A government’s budget (or, today, its fall economic statement) is many different things at once. There are the basics: Finance Minister Peter Bethlenfalvy rose in the legislature this afternoon to recite Ontario’s fiscal shape. That includes a deficit that has ballooned, relative to last year, to $13.5 billion. But that’s actually a slight improvement relative to the spring and is on track to be a surplus in two years.
A financial update is also a time to list all the many investments the government is making or wants to make, from things that exist in reality (the Ontario Line) to the flights of fancy (a tunnel under the 401).
Finally, the update is a map for where the government plans to take the province in ways big and small over the coming years. Seeds that were planted in previous budgets grow into actual policy implementation. In some cases, the government takes a major change in direction.
Here are some of the items from today’s fall economic statement you might otherwise miss.
The government is (probably) killing the Mathur climate change court case
Late last year, the province’s highest court reversed a lower court ruling and found that the Ford government’s climate targets substantially infringed the Charter rights of young Ontarians — that is, the class of citizens who will have to endure most of the costs of climate change. The court’s reasoning was straightforward: the province isn’t required to have a climate strategy, but if it adopts one, that strategy needs to comply with the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, as all government action must. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court of Canada declined to hear an appeal by the province, allowing a retrial to proceed.
In apparent response to the ruling in Mathur v. Ontario, the government is simply doing away with its climate targets altogether. The legislation accompanying the fall economic statement will repeal Sections 3, 4, and 5 of the 2018 law that Ford’s government brought in establishing the targets and climate plan. Those sections were always a kind of window dressing to offset the substance of the government’s actions (repealing the cap-and-trade plan inherited from the Liberals and a bevy of other climate-hostile policies); now they’re dispensing with even the window dressing.
At last, maybe a real beneficial ownership registry?
Financial transparency advocates have, for years, been pressing federal and provincial regulators to adopt a beneficial ownership registry of privately-held corporations as part of the fight against money laundering. Instead of a murky world of anonymously-owned-and-controlled numbered corporations, a beneficial ownership registry would allow Ontarians to easily search to find who owns what. Ontario has been slow to act on this front, requiring only that corporations provide information to the government but restricting access. Other provinces, including Quebec and British Columbia, have moved further. Today, the government announced that it will in fact be moving forward with a proper beneficial ownership registry and have it in place by 2027.
The government had previously said it was considering a beneficial ownership registry in the spring budget, but, after so many years of delay, it was uncertain whether the government would actually move forward with it. Today’s announcement is good news for anti-corruption advocates. It's possible that recent moves by British Columbia have forced Ontario’s hand.
LCBO finances are struggling, changes are coming
The government’s alcohol distributor is expected to hand over a dividend of $1.8 billion to the treasury this year. That’s no small sum, but it’s fully 25 per cent lower than the dividend provided just three years ago. The Financial Accountability Office has reported the Ford government’s changes to alcohol sale rules in Ontario have substantially hurt the province’s finances, and that’s starting to show.
In response, the government says it will bring forward a new LCBO wholesale pricing model to “level the playing field” for all market participants, answering the complaints of some retailers that not all stores receive the same discounts for the beer, wine, and coolers they buy from the LCBO. The government is also making other changes to, it says, facilitate a more efficient and more open marketplace for alcohol. This all comes in advance of the Beer Store being permitted to close its remaining retail locations without any restrictions starting January 1, 2026, leaving the LCBO as the sole wholesaler of beer, wine, spirits, and other alcoholic beverages in the province. How, or if, the government’s changes increase provincial revenues remains to be seen.
Will Ontario regulate Uber and Lyft?
Ontario municipalities are primarily responsible for regulating rideshare providers like Uber or Lyft. For now. The fall economic statement alludes to, but does not detail, the creation of a “provincial rideshare framework” it wants to explore. This would mark another example of a recent trend of the government hoisting regulatory matters from the municipal level to the province in the name of standardization. Critics of rideshare companies may be concerned that the province will seek to weaken municipal rules they’ve fought hard for: other recent cases of the province stepping into the role of municipal regulator include killing Toronto’s green development standard and its green roof law — measures that arguably created more uniformity in building rules but just as arguably uniformly helped developers, not city planners.
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