As the Ontario PC leadership contest draws to a close, I have a confession to make. In a weird way, I kind of envied the candidates. They have all been able to promise absolutely anything, and if asked how they were going to pay for it, they all had the same easy answer — eliminate government waste.
You remember government waste? The billions upon billions of dollars that opposition parties always tell us governments have lying around, being misspent every year. Hasn’t everyone seen the movie Dave, where a fictional U.S. President, played by Kevin Kline, easily finds hundreds of millions of dollars for the homeless by letting his accountant friend (played by Charles Grodin) take a quick look at the government’s books?
Aren’t government and waste synonymous?
The PCs seem to think so. Their initial platform, the People’s Guarantee, promised to find close to $3 billion in savings. And talk of eliminating government waste and inefficiency was a favourite subject during the two major leadership debates, particularly as candidates scrambled to explain how they will replace revenue lost through their common pledge to cancel Patrick Brown’s carbon tax.
Caroline Mulroney said she would use the auditor general’s reports to find at least a billion dollars in waste. Christine Elliott bragged that her past career as an auditor would help her “audit Kathleen Wynne’s economic mess.” Doug Ford, meanwhile, explained how easy it would be to shave a couple of percentage points off Ontario’s $140 billion budget to find all the savings you need, proudly proclaiming that there is so much waste at Queen’s Park that “you could sneeze and find billions of dollars.”
Oh, how it brings back memories.
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