I think you should have read the column that had this nfo in the NP.
Drummond report signals start of Dalton McGuinty's lean years: Andrew Coyne | Full Comment | National Post
After the seven fat years come the seven lean. The government of Dalton McGuinty had a fine old time of it running Ontario the past seven years, dispensing tax credits and subsidies this way and that on the way to three consecutive election victories. Spending increased by 62% overall, about 25% after accounting for increases in prices and population. Now he will have the privilege of rolling most of it back.
So Drummond had a tall order in front of him from the outset. When inflation and population growth are factored in, holding spending to 0.8% annual increases for seven years works out to a 16.2% cut in real per capita terms. For sustained restraint, he says, this would be “unprecedented in the post-war period in Canada” — more than Ralph Klein’s cuts in Alberta, more even than Roy Romanow cut in Saskatchewan, and orders of magnitude more than the cuts imposed by the previous Conservative government, under Mike Harris. Yet it would still leave spending higher than when McGuinty took office — after inflation, after population growth.
