Duncan doubts Tories can hit budget target

Ontario’s finance minister is casting doubt that the federal government can balance its budget in 2015 and is taking Ottawa to task for not giving the province’s citizens better treatment in getting employment insurance.

“They’ve changed their target balance date four times now,” Dwight Duncan said of Thursday’s budget from his federal counterpart, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty.

“They’ve missed their deficit targets twice,” added Duncan, who de- livered Ontario’s austerity budget on Tuesday with a plan that won’t balance the province’s books until 2018. The gap in approach provided the provincial Progressive Conservatives with fodder as parties jockey over the odds of passing Duncan’s fiscal blueprint in Ontario’s minority Legislature.

“It demonstrates the difference between a government that actually understands what the priorities have to be and one that doesn’t seem to get it,” Tory MPP and finance critic Peter Shurman (Thornhill) told reporters at Queen’s Park. Duncan said he was disappointed Flaherty’s budget did not allow jobless Ontarians to get employment insurance as quickly and receive the benefits as long as residents of other provinces — long a sore point for Premier Dalton Mcguinty. “Only 34 per cent of unemployed Ontarians are able to access employment insurance versus 54 per cent in the rest of the country,” Duncan told a news conference. “We’ll continue to press that case as well . . . welfare costs go up because fewer of our people can ac- cess employment insurance and are on it for a shorter period of time, on average.” The impending loss of about 19,000 federal civil service jobs mainly in the Ottawa area is also a concern, even though they will largely be eliminated through attrition, Duncan added. But it was the future postponement of Old Age Security and Guaranteed Income Supplement payouts to Canadians that proved the biggest red flag for Ontario’s finance minister in a budget he otherwise credited for taking a “mea- sured approach.”

Delaying payments to age 67, from the current 65, starting in 2023 threatens a serious pinch for the middle class, making it tougher for people to maintain their lifestyles or afford expensive long-term care as they age and become infirm, Duncan warned.

“We’re all going to live longer, care costs are going up, this is going to put enormous pressure on families and on health and welfare budgets,” Duncan predicted. “They’re going to turn to governments, and it’ll be provincial governments.”