PC Leader Ford pledges inquiry into Liberal finances
Doug Ford is not one for nuance and subtlety, and Thursday offered no exception as he sought to exploit a damning report from Ontario’s auditor general.
The watchdog ’s conclusion a day earlier that the Liberal government had understated the provincial deficit by billions of dollars pointed to “the biggest financial scandal in Canadian history — that I’ve ever seen,” the Progressive Conservative leader said. To address it, Ford promised to call a commission of inquiry to get to the bottom of the provincial accounts, saying its mandate would be similar to a 2004 investigation into the federal Liberal sponsorship scandal. “We cannot trust anything about the Liberal estimates or projections,” he told a news conference in Toronto. “Their budget is no longer worth the paper it is written on.”
But when asked about his own plans should he win the June 7 election, Ford was characteristically less explicit.
He revealed for the first time that he would not initially balance the budget if elected, but would move in a “modest and responsible” way to eliminating the deficit. Beyond that, he offered scant detail of how much his own platform would cost, or how it would affect the government’s bottom line.
“Until we get in there, we can’t start guessing, because every single day there is a new financial scandal with this government,” Ford said, before the media questioning was abruptly cut off.
His caution may be understandable — the Tories’ promise to eliminate 100,000 public-sector jobs in the 2014 election is widely seen as key to their loss.
The pre-election finance report auditor general Bonnie Lysyk issued Wednesday was, ironically, required under a “transparency and accountability” law brought in by the Liberals themselves in 2004. It concluded the deficit for this year and the following two had been underestimated by at least $5 billion annually, as the government employed unorthodox accounting methods and deliberately froze out the auditor.
On Thursday, Finance Minister Charles Sousa again dismissed her criticisms as another round in a longstanding dispute over how the books are presented to the public, and nothing scandalous.
“We have an independent auditor and now Mr. Ford is suggesting that we audit the auditor. She’s already done her job,” said Sousa. “The people of Ontario should realize and appreciate that the work being done by government and the civil service and professional accountants is accurate.”