Doug Ford is touting the great myth of the anti-tax crusaders, a seductive story that simply isn’t true.
The new Ontario Progressive Conservative leader says if elected premier he will deliver billions of dollars in tax cuts. He will tackle the province’s debt. And he will do all this mostly by weeding out government waste.
Ford is promising a free lunch. Yet experience, including Ford’s own political past, dictates there is no such thing. There will be costs. And while we cannot be sure of exactly what form they will take, we can be confident they will be high and cruel.
Ford says he would cut at least $10 billion in income and sales taxes, a promise held over from the “People’s Guarantee,” the carefully costed platform of Ford’s predecessor, Patrick Brown. To cover the lost revenues, Brown planned to impose a carbon tax, much of which would have been returned to voters. The province’s books, Brown said, would be balanced by 2020. Ford, too, promises balance. But while Ford likes the tax cuts, he doesn’t like the carbon tax (or any other tax), leaving a $10-billion hole in his budget.
Not to worry, says the self-proclaimed stopper of gravy trains. Ford insists the better part of the shortfall – about $6 billion – could be covered through the elimination of so-called inefficiencies. Unfortunately, those who promise savings through waste-elimination rarely say where, specifically, this waste can be found — and Ford is no exception. He wants us to take it on faith.
That would be a mistake, as anyone who recalls Ford’s tenure at Toronto city hall can attest. Had it not been overshadowed by spectacular scandal, the mayoral administration of Doug’s late brother Rob, in which Doug played a central role, might now be remembered first and foremost for its spectacular fiscal folly.
The Fords famously came to power vowing to save the city billions of dollars a year by eliminating waste at city hall. They hired the consulting firm KPMG to find inefficiencies and recommend areas to cut. The consultants were largely stumped. Perhaps, they suggested, the city could afford to close a few libraries.
When residents revolted in the face of this threat, the administration backed off and instead demanded each department cut 10 per cent of its budget. Ten per cent across the board without any apparent rhyme or reason, even though the KPMG report suggested this would in every case cut into core services – core protections for low-income people and the homeless, core infrastructure projects, core economic initiatives. And it did. There simply wasn’t enough gravy. There never is.
For an anti-government populist such as Ford, who thrives on the anger of the electorate, promises of tax cuts funded through efficiency-finding hold a visceral power. We all remember Bev Oda’s $18 orange juice, Jane Philpott’s pricy limo rides. And much has rightly been made of e-Health and ORNGE, cancelled gas plants and other boondoggles.
Certainly such misspending is an insult to voters and should be reined in. But it would take hundreds of millions of Oda’s fancy OJs to fill the hole in question. Even the costlier one-off boondoggles can’t be the basis for enduring tax cuts. The greatest cost to government of such spending scandals is that they undermine trust and give credence to those who would foist upon voters the lie that tax cuts are a free good.
Ford won’t find $6 billion in waste, just as he and his brother did not find the promised efficiencies at city hall. Instead, he will have to raise the money the old-fashioned way: taxes, debt or cuts to services. And given his outspoken disdain for taxes and debt, it’s no great mystery what path he would pursue.
The question, then, is what Ford might choose to cut. Presumably not the health-care system, the costs of which are rising as the population ages and which he has promised to improve. That takes about half of the province’s budget off the table. Will he cut Ontario’s already inadequate welfare system? He could gut it and still not fill the gap.
As Nathan Laurie, a former member of this editorial board, pointed out in an opinion piece this week, Ford could eliminate the entire justice system and still barely cover two-thirds of his promise. There’s no way to cut $6 billion in spending without great pain.
Let’s be clear about what’s really on offer here. Ford is asking us to play a sort of austerity lottery. Because Ford won’t tell us, we can’t know which jobs will be lost, which programs deep-sixed, which services cut. At least Tim Hudak, the PC leader who went down in flames in the last provincial election promising to fund tax cuts by slashing 100,000 public-sector jobs, had the courage to spell out the human costs of his proposal.
Ford insists his tax cuts won’t hurt. They will. Let’s hope we never have to find out how bad.
https://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorials/2018/03/28/doug-fords-false-fiscal-promises.html
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