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ANALYSIS

The week before Charles Sousa tabled the Ontario budget that failed to pass, triggering a provincial election, the man who preceded him as Ontario Finance Minister came to Queen’s Park with a warning.

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tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or Ex-Liberal finance minister warned his party that deep spending cuts are needed to balance Ontario budget Back to video

“Ontario is faced with a staggering debt,” Dwight Duncan said, and he called for public services to be contracted out. Government, he said, would have to “fundamentally re-evaluate its role.”

It didn’t escape notice that his warning was akin to a Kardashian tut-tutting someone about overexposure: Ontario’s debt rose from $154-billion to $281-billion during Mr. Duncan’s own time as Finance Minister. But he had warned about debt issues, he said, before he left office.

That much is true. Seemingly emboldened by the fact that it wasn’t his problem to solve anymore, Mr. Duncan went on an anti-debt crusade in his last months at the legislature. Given the province’s debt levels, he said in January, 2013, low interest rates were a “ticking time bomb.” He warned contenders for the Liberal leadership that spending cuts would have to be doubled if the government was still going to reach a balanced budget by 2017-18.