Ontario financial accountability officer Peter Weltman said last week that Premier Doug Ford can balance the provincial budget by 2023-24, but it’s going to be difficult.

To succeed, the Ontario economy will have to remain relatively strong, the government will have to limit annual spending growth to 1% and find $6 billion in additional savings, Weltman said in his spring economic outlook.

Even then, the budget won’t be balanced until a year after the next Ontario election in 2022 (as Finance Minister Vic Fedeli made clear in his 2019 budget), assuming Ford and the Progressive Conservatives are re-elected.

As a non-partisan financial watchdog of government spending like auditor general Bonnie Lysyk, Weltman reports to the Legislature, not the government of the day, which is why his economic forecasts should be taken seriously.

His latest one reveals that while it’s going to be hard for Ford to balance the budget, it would have been impossible for the former Liberal government of premier Kathleen Wynne.

That’s because while the Liberals held spending growth to 1.4% in the post-global recession period from 2010 to 2016, they recklessly increased it by 6.8% in their final two years in office.

That was during the lead-up to the June 2018 Ontario election when Wynne and the Liberals shamelessly tried to buy the support of voters by bribing them with their own money.

Not only did that effort fail, but as both the FAO and Lysyk pointed out at the time, the Liberals were fudging the books to hide the true level of the government’s debt.

The point is, we didn’t get into this financial mess by accident or bad luck.

We’re here because the previous Liberal government over 15 years spent taxpayers’ money irresponsibly, saddling us with an $11.7 billion deficit this year (after billions of dollars of cutting by Ford), a public debt of $347 billion and $13.3 billion in annual interest payments, just to pay interest on the debt.

That’s the fourth largest government expenditure after health, education and social services, not one cent of which goes to hiring more front-line emergency workers, lowering taxes or paying off the principal amount of the debt.

Liberal government spending from 2003 to 2018 turned Ontario into one of the world’s most indebted sub-national governments and, for a decade, technically, a “have not” province when it came to federal equalization payments, although that’s no longer the case.

By the end of their rule, the Liberals had turned their annual budgets into a farce, where the promise of three years of balanced budgets in their 2017 budget suddenly disappeared, to be replaced by six years of deficits in their 2018 budget, the last one before they were defeated.

They were acting like children left in charge of the candy store.