TORONTO — Ontario should be prepared for “tougher times” amid global economic disruption, but the government won’t slash public sector jobs to buttress the budget amid uncertainty, the finance minister is signalling ahead of Thursday’s fiscal update.
Other provinces have recently braced against the economic headwinds by forecasting record deficits, raising taxes and cutting front-line jobs, but that will not be Ontario’s approach, Peter Bethlenfalvy says.
“The world has changed — and Ontario must be ready for what change may bring, even if that means being prepared for tougher times,” he said in a pre-budget speech earlier this month.
“As a government, we cannot eliminate uncertainty, but we can mitigate risks with a responsible, balanced fiscal approach that supports public services and infrastructure while maintaining flexibility.”
In that speech, he twice mentioned delivering government programs “efficiently and sustainably,” words that are sometimes used by politicians to signal belt tightening.
“I think it reflects the fact that we’ve got to make sure that the money, the significant investments we’re making in social services, health care, education, gets to the workers who are providing, whether it’s a social worker or a health-care worker or a teacher, and making sure all the money just doesn’t flow to administration,” he said Wednesday in an interview.
Ontario has already tasked hospitals with coming up with a three-year plan to balance their budgets, in a bid to get a handle on growing deficits in the sector, using an assumption of getting two per cent annual funding increases. That is half of the increase they received the previous year.
Some hospitals have already started making some “lower risk” cuts under that plan, the Ontario Hospital Association has said. The province would need to add about $2.7 billion to meet the full operating needs of the hospital sector, the association has said.
The province’s deficit, in the most recent fiscal update earlier this year, stood at $13.4 billion. Bethlenfalvy has been silent on whether the path to balance remains the same as his plan in last year’s budget to get into the black in 2027-28.
Balance, however, has been a moving target. The 2027-28 goal is a year later than Bethlenfalvy projected in the 2024 budget, which itself was a year later than he projected in the 2023 budget.
Ontario’s books are in a relatively good position to be able to stay on the province’s path to balance and lower the net-debt-to-GDP ratio, as long as it doesn’t use fiscal breathing room to announce new spending commitments, according to a budget preview from Desjardins.