All three parties spending like drunks

Provincial leaders give lip service to debt while promising to spend more

During the last televised leaders’ debate, 19-year-old Martin Badger, a first-time voter from Burlington, posed an audience question to the three party leaders that’s probably troubling other Ontario voters.

How do you plan to pay for the additional services that you’re promising? Badger asked.

Unless you’re dipped, dyed and butt-branded in party colours, the answers weren’t exactly comforting. The reality is they’re all spending like old-time drunken sailors, tossing free programs and tax cuts around as if the election is an extended shore leave binge.

NDP leader Andrea Horwath kicked off by acknowledging that people across the province, including herself, are concerned about the accumulated debt, now pegged at about $325 billion and rising.

To help pay for her promises, which include drug coverage for everyone, lower electricity rates, hiring 4,500 new nurses and getting rid of “hallway medicine,” Horwath said she’s “going to ask” the richest people and corporations to pay a “little more” in taxes.

What Horwath didn’t specifically mention is she also plans to borrow $25 billion to pay for these and other elections promises. Oh, yes, and then she’ll balance the books and stop deficit spending. Once that’s done, Horwath previously told The Spectator, the New Democrats “will take any surpluses … and apply them to the debt.”

Given Horwath’s snowballing promises, the likelihood of budget surpluses seems remote, despite the party’s rosy predictions. And saying you’re going to “ask” the rich to pay a little more borders on weasel words. If the NDP really is asking, then the rich are presumably free to say no. That ain’t going to happen.

For his part, Progressive Conservative leader Doug Ford basically repeated what he’s been saying before the campaign began. He intends to pay for his promises by finding four cents of savings on every dollar spent by the province and by bringing in outside auditors to find more “efficiencies.”

That’s a tall order, particularly since the platform-free Ford is promising to cut hydro rates, lower gas prices and taxes, create 15,000 new long-term care beds and invest almost $2 billion in various health and housing services, which, of course, means less revenue and more expenses. He also intends to run a deficit for at least the first year.

Finally, Liberal leader Kathleen Wynne said her party has deliberately decided not to balance the books so it can continue to “invest in people.”

Liberal promises include more money for hospitals, more free tuition for post-secondary students, free preschool child care, and free prescription drugs for children, young adults and seniors. In total, it amounts to more than $20 billion of new deficit spending. Still, in a woebegone gesture to fiscal responsibility, Wynne also promises to introduce legislation directing budget surpluses be used to pay down the $325 billion debt.

Servicing that debt now amounts to $12.5 billion in annual interest payments. That makes it the fourth largest expense in the provincial budget, after health, education, and children’s and social services.

To put those yearly interest payments in perspective, that’s the cost of a dozen Hamilton LRT systems. It’s more than double what the province presently spends on home and community care, and almost three times what it spends on long term care. Every month one billion tax dollars that could be going toward programs and services are being used to pay interest on a debt that just keeps getting bigger and bigger.

Ford is fond of calling it the “largest subnational debt in the entire world.” No question it’s a monster, one the Liberal government in the last decade grew by $168 billion. It’s now constitutes money borrowed for big capital projects and, increasingly, for covering operating expenses over and above government revenue.

This is what comes from living beyond your means, trying to be all things to all people and now trying to buy as many votes as possible. If you care about getting Ontario’s fiscal house in order, between the three parties, there’s really not much choice on June 7 for either first-time voters or grizzled vets.