Ford's rhetoric around government waste gives the impression there are public servants burning money in the parking lot

After the final leaders’ debate on Sunday, Ontario voters now face a choice between two parties paying for their promises with money they would have to borrow and one party funding them with cuts it can’t explain.

While deficit spending may be nothing new to Canadian voters, Progressive Conservative leader Doug Ford’s promise to trim nearly $6 billion from the provincial budget without cutting any jobs is unusual.

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And it raises an obvious question: is it even possible?

Ford wants to cut hydro rates, lower gas prices, lower income taxes and scrap the province’s cap and trade system. He has also promised to honour several hefty promises for public transit in Ontario cities.

Ford says he will “find efficiencies” and his rhetoric around government waste gives the impression there are public servants burning money in the parking lot and all it takes is a premier with an industrial-sized fire extinguisher to reverse the trend. And he’s not the only one who thinks so: over the last few decades, one of the most consistent results in modern polling is that Americans believe the government wastes about half the money it spends.

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Third party assessments peg the amount of true waste in most governments at around 2-3 per cent, but it could be that the people conducting this polling just don’t understand what most voters mean when they talk about government waste. For example, a person who disagrees with their country’s foreign policy will be inclined to see all military spending as wasteful. The experts are usually talking about government departments paying too much for printer paper.

And policy preference is tied heavily to how much people think the government wastes. In other words, people who want the government to stop wasting money are likely to believe it wastes obscene amounts of money.

But as anyone in government who has seriously taken on the task of cost-cutting will tell you, it’s a long, hard slog through a political minefield.

“Doug Ford has rightly recognized that the Ontario government has become too burdensome. He’s correctly diagnosed the problem but he’s misdiagnosed the solution,” said Sean Speer, a Munk Senior Fellow for fiscal policy at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and former economic adviser to the Harper government.

Speer said trimming government without cutting staff isn’t the solution . If a future Ford government finds an underperforming program to cut, is it going to keep the people who administer it on the payroll? Is it going to repurpose them?

“People don’t sit idle very long,” said Speer, and public servants looking for something to do often conjure up ways to spend money.

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He’s correctly diagnosed the problem but he’s misdiagnosed the solution Sean Speer, a Munk Senior Fellow for fiscal policy at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute

In light of that growth, “I don’t know why any conservative would not want to make it an objective to get rid of people,” said Speer.

Ford has several recent examples of cost-cutting to read up on, but all of them involve cutting jobs.

After forming government in 2007, the Harper government launched a strategic review of spending which, by the 2010-11 fiscal year, had found more than $2.8 billion in ongoing savings. A Parliamentary Budget Office review of the cuts asked departments to describe how the savings were achieved and the public works department alone reported eliminating 687 positions in 2010.

The Harper savings were about half the amount Ford hopes to find, despite the Ontario budget being about half the size of the federal one. That means Ford’s cuts will have to be about four times deeper — and presumably, four times more painful — than the Harper ones.

Speer said the Harper government made about 500 different cuts and he only remembers significant political blowback on a handful of them.

“There are few easy cuts in government,” said former parliamentary budget officer Kevin Page, who now runs the Institute of Fiscal Studies and Democracy at the University of Ottawa. “It is also difficult to make significant spending reductions without reducing the number of public servants.”

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Page said there are a lot of experienced public servants in the Ontario government who may be keen for a substantial review of government services after the election, as part of any government transition that may happen. That would allow the government to pinpoint unsuccessful programs, explain clearly why they aren’t working, and offload them if necessary.

Speer said the blowback on cuts happened for the Harper government when they couldn’t clearly explain why a cut was needed and that’s why the knife can’t be wielded arbitrarily.

“There isn’t a line in the public accounts called ‘waste,'” said Speer.