The good news for Conservative supporters is that Doug Ford‘s PCs have given us what they say is a fully costed campaign platform; the bad news for Ontario voters is that it doesn’t answer the elementary question of how they will pay for what they promise.
What the PCs released was, in fact, simply a list of all of the expensive campaign promises that Ford has announced over the last few weeks.
But how do they plan to pay for it, or, more to the point, how are we expected to pay for it, since it will be we, the taxpayers who will get the bill for these promises?
You don’t need to be an economics genius to understand that if you make numerous spending commitments, but reduce the revenue coming to the government, you’ll create a huge deficit.
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Ford says he’ll avoid that by finding efficiencies, but that’s really political talk for either cutting programs or staff.
Mike Harris did that by downloading the cost of some programs onto our property taxes and cutting budgets for things like hospitals and food and water inspectors.
The fact that some of the same people that crafted the Mike Harris strategy are working on the Ford campaign is concerning.
Doug Ford is either the man without a plan or the man with a plan that he doesn’t want us to know about.
Bill Kelly is the host of the Bill Kelly Show on Global News Radio 900 CHML.