Premier Kathleen Wynne keeps hearing the same thing from business leaders ranging from Fiat Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne to the Ontario Chamber of Commerce.

They’re all warning her that the cost of doing business in Ontario is becoming prohibitive because of the added costs being imposed on them by her government.

According to the Liberals’ own estimates, Wynne’s decision to create a new Ontario pension plan and introduce cap-and-trade carbon pricing, will cost businesses and workers up to $5.5 billion annually.

That’s to say nothing of skyrocketing increases to electricity rates under the Liberals, due in part to their mad, failed experiment with expensive and unreliable green energy.

Business people, of course, don’t march on Queen’s Park or burn premiers in effigy.

Instead, they register their protests using polite and deferential language.

After all, there’s no point in gratuitously offending the most powerful politician in Ontario.

But here’s the thing.

Unless Wynne heeds these polite and deferential warnings, more and more businesses will do something far worse than manning the barricades at Queen’s Park.

They will leave. They will take their businesses and their jobs elsewhere.

And the communities in which they provided those jobs will be devastated.

That’s what’s already happened to hundreds of thousands of jobs in Ontario’s manufacturing sector since the Liberals took power in 2003.

To be sure, not every job loss can be blamed on Liberal policies.

They didn’t cause the 2008 global recession.

But what Wynne, and before her Dalton McGuinty are responsible for is out-of-control government spending and more than doubling the Ontario debt since coming to power in 2003.

That’s why the Liberals are so desperate for cash now, simply to meet the operating costs of the bloated public service they’ve created.

We hope Wynne will heed the warnings from business leaders that her government is making it harder and harder for Ontario businesses to compete -- not just with Third World countries, because that can’t be helped.

But more importantly, with comparable jurisdictions to Ontario’s all over the world.

We hope the premier and her government come to their senses soon and finally realize they cannot spend Ontario rich.

Sadly their record to date suggests they have no intention of doing so.