It's been a good week for Mike Harris. First the Ontario premier won himself a raft of admiring headlines with his surprise offer of compensation for hepatitis C victims left out of the original federal-provincial package. Now comes a budget that has something for everyone: more spending, less taxes and a declining deficit to boot. In the circumstances, perhaps no one will notice that the Common Sense Revolution is over.

History, as always, lends a little perspective. Return with me now to the golden days of Bill Davis, the kind of Red Tory now so sadly out of favour: or at least, that is how he is remembered. Certainly no one would accuse the Davis Tories of miserliness: these were the people that bought Suncor.

Yet by the mid-1980s, the feeling in the province was that this was not enough. If it was more public spending that people wanted, the David Peterson Liberals delivered: double-digit spending increases, year-in, year- out. Yet so rapid was economic growth in those years that the deficit continued to shrink. By the Liberals' last year in office, spending was nearly double what it had been when they started, yet the provincial Treasurer was able to boast of a balanced budget – as if, at the height of a six-year boom, this were something of an achievement.

So we start from the ample base laid down by the free-spending Davis Tories. Then we add several years of force-fed expansion under the Peterson Liberals. Now, in 1991, we elect the NDP. Far from embarking on a spending spree of unprecedented recklessness, it seems the government of Ontario had not been spending nearly enough. In its first budget, the NDP increased spending by an astonishing 13 per cent.

Very little of that was driven by the recession that arrived that year. Of the $6-billion total increase, just $1-billion was connected to a surge in welfare caseloads. The rest was simply discretionary spending, including a sizeable hike in public-sector pay. At any rate, the government spent the rest of its term recovering from that amazing outburst: the deficit tripled in one year, leading over time to a doubling of the debt.

And so the people of Ontario turned in desperation to a gang of radicals who had used the leadership campaign of a former golf pro to take over the Tory party. The campaign platform they produced, the Common Sense Revolution, was breathtaking in its forthrightness. The Tories actually proposed, not merely to slow the rate of growth of spending, nor even to freeze it, but to roll it back – an extraordinary $6-billion over four years.

Critics wondered if anything would be left standing. Supporters crowed that the era of Big Government was over. Only a few malcontents pointed out that the $6-billion cut, even after adjusting for inflation and population growth, would do nothing more than reverse the excesses of the Liberals and the NDP. That is, in real per capita terms, the CSR promised to spend every bit as much as Bill Davis in his Suncor-buying prime. If this was a revolution, it was an awfully tidy one.

All the same, $6-billion is $6-billion. With program spending trimmed back to a more manageable $41-billion, the Tories might have hoped to eke out a balanced budget by the end of their term in office, and still have room to deliver their centrepiece 30 per cent tax cut.

Unfortunately, an economic boom intervened. Tax revenues surged far beyond expectations, and the Tories, like the Liberals before them, spent the difference. In the fiscal year just ended, for example, Ontario will take in nearly $4-billion more in revenues than it predicted this time last year.

Remarkably enough, spending is also much higher than it was: some $3- billion.

True, most of that is accounted in one-time, "restructuring" costs. But in the current fiscal year the Tories plan a similar increase in ordinary program spending. The result: the Tories will spend some $47.6-billion this year, not counting interest on the debt – precisely as much as the NDP did in their last year. The $6-billion cut has disappeared.

Yes, yes, I know: prices have risen, population has grown. But take all that into account, and you still find spending, in real per capita terms, is down less than 10 per cent from where it was when the Tories took office, or about equal to 1991 levels. The original, take-no-prisoners CSR never promised more than to cut spending back to the last days of Bill Davis. Now the definition of Tory savagery has become the early years of the NDP.

Maybe this is a good thing. Maybe it's what people want. But if it's a revolution you're after, you won't find it in Ontario.