Lies, damned lies and budgets

Both Ian Urquhart at the Toronto Star and Bruce Little at the Globe and Mail have stories up detailing how $5.6 billion of Ontario taxpayers money went up in smoke. The numbers may vary slightly from one to the other but the basic story is the same: Eves' and Eckers' claims of a balanced budget were a con job. We were lied to. But a lot of us knew that already.

The PC party won't recover from this for a long time. And I suspect the odds against Mike Harris leading the united right at a national level just increased quite a bit as well.

There's a little more from Erik Peters' report that's worth mentioning.

[H]e took aim in his news briefing at the provincial law that requires the government to balance its books or face penalties.

He compared it with a corporate board of directors that instructs its management to deliver a profit; the managers comply, but only by bending the rules of accounting out of shape. These days, it's a simple mental leap to compare the former Tory government to the accounting scandals that have rocked the United States -- a euphonious joining of Enron-Eves-Ecker into a single phenomenon.

Meanwhile, what's a Premier to do? For starters, he's trashing the current electricity rate cap of 4.3 cents as soon as he can. Technically he'll be breaking a promise since he campaigned on a commitment to keep it in force until 2006, but I think it was a dumb promise in the first place. As painful as it may be, we're better off to let the price find a more natural level and deal with it.

There are also measures he can take that were promised during the campaign.

He also said he would follow through with promises made during the election that swept the Liberals to power Oct. 2, and introduce legislation in the coming weeks to roll back corporate tax cuts, scrap plans for further cuts and eliminate a tax credit for seniors. Tobacco taxes will also rise to national levels this year.