The NDP is warning that Ontario Finance Minister Vic Fedeli's announcement Friday that the province has a $15-billion projected deficit this year sets the stage for “deep and painful cuts across Ontario.”
In a speech to the Economic Club in Toronto on Friday, Vic Fedeli said the province had chosen to adopt the accounting practices used by the auditor general in reviewing the recently defeated Liberal government's budget and projections, and found greater deficits than had been reported.
As a result of the new Progressive Conservative government's adjusted take on the province's books, an independent commission tasked with examining Ontario's finances concluded the Liberals ran a $3.7 billion deficit in the last fiscal year rather than balancing the budget as claimed, Fedeli said.
The commission also found the Liberals had overestimated their revenues for this fiscal year, reduced a reserve fund by $300 million and claimed $1.4 billion in cost-cutting measures that weren't spelled out.
Once those were factored in, the projected deficit for 2018-19 rose to $15 billion from the $11.7 billion predicted by the auditor general, the government said.
Fedeli would not give a timeline for getting the province back in the black, though the Progressive Conservatives promised during the election campaign that they would return to balance by the end of their mandate.
“What Fedeli made clear on Friday is that nothing is safe in Ontario,” said NDP Finance critic Sandy Shaw, in a press release.
“Our hospitals, our children’s schools, our transit systems – everything our families need and count on are at risk in Ford’s hands.”
In what the NDP calls “an act of political theatre,” Fedeli announced that after Doug Ford hired embattled former British Columbia premier Gordon Campbell to weigh in on Ontario’s books, Campbell found that the deficit was worse than stated.
The unsurprising move is not unusual from a new government desperate to justify its agenda, the NDP said.
When the Ontario Liberals won the 2003 election, they claimed to have found a new $5.4 billion deficit left behind by the previous government, said the press release from the NDP. That deficit was used to justify a new health tax.
“Fedeli’s words this morning were chilling,” said Shaw. “Calling on every last person in our province to brace for cuts reminds people of the last time the Conservatives were in power. They fired more than 6,000 nurses, closed 28 hospitals and shut down over 7,000 hospital beds.
“The Liberal government left Ontario with a legacy of long hospital waits and hallway medicine, crumbling schools and jam-packed transit. What Ford is threatening is to take us from bad to worse – not only not fixing what’s wrong nor delivering new relief, but cutting even deeper.”
Shaw said this claim by the Conservatives sheds a new light on a key difference between the NDP and the Conservative’s plans. Andrea Horwath and the NDP proposed raising income tax collected on individual income above $220,000 by one per cent, and an additional one per cent on earnings above $300,000.
Meanwhile, Doug Ford proposed cutting taxes for the very wealthiest Ontarians, the NDP said.
“It doesn’t have to be this way,” Shaw said. “By asking the wealthiest individuals to pay their fair share, we can dig this province out of the mess the Conservatives and Liberals have made, while we invest in and expand the services people depend on most to build a great life.
“It’s not too late.”
-With files from Canadian Press
