Article content continued

To be sure, the cuts in the Conservative platform — to the extent they still have one, or that anyone knows what is in it — are not pocket change. At the very least, the party would have to find the $6 billion over three years the “People’s Guarantee” (drafted under its previous leader, Patrick Brown) pencilled in as “savings from value for money audit.”

If it were also forced to do without the revenues from the federal carbon tax, which the People’s Guarantee had promised to accept but Ford has promised to fight, that’s another $10 billion it would have to find. That’s if it wanted to stick with its promise to run balanced budgets, starting next fiscal year.

That’s a lot of ifs. But suppose they cut the full $16 billion — again, that’s over three years: $3.3 billion in the first year, rising to $7.1 billion in year three (a little less if they merely balanced the budget, instead of running the small surpluses they propose). That sounds like a lot, until you remember how much the government spends overall: last year’s budget projected spending for next year at $135.8 billion. So we’re talking about roughly 2.4 per cent of spending in the first year, rising to 4.5 per cent three years out.

Could Ford cut four per cent out of annual spending just through “efficiencies”? It’s not as easy as it sounds. It isn’t that there isn’t a lot of fat in government. It’s that it’s hard to get at: that’s why it’s there. It’s difficult enough “driving efficiencies” in the private sector. But the nature of government — its vast size, its powerful unions, its many beneficiaries, its activities largely hidden from view until the moment someone tries to change anything, when they are suddenly lit by the flash of a thousand media Klieg lights — is such as to defeat even a management genius, let alone Ford, who is not a genius.