No plan.
To balance Ontario’s budget without a carbon tax, the PCs will need deep cuts to spending and jobs
What would it take for the Ontario Progressive Conservatives to balance the budget, now that every leadership candidate has vowed to scrap their planned carbon tax? The answer: axing the $1.9 billion per-year of investments in the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Account (GGRA, or as the Tory platform calls it, the “Liberal Cap-and-Trade Slush Fund”) and cutting roughly 40,000 jobs from the public service.
My intent was not to predict what the Tories would do, rather it was to examine their options. Economically speaking, a $2.8 billion deficit in a province the size of Ontario is easily sustainable, giving the Tories a straight-forward fiscal way of dealing with a lack of carbon tax revenue.
But let’s instead assume that the Tories will not run a deficit, but make up any revenue shortfall through spending cuts. Using the estimates from their platform and removing carbon tax revenue, here is the fiscal landscape in the final three years of their mandate:
Between the “Value for Money” cuts and the projected shortfall, a Progressive Conservative government would need to cut $6.4 billion of spending in fiscal year 2021-22, on top of removing the $1.9 billion of spending from the GGRA. To put that number in perspective, the Ontario government is projected to spend $136 billion on programs in fiscal year 2019-20. There is no spending projection for 2021-22, but seeing as Ontario government program spending is growing by roughly $3.5 billion per year, we can reasonably assume program spending would be roughly $143 billion before the cuts.
A spending cut of $6.4 billion in a budget of 142.8 billion represents 4.5 per cent of projected 2021-22 program spending. To date, no leadership candidate has indicated what the Tories would spend less on. The Ontario government pays for everything from ambulances to paperclips to teacher salaries, so without additional information it is hard to know how such spending cuts would affect Ontarians, in terms of services and jobs.
Excluding municipal workers from our discussion, a 4.5 per cent reduction in employment translates to an employment reduction of 40,500 jobs.
To balance Ontario's budget without a carbon tax, the PCs will need deep cuts to spending and jobs - Macleans.ca
To balance Ontario’s budget without a carbon tax, the PCs will need deep cuts to spending and jobs
What would it take for the Ontario Progressive Conservatives to balance the budget, now that every leadership candidate has vowed to scrap their planned carbon tax? The answer: axing the $1.9 billion per-year of investments in the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Account (GGRA, or as the Tory platform calls it, the “Liberal Cap-and-Trade Slush Fund”) and cutting roughly 40,000 jobs from the public service.
My intent was not to predict what the Tories would do, rather it was to examine their options. Economically speaking, a $2.8 billion deficit in a province the size of Ontario is easily sustainable, giving the Tories a straight-forward fiscal way of dealing with a lack of carbon tax revenue.
But let’s instead assume that the Tories will not run a deficit, but make up any revenue shortfall through spending cuts. Using the estimates from their platform and removing carbon tax revenue, here is the fiscal landscape in the final three years of their mandate:
Between the “Value for Money” cuts and the projected shortfall, a Progressive Conservative government would need to cut $6.4 billion of spending in fiscal year 2021-22, on top of removing the $1.9 billion of spending from the GGRA. To put that number in perspective, the Ontario government is projected to spend $136 billion on programs in fiscal year 2019-20. There is no spending projection for 2021-22, but seeing as Ontario government program spending is growing by roughly $3.5 billion per year, we can reasonably assume program spending would be roughly $143 billion before the cuts.
A spending cut of $6.4 billion in a budget of 142.8 billion represents 4.5 per cent of projected 2021-22 program spending. To date, no leadership candidate has indicated what the Tories would spend less on. The Ontario government pays for everything from ambulances to paperclips to teacher salaries, so without additional information it is hard to know how such spending cuts would affect Ontarians, in terms of services and jobs.
Excluding municipal workers from our discussion, a 4.5 per cent reduction in employment translates to an employment reduction of 40,500 jobs.
To balance Ontario's budget without a carbon tax, the PCs will need deep cuts to spending and jobs - Macleans.ca
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