Incentives might cut government waste

Re No mandate for deep cuts, Editorial, Oct. 4 You write in your editorial that “the bulk of provincial spending goes to services that Ontarians care deeply about.”

While we do care deeply about our government services, Doug Ford is right that there is wasteful spending, and it’s not just at the provincial level.

As long as each department strives to get its budget renewed for the next year, there will be wasteful spending in government.

In the 1970s my father sold office furniture. He would receive massive orders right before the provincial government’s fiscal year ended, and was told to deliver them to storage warehouses.

When I was a city camp employee in the 1990s, I was sent out to buy hundreds of dollars of art supplies in the last week of camp. The camp director was blunt: “If we don’t spend our budget, it gets cut for next year.”

The situation hasn’t changed. Many of us have heard stories like this.

The solution is not to cut vital programs. It is to offer incentives to government departments to cut waste.

For every dollar that is saved from the previous year’s budget, 10 cents should be divided among all employees in that department in the form of a year-end bonus.

Within a couple of years we will see a dramatic reduction in wasteful spending and the excess funds could be used for debt repayment, tax cuts, transit expansion — you name it.

That’s better than filling warehouses with office furniture. Jason Shron, Thornhill The first code word for privatization was monetization. Now it’s modernization and the holiest word in conservative policy: competition.

We’ve all seen what happened to our hydro bills when the provincial Tories eliminated public, non-profit power and replaced it with a for-profit system with a so-called competitive electricity market.

There’s a reason why we have a public sector, with schools and hospitals. There’s also a reason why we have regulations — to protect people from the vagaries and excesses of the market.

Ford believes he has to get everything out of the way of the private sector, and let the invisible hand of the market control our public sector. Paul Kahnert, Markham