Almost time to break election promises Ontario voters to choose between equally unbelievable platforms By: Editorial  Posted: 7:00 PM CDT Monday, May. 28, 2018

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 27/05/2018 (2307 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The race to Ontario’s June 7 election approached an exciting finish this week with the Progressive Conservatives and the New Democrats roughly neck-and-neck in the polls and the ruling Liberals trying to limit the damage. 

Next week’s winner will enjoy the fruits of victory and will then start breaking promises. The tough thing for Ontario voters to figure out now is which promises will be broken first.

Italy last weekend may have provided a foreshadow of Ontario’s near future. Two anti-European Union parties more or less won Italy’s March election and were preparing to take power with an economy minister who wants to take Italy out of the European common currency and the EU. When President Sergio Mattarella intervened and told them they could not do that — Italy would cease to be credit-worthy without the backing of the European Central Bank — they raged against him and asked for new elections. A government of technocrats will run Italy for the rest of this year.

Election promises will collide with the realities of government in Ontario, too — under any of the possible governments. Kathleen Wynne’s ruling Liberals promise free daycare for all children from age two-and-a-half years until kindergarten. Andrea Horwath’s NDP promises free daycare at government or non-profit centres for all households below $40,000 of annual income. Doug Ford’s Conservatives promise to rebate 75 per cent of child-care expenses up to $6,750 per child, together with tax cuts for everyone.

One of these parties will take power. After a few weeks in office, the new government will announce something along the lines of, “Heavens above! We’ve looked in the treasury and it’s empty. We’re still going to do what we promised, but it will take a little longer.”

Ontario does not have a Sergio Mattarella to tell a government publicly what is possible and what is not, but it does have bankers who will explain privately about the realities of marketing Ontario bonds.

Ontario is now running a budgetary deficit of $6.6 billion — $12.5 billion if you count pension plan deficits and hydro subsidies — to add to its provincial debt of $311 billion, which is an eye-popping 38 per cent of GDP. The Liberals and the NDP plan to keep borrowing, but they show no curiosity about the discipline lenders will enforce upon them if they keep driving the province deeper into debt.

The Progressive Conservative solution is to forecast economic expansion that will increase government revenues despite the promised tax cuts and hydro rate cuts. Businesses will expand because they will be so happy to have Mr. Ford as their premier.

All the parties promise to expand hospitals and schools and build new urban transportation links. But in Ontario, as in Italy, governing is a different thing from writing election promises. The promises are driven by what a party thinks the public wants to hear and limited only by what they think people will believe. Government policy, once the election is over, is driven partly by those election promises, but also by the demands of loyal supporters and the evident needs of the moment, limited by the willingness of lenders to keep buying the government’s bonds.

The election promises, therefore, are just a first draft. The hard choices will come later, when the realities of power intervene. Ontario voters are trying to compare the lists of promises, but they’ll only learn much later what path they chose for their province.