Wynne spends like a drunken sailor

The new tax hike and fire sale of public assets Premier Kathleen Wynne announced Thursday are what you would expect of a government desperate for cash that doesn’t know how to reduce spending.

Wynne imposed a $ 100- million- ayear tax on the beer industry that will start hitting consumers two years from now when the brewers are allowed to pass on their added costs to the public.

In return, Ontarians will be permitted to buy singles and six- packs of beer ( no wine) in 450 grocery stores, perhaps by Christmas, an absurdly inconsequential benefit in return for yet another Liberal tax grab.

Wynne is also selling a 60% stake of Hydro One to the private sector.

That’s the provincial utility that charges its hapless customers up to thousands of dollars extra on their hydro bills and then refuses to give the money back, according to Ontario Ombudsman Andre Marin.

Wynne estimates the sale will raise $ 9 billion which, under Ontario law, is supposed to pay down the electricity system’s $ 27 billion debt.

But Wynne’s going to change the law to funnel off $ 4 billion for transit and infrastructure.

That’s in addition to the billions of dollars annually, also supposedly for transit and infrastructure, that Wynne is poised to grab from Ontarians through her cap- and- trade (read cap-and-tax) plan and 1.9% payroll pension tax for workers without a pension plan.

The Liberals also claim, with zero evidence to back it up, that their selloff of Hydro One could bring electricity rates down, while the opposition parties charge it will drive them up.

In yet another fire sale that the Ontario Liberals used to go berserk over when they were announced by the Mike Harris Conservative government of 1995 to 2003, Brampton Hydro One will be carved off from the main utility and sold to a consortium of energy distributors for an expected price of $ 607 million.

The most alarming thing about Wynne’s announcements was that there wasn’t a word about reducing the province’s job- killing $ 10.9 billion deficit and almost $ 300 billion debt.

That’s because the Liberals have no idea of how to do it, or inclination to do it, even if they could.