This coming Thursday afternoon, when provincial Finance Minister Charles Sousa delivers his budget, he will not break Ontario's streak of deficits.
Sousa says he won't get to balance the budget until 2017, and that means this week he'll deliver the ninth straight deficit under successive Liberal governments. The last balanced budget was in fiscal 2007-08.
Ontario's successive deficits, plus borrowing to pay for building projects, have pushed the province's debt load to $298.9 billion.
That's certainly an eye-popping figure. It's nearly double what it was before this string of deficits ($153 billion in 2007-08).
The biggest consequence of that ballooning debt is how much it costs in interest.
Taxpayers are shelling out $11.4 billion in interest on the debt this year. That's more than the government is spending on either community and social services ($11.1 billion) or colleges and universities ($7.8 billion).
Nine cents out of every government dollar now goes to service the debt. One expert points out that's money that can't be spent on other programs.
Economists measure the burden of debt by comparing it with the size of the overall economy, in a measure called debt-to-GDP ratio. Ontario's current ratio (40.2%) has never been higher, even in the prolonged recession of the early 1990s.
When the debt-to-GDP ratio gets too high, the government runs the risk of a credit downgrade, potentially forcing it to pay a higher interest rate on new borrowing.
It all shows that repeated deficits are not without consequences, even if the governments who run them — or parties who campaign on a promise to run them — keep winning elections.
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