The online version of the report will be published soon.
Long-Term Budget Outlook: Fiscal Implications of the Government’s Program Reforms: 2020-2050
The report provides a forecast of Ontario’s economy and fiscal position through 2050, based on current fiscal policies.
About this document
Established by the Financial Accountability Officer Act, 2013, the Financial Accountability Office (FAO) provides independent analysis on the state of the Province's finances, trends in the provincial economy and related matters important to the Legislative Assembly of Ontario.
This report was prepared by Sabrina Afroz, Edward Crummey, Zohra Jamasi, Jay Park and Nicolas Rhodes, under the direction of Paul Lewis and David West and with contributions from Laura Irish. External reviewers were provided with earlier drafts of this report for their comments. However, the input of external reviewers implies no responsibility for this final report, which rests solely with the FAO.
The content of this report is based on information available to February 26, 2020. Background data used in this report are available upon request.
In keeping with the FAO's mandate to provide the Legislative Assembly of Ontario with independent economic and financial analysis, this report makes no policy recommendations.
FAO’s Fiscal Projections
The FAO's fiscal projections provide an assessment of the long-term implications of maintaining current fiscal policy trends. These projections are not intended to be a prediction of actual budgetary outcomes over the long term. Instead, the FAO's projections provide an assessment of the long-term implications of maintaining the current fiscal structure, without anticipating any new government policy decisions.
Some long-term government policies, including energy and infrastructure planning, are laid out in government reports.* However, fiscal policies including taxation and spending plans are rarely well defined over the long term.
Given the government's discretion over spending, the FAO adopts the government's announced spending plans from fiscal documents and incorporates policy announcements as appropriate. Beyond the government's published spending projections, the FAO assumes that the government will continue to fund public services at rates reflecting population growth, price inflation, and past rates of program enrichment.
The FAO's long-term fiscal projections assume that the tax system and federal-provincial fiscal arrangements will remain largely unchanged.
All average annual growth rates in this report are calculated using the year before the first indicated year as the base.
*See Ontario's Long-Term Report on the Economy, Ontario Infrastructure Reports, or Ontario's Long-Term Energy Plan.© Queen’s Printer for Ontario, 2020
Long-Term Budget Outlook: Fiscal Implications of the Government’s Program Reforms: 2020-2050, Financial Accountability Office of Ontario, 2020.