Ford's $200 bribe hits Ontario mailboxes before early vote

If you’re a resident of Ontario, the Ford government is sending you a cheque for $200. The move was announced in the Progressive Conservatives’ fall economic statement and amid speculation that the Tories will send voters to the polls early, before the next federal election.

The “rebate” money is set to reach 15 million Ontarians and cost the province $3 billion. Premier Doug Ford is billing the move as an affordability measure, citing, among other concerns, inflation, grocery prices, and the federally mandated carbon tax. Opposition parties are calling it a pre-election bribe. 

It’s a bribe.

Certainly, many could use the money. But everyone will get one. The cheques will go out to all Ontarians, and will include extra payments to households with children. A minimum wage earner will get a cheque. So will millionaires and billionaires. The measure is the definition of a blunt instrument, a one-off payment timed to precede an election that will be called for no reason other than maximising the political fortunes of the incumbent government.

A competent government would find other, less cynical, ways to spend the money. Ontario faces deep and persistent challenges, including crises in healthcare, housing, and education. People can neither find a doctor nor an affordable place to live. Classrooms are packed with too many students students, which hampers learning. Transit is a joke, with Toronto and Ottawa plagued by inadequate service. Long-term care facilities are deathtraps. The Ontario Disability Support Program is deeply underfunded – part of a pattern of nickel and diming social supports. Indeed, the province’s budget watchdog recently flagged a $3.7 billion dollar program funding gap in social services, which shakes out to just a bit more than the cost of the cheques.

The province’s debt, if you care about that sort of thing, is roughly $400 billion — which costs the government $13.4 billion in interest to manage each year. The deficit is now projected to come in at $6.6 billion. Even the conservative Fraser Institute has started going after Ford for his fiscal ineptitude. 

While few will turn down the money – their own money, as it happens – they really don’t have much of a choice. You could return the money to the provincial treasury to, say, pay down the debt, for instance, but this move presents a collective action problem. Your cheque makes no difference in the grand scheme of things unless others join you. But they won’t. Why would they? Especially when this government is keen on spending to support their own partisan ends. 

Government, after all, is the institution meant to be solving collective action problems, not causing them. Instead of cutting bribe cheques, the Ford government ought to invest in the province, building capacities that will help make life more affordable in the long run, raising quality of living, and supporting those in need today with the care they need. The government could sink $3 billion into hiring more doctors and nurses, raising disability support payments, or building affordable housing. Any of these investments would yield far better long-run returns than a one-time payment that, incidentally, risks contributing to the inflationary pressures Ford pretends to care about.

Cutting $200 bribe cheques ahead of an early election, the timing of which the government controls, is so utterly and self-evidently cynical, you might think voters will see through it. But despite routine, epic blundering and endemic corruption – the Greenbelt scandal, the cancelled Beer Store contracts, which cost the province $225 million – the Ontario PCs have proven to be remarkably resilient, remaining in majority government territory with roughly 40% support. 

The opposition is divided between the Ontario New Democratic Party, Liberal Party, and Greens, who come in at 21%, 27% and 7% respectively. A plurality of seem to have priced all of this in and decided Ford and company are worth the cost.

One hopes, however, that this time Ontarians will push back. Being bribed with your own money ought to be a wake-up call; it ought to signal, once and for all, that the Ford government can’t be trusted with the governance of the province given that they are willing to inflict long-term pain in the form of $3 billion in debt – and an even greater opportunity cost for money that could have been better spent – for the possibility of partisan short-term gain that will only lead to further problems still as the Ford runs Ontario into the ground.