Getting Less, Feeling Fine: Why Governments That Spend More Still Win
Three Canadian provinces spending more, delivering less, restricting accountability, and winning elections. Huh?!
Danielle Smith, Doug Ford, and Scott Moe govern three provinces where government spending has grown, debt has accumulated, social services have declined in real terms, food bank usage is at record levels, child poverty has worsened, and the tools citizens use to hold governments accountable have been systematically narrowed.
And all three premiers keep winning.
That outcome is not irrational voter behaviour. It is the predictable result of four documented psychological mechanisms — fiscal illusion, motivated reasoning, partisan attribution bias, and salience asymmetry — that these governments have built their fiscal and communications strategies around.
Understanding how those mechanisms work is the only way to make sense of what the budget documents and service records show.
The Psychology: Four Mechanisms That Make Less Feel Like More
Governments do not keep winning by accident. They win because four documented patterns in how people process information work in their favour — and because these governments have built their spending, advertising, and accountability decisions around all four of them.
Fiscal illusion is what happens when the cost of government spending is hidden in debt. Economist James Buchanan documented this: when a government borrows instead of taxing, the bill goes to future generations who cannot yet vote. Current voters feel the benefit without feeling the full cost. Research published in Public Choice confirms that taxpayers consistently underestimate what government costs them when the price is buried in debt rather than taken from a paycheque.
A $200 cheque lands in your hand today. A $14.6 billion deficit lands on your children’s tax bill in a decade. Governments that understand this design their fiscal choices accordingly.
Motivated reasoning is what happens when people process political information through the filter of who they already support. Multiple peer-reviewed studies confirm that voters who identify with a governing party attribute its successes to competence and its failures to external circumstances.
A study published in the Journal of Politics found that Trump voters who got worse-than-expected tax returns — a direct result of his tax policy — did not withdraw their support. They decided tax policy mattered less. The identity held. The evidence did not change it.
Partisan attribution bias is holding your own government to a different standard than the opposition. When your government makes a bad decision, the cause is external. When it succeeds, the cause is competence. Research across multiple countries confirms this pattern holds consistently and strengthens with partisan depth. Smith blames Ottawa, immigration, and oil prices.
Ford blames U.S. tariffs and global uncertainty. Moe blames trade volatility and the Middle East conflict. All three narratives are partially true — and all three are applied selectively, to cover policy choices these governments made independently of any external force.
Salience asymmetry is the gap between what registers and what doesn’t. Research published in Public Budgeting & Finance shows voters respond to what they can see and feel, not to costs that are abstract or deferred. A sticker fee elimination shows up every time you renew your plates. An additional $150 billion in provincial debt shows up nowhere you will ever directly notice.
Together, these four patterns allow governments to spend more, deliver less, restrict accountability, and continue winning — not because voters are careless, but because the system is designed to exploit how all voters process information.
Alberta: More Government, Less Accountability, Worse Outcomes
Alberta’s 2026-27 budget projects a $9.37 billion deficit alongside record total spending of $83.9 billion. Over just the two preceding years, government spending grew from $74.1 billion to $83.9 billion — a 13.2 per cent increase — while the government’s own Fiscal Responsibility Act pegged the acceptable growth benchmark at 3.7 per cent.
Alberta’s finance minister confirmed the budget breaks the government’s own law: “We created these rules, and I’m breaking them.”
The government’s main health restructuring — dismantling Alberta Health Services — was sold to taxpayers as eliminating bureaucratic bloat. The documented result is the opposite. One health authority became four agencies, each requiring its own CEO, management team, administrative arm, and board. Administration spending is projected to rise from $544 million in 2025 to $604 million by 2027-28. No taxpayer savings have been confirmed through any completed transfer. Surgery wait-time compliance fell from 63.4 per cent within recommended benchmarks in May 2024 to 58.2 per cent in May 2025. The restructuring cost $85 million and at least $30 million in executive severance — paid to eliminate a bureaucracy that has since grown larger.
Taxpayer-supported debt is projected to reach $109 billion in 2026 and $138 billion by 2029. The projected deficit over three years is $23.9 billion. No path to balance exists within the government’s own forecast window. Alberta’s oil price assumption is more optimistic than the market, the U.S. Energy Information Administration, and most bank forecasts.
In 2024, 30.9 per cent of Albertans lived in food-insecure households — the highest rate of any province in Canada. Alberta’s minimum wage has sat at $15 per hour since 2018. Calgary’s living wage in 2024 was $24.45 — a 63 per cent gap between the government’s wage floor and what it costs to live in the province’s largest city. Alberta saw the sharpest rise in food bank use of any province in 2025, with 21 per cent more residents turning to food banks than the prior year.
The government replaced its freedom of information law in June 2025 with legislation that broadened exemptions for executive and Treasury Board records, eliminated the government’s duty to assist applicants in finding records, wrote political staff entirely out of the law, and extended response timelines with no limit on extensions. The Information and Privacy Commissioner recommended against these changes. The government proceeded anyway.
Before the new law passed, every one of Alberta’s 22 ministries were found to have illegally refused FOI requests by a national audit by The Globe and Mail — the only jurisdiction in Canada to do so. The RCMP is separately investigating AHS contracting linked to more than $600 million in contracts.
Smith blames the deficit on oil prices and federal immigration policy. The same budget documents project population growth slowing to 1.1 per cent — down from a peak of 4.7 per cent — and identify reduced population as a drag on provincial economic expansion. Both claims appear in the same budget release.
Ontario: Half a Trillion in Debt, and a Government That Changed the Law After Losing in Court
Ontario’s 2025-26 budget projected a $14.6 billion deficit. The Ford government’s 2026-27 budget, tabled March 26, set the following year’s deficit at $13.8 billion and pushed the projected return to balance back by another year — a target the province’s independent Financial Accountability Office says will not be met without spending cuts or revenue increases the government has not announced. The FAO projects net debt reaching $549.3 billion by 2029-30.
Ontario’s debt interest payments — $16.2 billion annually — are now the fourth-largest budget item, larger than the entire post-secondary education budget. That money buys nothing.
Since Premier Ford took office in 2018, Ontario’s program spending has increased approximately 30 per cent and the province is on track to have added more than $150 billion to its total debt by 2027.
The spending has not improved outcomes. Post-secondary funding as a share of GDP remains below its 2018 level. Social assistance rates have been frozen at $733 per month since 2018 while the cost of goods and services rose more than 23 per cent — Ontario is the only province that has not raised social assistance rates for single adults. Per capita real spending on social services dropped 11 per cent between 2018-19 and 2024-25. Child poverty has more than doubled since 2020, from 5.6 per cent to 12 per cent, a rate growing faster than the national average that researchers link to provincial policy choices. Hospital funding in the 2026-27 budget falls more than $1 billion short of what the Ontario Hospital Association says the sector requires.
The government fought its own public sector workers in court on wage caps ruled unconstitutional twice, at a documented legal cost of $430 million. Before the 2025 election, it spent $3 billion on $200 cheques to voters, eliminated licence plate renewal fees, removed highway tolls, and made a gas tax cut permanent. Every driver noticed the sticker fee elimination. Nobody’s monthly bank statement shows a line for provincial debt interest.
In January 2026, a panel of three judges rejected the Ford government’s attempt to withhold the Premier’s personal cellphone records — records from a phone he uses for government business. Within weeks, the government proposed retroactive changes to Ontario’s freedom of information law that would exempt the Premier, cabinet ministers, and their offices entirely from FOI obligations, cancelling hundreds of active requests including investigations into the Greenbelt scandal.
Ontario’s Information and Privacy Commissioner Patricia Kosseim stated it directly: “This change is about hiding government-related business to evade public accountability.” On the retroactive application: “If oversight bodies get in the way, just change the rules.” The FOI changes were embedded in the 2026 budget bill.
The pattern holds. Ford won a third consecutive majority in February 2025 — after seven years of deficits, frozen social assistance, and an RCMP investigation into the Greenbelt land transfer. The FAO has rejected the government’s path-to-balance assumptions on both revenue and spending grounds. The fiscal position is attributed, by the government and its supporters, to tariffs and global uncertainty.
Saskatchewan: Quiet Spending, No Enforcement, and a Surplus That Wasn’t
Saskatchewan’s 2025-26 budget projected a $12 million surplus. The final result was a deficit exceeding $1.2 billion. The 2026-27 budget projects an $819 million deficit, with no return to surplus until approximately 2030. Total provincial debt is projected at $43.5 billion by 2027 — accumulated at three times the pace of the Brad Wall era under the same governing party.
The Saskatchewan Information and Privacy Commissioner can only make recommendations. The Moe government has ignored 84 of them. There are no enforceable consequences.
The 2026-27 budget adds $1.2 billion in new program spending. The education increase of 2.6 per cent does not keep pace with inflation. Both the Saskatchewan Teachers’ Federation and the School Boards Association confirmed the budget does not cover rising costs. More money is being recorded; less purchasing power is reaching the classroom.
In February 2026, the government issued $650 million in additional spending while the legislature was not sitting — published quietly on the government’s website over a long weekend, with no public explanation. The year before, it was $923 million.
The government also withheld third-quarter financial statements until budget day, preventing the public from seeing the true fiscal position before the budget documents were released. The projected surplus of $12 million became a $1.2 billion deficit between those two moments of disclosure.
Saskatchewan’s Information and Privacy Commissioner cannot issue binding orders. The government faces no enforceable consequences for ignoring transparency recommendations. It has ignored 84 of them. Without binding enforcement, the information voters need to evaluate their government is legally unavailable on demand — fiscal illusion built into the law itself.
The Fire Hose: Public Money Spent on the Perception of Performance
Alberta and Ontario have not left this to chance.
Ontario’s government advertising spending reached a record $112 million in 2024-25 — the year before the snap election Ford called and won. The province’s Auditor General found that 38 per cent of that spending was designed to leave Ontarians with a “positive impression” of the Ford government. Since taking office in 2018, the province has spent approximately $452 million on government advertising.
Ford’s own campaign manager, Kory Teneycke, put it plainly. He compared party advertising to a water gun and government advertising to a fire hose: “I don’t think you’d see the Ontario PC Party where it is in the polls if it wasn’t out telling its own story in a positive way using government advertising.” Ontario previously had laws prohibiting partisan government advertising. Ford promised in 2018 to restore those laws. He did not.
Alberta’s Smith government spent $7 million on a national advertising campaign in five provinces in October 2024 — weeks before a UCP leadership review. Political analysts noted the timing. The federal government publicly accused Alberta of using taxpayer money to spread disinformation. Alberta also ran the “Alberta is Calling” campaign using public funds to recruit migrants to the province — then, when population growth became a budget liability, attributed the fiscal pressure to immigration policy.
Governments borrow to fund visible benefits, then spend public money advertising those benefits, then restrict the information tools that would allow voters to see the full cost. The advertising budget and the accountability rollback are not separate policy decisions. They work together to control what voters see.
Three Governments, One System
The fiscal records of Alberta, Ontario, and Saskatchewan in 2026 share more than deficits. They share a system.
The four psychological mechanisms documented above do not require voters to be unintelligent or uninformed. They require only that voters behave as voters have always behaved — responding to visible benefits, filtering contradictory information through partisan identity, accepting their government’s explanation for failures, and underestimating costs they cannot see.
Governments that understand these patterns can exploit them indefinitely, as long as the opposition does not offer a case concrete enough to shift the calculus.
None of these governments are presently facing that case.
Who Wins / Who Loses
Who wins: Governing parties win elections on public advertising budgets opposition parties cannot match. Insiders with access to government contracting benefit from decisions made outside public view — documented in Alberta’s AHS procurement investigation and Ontario’s Greenbelt and Skills Development Fund scandals.
Who loses: The lowest-income households in all three provinces — the ones on frozen benefits, in food-insecure households, receiving education funding that does not keep pace with inflation — are the same people the advertising tells things are fine. Future taxpayers in all three provinces inherit the debt being accumulated in their names now.
Factsmtr Analysis
The real finding is not the fiscal record — it’s that the fiscal record was predictable.
The psychological system producing it is documented, and the governments running these provinces have built their policy and communications strategies around all four mechanisms at once.
The advertising amplifies every mechanism. Ontario’s $452 million in government advertising since 2018 and Alberta’s $7 million campaign timed to a leadership review shape what voters see. Alberta’s new FOI law, Ontario’s retroactive exemptions, and Saskatchewan’s unenforceable commissioner restrict what voters can independently verify. Governments that control both the message and the means of checking it hold a durable electoral advantage.
These mechanisms are universal, not pathological. Voters respond to visible benefits, filter information through identity, and underestimate deferred costs.
The question is whether governments are exploiting that reality at documented cost to the people whose taxes fund the exploitation. In Alberta, Ontario, and Saskatchewan in 2026, the answer is yes.
The minimum wage has not moved in Alberta in seven years. Social assistance has not moved in Ontario in seven years. Debt is rising in all three provinces faster than under any previous government these premiers replaced. Child poverty in Ontario has doubled. Food insecurity in Alberta leads the country. Saskatchewan’s debt pace has no precedent in its own governing party’s history.
Taxpayers are paying more, getting less, and funding the ads that say it's working — when the evidence proves it is not.
The post that should exist alongside this one is the one opposition parties in all three provinces have not yet written: a case built on the same evidence, specific and concrete enough to make the cost visible before the next election rather than after it.
That post does not yet exist. Until it does, the system documented here keeps running — and voters keep being told to believe they are getting more when they are, in reality, getting much less at higher costs.
If you found this analysis useful, share it with someone who should read it. If you think the documented record shows something different, the comments are open.
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