Ontario’s budget landed on Thursday, not with a bang but a whimper. By any non-2020 standard, it’s a horror show: To the previously projected $38.5-billion deficit in 2020-21 you can now add $33.1 billion in 2021-22 and $28.2 billion in 2022-23, all of which will ratchet the province’s debt-to-GDP ratio to very nearly 50 per cent. The balanced-budget target, which had not been very ambitious to begin with, has been fired out of a cannon into the sun. And it won’t be nearly enough to get every Ontarian through this pandemic unscathed.
In the lead-up to the budget, Premier Doug Ford and Finance Minister Rod Phillips had been talking up improvements to the province’s system of long-term care homes: Increasing “direct daily care” provided to residents from 2.7 hours to four, and recruiting thousands more personal support workers. These were among the interim recommendations issued last month by the Long-Term Care COVID-19 Commission, created by the government in May to examine the catastrophe that swept through so many facilities in the spring.
There is no costing for those measures in the budget, however.
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