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The Ontario government employs more than one in 10 salaried workers in the province, paying them $41.4 billion in salary and wages.

Peter Weltman, Ontario’s new Financial Accountablity Officer (FAO), released those facts in a commentary Wednesday, raising serious questions about Premier Doug Ford’s stated plan to balance the province’s books without laying anybody off.

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Finance Minister Vic Fedeli said the government is currently contracting a line-by-line audit of government spending that will help find efficiencies without costing public sector workers their jobs.

“As an example, the auditor general reviewed only 14 agencies in December of last year, and found $1 billion in savings … and not one single job would be cut to save the billion dollars that she outlined,” Fedeli said. “If you took that and just stretched that right across the broader public sector service, you can see that there are going to be efficiencies found that don’t affect the employees at all.”