The Ontario Legislature returned on Monday after a 14-week winter break . By Thursday, the government tabled its annual budget, including a 77% increase to the deficit. Debate will surely be rushed because, naturally, there is no time for scrutiny.
Finance Minister Peter Bethlenfalvy is warning of harder days ahead . You can hear the excuse-making machinery warming up for the coming days. Tariffs. Global instability. Donald Trump. Bad weather, perhaps.
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Province in decline
The deeper problem is that Ontario has been in decline now for decades . Under Doug Ford, that decline has only accelerated.
Since 2018, Ontario’s per person output has slipped from above the Canadian average to below it. Real wages have grown at half the OECD pace and roughly one third of the American. Unemployment sits at 7.6% , now persistently above the national rate, with youth unemployment at generational highs. Ontario’s tax burden is higher today than it was under Liberal Kathleen Wynne. The 20% middle class income tax cut promised in 2018 never arrived .
It is an odd performance. One does not usually set fire to the kitchen and then muse about the rising temperature.
No wonder the government’s self promotion budget now runs north of $100 million a year . Since 2018, the Ford government has spent about $450 million on advertising, enough to have doubled the number of MRI machines across Ontario.
Ontarians face bad economy
In the same budget that talks about protecting Ontario, the government is shifting OSAP from grants to loans . Someone had to pay after this government blew up the higher education system with its international student fiasco and funding freezes. Young Ontarians face a generationally bad economy, yet the Ford cabinet must have concluded that protection is for other people .
Not all is bad, even when it’s insufficient. The one year HST break on new home construction is welcome, but it should be permanent. Ontario has loaded new housing with some of the heaviest taxes in the developed world. In parts of the Greater Toronto Area, local development charges alone can add more than $100,000 to the cost of a home. The province built just 62,561 homes last year, less than half its own target , even after padding the numbers with student dorms and long term care beds.
The budget also ignores Ontario’s problem of cost disease , where it now costs two to three times what it should to build almost anything. That is why growth has stalled. We cannot build enough housing, transportation infrastructure, or energy to expand the economy. Without growth, we are stuck, unable to properly fund services like health care and education, and unable to lower the burden on taxpayers.
Lack of urgency
What is most striking is the lack of urgency. A government serious about growth would treat this as a central economic problem. Instead, it spent its holidays flooding the zone with billion-dollar announcements on vanity projects, especially around Toronto’s waterfront and Ford’s own Etobicoke backyard. Ontario Place. The Science Centre move. Convention centre expansion. Ad-hoc plans for Billy Bishop airport. All while warning Ontarians about restraint and pushing the province over $500 billion in debt.
Ford is governing Ontario on a whim, where scrutiny is a nuisance and public money follows political convenience instead of accountable systems. Ontario today feels like a developed society saddled with a tired third-world government.
This is the real story of this budget. Ford’s eighth, and it barely confronts any of Ontario’s real problems. Just another bill for taxpayers in a province that refuses to face its own decline.
— Eric Lombardi is exploring a run for Ontario Liberal Party leader. Learn more at EricForOLP.ca.