to submit three ideas for making the provincial government cheaper or better, which any government should be happy to hear.

(The Liberals used to do something like this every year when they’d ask people to pitch ideas for the provincial budget and put them up for votes. They sought tiny suggestions, things that would cost no more than $1 million, once, but they flapped the results around as if they were a big deal. Bigger proposals, like merging some of Ontario’s four distinct sets of school boards, regularly got pitched and just as regularly got cut.)

The new survey also asks you to say how well you think the government provides various kinds of services, how important they are to you and how often you use them. The categories are massive, so much so that that part of the questionnaire isn’t likely to produce very useful responses.

How good a job does the government do at economic development, for instance? Before you answer, “economic development” includes “job creation, small business, trade and Indigenous employment and economic development, transportation and infrastructure.” It’s a lot.

Just “transportation and infrastructure” is a big category, considering that it includes both provincial highways and urban transit lines, sewage treatment and new hospitals. Now let’s throw in work on exports, defending NAFTA, promoting domestic industry, and contributing to prosperity for First Nations people both on and off reserves. Out of four, how important is this to you? How well do you think the government does it?

Another category, “general government and other services,” includes everything from liquor control to ServiceOntario. Can I average out my grim views on the LCBO’s liquor monopoly and how easy it was to renew my licence plate sticker this month? A third cluster includes DriveClean tests, provincial parks, mining regulations and energy.

How often do you use the justice system — a category that here includes family law, jury duty, the Ontario Provincial Police, criminal trials, jails and parole officers? In one sense, maybe you have a lucky life in which you never deal with any of them. In another, the justice system is working for you around the clock regardless whether you’ve ever personally called the police or been to court for anything.

The Progressive Conservatives famously got elected without producing a costed platform — one that itemized budgets they’d have to cut so they could afford the multibillion-dollar tax cuts and improvements to things like health care that they promised. Ford promised to cut or redirect about one-sixth of government spending, accounting for only a small portion of it by cutting environmental programs paid for by the province’s cap-and-trade revenue. Besides giving voters a preview of what was to come, such a reckoning would have forced people within the party to agree on their priorities even before showing anything to the public. They never had to.

Now that they’re in government, they need to decide whether justice or the economy or health care or education is most important. The government’s not releasing Ford’s “mandate letters” to ministers, the way Kathleen Wynne did. The opposition says maybe the Tories have a secret agenda. Another possibility: They aren’t really sure just what their agenda is yet.

So, er, if you have any advice for the Tories on how to look after the hard stuff, this is the time.

It is important that Ontarians have a direct say in how government can improve the effectiveness and efficiency of provincial programs and services, while avoiding job cuts.