TORONTO - Ontario residents won't be getting a break on the controversial health tax even though the province is getting a boost from the federal budget, Premier Dalton McGuinty said Monday.

The province can't eliminate or reduce the tax when provincial revenues are falling off, McGuinty said.

"In an era of depleting government revenues, at a time where almost one-half of program spending goes into health care... we're going to need every penny of that to continue to cope," he said in an interview with The Canadian Press.

"As our parents get older and their bodies become more frail, they need more medical attention. We have to make sure we have the capacity to support them."

Health-care spending amounts to more than $40 billion a year in Ontario and is expected to increase.

The Ontario government calculates it will receive an additional $139 million in health-care funding this year as part of last week's federal budget.

That money isn't enough to offset an aging population and rising health-care expenses, McGuinty said.

Progressive Conservative Leader John Tory said Monday the government has "never demonstrated to the Ontario public that they're even spending the money they take in from the so-called health tax on health."

"Ontario residents are struggling right now and they could use some form of tax relief," Tory said.

NDP Leader Howard Hampton called the tax a "fraud," saying it's not really about health.

"It goes into the consolidated revenue fund," Hampton said.

"For low, modest and middle-income families the health tax should be either done away with or reduced, because it is so regressive and unfair.

"It taxes those with the lowest incomes at a higher rate than it taxes people with very high incomes."

In 2004, McGuinty came under heavy fire from his political rivals early in his first term when he brought in the so-called health premium despite promising during the election not to raise taxes.

He defended it as a necessary evil aimed at tackling a $5.6-billion deficit inherited from the previous Conservative government.