TORONTO – “The players change but the music is always the same”: it’s an old Italian saying that is well suited to two Canadian “players”, the former Premier of Ontario Kathleen Wynne and the current one Doug Ford, both “champions of public spending” despite the opposite political position.

This is what emerges from a new study by the Fraser Institute: according to it, Premier Ford and the Progressive Conservatives, after having accused Wynne and the Liberals for years of “reckless spending” when they were in power, are actually doing the same thing. Or even worse.

“Despite promises to be more fiscally prudent than its predecessor, the Ford government has essentially continued the spending trends of the Wynne government that came before it” study co-author Ben Eisen says in the report titled “Ontario Premiers and Provincial Government Spending, 2024″ (you can read it here: ontario-premiers-and-provincial-govt-spending-2024).

In fact, the Fraser Institute report finds that the Ford government has recorded the second and third highest levels of average spending per capita among all Ontario governments since 1965 (all numbers are adjusted for inflation and population growth and exclude interest payments on debt so that results are consistent over time).

The highest level of per capita spending occurred under Dalton McGuinty’s Liberal government in 2010 at $12,305, while the second and third highest were under the Ford government during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 at $12,227 and in 2021 at $12,081. But even excluding pandemic-related spending, the study finds, the Ford government still recorded the second and third highest years of provincial spending per capita since 1965, at $11,294 in 2018 and $11,310 in 2021.

The two years Ford’s highest per capita program spending also surpassed Wynne’s highest year of $11,101 in 2017. “Under Premier Wynne, spending increased from $10,901 to $11,101,” the study notes. “The Ford government has essentially carried on (this) approach … although spending spiked during the pandemic, it has subsequently gradually returned to near pre-pandemic levels. Per-person spending increased from $11,101 in the final fiscal year of the Wynne government (2018) to $11,163 in 2022” under the Ford government.

Furthermore, the average annual growth rates of per capita spending by the Wynne and Ford governments are nearly identical, at 0.3% for Ford and 0.4% for the Wynne government, according to the study. Not only that: when Ford and the Progressive Conservatives defeated Wynne and the Liberals in 2018, Ontario’s net debt amounted to approximately $337 billion, which according to Ford’s party at the time had burdened Ontario taxpayers largest non-national debt in the world; today, after six years under Ford, Ontario’s net debt is estimated at $439 billion and is on track to reach $459 billion in 2025 and $474 billion in 2026. As if to say, using another Italian “motto”: from what a pulpit the sermon came…

In the pics above, Doug Ford and Kathleen Wynne (from their Twitter X profile – @fordnation and @Kathleen_Wynne)