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Saturday November 9, 2019

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday November 9, 2019

Doug Ford government tries for a reboot with its latest fiscal plan

Premier Doug Ford’s government is listening and Finance Minister Rod Phillips really wants you to know that.

November 1, 2019

“We listened to Ontarians,” said Phillips in a news conference after delivering the government’s budget update on Wednesday afternoon.

“We listened to what they thought was working well in the plan that we had, and we listened to the concerns that they had,” Phillips added.

“So you can expect this is a government that has listened and is going to continue to listen, and make sure that we make adjustments as we go along.”

The fiscal tally of all that listening is found in the pages of Phillips’s fall economic statement. The document accounts for the government’s recent backtracks, updating the budget from the $163.4 billion spending plan tabled in April by Vic Fedeli, whom Ford dumped as finance minister two months later.

August 21, 2019

The fall economic statement is part of the Ford government’s attempts to portray itself as new and improved, striking a new tone, turning over a new leaf. The budget update tries to do this by highlighting the spending cuts on which the government reversed course and recasting them as spending increases.

Technically, it’s true the PCs are increasing program spending by $1.3 billion from the April budget. In reality, this is simply putting some spending cuts that didn’t happen back on the government’s books.

Does a reversal of a spending cut equal a spending increase? NDP leader Andrea Horwath doesn’t think so.  

May 23, 2019

The fiscal update reflects merely “a softening of their previous cuts, a backtracking on some of their cuts, a delaying of some of their cuts, but really the cuts are still coming,” Horwath said Wednesday on CBC’s Power and Politics.

The new finance minister hasn’t fundamentally changed the budget that the old finance minister put in place, and acknowledged as much in his news conference.

“This isn’t about grand gestures,” said Phillips. “It’s about incremental important changes that make life easier for people.”

The update shows — just as the April budget did — that nearly every ministry is undergoing spending cuts this year from 2018-19 levels. Nominal increases in spending on health and education are not increases in real-dollar terms when population growth and inflation are considered. (CBC)

 

 

Friday April 13, 2018

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Friday April 13, 2018

‘We do not participate in Twitter diplomacy’: Russia responds to Trump

November 3, 2017

In the wake of President Trump’s tweet taunting Russia while promising a missile attack on Moscow’s ally Syria, Russian politicians and officials are jumping at a chance to show they are the more mature and serious party. Here’s how Russian officials from the president on down have responded to Trump.

President Vladimir Putin did not address the tweets directly while greeting new foreign ambassadors to Moscow at the Kremlin. But he reiterated his frequent call for global stability — which can only be accomplished, in the Kremlin’s view, by giving Russia a prominent role in a “multipolar” rather than U.S.-led world order.

“Indeed, the state of things in the world cannot but provoke concern. The situation in the world is increasingly chaotic. Nevertheless, we hope that common sense will prevail in the end and that international relations will become more constructive — that the whole global system will become more stable and predictable.”

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov responded to the tweets in comments to Russian journalists. While he dismissed Trump’s Twitter diplomacy, he left unmentioned that Russia’s own diplomats in London are no stranger to it.

Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova quickly took to Facebook, wondering whether an American strike would only be a pretext for erasing all evidence of a chemical-weapons attack that Russia has described as staged.

“Smart missiles should fly in the direction of terrorists and not a legal government that has been fighting for several years against international terrorism on its territory.… Or is the whole idea to quickly wipe away the traces of a provocation by striking them with smart missiles, so that international inspectors would have nothing left to find in terms of evidence?” (Source: Washington Post) 

Published in the Waterloo Region Record

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Tuesday June 16, 2015

By Graeme MacKay, Editorial Cartoonist, The Hamilton Spectator - By Graeme MacKay, Editorial Cartoonist, The Hamilton Spectator - Tuesday June 19, 2015 OntarioÕs Ôeye-poppingÕ shift to low-wage work It's one of the most excruciating decisions single mom Jodi Dean has ever made: choosing between the unpredictable, $13-an-hour job her family relied on, and taking care of her chronically ill daughter. "It (made) me physically ill with the stress," Dean said. "I needed that job to provide for my children." Welcome to the new normal for families across the province: low salaries, erratic schedules, dwindling hours, unpaid leave and constant stress. Ontario's low-wage work force has skyrocketed by 94 percent over the past two decades, compared with just 30 percent growth in total employment, according to a new report. 'Clearly, people need more predictability both in their schedules and in their incomes' In one of the few province-wide studies of precarious employment, the research details an "eye-popping" shift toward poorly paid, non-unionized work across Ontario. It shows that 40 percent of low-wage employees are saddled with unpredictable shifts, and the overwhelming majority do not get paid when they need time off. That reality, the report argues, calls for sweeping changes to the province's employment and labour laws, whose many loopholes have been detailed by the Star and are currently the subject of government review. "Clearly, people need more predictability both in their schedules and in their incomes," added Sheila Block, a senior economist at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and author of the study. The research compiled by the left-leaning think tank shows that the share of Ontario workers labouring for the minimum wage is now five times higher than in 1997. It rose from less than 3 per cent of all employees to about 12 per cent in 2014. The share of low-paid work has also ballooned: almost a third of all employees in the province are no

By Graeme MacKay, Editorial Cartoonist, The Hamilton Spectator – Tuesday June 19, 2015

Ontario’s ‘eye-popping’ shift to low-wage work

It’s one of the most excruciating decisions single mom Jodi Dean has ever made: choosing between the unpredictable, $13-an-hour job her family relied on, and taking care of her chronically ill daughter.

“It (made) me physically ill with the stress,” Dean said. “I needed that job to provide for my children.”

Welcome to the new normal for families across the province: low salaries, erratic schedules, dwindling hours, unpaid leave and constant stress.

Ontario’s low-wage work force has skyrocketed by 94 percent over the past two decades, compared with just 30 percent growth in total employment, according to a new report.

‘Clearly, people need more predictability both in their schedules and in their incomes’
In one of the few province-wide studies of precarious employment, the research details an “eye-popping” shift toward poorly paid, non-unionized work across Ontario.

It shows that 40 percent of low-wage employees are saddled with unpredictable shifts, and the overwhelming majority do not get paid when they need time off.

That reality, the report argues, calls for sweeping changes to the province’s employment and labour laws, whose many loopholes have been detailed by the Star and are currently the subject of government review.

“Clearly, people need more predictability both in their schedules and in their incomes,” added Sheila Block, a senior economist at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and author of the study.

The research compiled by the left-leaning think tank shows that the share of Ontario workers labouring for the minimum wage is now five times higher than in 1997. It rose from less than 3 per cent of all employees to about 12 per cent in 2014.

The share of low-paid work has also ballooned: almost a third of all employees in the province are now making within $4 of the minimum wage, compared with less than 20 per cent of the workforce in 1997.

And while more than half of all minimum-wage workers are still young people, most of those making less than $15 an hour are 25 or older. (Source: Hamilton Spectator)