Finance minister stuck in Ford’s muddle
Peter Bethlenfalvy insists he’s the man with a plan.
Mostly he’s the man in the middle. As Ontario’s finance minister prepares to deliver the provincial budget on March 26, he remains caught between his own bottom line and economic hard times. For his job is to juggle Premier Doug Ford’s populist politics with his own buttoneddown Bay Street background.
Meeting the Star’s editorial board this week, Bethlenfalvy cast himself as a pragmatic steward of the provincial treasury. Yet as Ford’s longest-serving — and surviving — finance minister, he presides over a kaleidoscope of tax-cutting, freespending, crowd-pleasing impulses from the premier that never seem to add up.
While pretending that he couldn’t scoop himself, the finance minister cheerfully telegraphed that his budget will maintain the gas tax holidays first brought in as temporary measures by Ford’s Progressive Conservative government years ago. They are now a part of the permanent political landscape as voters focus on affordability — and Ford’s Tories aren’t alone in seeing the signals.
The week before, Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew sat in the same chair and told the editorial board why his NDP government had also cut the provincial tax on gas and diesel. Tax-fighting is clearly catching among parties of both left and right, I conceded.
Bethlenfalvy didn’t miss a beat, noting that Kinew’s new finance minister, Adrien Sala had reached out shortly after taking power last year to compare notes: “He called me and asked for advice; and notwithstanding he’s from a different stripe, I gladly gave it to him.”
Despite their shared tax cuts, they are hardly on the same wavelength.
Manitoba’s premier told the Star he strongly supports the federal pharmacare plan — hatched by the governing Liberals with NDP support. Bethlenfalvy, by contrast, refused to be pinned down — neither supportive nor opposed.
Just straight down the middle. “I’m not going to argue against the merits of it, but I definitely want to see the details,” the finance minister said, choosing his words carefully.
“In principle, we’re always open to something that helps Ontarians and helps Canadians,” he added. “We’re not instinctively saying no, and we do want to look at what the program looks like and the sustainability.”
But at what point does prudence become hesitance? When does due diligence become undue delay?
In our meeting, Bethlenfalvy spoke eloquently about his political role models. But in politics, if you want to make a difference, diffidence won’t do it.
At some point you need to pick a lane. Whether on protecting the Canada Pension Plan, embracing a national child care plan or endorsing a belated pharmacare plan, he sometimes seems reluctant to play a leadership role — or bring his premier along.
To his credit, Bethlenfalvy talked up Ontario’s long-term needs in health care, education and immigration, along with federal-provincial collaboration — all delivered with avuncular reassurance to the assembled journalists and editors. But for this finance minister, actions — and numbers — speak louder than words.
He talked up Ontario’s critical infrastructure plans — the subways and highways, hospitals and schools that make up the province’s capital stock, all of which require steady infusions of investment capital and human capital to maintain our talent pool.
But unless he starts spending some of his own political capital — by persuading and pushing the premier to make the long-term investments in education and health care that bankroll our human capital needs — Bethlenfalvy will remain a prisoner of the short-term election cycle he long criticized before entering politics.
In his old job at a Bay Street credit rating agency, Bethlenfalvy fearlessly called out politicians’ contradictions. Now at Queen’s Park, the finance minister embodies that incongruity, faithfully carrying out Ford’s impecunious agenda of unaffordable hydro subsidies and tax cuts amounting to billions of dollars a year while shortchanging health and education.
He is passionate about the importance of immigration for Ontario, not merely as the son of immigrants but as a finance minister mindful of the province’s looming labour shortages and economic needs, stressing that it “keeps me up at night more than anything.” Bethlenfalvy worries about the “demographics of the aging population — it’s relentless, it’s getting worse and worse.”
Bethlenfalvy then launched into a critique of the recent federal crackdown on runaway student visas and work permits (overcrowding was putting pressure on local housing stock). When I pointed to his own government’s refusal to properly fund colleges and universities — which is what prompted so many campuses to rely excessively on higher tuition from so many foreign students in the first place — the minister ducked.
But the question kept coming back, notably when Torstar chair David Peterson, a former Liberal premier — and ex-chancellor at the University of Toronto — reminded Bethlenfalvy that “on post-secondary, everybody in the system believes they’re in a crisis.” After years of tuition cuts and freezes, without the government coming close to making up the shortfall, how can Ontario meet its future labour force needs if it refuses to invest in them now?
The minister pivoted again — criticizing the new federal cap on student visas, even though it’s a response to a problem of the province’s own making. He defended the tuition shortfall as an affordability question, even though the real question was why he couldn’t come close to finding the funds to make up the difference.
What else could the finance minister say, except that he’s the man in the middle — of a muddle.