The McGuinty government is launching a fresh assault on public-sector employees by eliminating a dozen provincial agencies and banning all perks, including golf memberships and season tickets to sporting events.
Finance Minister Dwight Duncan said the austerity measures aimed at eliminating waste and finding savings are necessary to help the province manage through hard times and erase its record $18.7-billion deficit.
“In these difficult times, we need to look under every stone to cut back on agencies with overlapping functions or agencies whose function could either cease to exist or simply be performed more efficiently by other means,” Mr. Duncan said in a speech on Tuesday to the Canadian Club in Toronto.
He would not name which agencies are destined for the chopping block, but said the government can reduce the 259 entities it has direct control over by 5 per cent.
The government also plans to introduce legislation banning perks in the broader public sector, including school boards, universities, colleges, hospitals and children’s aid societies. If passed, Mr. Duncan said, there will be no more golf or gym memberships for executives and no more “lump-sum, no-receipt, no-questions-asked” travel budgets.
Mr. Duncan acknowledged to reporters that he does not know how widespread spending abuses are in the broader public sector.
“But every time the [provincial] auditor goes somewhere,” he said, “he finds these things.”
Mr. Duncan essentially gave his audience a sneak preview of next year’s provincial budget, with hints of more spending cuts to come. The measures amount to pre-emptive steps to head off further embarrassing revelations about lavish spending by public-sector employees and opposition attacks over how much the bureaucracy has grown during the seven years Premier Dalton McGuinty has been in office.
Just last week, Ontario Auditor-General Jim McCarter released his annual report, which criticized the Municipal Property Assessment Corp. for wining and dining employees and for spending taxpayers’ money on Nintendo Wii consoles.
“Every time the Auditor-General files a report, I know it bugs you,” Mr. Duncan said in his speech. “It bugs me too. Actually … it drives me crazy.”
The government is also under attack by the opposition over the creation of new agencies. Much of the criticism centres on the Ontario Power Authority, an electricity planning entity that has ballooned to more than 300 employees, and the 14 provincially appointed health agencies known as Local Health Integration Networks.
Progressive Conservative Leader Tim Hudak called for a “sunset review process” on Tuesday of all provincial agencies, boards and commissions to determine whether they can justify their ongoing value. “If they can’t, you close them down,” he said at a news conference.
The LHINs, he said, are a classic case of a “bloated bureaucracy” that has diverted $250-million out of front-line health care into agencies that provide little value.
New Democratic Leader Andrea Horwath said the McGuinty government has created more than 30 new agencies, boards and commissions since 2003.
“And now they say they have too many?” she said. “It’s like an arsonist worried about fire damages.”
The proposed legislation banning perks amounts to a tacit admission that the government’s efforts to rein in the public sector are a work in progress. The government’s plan to largely erase its deficit by freezing public-sector wages for two years suffered a major setback last month after an arbitrator awarded a pay hike to thousands of hospital workers.
Mr. McGuinty attempted to end spending scandals that dogged his government a year ago by having major Crown corporations adopt stringent rules covering travel expenses. His government is now extending those rules to the broader public sector.
“We didn’t have the broader public sector under close enough scrutiny, so we’re changing that,” Mr. Duncan said.
