Nonsense.
First off 4% savings on a 150B budget is 6B.
Now remove those items where cuts are either impossible [[interest on the debt); or where any modest efficiencies would be eaten up by promises made [[Health) and you just removed 47% of spending from any cut.
You now need to cut that 6B or 7.5% from the remaining spend.
But you have a quick look, didn't he say 'no layoffs'? Since teachers are 80% of labour cost of education, and since he's said no school closings, ....can't really cut much there at all. A few administrators by attrition?
Can't stop feeding the prisoners or guarding them, no laying off the judges or the OPP....
At the end you're going to be left w/cutting departments like environment by 25% or more, and that would most certainly involved layoffs and lots of them. Last time we tried that by the way, people got killed in Walkerton Ontario by contaminated water.
His commitments are non-workable.
Beyond all that he has not released any deficit projection at all, and has made spending/tax committments totally over 6B on top of the deficit he would inherit.
That's before considering how to account for the hydro and pension costs at the core of the dispute between the Auditor General and the Liberals.
If you are even handed and allocate that money as deficit whoever is in power, and Ford gets in you would have the largest deficit in Ontario history at over $18B.
This is such a nonsense statement.
First off, Doug was not Mayor, nor was he budget chief.
Second, Toronto, as with all Ontario municipalities must have a balanced budget by law every single year.
Meaning Rob Ford inherited a balanced budget from his predecessor.
Third, during Rob's time as Mayor Toronto contracted out the jobs of 1/2 the sanitation workers; the workers for the new company make a fraction of what City staff did; there were many unfilled jobs, and service levels stagnated.
Fourth, Doug's attendance record at council was abysmal and this was idiot who tried to scuttle award-winning plans for the waterfront in favour of a giant ferris wheel.
The epitome of responsibility he is not.
Moreover, as of yesterday, he is being sued.
Sued...by Rob Ford's Widow, who in a Statement of Claim filed w/the court alleges that he is not only mismanaging and misappropriating his late brother's estate; but that he has also mismanaged the family business causing it to lose $5M in recent years.
https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/...-millions.html
While that mistake is accurate, the overall platform was submitted to an indpendent non-partisan third party for costing.
The mistake, when caught, was admitted, and corrected.
It was a stupid mistake that should have been caught earlier. That's a fair concern.
Though, just to be even-handed its not really a 1.4B mistake, just on paper.
The reason I say that is that its 700M, which by law is set aside as a contingency in the provincial budget each year.
The intent, of course, is not to spend a contingency.
So while it was wrongly recorded as revenue, in a typical year it is not actually an expense.