A SUSTAINABLE ECONOMY
FISCAL RESPONSIBILITY FOR A CHANGE
The Green Party believes in responsible fiscal management. Building up deficits and debts ultimately limits future policy choices. Interest payments on provincial debt could instead be going to health, housing, education, and environmental protection.
Unfortunately, the Ontario Liberal, NDP and Conservative governments together built up a staggering $110 billion debt. So what do we do now? First of all, we need to recognize that there are three kinds of debt: fiscal debt (money owed), social debt (illness, poverty, unemployment, and stress), and environmental debt (over-exploited natural resources and high pollution levels). Reducing a fiscal debt by cutting health and education services or by relaxing pollution standards only increases social and environmental debts, which will cost us even more to remedy in the future.When former Finance Minister and now Premier Ernie Eves and the Conservative government gave Ontarians a promised tax cut, they not only borrowed $2 billion to do it (in effect bribing us with a false tax cut), they also significantly increased Ontario's social and environmental debts.
The tragedy at Walkerton and the many other deaths directly resulting from social sector cutbacks are just the most visible symptoms of these higher environmental and social debt loads. Much more of these other debts are hidden from public view in the private suffering, stress, and illness of Ontario families. In effect, Ernie Eves and his government have increased our total real debt load. It was a false economy and reckless politics. Thanks to previous Tory, Liberal and NDP governments, we now have a higher combined debt load than ever.
We must now pay off all our debts without creating new
social, environmental, or fiscal obligations. That is the standard of a truly
fiscally responsible government.