May 5, 2012 - No. 34

Liberal Scheme for Majority Government

Oppose McGuinty's Political Opportunism!
Oppose Attacks on Injured Workers!

Liberal Scheme for Majority Government
• Oppose McGuinty's Political Opportunism! Oppose Attacks on Injured Workers!
• McGuinty's Choice of WSIB Chair a Betrayal of Injured Workers - Ontario Network of Injured Workers Groups
• Show McGuinty and Co. What Working People of Ontario Think
of These Shenanigans - Rolf Gerstenberger, President, Local 1005 USW
• A Slap in the Face to Ontario's Injured Workers - Ontario Public Service Employees Union
• Notes on By-Election for Kitchener-Waterloo

Austerity No! Stop the Cuts!
• Families of Autistic Children and Youth Rally to Save Thistletown Centre - Rob Woodhouse
• Now, It's a $292 Million Surplus? - David Greig
• Doctor Fee Negotiations and Degradation and Privatization of Health Care

Liberal Schemes for Majority Government

Oppose McGuinty's Political Opportunism!
Oppose Attacks on Injured Workers!

Ontario Injured Workers' Day, June 1, 2011 at Queen's Park.

On April 27, a day before the Day of Mourning for Workers Killed or Injured on the Job, in a cynical opportunist move, Premier Dalton McGuinty nominated Progressive Conservative Elizabeth Witmer, MPP for Kitchener-Waterloo, as Chair of the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB) of Ontario. With the nomination, Witmer resigned her seat in the Legislature, thus triggering a by-election. The Liberals form a minority government with 52 seats excluding Speaker Dave Levac, who only votes in the case of a tie vote. The PCs have 36 seats, following Witmer's resignation and the NDP have 17 seats. This means that with the resignation the opposition has a combined total of 53 seats, one more than the governing party. There is no doubt in anyone’s mind that since the last election the Liberals have been scouting to find a Conservative or NDP MPP that could be bought out so as to change its minority government status into a majority. If they win the by-election the numbers of seats will be even and this would allow the Speaker to cast deciding votes in the event of a split. This would create a majority-government situation once again.

Elizabeth Witmer is known as the hatchet woman due to the hatchet job she did during her term in the Mike Harris government. Her nomination to head the WSIB is seen as an all-out attack on injured workers and an insult to the working class of Ontario. Witmer was Mike Harris' Minister of Labour, appointed in June 1995 at a time when Harris launched a brutal assault on the rights of workers on all fronts. She subsequently served as Minister of Health in 1997 under the Harris regime of cutting health services in order to pave the way for privatization. She remained Minister of Health until 2001 when she was named Minister of the Environment. With the election of the Ernie Eves government she was appointed Deputy Premier and Minister of Education. She was also part of the onslaught against teachers and the entire public education system under the Progressive Conservatives, in which teachers and education workers were targeted for attack; similar to what the McGuinty government is doing today.

The WSIB is currently undergoing "transformations" in the name of eliminating its "unfunded liability." This unfunded liability is the result of the cuts to company contribution rates made by the Harris government in the 1990s, in which Elizabeth Witmer was a key player. The WSIB recently contracted the consulting firm KPMG to propose ways to eliminate the liability. KPMG's proposals are aimed at finding as many ways as possible to prevent injured workers from receiving compensation as well as reducing the compensation that injured workers currently get, and finding ways to force injured workers back to work despite the harm it causes them.

According to Premier McGuinty, all this makes her "exceptionally qualified to Chair the WSIB."

According to the Office of the Premier, "As a full-time Chair appointed for a five-year term, Witmer will bring stability and leadership to that process."

The workers of Ontario should give a fitting reply to McGuinty's political opportunism and his declaration with this nomination of stepped up attacks on injured workers. Ontario Political Forum calls on workers and people across the province to oppose this political opportunism and attack on injured workers.

Say No to McGuinty's Program for injured Workers!
Justice for Injured Workers!

McGuinty's Choice of WSIB Chair a
Betrayal of Injured Workers

- Ontario Network of Injured Workers Groups, April 30, 2012 -

The Ontario Network of Injured Worker Groups (ONIWG) held an emergency meeting today as a result of Premier McGuinty's choice of Elizabeth Witmer as the new Chair of the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board. ONIWG is the umbrella organization representing local injured worker groups across Ontario.

"McGuinty has betrayed injured workers for political gain." said Karl Crevar, Treasurer of ONIWG. "Elizabeth Witmer is responsible for the mess our workers' compensation is in today and McGuinty put her in charge of the WSIB? I feel the Premier has betrayed the injured workers of Ontario." Witmer was the Minister of Labour during the Harris government which reduced employers' WSIB rates by about 30% between 1996 and 2001. During the recent WSIB Funding Review by labour arbitrator Harry Arthurs, the WSIB acknowledged that if employer rates had been left at 1996 levels, the WSIB's unfunded liability would have been eliminated by 2006. The unfunded liability is now about $12 billion. Although this is solely the result of employers not paying enough premiums, injured workers are now being forced to pay through benefit cuts.

As Labour Minister for the Harris government, in 1997 Ms. Witmer brought in major changes to the workers' compensation system known as Bill 99. At the time, Liberal MPP Dwight Duncan called the bill "draconian" and "a backward step." Symbolically, the bill removed "workers" and "compensation" from the name of the Board and brought private insurance industry practices into the system. Benefit levels were reduced, cost of living adjustments were virtually eliminated, compensation for workplace stress was eliminated and the formerly independent Workers' Compensation Appeals Tribunal was required to apply WSIB policy.

"Bill 99 privatized vocational rehabilitation" said Peter Page, ONIWG President. "From then on, all the money went to private service providers. Injured workers got second rate training in fly-by-night schools and employers would not hire them." A 2009 study by KPMG of the WSIB Labour Market Re-entry Program found that one and a half years after successful completion of a WSIB training program, a little over 50% of the graduates remained unemployed although their WSIB benefits had been cut on completion of the training. "We fought Witmer's privatized system for more than 10 years. We finally convinced the WSIB to cancel the privatized services last year, and now she's back!"

"Since Witmer brought in Bill 99, poverty has risen dramatically for injured workers. We did a survey of injured workers recently and we found an 80% drop in full time employment after injury, nearly half had to give up their home and 30% were relying on food banks. All this comes as a result of the changes brought in by Witmer and Harris. You can imagine how injured workers feel to see Elizabeth Witmer appointed to head up the WSIB" said Steve Mantis, Secretary of ONIWG.

For further information contact: www.injuredworkersonline.org
Peter Page, President (905) 745-1003
Steve Mantis, Secretary (807) 767-9633
Karl Crevar, Treasurer (905) 517-0831

Show McGuinty and Co. What Working People of Ontario Think of These Shenanigans

- Rolf Gerstenberger, President, Local 1005 USW -

Speaking to a May Day rally of some two hundred workers and community members in Hamilton, Local 1005 USW President Rolf Gerstenberger denounced the McGuinty Liberals for throwing injured workers to the wolves in a callous attempt to gain a majority government. Gerstenberger said "the political opportunism to stay in power is so great at Queen's Park that McGuinty just named Tory MP Elizabeth Witmer to head the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board. His scheme is to skin the ox twice -- to hold a by-election to get out of minority government status and escalate the attacks on injured workers the Tory MP is known for when she was Minister of Labour under Mike Harris. "Besides the crass admission that politicians can be bought, the cynicism is beyond the pale," Rolf said. "It must not pass."

 "We must do our best to make sure that neither a Liberal nor a Tory get elected in Kitchener-Waterloo. We must show these enemies of democracy the meaning of the rule of law and what the working people of Ontario think of their shenanigans. Even if the by-election is not in your riding, all Ontario workers should defend the injured workers and not permit the attacks against them," Rolf concluded.

A Slap in the Face to Ontario's Injured Workers

- Ontario Public Service Employees Union, May 1, 2012 -

Dalton McGuinty's appointment of Tory MPP Elizabeth Witmer to head the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB) is nothing more than a calculated political decision that results in a slap in the face for injured workers in Ontario.

OPSEU President Warren (Smokey) Thomas says that the transparency of McGuinty's appointment to gain a Liberal majority will come at a huge expense to workers who depend on the WSIB.

"When she was Labour Minister in the mid-90s, Witmer made changes to the WSIB that hurt workers and benefitted employers," Thomas said. "She privatized vocational assistance, reduced benefits and put measures in place that forced injured workers to return to the workplace before they had recovered."

Thomas says this move is a clear indication that McGuinty's Liberals are continuing a shift to the political right that belies everything that the party once stood for.

"The Liberals opposed the changes to the WSIB under the Harris Conservatives, and 15 years later appoint the architect of those same changes to head the WSIB," Thomas said. "It's clear to me that this is nothing more than a political power play to gain their majority, and they have thrown their ideals, beliefs and their morals in the trash. It's sad to watch, and I fear it will be injured workers who will pay the ultimate price for gamesmanship at Queen's Park."

For Your Information

Notes on By-Election for Kitchener-Waterloo

A by-election to replace MPP Elizabeth Witmer will be held in the riding of Kitchener-Waterloo at a date yet to be set by Premier McGuinty. It includes the city of Waterloo and the northern section of Kitchener. There are two other ridings in the area: Kitchener Centre currently held by Liberal John Milloy and Kitchener-Conestoga currently held by PC Michael Harris (gained from the Liberals in last election).

Elizabeth Witmer held the riding for the Conservatives for 22 years since 1990. The Liberals held the riding pre-1990.

The other parties which challenged Witmer in the 2011 election have not fielded the same candidate in consecutive elections since 2003. In 2003, Liberal candidate Sean Strickland, who also ran in 1999, received only 1501 votes less than Witmer. In the most recent election in October 2011, Liberal candidate Eric Davis finished second with 17,837 votes (36 per cent) compared to Witmer's 21,356 votes (43 per cent). The other candidates in the 2011 election were Isabel Cisterna for the NDP (8,259 votes), J.D. McGuire for the Green Party (1,307 votes), Peter Davis as an Independent (316 votes) and Melanie Motz for the Freedom Party (124 votes). One report indicated that voter turnout for the riding in the October election was about 50 per cent.

McGuinty has not yet announced the date for the by-election. An April 27 article in the National Post speculated that Witmer's son, Scott, would run in the by-election. He is currently a city councillor in Ward 1 in Waterloo. He is currently employed at the Ontario Medical Association as a Regional Manager.

Austerity No! Stop the Cuts!

Families of Autistic Children and Youth
Rally to Save Thistletown Centre

- Rob Woodhouse -

Demonstration against McGuinty Government's plans to close Thistletown, April 20, 2012.

Families of children and youth receiving treatment for severe autism and with other mental health needs held a rally on the grounds of the Thistletown Regional Centre on April 20. They are demanding that the government abandon its plan to close Thistletown, a world-renowned centre for the treatment of children and youth that serves 400 children in day programs, provides overnight respite for families caring for autistic children, provides outpatient services and has a small number of residential patients. The 260 professional staff and support workers at Thistletown have made breakthroughs in treating autistic children, that have resulted in the centre becoming a leading research and clinical training facility.

This was the second rally in the month of April organized by the families of Thistletown patients to stop the closure of the facility. The rallies are in response to the announcement in by Dr. Eric Hoskins, Minister of Children and Youth Services, that Thistletown would be closed as an "efficiency" measure. Hoskins said the care of the children and youth would be transferred to the community.

In comments to the media, family members of patients denounced the claim that the children and youth could be treated in the community as irrational. "What we've tried to tell the minister is that it's a ridiculous thing to say," said the parent of an autistic child, "The reason these children are here is because community agencies can't serve them. They have complex and high needs problems. They can be aggressive, self-injurious." Another parent confirmed, "You end up there because community programs can't serve you. They haven't been able to serve you. It's the last hope of service for anyone." The Thistletown families know that with his ridiculous, thinly-veiled fraud about community care, the Child and Youth Minister is really telling them "fend for yourself."

Thistletown Regional Centre opened in 1927 as the Thistletown Hospital, a convalescent branch of the Hospital for Sick Children for children with polio and tuberculosis. It was built in the countryside on a huge tract of land north of Toronto near what are now Kipling and Finch Avenues. This land is surrounded by high density development and soon will be serviced by rapid transit. People at the rally expressed the opinion that one of the provincial government's aims in closing Thistletown is to grab the valuable Thistletown lands and sell them off to developers.

Families of patients know from previous struggles that there is widespread public support for the rights of their children for proper care and they are speaking out to mobilize this support. In 1995, parents were able to defeat a similar plan to close the centre. The Rae NDP government at that time attempted to close Thistletown as a cost cutting measure using the same hoax that the children could be "transferred to community care." Then, as now, the government was prepared to sacrifice very vulnerable children and their heavily burdened families to the demands of the moneylenders for cuts to social programs.

Fend for yourself. This is the outlook of those pushing retrogression in social programs -- from child care to pensions for seniors, to abandoning injured workers and everything in between. In health care, "community care" is the catchphrase of choice for retrograde politicians because it enables them to pretend that they are part of the progressive approach among health care providers who are investigating possibilities for using community care for improved health outcomes. This catchphrase lets these politicians prey on the desire of seniors to stay in their homes or the hope of parents of disabled children to see their children integrated with other children. But self-serving political parties turn these progressive approaches and sentiments upside down when they place cost cutting at the centre of policy rather than the rights of all to the best possible care. The result is people with high levels of need being dumped into communities when community treatment is not appropriate or where adequate supports do not exist.

The renewed struggle of the Thistletown families demanding a rational approach by the government and defending the right of their children and youth to proper care is totally just. It has the support of all who are resisting retrogression in social programs and standing up for the rights of all.

1995 rally against Rae government's plans to close Thistletown.

Now, It's a $292 Million Surplus?

- David Greig -

The main argument presented by all levels of government in the service of private monopoly interests to justify the anti-social cuts to public social programmes, services and jobs amounts to this: there is no money, so there is no alternative, such cuts are essential and inevitable. This position is repeated as gospel truth in spite of the abundant wealth evident especially in the hands of large private corporations and the small minority that controls and benefits from them.

Toronto's Ford administration took power and has wielded it using just such spurious logic loudly proclaimed by the mayor, his cohorts and monopoly media champions. First, they claimed Toronto had a spending problem, by which they meant funding for public social programmes and services and remuneration of the workers that provide them must be slashed, not the benefits big private interests receive from their financial, commercial and consulting relations with the city. They were acting in the name of Ford's abstract taxpayer, a rare being with no need or concern for public services and programmes, jobs or adequate levels of pay and benefits, or the well-being of others and society, and who just could not be expected to pay for such things. The only reality this abstraction approaches is precisely the very rich minority that gains from the anti-social direction being imposed on society.

Then for most of 2011, the Ford administration brandished the spectre of a financial disaster, a supposed $774 million dollar deficit looming for 2012, due to the wastefulness of previous administrations and the dire situation that had created for 2011. This no money scenario drove the Ford agenda of cuts, privatization, sale of public assets etc. as the year wore on. Popular resistance to this agenda grew, helped limit these anti-social measures and raised the prospect of defeating them. And as the year drew to a close, it turned out the gigantic deficit was really more of a category of expected expenditures that required allocation of funds and that done, a balanced budget emerged and was approved in January 2012. In the process, the dire 2011 situation came out as, surprise, a preliminary $155 million operating budgetary surplus!

The fiscal emergency was in fact a construct of deception and disinformation used to drive the Ford regime's anti-social agenda. It helped effect that agenda to the extent the people's resistance has still been unable to bring it to a halt. In the 2012 budget, some cuts were avoided thanks to that resistance, but it was launched with others intact just as the regime pushed on to degrade the city workers' collective agreements.

This past week, further proof of the Ford regime's deception surfaced. The aforementioned preliminary 2011 surplus of $155 million was, according to final figures, really $292 million! And instead of being held to account for dishonesty in the service of city wrecking and big private interests, the monopoly media instead repeats the administration's claim that it is evidence  of sound financial management.

Doctor Fee Negotiations and Degradation and Privatization of Health Care

Negotiations between the Ontario Ministry of Health and the Ontario Medical Association (OMA) over a new fee schedule for doctors have broken off. The collapse of negotiations is a result of the Ontario government's agenda in health care. This agenda is to degrade health care by severely restraining public health care funding at a time when health care needs of the people are steadily increasing and to create as many opportunities as possible for the rich to profit from health care as a business.

Before the talks broke off, the OMA had requested some form of third party arbitration, which the government rejected. The government also rejected an earlier proposal of the OMA for a two year freeze in the schedule used to set fees paid to individual doctors. The government wants to freeze the total provincial spending on doctor compensation, not just the fee schedule.

The position of the government amounts to a major cut to health care. In the four year time-frame of the negotiations, Ontario's population is expected to increase by 634,000 and the number of people over 65 will increase by 400,000. The OMA calculation is that the volume of services required of doctors will increase by 16 per cent over the four year period.

The government has made the ridiculous claim that freezing total provincial expenditure on doctor compensation at a time of massive annual increases in the volume of services is not a cut. In media interviews after the talks broke down, Health Minister Deb Mathews said covering the estimated $1 billion compensation shortfall would just require "eliminating a little bit of waste and duplication."

In the same interview Mathews threatened the OMA with unilateral action, saying, "My strong preference is to work with the OMA to get it right, but if they're not at the table, we'll have to move forward on our own." This is the style of "negotiation" that was set out in the 2012 Ontario Budget, negotiations under the threat of legislation and regulation if the government doesn't get its way.

As the negotiations between the government and the OMA were taking place the government launched a campaign of vilification of doctors using populist Occupy-style rhetoric to cover up the government's underfunding of health care. This campaign includes the publication by the Ministry of Health of selected statistics on the outrageously high incomes of various medical specialists in short supply.

This greedy doctor theme was taken up by Mathews in the media. After claiming that the average doctor makes ten times the average wage, she said, "I cannot look someone who needs home care in the eye and say, 'Sorry, you're not going to get the home care you need to stay out of the hospital because I need to pay an ophthalmologist $700,000.'" If Mathews were to tell the truth, she would have to admit, "Sorry, you are not getting the care you need because the moneybags I represent have decided Ontario needs more degradation of public health care so as to have more privatization of health care."

Playing on people's sense of injustice over the high incomes of doctors isn't going to fool any serious person about the government agenda in health care. People understand doctors' high incomes are part-and-parcel of the way the capitalist labour market operates, creating huge wage differentials among occupations. Moreover, it is not hard to see that the government stance is completely phony. Under the cover of populist anti-doctor rhetoric, the government is pouring money into the pockets of those insurance companies and "businessmen in white coats" who are setting up private for-profit clinics as hospitals are dismantled. As well, the Ministry of Health vault is wide open to health care monopolies operating private labs, home-care agencies, long-term care homes and to monopolies in pharmaceuticals, medical equipment and hospital construction.

Workers have contempt for the way the labour market operates to create hardship for the many and privileges for the few, one of many scores the working class needs to settle with the system of buying and selling of labour. But workers reject as a cover-up the government's PR campaign about doctor compensation. The issue at hand is the anti-social agenda of the rich and bankrupt politicians in health care: the wholesale reduction of services to patients in the public health system and the further opening of opportunities for the rich to profit from health care services. The task of the working class is to resist this anti-social agenda and to organize for its own agenda, a fully funded, universal, public health care system that guarantees the rights of all to the best possible health care.

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