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Historically yes. Maybe conical but this announcement coupled with the hydro announcement say "from now until the election we will show everyone that we care". I disagree with many of the decision over the years and am very hopeful that people will remember.

   

They balanced the budget without firing 100,000 employees, which is what the conservatives were promising and claimed was necessary. I am very hopeful that people will remember.

   

So the policy is to let all the infrastructure in the province fall apart,
keep the housing bubble going to collect them taxes,
with a huge roll of the dice that interest rates won't go up.

   

You're the type of voter the Liberals love. You get lied to, you believe it and then you praise the party not knowing you've been lied too.

The Ontario Liberals have cut billions from health care, to suggest their 'pouring money in' after taking so much out, laying off thousands of nurses is just creative PR.

Instead of telling you what was going to happen like the PC's did, the Liberals just started cutting, all the while patting people like you on the head with a comforting "it'll all work out". I believe one of the big union leaders piped up during the last election saying that Wynne had to made deep cuts across the board to balance the budget and he was right.

It's easier to cut 100,000 jobs behind the curtain all in the name of balancing the books....just don't be honest and tell people what's happening because Ontario doesn't want to hear that. (Ask Tim Hudak) We want to be lied to and then hear the apology when the truth comes out.

   

They weren't going to fire they were going reduce. Wouldn't surprise me at all if the liberals weren't doing that quietly

   

This.

You hit the nail on the head, explaining the current state of affairs in this province very well. The left-wing electorate in this province are the reason why all of this has transpired. You're right that they'd rather be lied to and then hear some lame apology than accept the truth. Tim Hudak's only flaw was that he was an honest politician, but I think that's what we need. Problem is, Ontario doesn't like honesty. Ontario would rather be pissed and shit on (pardon my wording), at the same time being brainwashed into thinking it's the best thing ever. Then, we just ask for more.

Another problem is that the younger generations have already been coerced by the left-wing media into thinking this is how things work, and because of their overwhelming sense of entitlement, start to complain and protest when the opposite to what they know starts happening. It's a very dangerous cycle we're in, and it will get worse before it gets better.

-J.

   

You may be correct. But any budget that doesn't take servicing the interest into account isn't a true surplus, it is just a gimmic.

   

By rolling over their debt payments. That's not balancing the budget, it's deferring debt service and that is itself deficit spending.

   

Agreed.



http://www.torontosun.com/2017/04/27/li ... ir-deficit

   

double

   

Ok, lots to reply to here.

First let me say that I've posted two articles that easily point to very valid criticisms of Wynne. And yet the Deplorables on this forum hate Ontario and Wynne so much that they're desperately inventing false or non-sensical criticisms of their own. Maybe go back to the articles I posted to guide you to some accusations that make sense, sad that I have to do your job for you.

That's literally the exact opposite of what the story says. In fact there's a whole other thread about the measures announced to DEFLATE the housing bubble and even the quote you posted describes new money for infrastructure.



Sorry my friend, there are so many falsehoods in your post I don't know where to begin. Talk about not knowing when you've been lied to!

First, the Liberals did not "cut" or "take money out" of the healthcare budget. They simply limited annual budget increases. Obviously this had consequences down the chain as costs are increasing faster than the budget but it is a factual statement that the overall healthcare budget was NOT "cut" and they did not "take money out". Simply put, the healthcare budget for this year overall is larger than last year, which in turn was larger than the year before it, and so on. More on the nurses in a bit.

Second, just an academic point here - budgets go up and down, generally. You seem to suggest that a party cannot take credit for increasing the budget for a program, if at some point in the past that program already had the same or larger budget. That doesn't make any sense, because then the opposite would also be true, someone can't be accused of cutting a budget if at some point in the past the budget had been lower that it was currently. When the budget goes up compared to last year, it's been increased, and when it goes down, it's been cut. It's really that simple.

That said, there's a very valid argument to made by the NDP that the Liberals should have been increasing the healthcare budget MORE than they did, to keep up with cost increases, but for the slash-and-burn conservatives, that would be an odd position to take. Kind of like a serial killer complaining about a reckless driver.


Back to the nurses. The liberals did not "lay off thousands of nurses" as you falsely claim and certainly not the 100,000 that the Conservatives actually campaigned on firing deliberately. You know who deliberately laid off thousands of nurses? The last conservative government of this province, then they publicly joked about it, comparing them to being out of fashion, "like hoola hoops" they said. Laying off nurses seems to be a conservative obsession. There are literally tens of thousands more nurses since the Liberals came to power, almost 25% more overall than under Tories. No Liberal politician ever ordered up the firing of thousands of nurses as the Harris Conservatives did and Hudak promised to do again, as you falsely claim. True, in light of the limited budget increases, some local hospitals have chosen not to replace retiring nurses and may have even laid some off but those were local decisions and the total number of nurse jobs lost numbered a few hundred, not a hundred thousand and they were mostly from attrition rather than lay-off.




Nowhere does it say servicing the interest hasn't been taken into account, I think you're confused about something. Fun fact: Debt service payments currently cost the province 8 cents out of every dollar of revenue it takes in. So we're not exactly Greece here, no matter how much conservatives try to make it sound otherwise.



Not true. I don't see where you get that from.




If that's true then no conservative has ever balanced a budget, because all 4 of Harris's balanced budgets had one-time sales involved, as he cannibalized the schools, hospitals and public lands. Stephen Harper's only true balanced budget, which was during final year in office (the first one not really counting as he inherited it from Paul Martin) used a one-time transfer from cash reserves to balance the books.

If one-time transfers to balance the budget don't count, then the only recent leaders to have ever truly balanced a budget in Ontario or Ottawa are Dalton McGuinty, Jean Chretien and Paul Martin. Let's play "find the conservative" shall we?

   

The Feds are mandated by law to increase health transfers to the Provinces by a set amount annually (6%). When only 1/2 of that is spent on it's intended purpose, as is the case in Ontario, what would you call that?



Very true. However, let's not cut money from a program and then celebrate it when it's restored to it's previous level. It's disingenuous. As we all know, health care is going to be a continually rising cost.



Why do you keep doing that? The Liberals have been in power in Ontario for almost 14 years now. It's time to stop looking back to defend decisions of the current government.

I'm not having a PC vs. Liberal debate here. This is simply about the current government and their decisions.

Ontario laid off 1200+ nurses in 2015 alone and Ontario now sits with the lowests RN to patient ratios in Canada. The Conservatives never said they were going to lay off 100,000 nurses. Did you mean government staff?

How can all of these cuts be possible after the health care premium was brought forward? Where is that money going?

Again, can we avoid going back to a government that was in power 14 years ago and avoid discussing things mentioned in an election campaign? They aren't relevant to the discussion.

   

The Canada Health Transfer from the feds only accounts for a portion of provincial health care budgets- about 23%



As I said, the budget hasn't been cut. It's been increased, just at a rate less than cost increases



I think it's relevant to remind people what Conservatives did the last time they were in power. Conservatives don't want it brought up because Harris/Eves are so unpopular and history has judged them poorly. And as much as you don't want to make this a conservative/liberal thing, when the complaint is that the liberals did a little of something that the conservatives did a lot of, it's relevant to point that out.




Aside from that, it's important to remember how far we've come. It's completely relevant to say since the Liberals took office, they've added 23,000 net new nurses. On that note,I repeat the Liberals didn't cut any jobs, those were local hospital decisions and most of those jobs went through attrition, meaning that as people retired, they didn't replace them. Yeah, you're right they didn't say 100,000 nurses but still that they would intentionally add 100,000 people to the unemployment list in the midst of a struggling economy.


Again, there were no cuts. Revenue from the healthcare premium is part of the budget.

   

I think it's also relevant to point out that you didn't add in the part about how badly off the province was when Mike Harris came to power. I'm not a big fan of Mike, but after what he inherited from the previous NDP government that was more surprised than anyone that they were elected, was not the best starting point. But because you're a left-wing hack, you conveniently left that out. Not surprised.

When the PC's finally bowed out due to the rise of Dalton McGuinty, how did that work out? He indebted the province even worse, and still keeps a low profile because of all the damage he did. Why don't you tell us how much of a saint that man is? Why aren't you singing his praises? Add to the fact what Wynne has done to the province..... She makes Bob Rae look like an amateur at this point! I'd rather have a PC like Mike Harris back in, not because of his tough stance and cuts, but because he did what he had to do because of the circumstances. I have more respect for a politician that makes the hard decisions, rather than make NO decisions, then lies to the public saying they did 'something'.

But you don't care anyhow. You're probably knelt down in your secret room with the posters of McGuinty and Wynne on the wall in front of you, all 200 candles lit on the tabernacle.

-J.

   

First let me address hypocrisy of your "tough choices" argument. Why is it only a "tough choice" when conservatives choose unpopular policies but never when Liberals do?

Stephen Harper and Dalton McGuinty were both in office and running deficit budgets at the same time yet according to Conservatives Dalton was the devil incarnate for not running a balanced budget at all costs, meanwhile poor Steevie in Ottawas deficits were just "tough choices" and he was just "doing the best he can given the weak economy, which the government does not control". Apparently, on Liberals control the economy. And just for the record, McGuinty balanced more budgets than Harper evr did. That's just a fact of history.

Second, you need to get your story straight: a few posts up it was alleged that Liberals were more interested in making easy popular choices rather than tough unpopular choices that Harris did. Now you're saying that hated Liberal policies were deeply unpopular. Which is it?

I'll give you a hint: the Liberals are not leading in any popularity polls. They made their own politically difficult choices because they thought those were the right decisions to make.

Next I call BS that Harris was truly making "tough choices". As he was dismantling and selling off the province, he enacted massive tax cuts that significantly reduced provincial revenues. If balancing the books was truly a "code red" urgent issue and he only reluctantly shuttered schools and hospitals and left people to die on some of the longest waiting lists in the country, then he wouldn't have at the same time enacted these massive tax breaks for the wealthy that only required more of these drastic cuts . Harris was a far-right ideologue who slashed and burned because he believes in it deeply, not because he was making "tough choices".

This is also one of the reasons that despite all of their bullshit talk, conservatives have such a poor record of actually balancing the budget: no matter how much they cut from the budget, their tax cuts always seem to cut more in revenue. The only voters being consistently lied to here are the ones who believe conservatives have a better track record than Liberals. McGuinty/Wynne have the same number of balanced budgets as Harris/Eves and more than Stephen Harper. With her one balanced budget, Wynne has now balanced more budgets than every Republican president in modern history COMBINED.

Harris had the fortunate accident of history of coming to power after a recession had already passed and the North American economy was already growing rapidly in the late 90s tech bubble. Yet he still only balanced his budgets by destroying and dismantling. The Liberals by contrast governed through the worst recession since the Great Depression and still they rebuilt much of what Harris destroyed and then some.

You know, most peoples lives will not be directly affected if the debt goes up next year or if the government runs another deficit or even a few more years of defecits. But lives ARE directly and immediately affected when schools, hospitals, transit routes, daycares etc are closed. So anyone who.claims to be making a "tough choice" to destroy the necessary services people rely on every day just to "balance the books" are full of shit. And before anyone yells "but Greece!" I'll remind you we are nothing like Greece and we're are not a few years or even a few decades from becoming the next Greece. Saying that we must be permanently (or even regularly) austere to avoid becoming the next Greece is like saying we must starve to death to avoid dying from obesity.

Besides, the anti-deficit religion was founded in the 80s when interest rates were in the double digits and debt was much more expensive than it is now. In recent years governments borrow at about as close to zero percent as one can get. There are even bonds that offer negative interest rates and apparently people still buy them. So historically speaking it's actually been a good time to run defecits.

Were the Liberals all things to all people? No. Did they provide unlimited funds to every single program and leave nobody wanting? No. They picked their priorities, chose to run defecits at the same time Harper was also running defecits endured the shrieking and baiting of the conservatives, and we are better for it.

   

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