We won’t have Ontario premier Doug Ford to kick around much this summer. He will be up polluting the air in Muskoka on his gas-guzzling water craft. Before he fled the legislature, he left us with a few ‘bons mots’ about how successful his government has been for the province.
Interestingly, those few ‘good words’ were mostly about how much of our money he has spent on the more serious shortcomings of his administration. He started out though by saying how many Ontario taxpayers are back to work after the pandemic. Out of a population of 15 million in Ontario, he tells us that 670,000 people joined the workforce in an undefined period. That is good news as these people are all taxpayers and it means the government is getting more tax money. I really wasn’t aware that Mr. Ford’s government did all that much to end the pandemic. I think of the pandemic as more than a couple rotten years of general confusion in Ontario.
In fact, Mr. Ford went on to tell the legislature that his government had thrown some money at some of the after-effects of the pandemic. Since Ontario is the largest province in Canada, it is expected to spend more on health care than any other province. While he neglected to say what was really needed, he bragged that Ontario had spent $81 billion.
But he did not say how much more was needed and why hospital emergency clinics were closing because of the lack of staff. It might be because of the for-profit clinics that the Ford government is enabling to operate in Ontario. They can hire staff away from our hospitals by just offering them a decent wage.
I really don’t think Mr. Ford should take any pride that the government has to pay $34 billion on education this year. That is just a bit more than the Ford government has committed to spending on the Ontario Line subway project in Toronto. And if it goes like the Eglinton Crosstown, it will be way over budget, years late in completion and continue to disrupt small business in Toronto.
And if Mr. Ford’s education minister was not a private school kid, he would have more empathy for our school teachers in the public system. Should premier Ford be hurrying home to show Mrs. Ford his report card for the year, she would likely refuse to have those words on her refrigerator.
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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry
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