‍Budgeting For Decline‍

Ontario's budget arrives this week. Before it does, it's worth being clear about the province it lands in, because we have developed a bad habit of treating each budget as its own event, as if eight years of choices are somehow separate from the choice being made now.

They are not separate. They are the same choice, made again.

Since Ford took office, Ontario has become the slowest-growing province in the country by per-person GDP. Real wages here have grown at roughly 0.7 per cent a year over the past quarter century, about half the OECD average and a third of what American workers managed over the same period. That gap is not an abstraction. It is the reason a generation of Ontarians who are employed and working hard still cannot afford to live in the cities where the jobs are.

Unemployment sits at 7.6 per cent, against a national rate of 6.8. Youth unemployment is above 15 per cent. Consumer and business confidence have been near pandemic lows. These numbers did not arrive with Donald Trump. They were already the story.

So was housing. Five years ago Ford promised 1.5 million new homes by 2031, which required 150,000 starts a year, a stretch when announced and a joke now. Ontario started 62,561 homes in 2025. Every province except British Columbia is currently building more than it was a year ago. Ontario is not. The premier once assured us homes would sprout like mushrooms once interest rates fell. It turns out the only thing getting sauteed is the homebuilding industry.

The tax cut promised in Ford’s 2018 campaign, a 20 per cent reduction in the second income bracket that would have meant real relief for working families, has not arrived. Eight years of majority government. Meanwhile, since taking office, this government has spent $452 million in taxpayer money on advertising, with the province's Auditor General finding hundreds of millions of it existed primarily to generate a positive impression of the governing party. Ontario has roughly 125 MRI scanners. For what was spent on ads, the province could have bought between 150 and 300 new ones. More than half of Grade 6 students still do not meet the provincial math standard, after seven years of curriculum reform and ministerial review panels.

The pattern extends to how the province builds things. A kilometre of subway cost roughly $400 million in 2017. The Ontario Line is now projected at over a billion per kilometre, with some estimates pushing higher. We build one project at a time, lose the institutional knowledge between each one, and pay a premium on every contract because nobody trusts the process to hold. Our cities fund long-term infrastructure through development charges because the province has never given them a stable alternative, and those costs end up in the price of every new home.

A serious budget would reckon with all of this. This one probably won't. Not because the problems are intractable, but because a government this comfortable with decline is incapable of real change. I sympathize with many conservative voters who are left scratching their heads after 8 years.

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War In Iran & The Attention Economy‍

There is a war in the Middle East now in its third week. The United States and Israel have been bombing Iran since late February. The Iranian regime is genuinely dangerous, has funded proxy violence across the region for decades, and has murdered its own people for wanting to be free. None of that is in dispute. What is less clear is whether this war is working, whether anyone in charge knows what victory looks like, or whether a senior American counterterrorism official was right when he resigned last week saying there was no intelligence justifying the conflict in the first place. The Strait of Hormuz is effectively closed. Oil is trading above $112 a barrel. The region is destabilizing in ways that were predictable and predicted.

It is a lot to hold. And it arrives on top of everything else, the trade war, the political chaos south of the border, an information environment that produces a new emergency roughly every four hours. I understand why people feel disengaged right now. It is not indifference, but is a kind of rational exhaustion.

But unfortunately, the world's conflicts are landing here in Ontario too. Three synagogues in the Greater Toronto Area were shot at within a week this month, one of them while worshippers were inside celebrating Purim. A mosque on Yonge Street received a threatening call referencing the Christchurch attack. A worshipper was assaulted leaving Friday prayers. These are our neighbours. A pluralistic society does not mean everyone agrees. It means everyone belongs, and that compact is something we can actually protect, here, at home, despite what is happening beyond our borders.

On that note, I believe the antidote to the doom many are feeling is not more scrolling. It is action. Go join a volunteer organization. Knock on doors for a cause or a candidate you believe in. Treat the people around you with more kindness than the moment seems to call for. The nihilism that the news cycle produces is a kind of paralysis, and paralysis serves no one. People often underestimate how much change just one person can make at home.
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