Ontario Liberals need to address the debt

T here is much trouble to be found in Ontario Auditor General Bonnie Lysyk’s annual report, but what’s really troubling is her projection the province’s debt could reach $325 billion by 2018.

The number, revealed Tuesday, comes from the assumption the governing Liberals won’t have a balanced budget until the 2017-18 fiscal year. And that they’ll continue to post annual deficits.

Members of the Liberal leadership have said as much. Both Premier Kathleen Wynne and Finance Minister Charles Sousa have promised a balanced budget by that time, but not one minute sooner.

Indeed, Wynne’s government has yet to submit a balanced budget, and her predecessor’s government rarely spent less than what it took in.

Deficits have become habit-forming for Queen’s Park. It’s not only a Liberal problem. Progressive Conservative and New Democrat governments have added to the debt pile. Consider Ontario’s debt was $31.5 billion in 1985. When Dalton McGuinty became premier in 2003, the debt stood at $138.8 million. It’s since more than doubled.

With this disappointing history, it’s almost understandable the Wynne Liberals would find cause for celebration in the most modest of gains. Earlier this year, Sousa was doing cartwheels because the projected budget deficit for 2013-14 was half a billion dollars less than forecast. Yet the deficit was still north of $10 billion.

Such chronic negligence has added up to one monstrous debt — a problem this Liberal government has never had the courage to face head-on. In Quebec, the Liberal government of Philippe Couillard has started an aggressive program of cost-cutting. Yet Quebec’s budget deficits and its overall debt are not near the immensity of Ontario’s.

Lysyk’s annual report should be a wake-up call to the Wynne Liberals to take action, but that’s not likely to happen.

The Liberals have already committed to a balanced budget in three years, hoping in the meantime for a fiscal miracle to make things better. They refuse to make the difficult decisions.

The cost to service Ontario’s debt is already excessive — more than $10 billion a year. And that’s based on the $267-billion debt in place at the end of the last fiscal year.

What will it cost to service $325 billion? Whatever that sum is, we can’t afford it.