Even when we disagree on what government should or shouldn’t pay for, we all want government to be efficient with money. Politicians all promise to limit spending and reduce the deficit. We miss that being efficient, and spending as little as possible, are not the same. 2/15
Often, refusing to spend money today only costs much more money tomorrow. People know this. If you neglect your teeth, or your roof, or a highway, you’ll end up paying more when the bill comes due. Yet we applaud governments that do this, and imagine they are saving money. 3/15
Sometimes an individual just doesn’t have money today. A province should never have that problem. It can raise taxes and borrow, easily and cheaply. Debt isn’t always good, but if we can spend less now rather than much more later, it’s very good. It’s our taxes, either way. 4/15
Often, you also need to spend money to make money. Entrepreneurs know this. I have a small business myself. If my overhead isn’t growing it means my business isn’t growing. Failing to spend money isn’t a virtue here. It’s a failure to invest. 5/15
Somehow, conservatives have convinced us that we should invest in corporations, in tax breaks to the rich, even in sports stadiums. But we fail to invest in individual people. We treat services and costs associated with people as an expense, rather than an investment. 6/15
If spending money on a person helps them get back on their feet it isn’t a cost at all - it’s a savings and a gain. Whether it’s education, healthcare, addictions treatment, or simply a livable income on disability or OW, helping someone succeed saves money all around. 7/15
Despite the obvious incentive to help people manage, if nothing else, to at least cost the system less money over time, so many people oppose spending money to save money here. They view it as a hand-out, or a waste. And again, we only pay more in the end. 8/15
One of the hardest things to resist is the desire to reverse or cancel everything another party did in power. It costs us all a fortune. We throw out massive efforts already underway and trash them in favor of something new. And then we applaud the waste. We all do it. 9/15
It defies logic to imagine that in a large and complex government, any party’s efforts and plans are always bad or always good. We need to be mature enough to accept that sometimes the other folks get something right. And sometimes a thing is just done. 10/15
Doug Ford just wasted hundreds of millions reversing green energy projects, literally ripping completed wind turbines out of the ground. And his base loves it. As Liberals we need to be better than that. We can admit even in this government there are efforts worth saving. 11/15
I do not dislike Ontario Health Teams. This change may not be implemented perfectly, but the goal of integration is good. I do not dislike online high school classes. I don’t think they can or should be mandatory, but there’s nothing wrong with making them optional. 12/15
The bottom line is this. Our political leaders will never be better than the people who elect them. If we want our government to spend money well, we need to accept certain economic realities and stop voting for people who make promises based on extreme short-term thinking. 13/15
Sometimes we need to spend more now, to avoid greater future costs. We also need to invest well and broadly, not just in corporations but also in our citizens. And we need to avoid wasteful, constant reversals, just because it makes us feel good to undo whatever "they" did. 14/15
If we want our government to be better, we need to be better, smarter voters. We need to support leaders who will spend and manage money in the same way we manage our own pocketbooks. And as an Ontario Liberal, I’ll be challenging our leadership candidates to do just that. 15/15
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