A POISONED CHALICE WILL BE INHERITED
WHOEVER WINS THE ONTARIO ELECTION WILL BE IN FOR A ROUGH RIDE
I’d love to hear what Kathleen Wynne has to say about Bonnie Lysyk when no one but her most loyal operatives are around to hear.
I bet Ontario’s premier knows some really harsh words, and I bet she uses them. Lysyk has been a persistent thorn in her side, as have other independent agencies tasked with keeping a non-partisan eye on government finances and actions. The auditor general, the financial accountability office, the ombudsman — they’ve all issued repeated alerts about the Liberals’ fast and loose approach to practices and regulations that don’t suit them.
The Liberals’ response has been to attack and belittle the very offices set up to keep them honest. When auditor general Lysyk ruled that the government was running promotional ads for itself in the guise of public service announcements, Wynne reduced her vetting powers to a rubber stamp. When Lysyk highlighted problems in an expensive government power project, Wynne’s energy minister at that time, Bob Chiarelli, suggested the poor woman was unable to understand such complex big-boy matters — even though Lysyk previously spent 10 years with Manitoba Hydro.
Wynne is ignoring opposition calls to fire her current energy minister, Glenn Thibeault, over a critical report on the government’s smart meter program and patronizing comments he made about the auditor general.
Undaunted, Lysyk soldiered on, issuing a charge this week that seems finally to have hit home. Just days before an election is to be called, the auditor general delivered a report indicating the government’s budget figures can’t be trusted. They’ve been fiddled so badly with accounting tricks that the conclusions can’t be treated as valid. The deficit won’t be $6.7 billion as claimed, it will be $11.7 billion, says Lysyk. It will be another $12 billion next year, and the year after that.
Ontarians were already showing signs of alarm at the flood of borrowed money flowing through the Liberals’ hands. To be told they didn’t know the half of it can’t help but come as one more unwelcome surprise. Their consternation can only be increased by the fact an independent watchdog would feel worried enough to openly accuse the province’s elected leadership of such blatantly dishonest shenanigans.
Not only did the Liberals cook the books, Lysyk reported, they did their best to hide it from her. “The government knew we would have an issue with this accounting,” she reported. “And there was intent to keep us out of the picture.”
“They took a risk and fortunately, I would say, for all the legislators and for the citizens, my staff is pretty strong and we figured out what was going on.”
The report is one more problem the Liberals can blame on themselves. The requirement that the auditor general review the books before an election was introduced by former premier Dalton McGuinty as a means to embarrass the Progressive Conservative government he had just replaced. The hanky-panky Lysyk uncovered flows from the Liberals’ need to disguise the degree to which they’ve become dependent on borrowed money to finance extravagant election pledges. And that reliance on debt results from 15 years of spending that has left the province $312 billion in debt, with $1 billion a month going to interest payments alone.
Now all three parties — not to mention the taxpayers of Ontario — are stuck with the result, and some heavy recalculations may be in order to deal with the fact. Wynne’s Liberals faced a tough enough task convincing Ontarians it was worth an additional $6 billion yearly shortfall to finance the daycare and pharmacare programs they promised in their latest budget; but if the real gap is $12 billion, with no end in sight, the convincing becomes that much more difficult.
Doug Ford, the Progressive Conservative leader, adopted an appropriately sober air as he assessed the situation. It may be, he suggested, that a Tory government wouldn’t be able to balance the budget as quickly as he had figured. He would, however, make sure voters knew who to blame: “We will initiate a full, independent, end-to-end commission of inquiry … to investigate and recommend options for how to restore integrity in the government of Ontario’s financial reporting,” he announced. Lysyk’s findings, he said, amounted to “one of the largest financial scandals in Canadian history.”
“What we are witnessing is a betrayal of the public trust,” he said. “We cannot trust anything about the Liberal estimates or projections. Their budget is no longer worth the paper it’s written on.”
That may be so, though Lysyk has been sending up rockets of alarm about Liberal practices through much of her tenure as auditor general. It’s just that none of them hit home like this week’s revelation. While Ford can be forgiven for taking advantage of the opportunity to flagellate the Liberals, it underlines just how precarious a situation the next government will find itself in. There can be no pretending Ontario can any longer afford the sort of spending practices it has become accustomed to. Whoever becomes premier will be forced, at some stage, to close down the cash dispenser until a semblance of order can be restored.
That won’t go over well with an array of Ontario interest groups: the doctors who have been without a contract for four years and are keening for a Liberal defeat; the teachers’ unions that have benefited from regular Liberal handouts in return for re-election support; the police and firefighter unions that skilfully exploit flabby negotiating rules for ever-bigger settlements. They’ll all want more, from a government that won’t be in a position to give it — at least, not if it wants to act responsibly.
It’s a poisoned chalice the next government will inherit. The Liberals did the poisoning. Ford and NDP Leader Andrea Horwath may want to reconsider their eagerness to drink from it.
$1 BILLION A MONTH GOING TO INTEREST PAYMENTS ALONE.