There are no iron-clad rules in politics, but there are patterns that repeat: after the post-election honeymoon period ends, for example, winning parties often face the cold reality of what governing actually means. For the Progressive Conservatives at Queen’s Park, the year ahead is going to be a tough one.

It’s worth noting that the Tories’ first six months in power haven’t exactly been a triumph: they picked an entirely unnecessary fight with the City of Toronto over the size of city council, made changes at Hydro One that could easily cost more than they saved, introduced spending cuts that targeted franco-Ontarians, and faced a caucus defection. They’re now dealing with a controversy involving the appointment of a friend of the premier as head of the OPP.

And the government’s successes have been relatively small. (We raise a glass to you, buck-a-beer.)

In 2019, things are only going to get harder. The Tories have formally pinned the provincial deficit at $14.5 billion, and that move will have consequences in the coming months. Finance Minister Vic Fedeli will have to present a plan to the legislature outlining how the government intends to balance the public accounts. He’s not required to do so by a certain date, but he’ll need to give the public a general sense of how and when this is going to happen.

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Peter Weltman, Ontario’s financial accountability officer, has already warned that if the PCs want to balance the budget by the next election, they’ll need to exercise spending restraint of a kind not seen since the Harris government’s tenure in the 1990s — and the Tories may not be excited by the prospect of regular protests on the front lawn of the legislature.

The cuts the government has already implemented may have hefty-sounding price tags, but they’ll have a surprisingly small impact. Many of the big infrastructure cuts — the cancelled university campuses, the freight-rail bypass the Tories recently announced they’d be bypassing — promise billion-dollar savings, but that spending would, in many cases, have been spread over years or even decades, meaning that the effect on the public accounts will be more modest than the headlines suggest. (Accountants! They rule the world, and nobody notices.)

The long and short of it is that if Fedeli and the Tories want to start making real headway on balancing the budget, they’re going to need to focus less on trimming the fat and more on cutting the meat. That means program spending — the kind of cash that goes to teachers and doctors, police and paramedics. The government has always maintained that it doesn’t want to touch front-line services, but cost-cutting governments always end up cutting services for the same reason Willie Sutton robbed banks: that’s where the money is.

The government doesn’t have to cut spending at all, its critics will insist. It could raise taxes or postpone the tax cuts it has already promised. This is mathematically true, and it may even be wise to delay additional tax cuts.

But introducing deep spending cuts or breaking its word on tax cuts would mean a world of misery for a party that was elected largely on the basis of its claims that (a) the Liberals were lying about billion-dollar deficits, (b) the Tories would cut taxes, and (c) doing so wouldn’t require any painful choices.

The fiscal cycle isn’t the only thing on the horizon in 2019, and the Tories may rack up some wins in some areas: the Ontario Court of Appeals may decide in their favour in the lawsuit against the federal carbon tax; Canadian voters may elect a Conservative government led by Andrew Scheer, an outcome that would be celebrated in the premier’s office. But neither of those victories would make the government’s tax-and-spending choices any easier — or more popular with the Ontario voters who’ll be heading to polls again in 2022.