Talking big, delivering less

The Ontario government has tabled its latest budget and, right off the top, it includes some really big numbers. It’s a record high $187 billion, with a whopping $38.5-billion deficit.

As a sign of the topsy-turvy pandemic times we’re in, Progressive Conservative Premier Doug Ford hailed this as “an outstanding budget” and “great news” for people and businesses.

Finance Minister Rod Phillips followed that up in the legislature by saying: “Your government will do whatever it takes to get you through this.”

People and businesses, suffering through a pandemic that shows no sign of abating, really do need Ford and Phillips to fulfil that promise.

Unfortunately, the Ford government has a nasty habit of talking a big game and delivering much less amid a blizzard of numbers that don’t always add up.

The government’s first budget in 2019 was billed as a big spending document, but was full of hidden cuts, including particularly appalling ones to public health.

Then came its fiscal update in March, which also claimed to spend big — this time on measures to support people and businesses through the COVID-19 crisis. But, again, there was billions less in new pandemic-related spending than it first appeared.

The government’s troubling habit of overpromising and underdelivering is back on display in this budget, which outlines three years of spending.

After the pandemic exposed horrors in Ontario’s long-term-care system, Ford promised to provide seniors in those homes with four hours of daily hands-on care by 2025.

Ontario, he said, will be the first province to offer this “gold standard” of care.

Thousands of personal support workers and nurses will need to be hired to make that longoverdue care happen at an estimated cost of $1.6 billion a year.

But that number isn’t in the budget document, nor is any other number allocated. So there’s no way to know how quickly, or slowly, the government intends to meet this commitment.

That means we can’t have an informed debate about the plan or even hold them to account on what they claim they’ll do. It’s just a big blank, and it’s hard to have faith in a government’s commitment to something when it doesn’t bother to allocate any funds for it in a three-year spending document.

This budget also sets aside billions in various “contingency funds.”

According to Phillips, this gives the government the necessary flexibility to react quickly in these uncertain times, and there’s some truth to that. But setting aside so much in unallocated funds — more than $5 billion in the next fiscal year and $2.8 billion in the one after that — also means the government is boosting the size of the budget without necessarily spending all the money.

Given that the independent Financial Accountability Office has already pointed to billions in unused contingency funds, that’s cause for real concern.

It brings into question whether the government is “sparing absolutely no expense in the fight against COVID-19,” as Ford claims. Or whether its trying to squirrel away funds for deficit reduction later on. Funds that could be put to better use immediately in the hands of people and businesses who are suffering now.

Or, indeed, in the hands of the government ministries that fund hospitals, schools, children and social services and the justice system.

There were major cost pressures in all those areas well before COVID-19 came along and the spending plan holds them to such minimal annual increases that those challenges will only be made more difficult.

Every budget includes a sprinkling of targeted measures and this one includes $200 payments to families with children up to 12, a home renovation tax credit for seniors, and a “staycation” travel rebate.

As they say, every little bit helps. But Ontarians can be forgiven for feeling those are small measures in the midst of a crisis that has created such economic turmoil.

So far, the bulk of the big support measures that are holding Canadian families and businesses together though the pandemic are funded by Ottawa. This budget, for all its big numbers, doesn’t change that.

The government’s troubling habit of overpromising and underdelivering is back on display in this budget, which outlines three years of spending