Deep cuts to budget.

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TORONTO — Ontario’s economy has become the little engine that couldn’t and only seven years of spending cuts deeper than what Mike Harris brought in can keep the wheels turning.

Economist Don Drummond’s long- awaited checkup on the province’s fiscal health has found an under-performing economy that cannot sustain current public services without amassing a $30.2-billion deficit, a net public debt of $411.4 billion and annual debt interest payments of $19.7 billion by 2017-18, the year in which the Dalton Mcguinty government hopes to balance the books.

“This will strike many as a profoundly gloomy message. It is one that Ontarians have not heard, certainly not in the recent election campaign, but it is one this commission believes it must deliver,” his report says.

Cutting spending outside of health, education and social services by 2.4% a year until the budget is balanced in 2017- 18 is “tough but doable” but would be “unprecedented” in post-war Canadian history, Drummond said.

“It’s somewhat deeper and a lot longer” than the austerity regime Harris enacted in the mid- 1990s, he said — which lasted a mere three years.

Much of what the three main political parties at Queen’s Park campaigned on in last fall’s election are unaffordable. Full- day kindergarten and a tuition break — big ticket items that we can’t afford right now, the report says.

“All those parties were based on unrealistic economic assumptions and some election platform promises that weren’t costed out,” Drummond said.

The commission was instructed not to recommend a tax hike, but Drummond acknowledged “we bent that a little bit.”

Instead of boosting tax rates, the report says the province could realize about $ 2 billion in “enhanced revenue” through measures such as a crackdown on tax avoidance, increasing user fees to recover the full cost of the service and changing the way alcohol, gasoline and tobacco are taxed to include inflation.

But the focus of the report is undoubtedly on the billions Ontario spends each year.

Drummond recommended immediately ending the $1-billion a year Clean Energy Benefit, increase grade school class sizes, make teachers work longer before retirement, tie seniors’ drug benefits to income, stop bailing out struggling pension plans, amalgamate hospitals, and phase out business subsidies.