EDITOR’S NOTE: This article originally appeared on The Trillium, a Village Media website devoted to covering provincial politics at Queen’s Park.
If Ontario’s political parties were students in Brian Lewis’ public finance class, just one would be getting a failing grade.
The former provincial chief economist is now a senior fellow with the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy and teaches at the University of Toronto.
He looked at all four major parties’ platforms to judge how transparent they’re being with voters about what their promises would cost and how they’d pay for them.
The Green Party’s platform would have received the highest marks for its detailed costing, he said.
The party went to a higher level of detail about its plans and their fiscal impacts than the others. While Lewis spotted a couple of lines he believes relied on incorrect assumptions, it was a good effort all around — particularly on short notice, given the snap election call.
“There might be some details in there that are head-scratchers, but it speaks to their priorities, and it's got lots of great information in it — so best in class,” he said.
The NDP would be next, he said. The party gave voters a year-by-year breakout of the fiscal impacts of its promises and was forthcoming about planning major tax increases to pay for them — but he’d have to dock marks for failing to put a cost estimate to one of its major promises, taking tolls off of the 407 highway.
The Liberals would have come next. The party didn’t provide a yearly breakdown of its platform’s costing and was vague on how it would find savings to pay for things, according to Lewis. Overall, there was less there to mark, with fewer promises than the other parties, he said.
All three of these parties made expensive promises, such as doubling Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP) payments, and were forthcoming about the cost.
“I'd give them all a passing grade, and I'd give an F to the current government, who didn't say anything about how it's going to pay for all this stuff or even what it costs,” Lewis said.
Asked at a press conference Tuesday if he knows how much his promises will cost, Ford cited his $40-billion plan to protect Ontario from the impact of U.S. tariffs. However, not all of that $40 billion is spending — some of it, according to the party, will be in loans and tax deferrals.
At the same time, his platform also includes far more than $40 billion in spending flagged as “new” or “more” than what the province has spent before.
Other promises lack costing entirely, particularly infrastructure promises like building a tunnelled highway with transit under the 401, which some experts have said will cost over $100 billion.
That troubles Lewis, who said that talk of highways in this campaign has “lacked rationality” all around.
“There’s this ludicrous tunnel proposal,” he said. “But you know, I thought the NDP proposal on (removing) the tolls on Highway 407, given the lack of specificity about how it will work, seems pretty absurd, too.”
Should the PCs win again, the government will have to build the tunnel's cost high into the province’s capital plan based on its time frame and cost estimate, none of which has been determined yet, Lewis said.
When governments announce new capital projects, they either add to the capital planning budget or displace other projects — and the cost of the tunnel would be so high it will require more budget and more debt, Lewis said.
He’s also concerned that it will consume a huge amount of the provincial workforce’s capacity to build, requiring specialized skills that are already in high demand, displacing the capacity to get other infrastructure built.
It’s not the only major infrastructure plan the government has promised without a price tag.
The PCs have promised a “GO 2.0” rail plan that would divert freight trains off commuter rail lines via a bypass running along the Highway 407 corridor.
The change would enable new rail lines, and the party released maps showing GO train lines with 23 new stations, one through midtown Toronto and another from downtown Toronto to Bolton, as well as extensions and other improvements to existing lines in Richmond Hill.
Asked if that amounted to a campaign promise to build them, Ford said it did, “absolutely,” and the party included a description of the lines in the campaign platform, with no timeline or estimate of the cost.
Lewis also said that whoever wins the election may be in for a very challenging fiscal future.
Ontario released a very positive economic update in the fall, showing a balanced budget potentially in reach soon. But that was before U.S. President Donald Trump’s threatened to impose across-the-board tariffs on Canadian imports.
“With the Trump presidency and the massive amounts of economic uncertainty, you can pretty much count that the economic growth outlook is going to be lower,” Lewis said.
And it may be small change compared to the tariff impact, but Ontario’s finances are likely to take a $3.3-billion hit over three years, thanks to the federal government’s likely reversal of the capital gains tax changes, he added.
“I think it's an important part of an election campaign to try to speak responsibly to people,” Lewis said. "If you're going to do things for people, and spend a lot of money, it's not free. It's either going to be borrowed, or it's going to be raised somewhere.”
