When filling out your income tax form you often see a lot of little additional boxes at that you have the option to check off. One of these will be whether you would like to donate your tax refund to the province. It would seem that the province has a debt of $298.9 billion with no plans of how to be able to pay this back. It would seem that the government’s outlook for this year’s deficit is at $7.5 billion. If we broke that down to every man, woman and child that lives in Ontario then each of their responsibilities to that debt would be $21,000 each.
This is almost mind-boggling when we look at all of the expenses that have climbed every year, particularly between 2006 and 2014 which showed as a 70 % increase in our hydro-bills. The government has made a lot of decisions concerning our energy. The indicators are that the amount that will be owed will be 133 billion by the year 2032.
For those that feel that they have the obligation to bail the government out of this large deficit that they are in, you can actually write a check out to the government which is to the Ontario Opportunities Fund. It has been said that so far 36,560 people have donated to the find bringing in a total of $135,289 last year. No doubt the government is not impressed with this and figure it is a drop in the bucket.
So where is this big financial dilemma coming from, and what is it that we are seeing that can justify this type of deficient? Well you would have to go back and look at what is classed as unexpected costs. To begin with there was the gas plant that originally was only going to cost us $230 million but the bill came in on that closer to $1 billion. Then there was the Smart meter program that ended up costing $1.9 billion, which was pretty well twice the amount that was estimated that it was going to cost, and then there was the escalated cost of the Green energy act that ended up bringing in at $9.2 billion. So when looking at all of these misconceptions of what costs are supposed to be and what they end up being, are we looking here at the circumstances beyond one’s control or are we purely looking at money miss management. No matter what the reason is the bottom line is that the government is appealing to the people to help bail them out of this most serious of financial problem that the province is in.
