Sousa fires at NDP for ‘major mistake’

Liberals claim that math error in campaign platform would cut funding for ‘valued programs’

The NDP platform has an estimated $3-billion-a-year hole in it due to a “major mistake” in crunching the numbers, the Liberals charge.

Taking aim at the New Democrats, who appear on the rise in recent polls, Finance Minister Charle Sousa said the party made “a significant, sizable and undeniable mistake” in crafting its 97page campaign manifesto.

The NDP insists no error was made, but the Liberals claim it’s an unintentional “blunder.”

“As a result, they have defunded billions of dollars that flow to valued programs,” Sousa told reporters Monday at t the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades Training Facility in Downsview.

“It’s a failure of basic competence that

leads to real consequences and it means the NDP are running on a program of careless cuts and unfunded promises,” said the Mississauga South Liberal candidate.

The dispute stems from the NDP apparently ignoring a chart in the March budget entitled “key changes in the medium-term expense outlook since the 2017 budget.”

“This chart includes both new items in the 2018 budget and all major investments in the last year and their platform misstates this chart, assuming it includes only new commitments in the new budget of 2018,” Sousa said.

“To make it simple, they missed a whole year. They built their program based on the wrong budget year. It means they are not just eliminating our future program commitments; it means they are also eliminating existing programs.”

As a result, the Liberals say the NDP’s

“Change For The Better” platform wwould over three years cut $800 million from f the seniors’ healthy homes pro- gram; $300 million from women’s shel- ters; $300 million for new guidance counsellors; $300 million for special education; $220 million from combating the opiod crisis; $170 million from apprenticeship programs for skilled trades; $137 million from the legalized cannabis implementation strategy; $85 million from the Northern Ontario Heritage Fund; $63 million from the jobs aand prosperity fund; $62 million from autism services; and $33 million from the Toronto-Windsor high-speed rail project, among other things.

In a statement, Western University economist Mike Moffatt, who is director of policy and research at the Liberal-friendly Canada 2020 think tank in Ottawa, said Sousa’s “analysis is accurate.”

“It is clear the NDP based their fiscal plan off Ontario's 2018-19 budget and then carved out all spending since the tabling of the 2017-18 budget and not just the new expenditures in the 2018-19 budget,” Moffatt said.

“The carve-out means some programs already in place would not be funded under the NDP plan,” he said. NDP Leader Andrea Horwath count- ered that if elected June 7, her government would “definitely not” be making the cuts the Liberals have outlined.

When asked if it’s possible that the NDP got the numbers wrong, Horwath insisted “not at all.”

“In fact, we’ve had the parliamentary budget officer that used to work in Ottawa check our numbers, and he said they a are solid,” Horwath said, referring to Kevin Page, who ensured the costing of the t platform was reasonable, but did not opine on whether there are any cuts.

“I can tell you this — anybody who thinks that the Liberals’ numbers are sound hasn’t been paying attention to wwhat they’ve been doing at Queen’s Park f for the last number of years,” she added, referring to “highly critical” reports of the government’s budget numbers by both the province’s auditor general and financial accountability officer.

The NDP platform, however, uses the government’s accounting and figures — not those of the two fiscal watchdogs, which dispute including $11 billion in joint-sponsored pension plan assets to the province’s bottom line.