Do the math

Election day in Ontario is just ten days away now, but the electorate has still not seen anything that could be called a coherent plan from any of the major parties, particularly as regards fiscal policy.  The leftist-by-conviction NDP, led by Andrea Horwath, and the leftist-by-convenience Liberals. led by Kathleen Wynne, have been strewing wildly expensive promises all across the Province like so much confetti.

The right-wing Conservatives, led by the populist Doug Ford, haven't been much better and, unlike the other two parties, haven't even issued an actual policy manifesto.  Ford is basically making it up on the fly -- cheaper gasoline, cheaper power, even cheaper beer.  They all admit they will be running budget deficits right from the get-go, with only Ford making even the vaguest noises about eventually balancing the budget.  In the most indebted non-sovereign jurisdiction in the world, voters are being offered more of the same.

But wait!  Here's Kathleen Wynne with a new pledge, one that she describes as the "anchor" of her party's entire platform.  Ready?  Wynne promises that a Liberal government will "introduce legislation forcing any budget surpluses to be directed to pay down the province's debt".  That sounds good for about half a second, and then you realize that it's more or less equivalent to legislating that 2+2=4.

If a government runs a surplus in any given year, then by definition the public debt burden goes down, either because you actually pay off some of your liabilities or because you accumulate cash on the other side of the balance sheet.  It may be that Wynne is trying to say that if a future Liberal government realized it was about to run a surplus, it would refrain from micturating the money away on new spending, but that's not the same thing.

Of course, Wynne's pledge is meaningless not only logically but also practically.  Wynne and her predecessor, Dalton McGuinty, presided over a doubling of the Provincial debt over the past decade, and if the Province's dogged Auditor-General is correct, the real picture is even worse than the government is willing to admit.  The idea of Ontario running a budget surplus and starting to pay down debt is a purely theoretical one, whoever gets elected next week.  Wynne's pledge is entirely meaningless, but if the opinion polls are to be believed, she won't get the opportunity to put it into practice anyway.