The myth of the big-spending Premier
Doug Ford isn’t growing government – he’s shrinking it in disguise.
It’s time to put to bed a persistent myth: Doug Ford is not a big-spending politician. When seen in the proper context, his budgets are slowly starving much of the public sector.
This may come as a surprise when the tabling of the annual budget invariably produces headlines about record budgets and massive deficits.
“Mr. Ford, he’s a big-spending conservative,” the Toronto Star’s Robert Benzie noted recently on the This Matters podcast. “He’s not someone who is looking to cut spending in as dramatic a way as people thought he would seven years ago.”
Strictly speaking, Premier Ford is indeed spending much more than previous governments. The total budget in 2025 is nearly 50 per cent higher than the last Liberal government’s 2018 budget. What’s missing from this analysis, however, is the role of inflation and population growth.
Inflation erodes the value of every dollar spent, while population growth increases demand for government programs. Both factors have seen unusual spikes in recent years. Even when the absolute amount of government spending goes up, if it does not keep pace with inflation and population growth, the availability and quality of services suffers.
This is the meaningful definition of a cut, and it can have devastating impacts on people’s lives.
Relying on the Public Accounts and the 2025 Budget, Maytree has analyzed trends in the Ford government’s program spending from its first budget in 2018-19 to what is proposed for 2025-26. Controlling for inflation and population growth, we find the increase shrinks to only 5 per cent over seven years.
This is not the result of across-the-board increases. The only sectors seeing real per capita spending growth were health, justice, and a catch-all category called “other programs.” Many of the largest sectors, including children and social services, K-12 education, and post-secondary education, have experienced effective cuts.
Nowhere have these cuts been more devastating than in the children and social services sector, where real per capita spending is down 11 per cent. Inflation-adjusted rates for Ontario Works are now well over $200 below where the Harris government left them in 1995, driving more Ontarians into homelessness.
As the Ford government has learned, slowly starving social services achieves the same result as using an axe, without any of the negative publicity.
If the government isn’t spending more, why does it continue to pile up debt? The answer is Ontario has a revenue problem. The Ford government’s slow and steady cuts to taxes and fees are now costing the treasury over $7.7 billion annually. According to the 2025 budget, inflation-adjusted revenues excluding federal transfers will drop by another 2.6 per cent by 2027-28.
The truth is, Ontario is a low-revenue, low-spending jurisdiction. An analysis by the Financial Accountability Office of Ontario found that Ontario had the lowest per capita revenue and per capita spending among all provinces in 2022. It’s not even close: Revenues were a full 24.2 per cent below the average for the rest of Canada.
An appropriate headline you will never see on budget day might read: “Ontario again tables smallest per capita budget in Canada.”
Putting the pieces together, we must acknowledge how well the Ford government has projected a false identity as a big spending government dedicated to protecting public services. By reducing revenues each year, the government maintains a small annual deficit that has little impact on Ontario’s debt-to-GDP ratio. This deficit is then reframed as evidence that Mr. Ford would rather protect our public programs than balance the budget through cuts.
Without the benefit of the proper context, this easy narrative propagates, and media coverage obscures rather than reveals the truth:
Doug Ford is not a big-spending politician.
Originally published as an op-ed in the Toronto Star.