Commission on the Reform of Ontario's Public Services

Recommendation 1-1: We recommend the following annual changes in program spending
out to 2017–18:
� Health care — plus 2.5 per cent;
� Education (primary and secondary) — plus 1.0 per cent;
� Post-secondary education (excluding training) — plus 1.5 per cent;
� Social services — plus 0.5 per cent; and
� All other programs — minus 2.4 per cent. As in the example cited, this would imply an
even bigger cut for everything except the fixed items referred to earlier; in this case, the cut
would be in the order of 4.5 per cent.
This permits post-secondary education grants to almost keep pace with enrolment and
provides a more realistic path for non-health, non-education, non-social services spending.
For the latter programs, it still represents a very significant degree of restraint — a cumulative
decline in the level of spending of about 15.6 per cent over seven years — even though a
significant portion of this “everything else” category is either fully committed by historical
arrangements such as amortization and pension contributions or simply unwise to cut,
such as existing shared-cost agreements, where the province would be giving up federal
dollars. For everything other than the fixed items, the cumulative decline would come to
about 27 per cent over seven years.
As mentioned earlier, program spending would rise by $6.3 billion between 2010–11 and
2017–18. Our recommendation implies the following changes for the major program
categories: health, up $8.4 billion; education (primary and secondary), up $1.6 billion;
post-secondary education, up $0.7 billion; social services, up $0.5 billion; all other programs,
down $4.0 billion. 7
7 These items add to $7.2 billion. An operating reserve would be up $0.3 billion, but year-end savings, a standard feature of Ontario’s
budgeting, would subtract $1.2 billion, leaving the $6.3 billion total increase in program spending.
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