Wynne at any cost

Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne is desperate.  With a Provincial election coming on on June 7, her Liberal Party stands third in the opinion polls, behind the Doug Ford-led Progressive Conservatives and the left-leaning NDP, and her personal approval rating is well south of 20 percent.

So the past few weeks have seen a daily parade of expensive spending promises, for health care, pharmacare, dental care, child care, and on and on.  Voters have been subjected to a shameless parade of Liberal propaganda on television and in the print media, thinly disguised as public service announcements so as to stay onside with the Province's toothless election spending laws. And today we got the bill, in the form of Finance Minister Charles Sousa's 2018 budget.

And quite a bill it is.  The various promises sprayed around like confetti by Ms Wynne add up to new spending of C$ 20.3 billion over the next three years -- though listening to the torrent of pledges in the last few days, you could have gotten the impression that the total would be much more than that.  There's a tax on "higher income earners" to help pay the bill, but today's really big news is that Ontario is heading back into budget deficit, with projected shortfalls of about $ 6.5 billion for each of the next three years, and no return to balance until 2025.

This is a remarkable change of stance by the Wynne team,  Sousa had pledged for many years to bring the budget back into balance ahead of the election and for the subsequent two years, and has claimed to have achieved just that, though the Provincial Auditor loudly disputes that.  Just a few weeks ago Sousa signalled the change, saying that the Liberals were now planning to use the Province's restored "fiscal strength" as the basis for a return to deficit spending.

The "fiscal strength" of which Sousa brags is best captured by the fact that Ontario is currently the most indebted non-sovereign jurisdiction in the world, a dubious honour taken from California a couple of years back.  Wynne and Sousa love to extol how well the Provincial economy is doing, which one might think would offer an opportunity to chip away at the debt a little, but there's an election to be won.  It appears that the Liberals think they can win it the old fashioned way: bribing the voters with their own money, or rather with their children's and grandchildren's money.

Wynne is a formidable election campaigner, but this is probably not going to work. Exhaustion with the Liberals, after almost a decade and a half in power, has a majority of the electorate looking for a change.  Wynne is personally disliked as a result of her and her predecessor's track record of failure -- reform of the education system that seems to mean there's always a teachers' strike on the go somewhere, poisonous relations with the Province's doctors,  privatization of the power utility Hydro One in the face of expert advice, and so on.

And then there's today's budget, which must seem like manna from heaven for Doug Ford.  This kind of fiscal laxity is exactly the kind of thing that he rails against most effectively on the stump.  There's plenty of evidence that the electorate is ready to listen: a majority of people polled about the recent (deficit-laden) budget at the Federal level said they would rather have seen the government set out a path towards fiscal balance.  It is very likely that today's document will receive the same response.

The prospect of the thuggish Doug Ford as Premier is entirely unappealing, but Wynne and Sousa may well have made that prospect all but unavoidable with today's budget.