If you’re from Ontario, you’ll have had yesterday penciled into your calendars, like a trip to the dentist, for weeks. If you’re from outside Ontario, you’re likely at least dimly aware that Premier McGuinty punted the matter of long-term fiscal stabilization to Don Drummond, an ex-Ottawa mandarin, so that his ministers could take to the hustings last fall saying everything was under control when in fact this place is broke, broke, broke.

Anyway, Drummond released his report yesterday and it’s a doozy. Figure 1 provides a succinct overview of Drummond’s view on Ontario’s prospects.

Figure 1 – Don Drummond with a word on Ontario’s Fiscal Future

RUN!

The big highlight is that sticking to the status quo will mean a $30 billion annual provincial deficit by 2017. As a result, Drummond recommends significant reductions in government spending growth rates. Specifically, he recommends keeping health expenditure growth over the next seven years to 2.5% per year (good luck with that!), education to 1%, PSE to 1.5% and everywhere else to -2.4%.

(How did PSE get that lucky? I’m guessing that having two serving senior university officials – Dominic Giroux and Carol Stephenson – among that four task members didn’t hurt.)

Not content to lay out general targets, the report offers a raft of specific measures designed to improve the efficiency of public services. The PSE chapter has no less than 30 recommendations, which vary significantly in quality. Some, like ditching tax credits and investing in upfront grants, are eminently sensible; others, like “rewarding teaching the way we reward research,” are things people have been saying for 20 years without much progress having been achieved. Some are weirdly trivial (extending the review period for OSAP default rates? Who cares?), and some are just flat out terrible. Specifically, the one about placing a moratorium on new Bachelor’s programs in community colleges. There’s zero justification for it, it will do nothing other than entrench a program-delivery monopoly by universities and it is completely at odds with the rest of the report’s emphasis on opening up public services.

It’s hard to tell how many of these 30 recommendations will actually become policy. Some are difficult to implement and TCU is – how to put this? – out of practice when it comes to tackling multiple tricky projects simultaneously. Others, like re-evaluating student assistance, will probably be seen as too likely to cause excess whingeing from certain (ahem) student groups to be worth the irritation.

If I had to guess, I’d say very few will be implemented any time soon. Universities and colleges will be grabbing that 1.5%, praying the health care leviathan doesn’t eat it into it, and letting bureaucratic inertia take care of the rest.