It’s always a pleasure to go to Toronto on business, as I did last week for three days, and be reminded why we don’t like to go to Toronto on business for three days.

Toronto loves Toronto in a way that puts the word ‘smug’ out of work.

That is why it was so much fun to be there when the report by highly respected former federal public servant and later TD Chief Economist Don Drummond landed with such a shudder last Wednesday on the corner of both Bay Street, and main street.

To recap: Eleven months ago, Premier Dalton McGuinty, knowing that his economic and fiscal forecasts were almost criminally demented, appointed a commission headed by Drummond to review the state of Ontario’s finances, with a mandate above all others to tell the truth, and oh, by the way, to do so after McGuinty’s Liberal government was safely re-elected in the fall of 2011.

Tragically for the Ontario Liberals, Drummond did his job.

Welcome to 2012, the year that the bills for the Great Recession of 2008 start coming in. As usual, governments took the easy way out in 2008 when the crash hit, and their revenues dropped. Rather than adopt a prudent reduction in government spending, commensurate with their falling revenues, Canadian governments simply ran deficits, and piled on the debt, or in Alberta’s case, burned through billions of dollars in hard-won savings to feed their spending addiction. The result is inescapable: deficits mean debt, and debt means debt servicing costs, and every dollar that goes to servicing a debt is a dollar that doesn’t go to essential public services.