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Premier Doug Ford's Ontario

adma said:
Now that's weird, as the Harris Tories bent over backward on behalf of the McMichaels' proscriptive views on art. I guess that's conservative aesthetes vs philistine aesthetes for you...
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I don't know if I read into the proposed legislation that the gallery itself is impacted, just the land around it.
 

Number of Ontario hospital emergency closures soars to new record: Health Coalition demands Ford government finally take action​

See https://www.ontariohealthcoalition.ca/index.php/report-release-unprecedented-and-worsening-ontarios-local-hospital-closures-2023/
In its report released today, the Ontario Health Coalition tracked the closures of these urgent hospital services and found the following closures to date in 2023:
  • 868 temporary or permanent emergency department closures (one is permanent);
  • 316 urgent care centre closures;
  • two outpatient laboratory closures;
  • eleven obstetrics unit closures;
  • one ICU closure, and;
  • one labour and delivery unit closure (long-term).
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A growing number of local hospitals are at risk of permanently losing services.
  • The local emergency department in Chesley has been closing evenings, overnight and on weekends since December 5, 2022.
  • Clinton’s emergency department has been closed from 6 p.m. to 8 a.m. since December 2019.
  • The town of Durham in Western Ontario has had at least 51 emergency department closures in 2023 to date.
  • Seaforth has had 17 temporary emergency department closures this year, Walkerton has had 20 and Wingham has had 31.
  • The Fort Erie and Port Colborne urgent care centres permanently closed overnight on July 5, and;
  • The Minden hospital’s emergency department permanently closed on June 1.
  • In Hearst, more than an hour away from the nearest hospital, labour and delivery has been closed for months.
  • Communities as remote as Red Lake and Manitoulin Island have warned they are on the brink of closures.
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The Annual Report, required by the Auditor General Act, includes value-for-money audits of Ontario public-sector and broader-public-sector programs, and our observations on the attest audits of the Public Accounts. It also includes reports and reviews required under other legislation or undertaken at the Auditor General’s discretion.

See https://auditor.on.ca/en/content/annualreports/annualreports.html

Staff shortages crippled some emergency departments in Ontario: auditor general​

See https://globalnews.ca/news/10150405/ontario-auditor-general-2023/
The number of emergency department closures and a crisis in health-care staffing has increased and compounded in recent years, largely driven by the province’s inability to properly staff hospitals, Ontario’s auditor general has found.

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A new probe into emergency departments by the province’s acting auditor general has found wait times are up, closures have become increasingly common, and some hospitals are being crippled with as many as one in four jobs left unfilled.

The audit found unplanned emergency department closures were “very rare” before 2019 and the beginning of 2020. In recent years, however, the number of closures has skyrocketed, with a lack of staff a key driver.

In a year from July 2022 to June 2023, the report recorded 203 emergency department closures in the province taking place at 23 hospitals, which were mainly in rural and remote parts of Ontario.
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Despite the rising closures, the Ministry of Health has “never collected or tracked” information on staffing shortages or vacancies in emergency rooms. The acting auditor general’s team reached out to several hospitals and “all of them experienced a significant increase in nursing vacancies” between 2019-2020 and 2023.

At some hospitals the jump in unfilled nursing jobs was stark.
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William Osler Health System, which runs hospitals in Brampton and Etobicoke, had a nursing vacancy rate of six per cent in 2019-2020; by 2022-2023, it had risen to 26 per cent. Sinai Health System in Toronto saw its unfilled jobs jump from three per cent to 19 per cent. And Sick Kids in Toronto went from an eight per cent vacancy rate to 22 per cent for full-time registered nurses.

“We noted multiple reasons for high staff turnover at emergency departments, especially among nurses,” the auditor general’s report said. “Factors included the higher pay and flexibility offered by private staffing agencies, as well as the introduction in 2019 of Bill 124.”

The Ford government has been under pressure through the pandemic for policies that critics say have led to a mass exodus of nurses from frontline roles.

Bill 124 capped wages for public sector workers at a one per cent increase per year for three years and was decried by nursing unions and advocacy agencies, who said it had forced many from the profession.
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Mount Dennis Resident said:
The Annual Report, required by the Auditor General Act, includes value-for-money audits of Ontario public-sector and broader-public-sector programs, and our observations on the attest audits of the Public Accounts. It also includes reports and reviews required under other legislation or undertaken at the Auditor General’s discretion.

See https://auditor.on.ca/en/content/annualreports/annualreports.html

Staff shortages crippled some emergency departments in Ontario: auditor general​

See https://globalnews.ca/news/10150405/ontario-auditor-general-2023/
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I'm reading that report now, in bits, as time permits, I'll go through most of them in due course.

On the ER one though, what really bears noting to me is:

1) The waits to clear someone out of an ER bed into an inpatient bed, that is seriously ill/injured enough to merit same is skyrocketing. So part of the ER problem is the backlog of patients in the main hospital. That is a function both of too few hospital beds, but also lack of sufficient long term care beds, rehab beds and homecare supports, preventing people who should be cared for in a less acute setting from being discharged.

2) The number of people who lack a family doctor is growing substantially, and we are neither producing enough family docs, nor ensuring their time is well spent, nor making sure we link patients to doctors that can take them on.

These problems are solvable. More money is absolutely part of it, but we really can and should be wiser about how we spend it as well.
 
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DSC said:

Doug Ford poised to reverse decision to dissolve Peel Region: sources​

Premier Doug Ford is poised to cancel his plan to dissolve Peel Region, breaking his deathbed promise to former Mississauga mayor Hazel McCallion, sources told the Star.

www.thestar.com

Doug Ford poised to reverse decision to dissolve Peel Region: sources

Premier Doug Ford is poised to cancel his plan to dissolve Peel Region, breaking his deathbed promise to former Mississauga mayor Hazel McCallion, sources told the Star.
www.thestar.com www.thestar.com
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Good. I thought the whole thing was silly, anyway.

Of course, the danger is that Bonnie, if elected premier, resurrects this idea. I don't know how parochial she will be as premier. Doug still meddles a lot in local Toronto politics.
 
I could definitely see Caledon seeing big tax increases in a Peel dissolution scenario. They have a lot of Peel Regional Roads that they would have to take care of with a much smaller tax base. The roads in Mississauga and Brampton I don't really see having any impact.

Overall though, I'm curious how they determined these figures. Which services would have continued to be regional and which ones would have gone to the cities? There's no way they seriously looked at breaking up Peel Police, and that's the biggest item that Peel Region pays for. Although if you went from 1 police force to 3, then yes, that would be very expensive.
 
Dan416 said:
I could definitely see Caledon seeing big tax increases in a Peel dissolution scenario. They have a lot of Peel Regional Roads that they would have to take care of with a much smaller tax base. The roads in Mississauga and Brampton I don't really see having any impact.

Overall though, I'm curious how they determined these figures. Which services would have continued to be regional and which ones would have gone to the cities? There's no way they seriously looked at breaking up Peel Police, and that's the biggest item that Peel Region pays for. Although if you went from 1 police force to 3, then yes, that would be very expensive.
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Like so many other things, no details of any dissolution were provided because none were worked out. Under the announced plan (term used loosely), the region would cease to exist so everything in Mississauga and Brampton would have rolled over to stand-alone single-tier cites. Caledon could also be stand-alone or perhaps join one of the surrounding counties or York Region.

Breaking up is hard - and expensive - to do. That's probably why discussions in places such as Chatham-Kent and Kawartha Lakes went nowhere, and they were much less established.
 
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