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OTTAWA Plans by the Ontario Liberals to spend billions of dollars renovating schools and partnering with new businesses that are moving to the province were revealed by the opposition Progressive Conservatives on Tuesday, revealing in advance a month of announcements leading up to a May 1 budget.

The spending plans, which also include numerous smaller programs and projects, are contained in a communications plan apparently leaked to the Tories. It describes 39 events over the next month, at various stages of planning, in which ministers and MPPs would announce details about one program after another. If the document is accurate, the actual budget presentation in the legislature by Finance Minister Charles Sousa would be just a formality at the end of the process.

The document was released on the morning of April Fools Day, but it appears genuine.

The biggest tickets are a $2-billion capital investment to support (1) school consolidations to reduce underused space and (2) repair and school maintenance (sic), and a new $2.5B 10-year Jobs and Prosperity Fund to attract significant business investments.

The document also notes a $300-million plan to provide support to front-line public sector workers who deliver important services to most vulnerable and an investment of close to $730M over three years to address critical pressures and support long-term transformation of developmental services (and significantly reduce wait-lists*). Its not clear to what the asterisk refers.

Many of the measures are clearly designed to attract New Democratic Party support for the Liberals budget, or at least to give the Liberals a way to attack New Democrats if they trigger an election by combining with the Tories to vote it down. But the communications plan also says the government wants to end an unpopular charge put on electricity customers bills to pay off the massive debt of the long-broken-up Ontario Hydro monopoly, which the Tories have demanded for years.

And, without giving details, the document says Premier Kathleen Wynne would hold a news conference April 14 to explain how she intends to fund multibillion-dollar transit and road projects without, as she has previously promised, raising either the provincial sales tax or gas taxes.

The individual policies can best be summed up as more of the same, Tory Leader Tim Hudak said in a written statement that went out along with the leaked communications plan. He derided it as a $5.7-billion spending spree (a figure derived by adding up all the numbers in the plan, though much of that would be spent over many years and its possible some of it is money the government would have spent anyway) that casts doubt on Liberal promises to shrink the provinces budget deficit.

In the legislature immediately after the release which coincided with the beginning of question period Tuesday morning Wynne said that of course the government has a communications plan to explain whats in the budget.

Whats unusual is for the opposition to know whats coming so far in advance. The leaks main value may be to give the opposition plenty of time to plan its responses to the governments plan, or to force the Liberals to scramble their plans at the last minute so they can regain the element of surprise.

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Provincial Tories blow lid off Liberals budget plans