Ontario Government's Anti-Social Offensive
No End in Sight to Corrupt Pay-the-Rich Schemes
Demonstration for public health care outside opening of
fall
session of the legislature,
September 25, 2023.
Since being re-elected in June 2022, in an election with the lowest turnout of eligible voters in Ontario's history and forming a majority government with only 17.8 per cent of the eligible vote, the Conservative government of Doug Ford is mired in corruption and disrepute.
Government cuts to education, health care, housing and social services hand-in-hand with unprecedented enormous pay-the-rich schemes are par for the course. The Ontario Infrastructure Bank is siphoning money from the public treasury in the name of "public-private partnerships" which everyone knows means public money to guarantee private profits. Nowadays hospitals, housing and transportation systems are funded through the public purse for the benefit of private investors that make a windfall off these projects. They have nothing to do with providing for the well-being of the people whose conditions are getting worse.
Cuts to education funding have increased since the Ford government first came to office in 2018. At the end of April 2024, following the tabling of the Ford Government's budget for 2024-25, the Ontario Secondary School Teachers' Federation (OSSTF) noted:
"The Ford government continues to make misleading claims about supposed 'historic' amounts of funding in public education. However, when accounting for inflation and increases in enrollment, over $2 billion is missing from core education funding for the 2024-2025 school year when compared to the 2017-2018 school year. Funding per pupil has also failed to keep up with inflation as the Ford government has cut effective funding per student by almost 10 per cent since 2018."
The OSSTF added: "The province's underfunding of public education has led to worsening working and learning conditions in Ontario schools, which has fueled an unprecedented staffing crisis for teachers and education workers. This has had a huge impact on students' access to mental health services. High numbers of psychologists, social workers, and other mental health professionals are leaving education because they can find higher wages and better working conditions elsewhere. Wait times continue to grow for students across the province who need access to vital mental health supports."
The Ontario Health Coalition (OHC), which has been active across the province mobilizing opposition to the Ford government's cuts to publicly-funded health care while expanding private health care, noted on September 9 that: "Public hospital funding in Ontario is the lowest out of all the provinces and territories.
"Ontario also has the fewest hospital beds per capita in Canada. When the Ford government took power, it chose to cut hospital funding to below the rate of inflation, increasing it only during the pandemic. Even after the pandemic it funded public hospitals well below the rate of inflation and has capped wages of nurses and health professionals, limiting funding and worsening the health care worker shortage."
On September 3 the OHC informed: "From 2023-2024, Ford gave an increase of more than 200 per cent to private clinics and increased funding to a private for-profit hospital (Don Mills Surgical Unit) by almost 300 per cent. At the same time, they imposed real dollar cuts on public hospitals throughout the entire budget year until the last month of it, by funding them below the rate of inflation leaving them without the resources to deal with the staffing crisis and emergency department and other service closures. The picture is clear: drive the public system into the ground and use the resulting crisis to privatize."
This year in June, the Financial Accountability Office of Ontario (FAO), which uses figures provided by the government, underscored that the Ford government has made cuts to social service spending for people with disabilities, supportive housing and services for children with autism. In its Ministry of Children, Community and Social Services: Spending Plan Review published on June 5, the FAO reports that Ontario Works (OW) allowances have been frozen since 2018, which resulted in a 15 per cent decline in inflation-adjusted OW allowances from an average of $11,154 in 2018-19 to $9,485 in 2023-24 and that, assuming the freeze continues, inflation-adjusted OW allowances will decline by an additional 10 per cent to an average of $8,511 per case by the end of 2028-29. For Ontario Disabilty Support Program (ODSP) payments the FAO estimates that inflation-adjusted ODSP allowances declined from an average of $16,075 per case in 2018-19 to $14,576 in 2022-23 before increasing to $15,095 in 2023-24 and that inflation-adjusted ODSP allowances will increase to approximately $15,646 per case in 2028-29. (Ontario Works itself came into being in 1996 during the anti-social offensive waged by the Mike Harris government to cover up its attacks on those who required welfare to survive.)
Speaking after the tabling of the Ontario budget in March this year, Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) Ontario President Fred Hahn noted in the context of the cuts to social programs: "These cuts come just when Ontarians are in dire need of real and substantial investment in their public services – hospitals, education at all levels, long-term care, social services, childcare, developmental services and more funding for towns and cities.
"The Ford government's gaslighting of Ontarians is exhausting [...] They have taken our public services to the breaking point, affordability is at an all-time low, Ontarians can't find housing or a family doctor. And this budget not only makes no serious effort to repair any of that, it tells us openly they plan to make it worse for all of us, in every part of the province."
Workers and people of Ontario recognize the need to take matters into their own hands. Workers make up the bulk of Ontario's 16 million people and it is they who produce all the wealth and provide the services that the people of Ontario need for their well-being. The situation in Ontario requires them to lead in taking the economy and political affairs in a new pro-social direction that puts the well-being of the people in first place. The electoral process that brings cartel parties to power must be discarded.
(With files from Government of Ontario, Ontario Health Coalition, CBC, CUPE Ontario.)
This article was published in
Volume 54 Numbers 8-9 - September 2024
Article Link:
https://cpcml.ca/Tmlm2024/Articles/MS54087.HTM
Website: www.cpcml.ca Email: editor@cpcml.ca