Kathleen Wynne campaigned and won on an anti-austerity platform. Will she deliver?

Already, Ontario’s Liberal premier is being advised to backtrack on her promise to spend more for infrastructure and necessary services.

The bond-rating agencies are circling. The business press is tut-tutting.

New Democratic Party leader Andrea Horwath scornfully refers to the Liberals’ most recent expansionary budget as a Trojan horse — one that, beneath its welcoming façade, includes hidden but devastating cutbacks.

Horwath is able to credibly make this claim because the budget that triggered last month’s election consisted of two contradictory parts.

On the one hand, the Liberals promised more spending — including $29 billion over 10 years for transportation infrastructure.

But, on the other, they promised to balance the province’s books by 2017-18 without raising taxes on middle- and low-income Ontarians.

It was never clear how they would manage these simultaneous feats.

From the right, Wynne is being pressed to abandon what the Globe and Mail referred to in a front-page headline as her “spending spree.”

In effect, she is being urged to follow a common Liberal trajectory: Campaign from the left; govern from the right.

As NDP strategist Brian Topp noted in the Star, this is the strategy followed by former prime minister Jean Chrétien.

Chrétien was elected on a centre-left platform that made no mention of cuts to public services. Yet once in power, he and finance minister Paul Martin took an axe to the pillars of the welfare state — including employment insurance, welfare and medicare.

Writing in the Waterloo Region Record, two economists from the right-wing Fraser Institute say they hope Wynne will do something similar.

And perhaps she will, thus proving Horwath correct.

So far, however, the premier has been cagey about how she would simultaneously fulfil her contradictory promises.

Speaking to the Star editorial board before the June 12 election, she said she was “very optimistic” she could balance the budget by 2017-18, that the social safety net was a “priority” but that “I don’t know what’s going to happen in a few years.”

Who knows what that means?

Certainly, the political pressure to eliminate debt and deficit is real. Ontarians like their governments well-managed.

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Former NDP premier Bob Rae was punished politically when, during the recession of the ’90s, government net debt as a percentage of gross national product soared to 29 per cent.

But intriguingly, Conservative premier Mike Harris was not punished for fiscal laxity even though under his government, the province’s debt to GDP ratio rose even higher.

The current slowdown has pushed Ontario’s net debt to GDP ratio to about 40 per cent. That’s higher than the ratio faced by other provinces, save Quebec. It’s also higher than Ottawa’s.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean it is too high. Throughout its boom years, Japan’s government debt to GDP ratio exceeded 100 per cent. But creditors never stopped lending to Tokyo because — then at least — the money was used for productive purposes.

All of which underlines the other political pressure Wynne faces.

Ontarians may like their governments well-managed. But they also like them to be activist. It is a Red Tory tradition that has been successfully used by governments of all political stripes.

When Wynne speaks of governing from the “activist centre,” she is speaking directly to that tradition. Ontarians disapprove of governments that waste money. But they don’t mind seeing their tax dollars spent on useful endeavours.

In short, Wynne has some political leeway.

In the end, all of this could be moot. It may be that the economy revives so quickly that the government will be able to meet its deficit targets handily.

It may be also that the premier’s brain trust will find a miraculous way to raise more revenue without hiking taxes or selling off Crown corporations.

But it’s more likely that she’ll have to make a choice between brutal spending cuts and growth. Let’s hope she chooses growth. That, after all, is what the voters voted for.

Thomas Walkom's column appears Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday.

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