It has been eight months since Doug Ford was elected Premier on a mandate of being “For the People.” After a little over half a year of finding efficiencies and sticking up for the little guy, it’s worth examining what this government has really given to the people.
For the people!—a deficit reduction from $15 billion to $14.5 after the previous government understated the deficit by around $6 billion. Or, is the current deficit now $12.3 billion?
While Ford claims it’s now $14.5 billion, having inherited a $15 billion-dollar deficit, Ontario’s Financial Accountability Officer, Peter Weltman, said it’s actually $12.3 billion and that this government is overstating the deficit. But, what would he know? It’s not like it’s his full-time job to keep track of this.
What we do know is Ontario’s credit rating was recently downgraded, partly because of Ford’s decision to eradicate $2 billion dollars’ worth of revenue for the province.
For the people!—no plans to fight climate change. Where did most of that lost revenue come from? It came from getting rid of Ontario’s plan to reduce greenhouse gases through cancelling the cap and trade program. Cap and trade would have put a limit on the amount of pollution that companies could emit. It generated close to $2 billion to fund infrastructure and social programs.
This program was also created with Quebec and California, so that companies from each jurisdiction could buy in. This would have created a more stable carbon price as a result and allowed for more companies to enter the market. However, things such as stable pricing and easier market entry clearly wouldn’t help Ontario be “open for business.”
For the people!—reduced OSAP funding. With government revenue short $2 billion, certain less-important programs, such as OSAP, just weren’t sustainable. Projected to cost almost $2 billion by 2020-2021, subsidizing Ontario students’ education pales in comparison to removing ways of fighting climate change.
Included in this change was the removal of the six-month grace period for students before they started acquiring interest on their loans. Luckily for students, Ford also cut tuition province-wide by 10 per cent, which has only left a dent of $360 million in the budgets of Ontario universities and $80 million for colleges.
This means that the average student will save around $700 yearly, making the resulting larger class sizes, less on-campus jobs, further overworked and underpaid university staff, and significantly fewer grants undoubtedly worth it.
For the people!—tax cuts for the wealthy and reduced incomes for the working class. Ford opted to cancel a planned surtax on the wealthiest in Ontario while also removing all income tax for earners of less than $30,000 year and freezing the minimum wage, which was set to go up to $15 per hour.
This means someone working full-time on minimum wage, currently $14 per hour, will make $29,120 in a year. Under the new tax cuts, they will have a net benefit of $859.
A CBC report showed how, had the minimum wage gone up to $15 per hour and the tax system remained the same, that same individual would instead have received a net benefit of $1,553 extra in 2019.
For the people!—no more fat-cat Queen’s Park crony elites making backroom deals and breaking promises. “Promise made, promise kept,” is a phrase we can enjoy hearing anytime a journalist asks a difficult question.
That is, of course, if you don’t include Ford’s literal backroom meeting with developers where he promised to allow them to build houses in the greenbelt. Once this was exposed, Ford backtracked on this promise. Then, once he was elected, proceeded to pass his pro-business bill which opens up the greenbelt for development.
No more broken promises would also not include the fact that Ford promised not to touch Ontario’s universal basic income pilot project—before promptly cancelling it without any data having been collected and $50 million already spent on it.
If lying about the province’s finances, removing measures to fight climate change, giving tax cuts to the wealthy at the expense of the poor, cutting OSAP, and breaking promises on environmental protection and welfare programs constitutes being “For the People,” then Ford is doing an excellent job.
Image by Jasmine Foong
