The Ontario Liberals are from the government and they’re here to help.

Seriously, their pre-election budget last week wasn’t an attempt to blatantly buy votes in the June 7 election, so much as to please progressive voters on the centre and left of the political spectrum.

The Liberals aren’t concerned about Progressive Conservative voters on the centre right. Kathleen Wynne is obviously quite content to leave them to Doug Ford, and to let him rail on about the deficit and the debt. It’s Andrea Horwath’s NDP base the Liberals are courting with their Plan For Care And Opportunity.

There’s something here for everyone.

Free child care for kids aged two and a half to kindergarten.

Free prescription drugs and dental care up to $400 per person, $600 per couple and $700 for a family of four.

Free meds for people over 65, to go along with the previously announced free prescription drugs for young people under 24.

Free college and university tuition for up to 225,000 post-secondary students.

And $19 billion for hospitals over the next decade.

Not to mention the Wynn government’s raising the hourly minimum wage to $14 this year and $15 in 2019.

All of which gets the attention of voters on the left, whom the Liberals will need to overcome a hefty Conservative lead in the polls.

Of course, there’s also the nagging problem of the deficit and debt. After a decade of deficit spending, the Liberals finally balanced the books in the fiscal year that ended last week.

In the current fiscal year, they’re going to run a deficit of $6.7 billion, followed by $6.6 billion and $6.3 billion deficits in the coming two years.

Ontario’s debt has tripled to $325 billion in the nearly 15 years the Liberals have been in office. That’s now a debt-to-GDP ratio of 37 per cent, due to rise to 39 per cent by 2021. By contrast, Ottawa’s debt-to-GDP ratio is holding steady at 32 per cent, and is projected to fall below 30 per cent by 2021.

And this is in a full-employment Ontario economy, which has created nearly 75,000 jobs over the last year, with unemployment falling a full 1.8 per cent from 7.3 to 5.5 per cent.

The Liberals are obviously hoping their budget is a game-changer for them. But there’s a deep attitudinal desire for a change of government. A Leger Marketing poll of 1,000 respondents from March 12-14 found the satisfaction level with the Wynne government at only 23 per cent, with the dissatisfaction level at 67 per cent.

Asked who would make the best premier, 24 per cent said Ford, 15 per cent said Horwath and only 12 per cent chose Wynne.

Asked which party represented change, 31 per cent chose the PCs, 20 per cent the NDP, while only 10 per cent said the Liberals.

In a change election, the governing party can make a good case for continuity. But the fundamentals of the Leger survey also work against the Liberals on these numbers, where 63 per cent of the sample said change was the issue in the coming campaign, while only 20 per cent said it was continuity.

Finally, on voting intention, Leger had the PCs at 42 per cent, the Liberals at 26 per cent and the NDP at 20 per cent. Those are majority territory numbers for the PCs, even after their messy seven-week leadership crisis and election campaign.

The Ontario budget might have changed voting intentions on the margins, but it doesn’t change the fundamental desire for change, or improve Wynne’s approval numbers, which are in the tank. The negative fundamentals include hydro and home heating bills. Not to mention the $6.2 million compensation package for the head of Hydro One in 2017, up from $4.5 million the previous year. Ford will have fun with that.

Ford may also prove to be the beneficiary of low expectations. For example, he handily won the second leadership debate, and since winning the PC leadership, has done a surprisingly good job of reaching out to and uniting the other candidates’ camps around his leadership.

Which isn’t to say the Conservatives can’t find a way to blow the election, as they have in the last three Ontario campaigns. But the Liberals would be mistaken to underestimate Ford, as his leadership opponents did, or to caricature him as a Trump-north populist, when he is nothing of the sort.

The Ontario election poses a bit of a quandary for Justin Trudeau and the federal Liberals, close allies of their provincial cousins. Trudeau’s most senior political advisers are themselves alumni of Queen’s Park from the Dalton McGuinty era.

For one thing, on climate change, Ford has already made it clear he opposes Ottawa’s carbon tax, which is a winner with voters at the gas pump. As premier, he would undoubtedly also support the auto industry in endorsing the Trump administration’s move to roll back auto fuel efficiency regulations scheduled to increase to a fleet average of 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025. Most suburban Ontarians own SUVs or pickup trucks. Ford will be with them.

One more factor that may favour Ford and the PCs: Canada doesn’t have federal-provincial checks and balances built into the constitution. But Ontario voters have kind of built the colours into the ballot box.

In this rotation, that would be Red in Ottawa, Blue at Queen’s Park.