Ontario

Saturday April 13, 2019

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday April 13, 2019

How Doug Ford’s budget has hurt Trudeau and helped Scheer

The sound coming out of Conservative backrooms on Parliament Hill in the hours following the presentation of this week’s Ontario budget was that of a collective sigh of relief.

April 12, 2019

From Conservative Party Leader Andrew Scheer’s perspective, his party dodged a pre-election bullet on Thursday.

By all indications, Premier Doug Ford’s fiscal plan will provide the Trudeau Liberals with less lethal ammunition to use against their Conservative rivals in the upcoming federal campaign than they had hoped for.

Yes, the fact that Ontario will remain in the red beyond Ford’s current term in office is liable to blunt Conservative Party of Canada attacks on the ruling Liberals for accumulating deficit upon deficit since they have taken power.

But it will also make it more difficult for Trudeau to turn the tables on Scheer and predict that the election of a Conservative government would result in a fiscal bloodbath.

November 20, 2018

And yes, the course charted in Thursday’s budget will — over time — impoverish Ontario’s social services. The plan to keep the growth in program spending below the rate of inflation for the next five years cannot but result in a thinner social safety net. The province’s most vulnerable constituencies stand to be the first and the hardest hit.

But the full impact on most Ontarians of the measures sketched out on Thursday will not have been felt by the time Scheer and his Conservatives go door-knocking next fall.

July 28, 2018

In the immediate, the first batch of post-budget media analysis has left federal Conservative strategists with an embarrassment of riches to counter the Liberals’ post-budget apocalyptic scenarios.

Take this summation by my columnist colleague Martin Regg Cohn: “There are no savage cuts in the first Ford-Fedeli budget, which could easily have been delivered by former premier Dalton McGuinty back when he belatedly discovered austerity.”

Or this one from Globe and Mail columnist Tim Kiladze: “If anything, it looks more like something that would come from the Liberals he replaced — the ones he swore had been reckless with the province’s finances.”

Those comments were not written to complement the Ford Tories but to highlight the gap between their rhetoric and their actual budget. (Source: Chantal Hebert, Toronto Star) 

 

Friday April 12, 2019

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Friday April 12, 2019

Ontario tightens purse strings, PCs don’t plan to balance books until 2023-24

May 17, 2018

Ontario’s books won’t be balanced within the Progressive Conservatives’ mandate, but the government’s first budget serves up an era of gradual belt-tightening with a side of booze.

The Tories peg the current deficit at $11.7 billion, and they don’t expect to eliminate the red ink until 2023-24. Drastic and widespread cuts that many had feared did not materialize in this budget, but the path to balance shows that much of the heavy lifting comes at the halfway mark to the next election, and after it.

March 27, 2009

The budget constrains spending growth – and shows cuts in post-secondary and social services – but is still nearly $5 billion larger than the last budget from the previous Liberal government, who the Progressive Conservatives often slam for their spending habits.

“We have developed a reasonable path to balance,” Finance Minister Vic Fedeli said. “Our path to balance in five years is a thoughtful and a measured approach to take … Our entire premise is to protect what matters most.”

The budget contains no new taxes. In addition to tackling the deficit, the government is also taking aim at the net debt – currently pegged at $343 billion – through ensuring surpluses and unused reserve or contingency funds go to paying it down.

March 20, 2004

As well, planned legislation would require the government to develop a debt burden reduction strategy, and make the premier and finance minister pay 10 per cent of their salaries for each missed reporting deadline for documents such as the budget and quarterly economic accounts. (Source: Global News)  

 

Saturday April 6, 2019

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday April 6, 2019

Balancing Ontario’s budget about to get painful — literally

Some are suggesting the Ford government is playing a little bait and switch with recent announcements.

April 9, 2019

As in, look over here: we’re dumping the licence plate slogan Yours to Discover for something else — maybe even Open for Business. How outrageous is that? (Based on the social media reaction, the answer is: very.)

And, look, look, we’re scrapping the provincial Trillium logo because it looks like three men in a hot tub. Crazy eh?

These would be the bait parts, intended to obscure the much bigger and altogether not humorous changes, like controversial education reforms that will reduce teacher-student interaction and eventually eliminate about 3,500 teaching positions.

Or this one: the province is studying changes to OHIP that would, among other things, drastically reduce the amount of pain-control medication available to chronic pain sufferers. And funding to remove certain types of polyps found during colonoscopies may be eliminated. Diabetes management, echocardiograms and tonsillectomies are also being examined.

Animated!

And, get this, the government may defund the practice of allowing general anesthetic for people undergoing colonoscopy testing.

The potential OHIP changes, which were revealed in an exclusive story by CityNews Toronto, are part of an effort to cut $460 million from the OHIP budget. A group of doctors and government officials are examining best practices to see where medical tests are overused or unnecessary.

Having a hard look at OHIP services makes sense. Health care, overall, is the top budget item for the province ($60 billion last year), with education not far behind. It makes sense to audit what we’re doing and paying for. But going from there to legislating more uncomfortable colonoscopies is a big leap.

With the government’s first budget coming next week, we should prepare ourselves for more news like this. Even though Doug Ford denied that getting Ontario’s books in order would be a painful process, anyone with common sense knew that wasn’t realistic.

It’s all about money. Those education reforms, which the province says will make kids more resilient? How convenient that they also save a few hundred million. Same with reducing OHIP-funded services.

But keep an eye on those OHIP changes. They may also be Ford opening the door to more private health care. Want more anesthetic with that colonoscopy? We can do that for a small fee. Need more pain management drugs? Sign right here.

What about the hidden costs of cuts like these? How many Ontarians who should get colonoscopies won’t? How many pain medication patients will turn to opiates, legal or illegal? How many people with diabetes will get sicker sooner in the absence of ongoing diabetes management programs? If the government cuts psychotherapy funding to 24 hours a year — another proposal — what will happen to patients?

We know the answer. People will get sicker, faster and more seriously. They will require more expensive, intensive intervention from the health and/or social services system. Sadly, the government is probably not studying that aspect of its budget plan. (Source: Hamilton Spectator Editorial)  

 

Friday April 5, 2019

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Friday April 5, 2019

The world still needs NATO after 70 years

The 70th birthday of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization this week deserved far more attention and celebration than it received.

November 23, 2002

There were no parades, no fireworks, no self-congratulatory gatherings of presidents and prime ministers clinking champagne flutes to recognize an alliance that has done so much for global peace and security.

Instead, and in marked contrast to the three-day extravaganza that saluted NATO’s accomplishments on its 50th anniversary in 1999, there was only a low-key ministerial meeting Thursday for the organization’s members in Washington, D.C.

This was likely because an ambitious, A-list gathering of NATO-nation leaders would have had to include the volatile, NATO-bashing American President Donald Trump. Having no party was preferable to having one he’d ruin.

Yet NATO was worthy of better. Whatever challenges it faces today — and some coming from disaffected members like Turkey are urgent — NATO must be judged a rousing success.

According to the Brookings Institution research group, NATO is one of the most enduring military alliances in the past 500 years. It rose from the wreckage of the Second World War, when European nations so recently freed from the scourge of Nazi Germany were confronted by an aggressively expansionist Soviet Union.

May 29, 2002

Some critics insisted NATO had passed its best-before date. Russian President Vladimir Putin showed how wrong they were. Today, and with support from Canada’s Armed Forces, the 29-member alliance has deployed troops in the Baltic States, Ukraine and Poland to halt Putin’s territorial ambitions. When the Russians annexed Crimea and destabilized eastern Ukraine, an impotent United Nations watched. NATO acted.

Despite Trump’s rants and threats, Congress and the American people are largely supportive of NATO. They know the alliance helped them in Afghanistan and how much the friendship of so many nations counts in a changing, uncertain world just awakening to the rise of a headstrong, authoritarian China.

Today’s world is very different from what it was in 1949. But for seven decades NATO has helped guide it through seas both calm and rough. Change it must and will. But NATO is still needed and we hope it lasts at least seven decades more. (Source: Hamilton Spectator) 

 

Wednesday April 3, 2019

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Wednesday April 3, 2019

Doug Ford defends plan to change Ontario licence plate slogan

Doug Ford and his Progressive Conservatives are defending their plan to change the slogan on Ontario’s licence plates as a signal that a new government is running the province.

June 27, 2018

Ford faced questions in the Legislature on Tuesday about his admission that he intends to replace the “Yours To Discover” slogan on licence plates.

“I can tell you that people across this province want change. They voted for change, and they’re getting change,” Ford responded.

Ford claimed changing the licence plates won’t cost taxpayers anything.

The PCs are considering putting “Open For Business” on commercial plates and a different slogan for the plates on passenger vehicles, government officials have confirmed. Ford said this week that the new slogans will be revealed in the budget on April 11.

Licence plate design falls under the portfolio of Government Services Minister Bill Walker and he too is indicating there’s a political reason behind changing the slogan.

“What we want to do is turn the channel; we want to turn the page on a dire economic situation that the Liberal government after 15 years of mismanagement left us in,” Walker said Tuesday in response to reporters’ questions about the licence plate slogan.

“Yours to Discover” has been on Ontario plates for 37 years. The PC government of Bill Davis brought in the slogan in 1982, replacing “Keep It Beautiful.”

The Ford government wants to “ensure that Ontario says to the world, ‘We are back on stage,'” Walker said. “We’re looking at all kinds of different options to brand our province as open for business, open for jobs.”

The opposition parties are hammering Ford and his PCs for the plan. (Source: CBC News)