Many Ontarians will pay a steep price if Doug Ford keeps his budget promises
Jim Stanford is Harold Innis Industry Professor of Economics at McMaster University.
Ontarians watched with fascination as provincial Progressive Conservatives demonstrated their proficiency at counting leadership ballots. Now, voters are waiting to see if the PCs are any better at counting billions of dollars in their fiscal platform.
Indeed, Doug Ford’s most pressing policy task is to present a convincing fiscal plan for the imminent election. He needs a budget true to his aw-shucks conservative populism – but also one that adds up at the bottom. This will not be easy.
Mr. Ford says he’ll ditch Patrick Brown’s People’s Guarantee, which carefully costed out the first three years of Conservative budgets. Mr. Brown’s platform was surprisingly centrist: hoping to convince voters that a PC government would be moderate and caring. But as soon as Mr. Ford threw his hat in the ring, he started jettisoning key planks – starting with the proposed carbon tax (meant to raise $10-billion over those three years).
Mr. Ford’s platform will have neither cap and trade nor a carbon tax. That throws climate policy into confused limbo, and leaves Ontario out of step with other jurisdictions (including neighbouring Manitoba, where a conservative government is using carbon revenue to cut income taxes). More troublesome for Mr. Ford is the $10-billion hole it leaves in the PC fiscal plan.
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