Ford denies breaking promise to reveal fully costed platform

Doug Ford denied breaking his promise to deliver a fully costed election platform Thursday even as political rivals and economists criticized the Progressive Conservative plan as vague and fiscally imprudent.

Speaking in London, Ont., a week before the provincial election, the Tory leader defended his party’s decision to quietly release a compilation of campaign promises without saying how they’d be paid for.

“I’m not breaking my promise at all - we have a dollar figure right beside every single item,” he said. “We’re the only party that’s fiscally responsible. We’re the only party that is accurate.”

Ford has promised to hire an auditing firm and find billions of dollars in “efficiencies” if elected premier, but the Tory plan doesn’t indicate what those would be.

He also said a Tory government would run deficits for the first two or three years, but the plan doesn’t spell out the size of those deficits or a path to balance.

Some economists said the plan leaves many questions unanswered, particularly when it comes to tackling the province’s deficit, which the governing Liberals have projected to be $6.7-billion in 2018-2019.

Don Drummond, an economist at Queen’s University, said voters who value fiscal discipline should find the Tory plan “very worrying.”

“The only source of savings in this is this four per cent acrossthe-board spending cut, which delivers $6 billion a year,” said Drummond, who was previously appointed by the Liberals to examine government spending. “I think that itself is highly dubious, but let’s just assume that that’s in place. These spending initiatives far exceed $6 billion.”