Politicians need to explain their promises - including how they’ll repay money they borrow

As the Ontario election got underway in early May, Doug Ford’s PCs took an early lead in the polls, leading to considerable focus on Ford’s inability to explain how he would pay for his promises. This focus is both appropriate and understandable: Ford has vowed to balance the budget, but hasn’t provided a timeline, hasn’t told voters how much money he’ll spend, and has said he’d achieve this balance by finding $6 billion in vague “efficiencies.”

The press is absolutely right to badger Ford for answers; more detail is the way to help voters know just what they’re voting for. But what’s remarkable isn’t that reporters are doing their jobs by pressing Ford. It’s that they aren’t doing the same thing to Ford’s opponents, Andrea Horwath and Kathleen Wynne.

Ah, you say, but both Kathleen Wynne and Andrea Horwath have costed plans. Assuming away the awkward conclusions of both Ontario’s Auditor General and Financial Accountability Officer about the Wynne government’s 2018 budget, and the NDP platform’s embarrassing arithmetic error, both have plans that are “costed” in the sense that the numbers on various lines are tallied up to arrive at a final number at the bottom.

But “costed” does not mean “financed” and the difference matters. While Doug Ford’s sin is failing to explain how he’ll ensure spending doesn’t exceed revenues, Wynne and Horwath’s is that they simply don’t even try. It’s as if we’re all at the grocery checkout and Ford is fumbling around with his wallet, while Wynne and Horwath simply pull out the taxpayer credit card, swipe and walk away.

Yet, if it’s wrong for a politician to avoid explaining how they’ll pay for things in one year, surely it’s even worse to be unable to do it over a five or ten year horizon.

Neither Wynne nor Horwath have a plan for a balanced budget within their term should they win government. Wynne’s plan doesn’t contemplate a balanced budget until 2024, which would require another election, in which case all bets are off. Horwath has verbally committed to “approaching” balance, but her platform shows deficits until 2023. Like Wynne’s plan, this would require another election.

And this only addresses the issue of deficits, not debt. Thanks to the widespread conflation of “deficits” and “debt” in the public mind, politicians have long been able to get away with claiming balancing a budget in a single year is as being equivalent to paying off accumulated debt. This is analogous to running up a huge balance on your credit card, never paying down any of the principal, and then declaring victory because in one month you managed not to increase the balance.

So it should be little surprise that a majority of Ontario voters – including a majority of Liberal and NDP voters – support spending reductions to help balance the budget.

If this is what voters want, how do they go about getting it? A few simple things.

First, demand to know how things will be paid for. Doug Ford needs to explain how he will pay for promised tax cuts, new spending, where immediate savings will be found, any tax hikes that will be needed, and what he’ll do if he is short on money.

The same applies to Wynne and especially to Horwath whose sudden rise in the polls makes her a serious contender for power. Her platform doesn’t explain how she will repay the billions in debt that she would rack up in. Will it mean tax hikes? Will she cut back on spending in future years?

Second, voters should demand balanced budgets. Balance should be the rule, not the exception. Wherever you sit on the political spectrum, we all have an interest in ensuring that whatever we collectively decide to spend, it doesn’t exceed what we collectively decide to tax. Indeed, in some ways progressives should be among the most concerned about budget deficits, since it starves future governments of revenue to pay for the public services the support.