Ford fakes deficit concerns to justify brutal spending cuts


Ontario Premier Doug Ford. Photo: Premier of Ontario Photography/Flickr

We can see Doug Ford is a man who is comfortable swinging an axe through some of our most cherished social programs.

But to truly understand Ontario's smiling premier -- to look deep into his soul, as it were -- we must consider why he is being so brutal.

He insists he has no choice, that the Ontario's mounting deficits force him to cut the province's budgets for health care, education, child care, libraries, legal aid, student loans, flood control, tree planting and anything else that moves, grows or matters in our lives. (A similar claim of necessity was made by the debt-plagued New Zealand government in the 1990s when it ordered the shooting of a newborn hippo at the zoo, explaining it couldn't afford to expand the pen.)

Nevertheless, preventing debt from spiralling out of control sounds like a plausible explanation for Ford's spending cuts -- until one notices his tax cuts. That's when it becomes clear the premier is, well, lying.

Let's not forget that a deficit is simply the shortfall in the province's budget -- and it can be the result of too much spending or too little revenue.



So pointing to Ontario's ultralow social spending as the cause of Ontario's deficit is about as credible as Donald Trump's claim that his inaugural crowd was bigger than Obama's.

If not spending, then what is driving Ontario's deficit?





All this suggests Ford is faking his concern about the deficit.

He harps on it to justify his spending cuts, but actually makes it worse by collecting less tax revenue. (Sadly, the media rarely focus on the province's revenue shortfall, helping Ford perpetuate the myth that deficits are always a spending problem.)




In an op-ed in the Star earlier this week, Ford's Treasury Board president Peter Bethlenfalvy insisted the government's measures aren't driven by ideology, just by math.

Well, here's some different math. Another approach would be to actually address the province's real deficit problem: its revenue shortfall.


It could be called a budget "for the people." But in this case, it would actually be true.


Photo: Premier of Ontario Photography/Flickr


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