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Officially, belatedly, Thursday’s budget is an echo of the premier’s February campaign slogan: “A Plan to Protect Ontario.�

A more fitting title: The “Blame Trump Budget.�

Fair enough. No question that the U.S. president messed up our economic outlook (and bolstered Ford’s re-election outcome).

The unanswered question is whether Ontario’s premier can clean up that mess — or make matters worse.

Ford has a penchant for cheering people up in dark times by promising the moon. It’s how he wins elections.

Despite his reputation for heartlessly slashing spending, the numbers tell different stories for Ontario’s Tories. Forget Ford’s press lines, look at the bottom lines.

In this year’s budget, as per previous budgets, his Progressive Conservatives have boosted spending to unprecedented heights: When he took over from the supposedly fiscally reckless Liberals, expenditures totalled a paltry $155 billion; after seven years of fiscally feckless Tories, the government plans to spend $232.5 billion.

That’s an increase of $77.5 billion — 50 per cent — on Ford’s watch. That’s how a people-pleasing populist premier boosts the economy ahead of elections in tough times.

Now, post-election, the times are destined to get tougher in Ontario than just about anywhere else in Canada. The government now acknowledges that growth in the economy will crater to 0.8 per cent this year — less than half of what it predicted in its previous budget before the election.

The outlook remains almost as bad in 2026, when economic growth will hobble along at barely one per cent — again less than half of the rosy 2.2 per cent the government previously projected. The numbers behind that number are even worse.

Housing starts are declining relentlessly and repeatedly: A pre-election prediction of 87,900 new homes last year has now revised downward to 74,600; what was supposed to be a banner year of 92,300 homes in 2025 is shrinking to 71,800 homes — even less than the year before, with more of the same bad news beyond.

The unemployment rate will average 7.6 per cent this year, (not the optimistic 6.6 per cent predicted). But even that seems optimistic and outdated given the latest trend line from Statistics Canada showing that Ontario’s rate jumped to 7.8 per cent in April (the highest in the country after Newfoundland and Labrador).

Unemployment is now even higher in º£½ÇÉçÇø¹ÙÍøat 8.6 per cent, and Ontario lost 33,000 manufacturing jobs last month — the largest drop of any province. You can blame Trump all you want for that bad news, but the unemployment rate was a relatively healthy 5.9 per cent when Ford took power from Kathleen Wynne’s Liberals in 2018.

It could be worse — we could be under the thumb of Ford 1.0, the first iteration of the premier who came to power in 2018 swaggering and slashing and cutting. Ford 2.0 has changed his tune, promising $11 billion in tariff relief and support.

On the eve of Thursday’s budget, appearing at a cheery news conference alongside Manitoba’s NDP premier, Wab Kinew, Ford mused about his new-found philosophy of stimulus and solidarity.

“What scares me are governments that go in there and start slashing and burning,� he began. “We’ve never done that, we never will,� he added (apparently repressing the memory of his early budget proposals upon winning power).

In fact, this year’s budget boasts a chunky deficit of $14.6 billion, pushing Ontario’s accumulated debt to a daunting $489.8 billion (more than 51 per cent higher than what he inherited from Wynne’s Liberals).

No problem, the premier says: “We can always balance in a year or two.�

While his recent deficit spending reflects his free-spending ways, it’s also a function of his old fashioned tax-fighting instincts. In good times and bad, and always at election time, this premier squanders every revenue opportunity because he never saw a tax or toll he didn’t want to terminate.

For four years, Ford fetishized his temporary gas tax holiday by extending it annually, costing the treasury $1.7 billion in foregone revenues. That money could have helped provide stable funding for cash-starved colleges and universities, where government spending is set to drop from $14.2 billion last year to $12.8 billion by 2027-28 — downward disinvestment.

Ostensibly, originally, the gas tax holiday was a way to compensate Ontarians for the effects of the federal carbon levy. Now that Ottawa has axed that tax, Ford still wants to keep provincial fuel taxes capped.

And so when Ford talks of stimulus, he doesn’t just invest in infrastructure, he also allocates money to voter appreciation: “You have to put money into the economy to keep things going — and when I say into the economy, into people’s pockets, into businesses.”

Buried in the bowels of the budget is a single line revealing Ontario’s biggest fiscal sleight of hand — $6.46 billion in annual “electricity cost relief programs� by which all taxpayers are compelled to subsidize the unlimited consumption of hydro ratepayers. Rather than letting us see the true cost of hydro on monthly electricity bills, the government keeps the numbers out of sight.

Apart from that recurring coverup, this budget is brimming with optimism in bad times, cataloguing the government’s greatest hits within its 232 fulsome pages. Maintaining the tradition of the last 15 Ontario budgets, this one boasts that we are once again on the cusp of cashing in on the Ring of Fire, a repository of rare minerals in the far north that has always been in our distant future.

Repeating the aspirations of budgets going back to the 1980s, Ontario vows to lead the charge in dismantling internal trade barriers between provinces as an antidote to America erecting a tariff wall.

Still, times change. Back in 2018, the Ford government came out of the gate slashing its support of artificial intelligence at Ontario’s Vector Institute. Now, thanks to the premier’s perspicacity and sagacity, the government has had a change of heart — and mind: The budget will bankroll “flagship investments of up to $27 million in the Vector Institute.�

Call it the miracle of machine learning for Ford 2.0 versus Ford 1.0.

The lingering question is whether the premier who knew enough to call an early election ahead of a bad budget — and who belatedly learned his lesson on AI — can now steer Ontario through the turbulent times of Trump.