FROM JUNE 2023 ISSUE OF WEST END PHOENIX

One way to think about the Ford government’s five years in power is to break that half-decade into thirds. The first period, so to speak, was shot through with a deeply chaotic partisan energy – not just the moves most of us remember, like slashing Toronto city council in the middle of a municipal election, but also the weirdness: the clapping by Tory aides to drown out questions during press conferences, the scheme to upload the subway to the province, the paleo-conservative meddling with sex ed.

Then came the second period, when Ford & Co. figured out that nice-to-haves such as public health are actually life and death services. At first, the premier seemed to muster an authentically human response to long-term care deaths. And in the early phases of the pandemic, he mostly made common cause with the federal Liberals instead of pandering to the conspiracy theorists who found willing audiences in other provincial legislatures.

But in the last segment – you are here! – Ford appears to have reverted to the mean. His fixation with municipal politics has consumed his cabinet’s attention. The building industry gets what it wants. We’re paving the Greenbelt, previous commitments be damned. Handing over Ontario Place to a private company. Mismanaging the Crosstown LRT.

At some point over the last few years, Ford decided to remake himself into a Bill Davis-style builder for the 21st century – a guy who Got Big Stuff Done. And some of that stuff is actually important stuff: for instance, the government’s land-use planning reforms, which are long overdue, as was the decision to finally build the Ontario Line.

But Ford’s worldview contains problematic cross-currents: He doesn’t care about sustainable urban planning or sprawl. He has serious gaps in his understanding of core government responsibilities, like paying health-care workers properly. What’s worse, he regards his government’s sturdy second-term majority as a get-out-of-jail-free card for more truly bizarre moves, like giving the mayors of Toronto and Ottawa authoritarian powers to advance agendas that line up with Ford’s priorities.

In this package, we’re offering perspective on the Tories’ track record by zeroing in on seven policy moves that have spelled disaster for cities like Toronto, and talking to people on the front lines who are doing what they can to save affected Ontarians from the flames. — John Lorinc

#1. DEFUNDING THE CITY TO GIVE DEVELOPERS A BREAK

THE PROBLEM: In November 2022, the Ford government passed Bill 23 (a.k.a. the More Homes Built Faster Act). Ostensibly designed to streamline the housing development process and facilitate a rapid expansion in housing stock, Bill 23 is a massive bundle of legislation that alters multiple acts including the Planning Act, the Conservation Authorities Act and the City of Toronto Act. The impacts of the bill are many, but one major example is sharply limiting municipalities’ ability to collect development charges and community benefits in exchange for building variances.

THE PUSHBACK: Parkdale-High Park Councillor Gord Perks has been sounding the alarm about Toronto’s finances for years. He’s criticized the previous two mayors’ refusal to raise property taxes to a level where we can fund our stated priorities. He’s warned about the risky business of relying too heavily on the Municipal Land Transfer Tax – a rug that could be pulled out from under our collective feet with little warning. But now, with Bill 23, there’s a new threat to the city’s fiscal stability, and he says it’s going to hit everyday people hard.

“The province has effectively stripped the City of Toronto of the ability to pay for infrastructure related to growth,” says Perks. “And that’s going to have an impact on our transit system, on our efforts to build affordable housing, on our parks system. Just about every major service the City of Toronto delivers is impacted by Bill 23.”

The repercussions Perks anticipates from that loss of revenue will be felt in everything from minor projects to essential services. For example, the city has secured park space for a development at 57 Brock Ave., but currently, he says, “We don’t have the money to do anything except plant grass.”

Much more troubling, Perks adds, is the danger that the sudden loss of revenue may mean for efforts to combat the ongoing housing crisis.

“Parkdale-High Park has been one of the places where we’ve been experimenting in new ways to get socially owned housing built. And the business case to make those projects go is suddenly out the window. Because some of the development charges was money we were counting on to help us build affordable housing. So now there are a whole bunch of affordable housing projects in Parkdale-High Park that are at risk of not happening at all.”

Examples of this type of not-for-profit housing include the former LCBO site at 11 Brock Ave., the University Health Network lands at 150 Dunn Ave. and the Parkdale Hub at Queen St. West and Cowan Avenue.

Without development charges, Perks says, “that path [to] building mixed-income, socially owned housing is suddenly very narrow.”

The Parkdale Neighbourhood Land Trust shares Perks’ fears. “Bill 23 has reduced the City of Toronto’s revenue from development charges, directly restricting the city’s ability to provide the needed funding to affordable housing initiatives,” executive director Joshua Barndt say. “Without new funding for affordable housing, the city and non-profits will be limited in our ability to respond to this escalating crisis.” — Glyn Bowerman

DEVELOPER FEES BY THE NUMBERS

#2. EXPANDING FOR-PROFIT HEALTH CARE THROUGH PRIVATE CLINICS

THE PROBLEM: Passed on May 8 this year, the provincial Tories’ Your Health Act is allowing private clinics to perform a range of publicly funded surgeries and procedures. Pushed as a solution to Ontario’s six-figure surgical backlog caused by the pandemic, the act has been criticized as an expensive investment in for-profit care in the midst of a crisis of stagnant wages, understaffing and pandemic-related burnout for health-care workers. Offering up to double the wages, private clinics threaten to create an exodus of health workers from precariously staffed public hospitals. As well, the reputation of these clinics for upselling patients on expensive, medically unnecessary procedures threatens the well-being of the most geographically marginalized and economically vulnerable Ontarians.

THE PUSHBACK: When Doug Ford’s provincial government passed their Your Health Act, a sweeping piece of legislation designed to expand the role of private clinics in delivering a number of procedures – including cataract surgery, gynecological services and hip/knee replacements – Health Minister Sylvia Jones argued that outsourcing is essential to reducing the province’s surgical backlog. However, critics have raised concerns about the lack of regulation associated with Ontario’s 900 private clinics and their downstream effects on patients seeking care.

“There are far more effective ways to clear the surgical backlog,” says Dr. Raisa Deber, a University of Toronto professor of health policy. To deal with long waits, she says, the province could create a unified waitlist to reduce the impact of cancellations, and help hospitals re-prioritize the procedures they are tasked to perform. As Deber puts it, “The way to handle waitlists is to make maximum use of your resources.”

There are also concerns about cost. According to a report by the Institut de recherche et d’informations socioéconomiques, which analyzed the results of a pilot project to conduct publicly funded surgeries in private clinics in Quebec, surgeries in private clinics cost up to 250 per cent more than those conducted in public ones.

In February, the Ontario Health Coalition – a public-interest group comprised of more than 500 member organizations across Ontario – compiled testimonials from patients who had been upsold at private for-profit clinics. Many were extra-billed up to $2,800 for procedures and diagnostic scans. That is, the clinics double-dipped, charging both the government and patients themselves.

“The number one complaint we heard from patients was that they didn’t know what they were being charged for. These things were not properly explained to them,” says Riley Sanders, co-chair of the Greater Toronto Health Coalition. “Canadians rarely ever doubt what a doctor tells us is the best course of treatment, because we’re not used to having to pay for our health care. As they expand [for-profit clinics], it’s going to put more and more patients in Ontario at risk of being upsold medically unnecessary services.”

The Ontario Nurses’ Association has also raised concerns that “the bill provides no assurances that private clinics will not poach nursing staff from our public hospitals.” Health-care workers who have endured stagnant wages over the years along with pandemic-related burnout in the public system may seek out positions with better pay or hours in private clinics. In February, at Ottawa’s Riverside Hospital, a private group renting out operating rooms over the weekend was caught offering nurses $750 – twice their usual pay – to staff the procedures they were conducting in these spaces.

“The problem is there is no unused capacity in the for-profit clinics,” says Sanders. “It’s not like they have a huge team of unused health-care professionals just waiting to pick up the slack. They’re going to be recruiting staff from our local public hospitals, and making wait times longer.” — Kunal Chaudhary

PRIVATE CLINICS BY THE NUMBERS

#3. NEGLECTING ONTARIO’S SENIORS

THE PROBLEM: With long-term care (LTC) backlogs as great as 40,000 seniors long, the province has faltered in meeting its targets for expansion and staffing. Meanwhile, little is available in terms of additional support for seniors, or crises like elder abuse. Similarly, home care funding and available hours remain slim. As the cost of living increases across the province, seniors on fixed incomes are bearing the brunt. From housing to health care to social supports, seniors in Ontario have consistently been shortchanged by provincial budgets. In 2022-23, the province spent $125 million less than promised on the operation and development of long-term care homes. Late last year, it also implemented the More Beds, Better Care Act; under this bill, elderly and chronically ill patients could be moved from hospitals to long-term care homes up to 150 kilometres away, without their consent.

THE PUSHBACK: For a senior moving from the community into an Ontario LTC home last year, the median wait time was 213 days, the longest it’s been in the past decade. Right now, nearly 40,000 people remain on wait lists for the province’s suffocated, understaffed long-term care homes.

“In some communities, it’s not unusual for people to be on a waiting list for more than five years,” says Laura Tamblyn Watts, CEO of the national senior advocacy organization CanAge. “Crisis lists for the people who have been designated [to long-term care] in a crisis regularly take between six and 18 months.”

For-profit long-term care homes in Ontario gained notoriety at the height of the pandemic for insufficient staffing and underfunding, which led to tragic outcomes when the virus swept through them at a rate 78 per cent higher than in non-profit homes. But the Ford government’s unsatisfactory record predated COVID-19. In 2019, provincial budget cuts resulted in significantly worse care. For some seniors, for instance, those cuts translated to just one shower per week. Now, both current and future LTC residents are forced to contend with the impact of an ongoing lack of investment, as well as policy decisions that fail to offer sustainable solutions.

Tamblyn Watts says CanAge often sees seniors forced directly into acute care because there are no resources that would allow them to return home after a fall or injury. Right now, there’s little to mitigate this problem, which brings a total loss of independence. It’s not unusual for an Ontario senior’s home care allotment to be limited to three hours a week.

Throughout the year, CanAge prepares reports and scorecards highlighting key issues for seniors. Using these metrics, the group makes it clear that improving Ontario’s long-term care situation requires a holistic approach.

“We’re not investing in anything that keeps people out of long-term care,” says Tamblyn Watts. “Preventive medicine, health, social supports, all of those things, including home care, are massively cheaper than trying to warehouse older people in long-term care homes that are not necessarily fit for the purpose.”

She adds that the areas in which this funding is being invested contradict recommendations from experts. “It’s an unfortunate and somewhat baffling choice to create more 600-person long-term care homes.” CanAge’s recommends that institutions should be “more community engaged...allowing independent living, supportive housing, retirement homes and long-term care to coexist in the same physical space.”

“What this government has done is provide a lot of money to developers,” says Tamblyn Watts. “Some of those developers also own corporate for-profit long-term care homes.” Although CanAge has expressed approval regarding steps the province has taken to increase spaces in long-term care and chip away at the wait lists, the organization hopes to see more done to ensure that the spaces and homes being built reflect the best interests of Ontario seniors.

Looking ahead, she says CanAge wants “a substantive conversation” about required accreditation for long-term care homes, more funding for home care and community supports that will prevent seniors from turning to long-term care in the first place. — Sakeina Syed

SENIORS SUPPORT BY THE NUMBERS

#4. SPREADING CITY COUNCILLORS TOO THIN

THE PROBLEM: Despite the fact that he’s premier, Doug Ford has demonstrated a predilection for meddling in Toronto’s municipal affairs. Exhibit A: the chaos preceding the October 2018 municipal election. On July 27, the last possible day that candidates could register, the Ford government introduced the Efficient Local Government Act to align Toronto’s wards with the federal and provincial ridings, shrinking the total number from 47 to 25. Many progressives were knocked out of the race and, despite a Charter challenge, the legislation stood.

Under the current structure, some wards are home to upwards of 130,000 people, with a single municipal representative. Meanwhile, some Ontario municipalities with similar populations have a mayor plus comparatively large councils. Take Ajax: a town of 126,666, which is governed by a mayor, three regional councillors and three ward councillors. While large ridings may make sense at the provincial and federal levels, where macro policies are developed, they complicate the granular community decisions that municipal politicians must make.

THE PUSHBACK: In 2018, Toronto glimpsed the prospect of more equitable representation when wards were expected to increase from 44 to 47. After four years of successfully serving downtown communities as a school board trustee, Ausma Malik was excited to be the first councillor elected in one of the new wards. She was ready to do more and better in a new role at city hall.

But Doug Ford had other plans. When he decimated council seats from 47 to 25, Malik’s ward – Trinity-Spadina – dissolved along with her council hopes. Malik stepped up again in 2022, running for Spadina-Fort York, one of the hottest races in the city. She emerged the victor in the 12-candidate pack, becoming the first hijab-wearing councillor in the city. She’d already become the first hijab-wearing Muslim woman elected to public office in all of Canada when she was voted onto the school board in 2014.

“That is not lost on me,” Malik says, noting that, in a diverse city like Toronto, people need to see themselves in their representatives so that they can imagine their own role in the life and decision-making of the city. With less representation overall, that’s a tall order.

Increased diversity alone won’t solve Toronto’s woes, however. For Malik, having elected colleagues across the province whose entire municipality is home to as many people as live in Spadina-Fort York – one of the most populous wards in the city – is a “clear and sobering indication of what this move by the premier did to equitable representation,” not just in her own ward but across Toronto.

During the course of her campaign, she discovered that Spadina-Fort York holds the most front doors of any electoral district in the country, close to 90,000, because of the sheer number of tall buildings and density in the ward. Often the challenge of representing such a large population is a practical one: It’s difficult to reach so many people. “We have to keep working hard to [build] connections, so that the work I’m doing here is relevant and that I’m using every channel to ensure that people know how to reach me and our team,” she says, explaining that issues around affordability, housing and being able to imagine a future in Toronto are really challenging for one person, “even with an incredible team.”

In the face of attacks on local democracy, Malik explains that mutual accountability between councillors and their constituents is critical. “Strengthening our belief and trust in what is possible through our public institutions, that’s really important to me,” she says. Achieving that goal means that, yes, councillors need to hear how their priorities are landing and what the issues and concerns are – and when something is going well, so that good learnings can be scaled. — Leslie Sinclair

COUNCIL SIZE BY THE NUMBERS

#5. DEFUNDING PUBLIC EDUCATION AND THE INDIGENOUS CURRICULUM

THE PROBLEM: Since taking office in 2018, the Ford government has cut education funding, causing ballooning class sizes, job losses, restricted professional development opportunities and a massive repair backlog. There was a groundswell of protest in response to the widely denounced attempt to use the notwithstanding clause to bind 50,000 of the lowest-paid education workers to a four-year contract last year. It remains to be seen how the Better Schools and Student Outcomes Act, announced in April, will play out. But as the act touts the benefits of a “back-to-basics” approach and gives the minister of education more power, it’s hard to imagine a reversal in spending cuts.

Meanwhile, 11 of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada Calls to Action relate to education. Yet according to the last complete set of data reported by the Education Quality and Accountability Office, published in 2013, there was a gap of more than 20 percentage points on literacy and math scores between Indigenous students and all students in English-speaking school boards. While the government committed $23.96 million in Indigenous education funding for the 2021-2022 school year and an Indigenous Education Grant of $120.5 million in 2022-2023, without transparent and up-to-date student data, it’s a challenge to know whether the government is making meaningful progress.

THE PUSHBACK: On July 6, 2018, Indigenous elders and educators participating in a curriculum rewriting process received an email: The sessions were off. In Maclean’s, Theodore Christou, a Queen’s University professor on the curriculum rewriting team, expressed his disgust: “As an educator who teaches aspiring teachers, I am aghast because the need to Indigenize curriculum in Canada is not up for debate.”

Former premier Kathleen Wynne had promised to update course content at both the elementary and secondary levels to incorporate Indigenous perspectives and ensure students learned about the legacy of residential schools. In 2018, the newly elected Ford government updated social studies and history curriculum, including units on residential schools for Grades 8 and 10. However, the Ministry of Education abruptly cancelled curriculum-writing sessions with Indigenous leaders.

While the Ford government denied it ordered the cancellation, a statement issued by then Education Minister Lisa Thompson’s office said the “ministry moved ahead with the cancellation unilaterally, with no direction from the minister of education” and that it was consistent “with the commitment Premier Doug Ford made to run government more efficiently.”

The move “signals a step in the wrong direction and makes Ontario out of step with other provinces in Canada,” wrote David Newhouse, director of the Chanie Wenjack School for Indigenous Studies at Trent University, in The Globe and Mail. Newhouse explained that the education system must achieve multiple goals, depending on whether the student is Indigenous or non-Indigenous. For Indigenous students, the curriculum should support the development of positive Indigenous identities and help students gain the skills and knowledge to effectively participate in the economy. Non-Indigenous students, in turn, need to “acquire the knowledge and skills that enable them to live and work alongside Indigenous people.”

Last month, the advocacy group People for Education released Still Waiting for Truth and Reconciliation, a progress report on Indigenous education. While the report found that trends in Indigenous education have slowly improved over the past 10 years, there is still a lot of work to do.

P4E policy and research director Robin Liu Hopson credits educators for the “silver lining” in the report. “It’s a testament to the educators on the ground who are making the decision for themselves where they have the jurisdiction to make progress for Indigenous education,” she told WEP.

One of the report’s key recommendations calls on the government to collect data about Indigenous student achievement so that progress on closing the achievement gap can be measured. The report also notes that collecting race-based data is critical, because funding for Indigenous curriculum is often tied to numbers of students. The 2022-2023 Indigenous Education Grant, for example, was distributed to boards not just based on total enrolment but also on how many students were in Indigenous programs and how many had self-identified as Indigenous.

“If you don’t collect information on how different groups are being affected by the same policy,” Hopson explained, “you’ll never know how equitable or inequitable your policy is.” Only as of 2023 have Ontario school boards been required to collect this data, with reporting lagging behind, making it unclear if funding is being distributed in the best way possible.

In September 2021, the Ontario government announced its plan to strengthen Indigenous-focused Social Studies curriculum for Grades 1 to 3 by September 2023. Last year, however, the government unilaterally deleted or significantly altered 16 Indigenous-related expectations, a decision People for Education described in its report backgrounder as a “glaring misstep.”

Reconciliation in Canada has barely begun. As Christou wrote in 2018, “The calls of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission mean that we can no longer simply repeat the stories that we have heard and memorized.” That shift has to happen in the classroom. — Leslie Sinclair

EDUCATION CUTS BY THE NUMBERS

#6. SELLING THE GREENBELT

THE PROBLEM: Premier Doug Ford’s government came out swinging at a number of long-standing policies meant to protect the environment, prevent sprawl and keep people safe and healthy. The opening of parts of the provincially protected Greenbelt lands for development, despite previous promises to leave them alone, threatens those environmental policies. What’s more, Queen’s Park has stripped conservation authorities across Ontario of their ability to enforce their mandate. Some municipalities have been forced to change their boundaries to enable sprawl. As an Ontario Superior Court Justice warned in a ruling, the weakening of those policies means the province “is contributing to an increase in the risk of death due to the increase in global temperatures and the various catastrophic effects that happen as a result.”

THE PUSHBACK: When Ford became premier in 2018, one of his first actions was to change the provincial slogan used on roadside billboards from “Yours to Discover” to “Open for Business.”

Whatever you think about the slogan, it’s a pretty clear indication of this government’s guiding principles. So, while many of Ford’s announcements in his second term have been made in the name of building homes quickly, it would appear that Ford sees the province as a place where money can and should be made, without sufficient attention to the environmental impact.

The opening of the Greenbelt is a primary example. Framed as a way to get 50,000 new homes built, some critics contend the real agenda is that it’s a favour to sprawl-hungry developers.

“There is a sort of unifying spine that connects pretty much all of Doug Ford’s highest-profile attacks on the environment,” says Environmental Defence program manager Phil Pothen, “and that is an attempt to lock in outward expansion of towns and cities and direct growth that should be going to existing neighbourhoods out into sprawl.”

Pothen sees Ford’s plan to build the new Highway 413 as a link in that chain, calling it “little more than a giant public infrastructure subsidy for a subdivision scheme in northern Peel Region.”

Aside from the obvious environmental impacts of bulldozing and paving natural habitats and farmland, Pothen says Ford’s sprawl agenda takes the focus away from what cities like Toronto really need to be doing, which is building up and intensifying existing neighbourhoods.

Toronto has many so-called “stable neighbourhoods” full of single-family detached or semi-detached houses where, for generations, no other housing types have been permitted. It’s known among urban planning folk as the Yellowbelt. Intensifying these neighbourhoods with multi-unit housing eliminates the need for urban sprawl and all the deleterious environmental effects that entails. It also provides housing where people need it the most: near employment, transit and the various services and amenities the city provides.

Pothen points to the improved multiplex bylaw recently passed in Toronto as an alternative to Greenbelt sprawl. He calls those kinds of measures "an example of an initiative that West End residents can not only talk about and express opinions about in other neighbourhoods, but actually achieve in their own communities."

On the pollution front, while Pothen says previous governments have not acted swiftly, the current government seems "hell bent on pushing us in the opposite direction and reversing so much of the progress we've made."

As an example, Pothen points to plans to extend the contract of the Portlands Energy Centre a natural-gas electrical generating station on the waterfront. "It's eye-poppingly reckless and backward behaviour by the government." — Glyn Bowerman

GREENBELT DEVELOPMENT BY THE NUMBERS

#7. ELIMINATING JOB-PROTECTED SICK LEAVE FOR ONTARIO’S WORKERS

THE PROBLEM: On March 31, 2023, the Ford government ended an emergency program to provide three days of paid sick leave for workers for COVID-19-related illness. This move leaves many workers – more than 70 per cent of them making less than $25,000 a year – without any form of job-protected sick leave. The province has provided little evidence that sick leave hurts taxpayers or employers. There is, however, ample proof of its benefits for the long-term health of workers. The pandemic is not over, and workers suffering from prolonged illness and disability as a result of COVID infection need sick days more than ever.

THE PUSHBACK: When Doug Ford became premier in 2018, he immediately moved to kill Kathleen Wynne-era amendments to the Employment Standards Act enshrining two job-protected sick days into law. Two years later, frontline workers in Ontario bore the consequences of this short-sighted decision.

At the onset of the pandemic, 65 per cent of Canadian workers were deemed “essential” and forced back into their workplaces despite the threat of a terrifying and mysterious virus. Their ranks disproportionately included low-income workers in manufacturing, health care, home care and service industries. In Toronto, lower-income residents accounted for more than half of the hospitalizations and deaths from COVID-19, despite comprising less than a third of the population.

We were a year into this tragedy before the Tories implemented a program to provide three days of “paid infectious disease emergency leave” for COVID-related illness. The program ended at the end of March 2023.

“It will be a failure not to learn the lessons of the pandemic,” says Dr. Steven (Sung Min) Cho, an internal medicine resident at the University of Toronto and a member of the Decent Work and Health Network. “Losing sick days results in lower vaccination rates and the unnecessary spread of illness. This is not exclusive to COVID-19.”

According to a recent study in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine, mandating a 40-hour annual paid sick leave requirement can reduce mortality in major cities by more than 5 per cent.

“Being a health-care worker, it’s really obvious,” says Dr. Cho. “This pattern does not go away. The people who come in sick [to the hospital] are people who are not going to the doctor’s office for a checkup. They don’t have the luxury of taking a day off to see an endocrinologist for suspected diabetes, for example. This is how chronic illnesses become exacerbated into severe chronic diseases.”

The importance of legislated sick days has only become more pressing considering the spike in chronic illness in the wake of the pandemic, due in part to the cancellation of procedures and appointments. In Canada, 15 per cent of people infected with COVID-19 have reported suffering long-term symptoms, half of these for a year or longer. And 74 per cent of the long-term sufferers who were employed had to take time off work – an average of 20 days each.

Until February 2021, amid mounting pressure, Ford had panned paid sick leave as a “waste of taxpayer dollars.”

Dr. Cho disagrees. “Paid sick leave can deliver long-term cost savings and economic benefits by reducing presentee-ism, work-related injuries, and transmission of infection to co-workers and the public. It effectively reduces absences when workers are able to actually take care of themselves.”

In San Francisco, when seven days of paid sick leave were mandated in 2007, six out of seven employers reported no impact on profitability. A study from British Columbia – the first province to legislate sick leave in the pandemic – found that implementing 10 days of paid sick leave would lead to “an increase in total business expenses of just 0.21 per cent.”

In Dr. Cho’s view, the problem is not the cost, but the lack of political will. “There is a lack of leadership. This is a government that has persistently lied that they’re caring for workers when they’re not. They sent people into the pandemic poorly equipped to deal with it, and they’re using false narratives to convince people of their disastrous decision-making.” — Kunal Chaudhary

SICK DAYS BY THE NUMBERS