The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.
“There are only hard answers and difficult solutions.” So said Don Drummond and his three fellow commissioners about reforming Ontario’s health-care system. They could have used the same words for the entire government of Ontario.
Ontario’s problem is not that it has big government, per se. If you want to see that, on a per capita basis, head to Alberta or Quebec. As the commission correctly noted, “Ontario runs one of the lowest-cost provincial governments in Canada relative to its GDP and has done so for decades.”
Ontario is at or near the bottom in funding universities. The health-care system is not the most expensive in Canada; the welfare rates are not the most generous. It doesn’t offer $7-a-day daycare, as in Quebec.
No, Ontario’s problem is that the size of its government doesn’t fit its revenues, and hasn’t for a long time. Those revenues have been hit by the slow, steady erosion of Ontario’s competitive position, in the face of which governments kept adding spending for which there were insufficient revenues.