Front Burner - Taking stock of Doug Ford's spending cuts

Episode Date: May 8, 2019

Today on Front Burner, CBC Queen's Park reporter Mike Crawley on the cascade of cuts in Doug Ford's Ontario and how they might be felt in the province.

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Escaping NXIVM from CBC Podcasts Uncover. Subscribe now at cbc.ca slash uncover. Hello, I'm Jamie Poisson. I promise to deliver a strong, stable majority government, and together we did that. So Doug Ford's government in Ontario was elected with a decisive majority mandate. He campaigned on cutting taxes and balancing the province's books fast. And lately, it feels like every week there's a new story about the premier's plans to cut. Cuts to libraries, cuts to tree planting programs, cuts to music grants.

So it can be a little hard, one, to keep up with all these cuts, and two, to make sense of their impact. For example, teachers across the province are now receiving these layoff notices. But Ford is saying that not a single teacher will lose their job. That's why I've got CBC Queens Park reporter Mike Crawley with me today. He's going to walk us through what was promised and what's now being delivered. And whether Doug Ford can avoid the same slash-and-burn legacy of former progressive conservative premier Mike Harris. This is FrontBurner. Mike Crowley, hello. Hi, Jamie.

So can we start here with essentially what Doug Ford campaigned on? When Doug Ford threw his hat in the ring to become leader of the progressive conservative party and to be premier, what did he campaign on? So he said he was going to get rid of the deficit, balance the budget. But he said he was primarily going to do that through what he called efficiencies. Matter of fact, what we're going to do, we're going to bring outside auditors in to go line item by line item to find efficiencies. But he was really vague on it. Like his party didn't even have

what you could really legitimately call a platform. There were no hard numbers. Most political parties, they put together basically a mini budget and they put that in their document. That was not there. There was just a list of promises,

how much the PC said they would cost and a list of things that they were going to find savings on. Show us the know, there was no detail whatsoever about this $6 billion in efficiencies he said he was going to find. Okay, so essentially, when he was campaigning, he just said that he was going to find $6 billion in efficiencies. I do remember, though, that he promised that he wasn't going to cut jobs. Am I right about that? So the very specific wording, and he said this five different times in five different places, no one is going to lose their job.

And under our government, I'm going to reinforce this, not one single person will lose their job. I say it every single night. I'm going to say it again and again. No one and no one will lose their jobs. I say it every single night. I'm going to say it again and again. No one and no one will lose their job. Okay, that's what he said. So he didn't say that jobs weren't going to be eliminated, but he said no one is going to lose their jobs. And then a little while later, he kind of tweaked that and said no frontline workers are going to lose their jobs. But he was still very clear. Nobody's going to lose their jobs. But he was still very clear, nobody's going to lose their jobs. And so why do you think he chose that initial approach?

So I think part of this was to try to allay people's fears that he was going to be the reincarnation of Mike Harris, that he was going to slash and burn, and he was going to take on the unions and have a whole bunch of people fired, nurses, teachers, you know, that kind of thing. And this is essentially the legacy of Mike Harris. So, yeah, I mean, in Ontario, even though it's more than 20 years ago, you bring up Mike Harris and that's what people remember is hospitals getting closed and nurses being laid off and the battles with the teacher unions. closed and nurses being laid off and the battles with the teacher unions. I think Doug Ford wanted people to feel that he wasn't going to take that same sort of approach, that he was going to be able to make the budget balance, but without wholesale cuts. Okay. So obviously that worked because he won a majority last June. He's elected premier. Huge mandate. My friend, a new day has dawned in Ontario. A day of opportunity, a day of prosperity, and a day of growth.

And what are the first sort of inklings as to how his government is going to rein in the spending, what he promises during the campaign. So one of the interesting things is that he had months of being in government where he didn't actually have to table a budget. So all he had to do really was kind of nibble around the edges at things. So he did some things that were somewhat symbolic, but that also meant that he could, without actually tabling a budget, kind of rein back the spending. So one thing he brought in was a hiring freeze within the public sector. Well, the bell tightening has begun here at Queen's Park and a cost-cutting move. Premier Descendant Doug Ford has ordered a freeze on discretionary spending as well as on hiring, unless you're an essential frontline worker.

He did stuff like order that government meetings couldn't have catered lunches to be at them. No food, no pop at meetings. Some of his ministers started doing little things like pulling the plug on their landline. So all kind of small potatoes stuff with symbolic value but you, you know, some of this stuff gradually started to have a bit of an impact in terms of, you know, the effect on services. They ramped back the hiring so much that there were delays in people getting things like birth certificates back in the fall. So there was a bit of an effect, but you didn't really see the extent of things until they tabled the budget. You know, what you mentioned about the lunches,

it reminds me of how Rob Ford ran Toronto City Council as well. He cut back on snacks. But like you mentioned, this is sort of tinkering around the edges. You can't slash like what the Conservatives are calling a $13 billion deficit by getting rid of lunches. Or even like pulling the plug on landlines, right? The few thousand bucks in office, you would have needed a crazy amount of phones to get rid of to actually balance the budget that way.

Doug Ford's government has unveiled its first budget since winning a majority last spring. So in April, we get the budget. And are we starting to see a clearer picture of what Doug Ford's plans are? So now we are a few weeks later after the budget was tabled. Because look, a budget is a very top line document. It talks about really big numbers that are being spent in various ministries. And so we could look at the budget that day and say, oh, well, look, there's funding cuts in certain ministries and natural resources and the Francophone Affairs Ministry, those kinds of things. The overall spending in things like health and education was going up a bit. But when you factor it in inflation and the fact that the province is growing,

it really actually amounts to a cut. But then it's the trickle-down effect. Like, when are those ministries going to communicate to the programs that they fund about the effect of the top line budget numbers? And that's kind of the stuff that we're seeing now. Okay. And so what are we seeing now? We got a budget, it gave sort of top line directives to all these different ministries. And now you're saying we're starting to see the effects of that. So what are we starting to see? You want a list?

I do. Let's do the list. This is every day. A leaked memo says the provincial government is planning to axe more than 3,400 teaching positions over the next four years to save some money. So first stuff is, let's talk education, to save some money. So first stuff is, let's talk education, a big reduction in the number of teachers that there are going to be at the secondary level. They're increasing the class sizes.

The average high school class size will increase from 22 to 28 students. That's just an average. Some classes could have as many as 35 or 36 students. That's one big one. In health care, big rollback to funding into public health, something in the neighborhood of $200 million to be cut back from public health. Some of the healthcare cuts, though, we don't really can't see them because it's going to be about reorganizing stuff at the bureaucracy level. So that's kind of a wait and see thing. Childcare,

so there's a cut in the subsidy amount that's being transferred to cities to provide subsidized childcare spaces. Okay. And what are cities saying about this? They are not happy. These are not efficiencies. These are dramatic cutbacks, which leave the city government with only two alternatives, especially when they're done retroactively in the middle of the budget year, which is to cut services or to raise taxes. Because a lot of cities, they've gone and done their budgets already. So they were expecting that money to come. And they're saying that this is going to mean a disappearance of child care spaces. The government's counter to that is that they're bringing in a new child care tax credit,

tax rebate that's actually going to put money in people's pockets to pay for daycare. We are offering $6,750 per child to go and get a babysitter, get a nanny, go to the daycare of your choice, not a government run one. Does it compensate for folks? Generally not. It's a lot less than would be the cost of an actual subsidized childcare space. Okay, then there's all these little programs and this is this is one of the things that they really wanted to do because they could cut a bunch of programs that are funded through grants without saying that they were actually laying people off. So they reduced grants to the Ontario Music Fund.

They reduced grants to a tree planting program that's supposed to plant 50 million trees. And what's the impact of cutting like this tree program, for example? Well, there's a, we heard about a nursery that had tens of thousands of trees that were going to get planted saplings, basically. And they're saying unless they can find a buyer for them, they're literally going to have to junk these trees. They cut in half the budget to provincial library service that sends books back and forth across the province, interlibrary loans for rural areas. That one got a big hue and cry because people love their libraries. People love the libraries. Yeah. Do you remember that fight that Doug Ford got into

when he was at City Hall when they were going to cut libraries then and Margaret Atwood objected to this. And then he said he didn't know who Margaret Atwood was. I remember that. Yes, for sure. OK, so I digress. What else? There was a problem gambling research fund that was cut. It just keeps going.

There are so many that I actually can't even keep them all in my head. OK, but, you know, he did campaign on reining in spending and people like that. So what kind of reactions are you seeing here? I think there's a couple of different reactions. There's the reaction that you're getting from municipal politicians, and some of that could be categorized as grandstanding because some of these municipal politicians are, you know, politically affiliated with the NDP opposition. Then there's the reaction that you're getting from the people that are really deeply invested in these sectors. So from the teachers, you know, individually, from the child care advocates, you know, they

are seeing this as the beginning of an attack, really. Really. We'll be back in a second. Thank you. car or out on a jog. The first 30 days of the Audible membership are free, including a free book. Go to www.audible.ca slash cbc to learn more. I want to drill down with you now on education because it's a big one. You know, what we're seeing now is that hundreds and hundreds of teachers are receiving surplus notices, and they're essentially being laid off. And how does this square with Doug Ford's promise during his campaign that no one would lose their job? Okay, so what's happening is these teachers are getting layoff notices from their school boards for next September. And that's because the school boards are looking at the math math and they're figuring out how many teachers are going to be able to fund, given the reduction in the grants from the province, and they're going to have to have fewer teachers in the classroom.

So the government says that there's going to be attrition. People will retire. And that these teachers who've received layoff notices will be safe in their jobs. And if there isn't enough attrition, they've tucked aside some other chunk of money. It's a fairly substantial amount of money for what they're calling attrition protection. So that if there isn't enough teachers that retire, that somehow those ones who got layoff notices will have their jobs come September. Again, this is one of those things that we're going to really have to wait and see. One thing is for sure, even if no teacher gets laid off, there are going to be fewer teachers in the secondary school classroom.

This is what I don't understand. If there are fewer teachers total, how do no teachers lose their jobs? Because they're expecting enough to retire to be able to cut the number of positions through these retirements. It's going to mean in the schools, fewer teachers. We're going to see bigger classes in the secondary level. We're also going to see fewer programs being offered, fewer course options. So quite a number of schools have been communicating to their kids in terms of the courses that they've chosen for next year and saying this list of options. So they're not cutting core programs like math and stuff, but optional courses are being dropped because the schools are figuring that they're not going to have the teachers available to teach those courses.

No A's, no buts, no education buts. Okay, and when we've seen thousands of students walk out and protest against the government's education plan, this is what we're talking about here. These are their concerns. Yeah, and so at the moment, it's fear. We're really not going to get the answers until the fall. But look, I've got two kids in the school system. So full declaration here. One of them is in secondary school. And, you know, he's got concerns about what the effect is going to be in his classes next year. And at my daughter's school, it's a fairly small school, and one of the teachers has received a layoff notice, and the kids are quite upset about it because they feel they're going to lose

this particular individual teacher that they really love. So the government's insistence that no teacher is going to lose their job might not actually really matter in the end because what's actually going to matter is the effect on people come September on the classrooms. And don't forget too, Jamie, the teachers' contracts expire at the end of August. So there's a whole round of bargaining going on. The government's wanting basically a wage freeze. There's a very, very strong likelihood of labor disruption in the schools next fall.

So what I'm hearing from you is that we're seeing all of these cuts, cuts to tree planting programs, cuts to library services, cuts to music grants, cuts to these sort of smaller programs, which will certainly be felt in some way. And then there are these cuts to like the core education and health care. And it's really unclear how this is going to play out. So do you think that Doug Ford will actually be able to avoid being painted with the same like slash and burn brush as Mike Harris? A lot of that we're only going to know in the fullness of time. But I think the government's strategy, you know, in this in this budget was to make the budget feel palatable to people. And that I think that they felt that they could get away with cutting some of these programs, you know, because they only really mattered to the folks who were highly invested in them, interest groups, let's say. in them, interest groups, let's say. But because of the way this is all coming out, that sort of trickle down, drip, drip, drip, you know, cut today, you turn around, oh, what cut are we

hearing about today? And then once this government ends up in bargaining with the teachers unions, and once we start to see what shakes down in the healthcare system. It could create the perception that instead of, you know, a big slash and burn approach, that this is kind of a death by a thousand cuts sort of scenario. Yeah, that you tick off people in that sector and in that sector and in this one by this chipping away at funding here, there and everywhere. So, you know, they obviously have a political strategy that they think is going to work and that they believe is not going to turn away the voters who had chosen them over the free spending ways of the liberals. Right. Because to be fair, people really like that about this government that they campaigned on the idea that they were going to cut. And there are a lot of people who agree that there are efficiencies that need to be found within government. It's

really going to depend on what sort of an effect people feel with these cuts three years from now, really. I mean, we'll be heading, we'll be in an election campaign three years from now. So it's going to give it some time to sort of sink in the impact. Right now, it's a lot of back and forth and noise. There's a lot of noise being made. And I don't know to what extent that noise is going to actually matter three years from now when we're into an election campaign. But if people feel that what Ford did ate away at the stuff that they cared about, ate away at their health system, ate away at their education system. Then we're talking about the ghost of Mike Harris here. That could be. Okay. Mike, thank you so much. I hope that we

can stay on top of the story with you. Thanks, Jamie. It's been a pleasure. Okay, so right after Mike and I finished this conversation, on Tuesday afternoon, news of more cuts. This time, $13 million in tourism funding for Toronto and Ottawa. And this really served to ratchet up tensions even more between the province and the city of Toronto. Mayor John Tory said all the cuts taken together from the Ontario government now amount to well north of $100 million in shortfall for Toronto. And that's a very significant number. I mean, for us, that's worth, say, three points of property tax or a host of other kinds of cutbacks that have to be made

either in that area of public health and child care or in some other area. We don't have the ability to say, well, fine, we'll run a deficit of $100 million and deal with it next year. That's all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks for listening to FrontBurner. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts. It's 2011 and the Arab Spring is raging. A lesbian activist in Syria starts a blog.

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