I heard Bob Rae messed up the finances giving almost anyone welfare as well.
The Welfare system was under strain from the biggest economic crisis in Ontario since the Great Depression, and Feds upping the interest rate exacerbated that by reducing overall affordability for people and driving businesses away from the province. In short, more people were put out of work due to the recession. The welfare system is there to protect people in situations of employment distress. 1 + 1 = 2. Would those newly unemployed people have done better had a hard limit been put on welfare? Should the province have turned people away in a time of job losses and rising prices?
Hearing that Rae "messed up the finances" mean the right-wing spin doctors got exactly what they wanted. Don't go by what you hear. Go and do some research on what actually happened. In the meantime, here are some long-term charts displaying what actually happened during that time (NDP term Oct 1990-Jun 1995 marked with orange):
Canada's unemployment rate (note the sharp spike upward starting in late 1988):
Ontario GDP (note the drop in GDP in late 1988):
Business Entry/Exit rate (note that businesses really started leaving Ontario during the 1987-1988 year):
Length of layoff periods (note: the numbers start going up in 1988):
LICO (low-income cutoffs; the percentage who spends the majority of their income on Food, Shelter and Clothing—a lower LICO means more disposable income). Note that LICO was already on the way up in 1989:
EDIT: I've overly simplified what LICOs are, but if you'd like to read more, read what the government says they are:
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/75f0002m/2012002/lico-sfr-eng.htm
Rae put into motion a number of things to combat further job losses, like the aforementioned "Rae Days". Yes, Rae borrowed more money to combat the effects of the recession, but again, Ontario was losing jobs, the economy had tanked. Imagine the situation had the public sector *also* fired the numbers of employees the private sector had.
The trends on these graphs show the province and it's finances/economy were already on the way of being effed, well before Rae took power.
So when our resident troll likes to pull out the graph below, they do so without laying out the context of trying to mitigate the worst economic situation since the great depression. Things like keeping public employee jobs, handling a greater number of people on social assistance, combating a high unemployment rate high, and raising the minimum wage to combat the federal interest rate hike and keeping further numbers out of poverty: