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2018 Provincial Election Transit Promises

PinkLucy said:
Um wait, wasn’t Doug supposed to save us $6 billion?
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Once they relabel pension contributions to be a deficit (current year spending) rather than an asset (money sits in a government controlled account for future spending), they can trim back those pension contributions in order to reduce the deficit.

I would hazard a guess that OPSU and Teachers will not be happy with the 2019/2020 budget.
 
I think we'll get City Hall era Ford economics where both revenue and expenditures are classified as deficit or savings for political purposes.
 
Accounting sheningians.

Pensions as assets or deficit is a powderkeg. (sigh)

Pension as asset. It's money in your pocket when you grow old.
Pension as liability. It's money they have to spend today.

Why can't our governments be consistent with accounting standards, for apples-vs-apples comparison stake, please?

This never ends, blaming the previous government for accounting shenanigans, and then starting their own accounting shenanigans.

Not saying we can do better with spending -- I've always been dismayed at certain government spends by ALL SIDES in the past -- but switching accounting rules repeatedly (back and fourth yet again) to make the previous government look worse, is only polarizing and doesn't help stabilize finances. Is there a new nonpartisan citizen's group that can call governments out on this practice? Ugh.
 
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mdrejhon said:
This never ends, blaming the previous government for accounting shenanigans, and then starting their own accounting shenanigans.
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The up side is, each change of government resets the baseline. No small reason why voters choose change, even when the chosen party has its own warts.

- Paul
 
Weren't the liberals supposed to deliver a balanced budget before they went out?
 
Neutrino said:
That downtown subway coverage would be crazy - 3 parallel lines. Wouldn't they cannibalize ridership from one another?
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Induced demand fixes that.

Beijing and Shanghai now has parallel subways out of the wazoo, and there are many cases where 2 parallel lines getting 3x as many people as the original solo line. They feed off and amplify each other, with all the extra connections and increased convenience.

To do that, what we need is a much better gridded-out subway system. More metro quality lines that interchange with each other. Loops, loops, galore generate induced demand. We only have one loop -- a horizontal line crossing the U.

With dense development, induced demand is more efficient with transit than with freeways. The Yonge Subway can move as many people across a single point as the full width of the 401.
 
Key transit projects in limbo as PCs do ‘line-by-line audit’
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Almost four months after the Progressive Conservatives swept to power, a handful of key Toronto-area transit initiatives remain in limbo, with the new provincial government refusing to commit to billions of dollars worth of projects championed by the ousted Liberals.
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Facing questions from reporters Thursday for the first time since the June election, Transportation Minister John Yakabuski declined to answer directly when asked whether the Conservatives will follow through on pledges their predecessors made, including reducing fares for shorter GO trips and electrifying large portions of the GO network.
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“Announcements that will be made will be made in due course and at the appropriate time,” he said, predicting the audit would be done “very soon.”
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https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2018/09/19/go-transit-adding-trips-on-lakeshore-train-lines.html
 
mdrejhon said:
Accounting sheningians.
Pensions as assets or deficit is a powderkeg. (sigh)
Pension as asset. It's money in your pocket when you grow old.
Pension as liability. It's money they have to spend today.
Why can't our governments be consistent with accounting standards, for apples-vs-apples comparison stake, please?

This never ends, blaming the previous government for accounting shenanigans, and then starting their own accounting shenanigans.

Not saying we can do better with spending -- I've always been dismayed at certain government spends by ALL SIDES in the past -- but switching accounting rules repeatedly (back and fourth yet again) to make the previous government look worse, is only polarizing and doesn't help stabilize finances. Is there a new nonpartisan citizen's group that can call governments out on this practice? Ugh.
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There is a consistent way of doing it. It's called Canadian Public Sector Accounting Standards.
The Liberals violated them. The PC's are now following them.

https://twitter.com/OntarioAuditor/status/1043124181137874945
 
Agree. This is way beyond partisan politics. The Auditor General, an independent public servant, called the Wynne government’s accounting fraudulent. The rating agencies all adjusted for Wynne’s off balance sheet structures. Which, BTW I used to do tax structuring for banks, and when I saw diagram of the fair hydro plan, I was really impressed by the ingenuity. But not so much by the dishonesty.
 
^Still not that clear cut.
Published on Apr 27, 2018
by John Michael McGrath
[...]
This is news, but it’s not new. The two key disagreements Lysyk has with the Liberals have been bubbling away for months. The auditor general’s office says that the government is misstating two billion-dollar items in its expenses: public pensions and the Fair Hydro Plan. The latter is a complicated bit of financial machinery whose whole purpose was to lower electricity prices in advance of the election without showing up as a deficit on the province’s books. (The Globe and Mailpublished an excellent analysis of the situation last week.) Lysyk says the public shouldn’t be misled and puts the financial costs of the Fair Hydro Plan on the government’s ledger.

The older disagreement has to do with what is actually, in a sense, a good-news story: two of the province’s biggest public pensions are running large surpluses, which the government is booking as revenue. Lysyk’s office says that’s shady accounting because, while there’s no actual cash flowing into the province’s bank accounts (indeed, the government would be breaking the law if it tried to deposit it there), the spreadsheet shenanigans make the province’s accounts look better than they are. The reason this has become an issue now and wasn’t highlighted as one in previous years is that the government first started booking this “revenue” (again, there’s no actual money coming in) in 2016.

Factoring in the sum of these two disagreements, Lysyk says that next year’s projected deficit of $6.7 billion should properly be $11.7 billion and that the deficit for 2020-21 should be $12.5 billion, nearly double the projected $6.5 billion.

This bad news can’t have come as much of a surprise to the Liberals; indeed, Liberal voters have surely “priced in” the allegations of financial malfeasance against the party just as surely as Progressive Conservative voters have learned to ignore the history of accusations against their leader, Doug Ford. (He has, for example, been known to trumpet politically convenient numbers that bear only passing resemblance to the facts.)

For his part, Ford on Thursday made a new promise to voters that raises at least as many questions as it answers. He said that in response to Lysyk’s new(ish) report, the Tories would form a commission of inquiry to sort out the province’s books and investigate 15 years of alleged Liberal perfidy.

But Ford had also already promised a “line by line” independent audit of the province’s books. What would an inquiry find that that wouldn’t also find? Indeed, what could it uncover that hasn’t already been highlighted by the auditor general? Even people who disagree with her work can acknowledge that Lysyk’s accounting isn’t particularly mysterious: her assessment rests on the principle that two plus two equals four, even if the government says otherwise — not the kind of thing it takes a team of forensic accountants to unearth.

Ford’s team says that the inquiry would be limited in time and scope to complement the auditor’s work. This wouldn’t be a long, sprawling affair like, say, the Gomery inquiry of the early 2000s. Unfortunately, there isn’t an obvious precedent it can point to for what it has in mind: making recommendations to the government on how clean up its own books.

Which leaves us nothing but questions: If the Tories agree with Lysyk’s recommendations, why not simply act on them? If they’re looking for independent outside advice, there’s already a national body that’s supposed to make clear decisions on public accounting, the Public Sector Accounting Board. Why not ask it to weigh in?

Which leaves the possibility that the point of this inquiry would really be to force some Liberals into a pseudo-trial and demand they confess their sins in front of TV cameras. That might make for good entertainment, but it’s not exactly a sign of high principles at work.

An independent commission is entirely unnecessary. MPPs at Queen’s Park can receive advice from industry experts in committee and question witnesses when they need to. They can even force people to testify and hold them under oath, if need be. There’s an existing standing committee at Queen’s Park dedicated to the province’s accounts — it’s called, wait for it, the Standing Committee on Public Accounts — that could do this work, or the legislature could set up a special committee to focus on the question.

There’s a tendency to assume that anything elected politicians touch is tainted, that any recommendations they produce must by definition be the result of greasy backroom deals. But that ignores the good work MPPs do — through, for example, private members’ bills and committees — which doesn’t get the attention it deserves at Queen’s Park. If politicians have made this mess of the province’s books (they have), it’s better for the public if they’re also the ones responsible for cleaning it up. If nothing else, it would show voters that such a thing is possible.
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https://tvo.org/article/current-aff...tarios-finances-but-show-trials-wont-fix-that
 
steveintoronto said:
^Still not that clear cut.

https://tvo.org/article/current-aff...tarios-finances-but-show-trials-wont-fix-that
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No, it is clear cut. It’s an accounting issue. Our independent accounting watchdog called major bullshit on Wynne’s numbers. Then a journalist said no, it’s all politics. Personally, I believe the Auditor General over the journo. Because, you know, accountant opines on accounting. But if you’re really in doubt, check out all the boxes and arrows in the structure Wynne tried to use to get the additional FHP debt off the books. It’s Byzantine, to say the least.
 
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