The president of Ontario’s largest public sector union blasted the Ford Conservatives’ cuts – and their outright lies about of the cuts – contained in the 2026-27 budget released by the Minister of Finance yesterday.
“The Conservatives’ budget has extra funding for police in schools – but it cuts per-student funding for schools. The budget has money for another Ferris wheel in Niagara – but cuts $5 billion from the health care funding that would help reopen emergency rooms in the region. It has money to build jails, but cuts municipal infrastructure spending in half,” said CUPE Ontario President Fred Hahn.
Hahn pointed to an analysis done by CUPE Ontario of past, current and projected spending in Conservative budgets; the figures show clearly that, far from claims of spending record billions on health, education, post-secondary, and social services, Ford’s Conservatives have been slashing billions for years from these sectors:
“We pay attention to the numbers, and the real numbers don’t lie. And with today’s budget, the picture for our province only gets worse,” said Hahn.
He challenged Conservatives’ proclivity for rebates rather than real funding for public services.
“Tax cuts and rebates – like HST holidays for new homes and energy rebates – don’t build anything. They aren’t programs and they don’t replace public services. When it comes to funding the services we all rely on, the Ford Conservatives keep trying to get us all to ignore reality.”
Hahn further took the government to task for its neglect of the tens of thousands of Ontario workers laid off in the private sector, while public sector employers struggle to fill some 40,000 vacancies in schools, hospitals, long-term care, child care and social services – jobs that remain unfilled because of their low pay, crushing workloads, precarious work and chronic underfunding that results in understaffing.
“The Conservatives earmarked billions for private sector industries affected by Trump’s tariffs, and then short-changed laid-off workers by not spending what they’d promised. And there’s no relief at all for public sector workers. The latter group even had their wages stolen under the government’s Bill 124, and many of them are still fighting for what they’re owed,” observed Hahn.
“This Premier and his Conservative cabinet claim repeatedly that they are “working for workers,” but they don’t know the first thing about the everyday realities of working people. If they did, Conservatives wouldn’t have produced a budget like this one – one that increases people’s pain, ignores their struggles to afford housing, groceries, and education, and peddles the same old lies about the government’s improvements for hospitals and health care and public services in general.”
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For more information: Mary Unan, CUPE Communications, 647-390-9839 | [email protected]
