Ontario back in a surplus

It took them a good three years, but the Ontario Liberals have finally undone the damage inflicted by the Tories and their $5.6 billion deficit. Sooner than expected, too!

Now they can get to work fixing the damage the Tories did to Ontario's social safety net. I wish them as much success with that as with the elimination of the deficit.

For anyone who forgets the story of what happened, basically, the Tories cooked the books in 2003 to make it seem like Ontario was in a surplus. When the Liberals won, they opened up the books and found a huge deficit. The Tories basically lied, and then had the nerve to blame the deficit on the newly-elected Liberals (who hadn't even presented a budget yet).

This is what I think happened - in one of the biggest political dirty tricks ever, the Tories figured they could cook the books, with one of two outcomes. The first would be they'd win on their "sound" economic record (by hiding, of course, a $5.6 billion dirty little secret) and the second would be that they'd lose and the Liberals would find a nasty surprise waiting to cripple them and all of their promises. The latter happened, and their game worked pretty well for a while there, with McGuinty pulling in approval ratings in the teens as he was forced to make some unfortunate and painful but nevertheless necessary decisions to fix the Tories' mess. But he seems to have bounced back, which gives me hope that the voters of Ontario are smart enough to realize it wasn't McGuinty's fault, and he and his government have done an admirable job of coping with the knee-capping the Tories gave them. Here's hoping.