The Ontario government’s 2023 fiscal plan is defined by massive spending and a top-down approach that feels awfully Liberal
Leafing through the Ontario government’s latest fiscal plan, the thought occurs: What distinguishes this as a conservative, or at least Conservative, or even a Doug Ford budget? How is this different from anything, say, a Kathleen Wynne government might have produced?It’s true. In the fiscal year just started, 2023-24, theproviding services to Ontario’s 15.4 million citizens, or roughly $12,000 per capita. Adjusting for inflation, that’s about the average since it came to power. Under Ms.
The same holds if you look at spending as a share of GDP. Under Mr. Ford – even leaving out the lockdown year, fiscal 2021 – it averages 17.6 per cent. Under Ms. Wynne: 17.2 per cent. Under Rae: 16.4 per cent., this is not a tribute to the government’s fiscal discipline. The way revenues have been flooding in, it would have to have been building missile systems toThe government collected $200-billion in revenues from all sources in the year just ended.
Anyway, the budget deficit, as such, has become a meaningless target. Successive Ontario governments have moved so much borrowing off-budget that to get a half-way accurate picture of the province’s finances you have to look, not at the annual budget deficit, but the accumulated net debt, and how much has been added to it. So where the budget shows deficits of $2.1-billion last year, $300-million this year, and a surplus of $2.
The same sense of déjà vu pervades the entire document. There is no plan to improve the province’s lagging productivity growth – again, certainly nothing that a Wynne government would not have thought of. An Ontario Made Manufacturing Investment Tax Credit? Why? Why only for manufacturing? Why this, and not an actual tax cut?
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