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Premier Doug Ford's Ontario

Towered said:
If they did this, what would differentiate them from the Liberals?
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I think in order to survive and stay relevant they will need to merge.

jayme2016 said:
I think that what hurts the NDP is they stand with the defund the police movement and others movements that the masses have little time for.
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That's why I left the party. I got tired of all the "Days of activism" and "calls to action". Being an NDP Member demands that you attend pretty much every protest at Queens Park.
 
I've discussed in the past how strongly I feel that minimum wage needs to be noticeably higher.

No Ontario-centric news here.

Just noted that New Zealand is raising their minimum wage to $20 per hour in their local currency; which is $18.12 per hour CAD, effective April 1st, 2021.


Worth noting, I looked at a cost-comparison for Aukland and Toronto, and we are both the slightly more expensive place to live; and have slightly higher average incomes.

Cost of Living Comparison Between Auckland, New Zealand And Toronto, Canada

www.numbeo.com www.numbeo.com

Closer at hand, the NYC minimum wage is already $15USD, or about $20 CAD per hour.

Minimum wages in the balance of New York State are set to rise on Dec 31st to $12.50USD, which is $15.93 CAD. So someone in Buffalo, NY, with a much lower cost of living, will now have a minimum wage nearly $1.75 per hour higher than someone in Toronto.

www.democratandchronicle.com

New York minimum wage will increase on Dec. 31 as planned

The state pointed to minimum wage workers being disproportionately affected by the pandemic.
www.democratandchronicle.com

Needless to say I'm just venting about the lack of action on this file; even though raising the minimum wage would not adversely affect our competitiveness.
 
Ontario now has a new, un-paid, innovation czar, who has the Premier's ear, in the person of Tim Hockey, a former TD Bank executive.

www.theglobeandmail.com

Ontario to appoint former TD Bank executive Tim Hockey to lead innovation strategy

Hockey recently moved back to Toronto from New York and turned down a number of paid executive positions before saying yes to the unpaid provincial role
www.theglobeandmail.com www.theglobeandmail.com

I don't intrinsically have a problem w/this; innovation is good; the man's CV is on-point; and if he's content to donate his expertise to the rest of us; that's a win.

But.....I do think a dose of healthy cynicism is warranted, no offense to Mr. Hockey.

He's not the first TD executive to end up advising a Premier for free, immediately after retiring.

Ed Clark, former TD CEO was an advisor to Kathleen Wynne.

It strikes me that TD executives seem quite agnostic about party, when they have a pipeline to the power centre.

I'm not implying anyone is receiving inappropriate benefits here; but I don't think it would be wrong to imagine that this kind of influence could carry with it some obvious advantages........

One cannot only steer public policy, but the public purse.........

Also, the connections one forms, not merely w/the politicians, but with the senior bureaucracy are more than likely monetizable in a future job.

Just something to keep in mind.............while genuinely appreciating that donated expertise.
 
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jayme2016 said:
I think that what hurts the NDP is they stand with the defund the police movement and others movements that the masses have little time for.
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The 'defund the police' movement really made their case difficult to argue for with their 'name'. What many want is for police budgets to be used better by improving the 'mix' of personnel - many would continue to be be 'trained police officers' while many more would have training in conflict resolution, mental health support etc etc
 
DSC said:
The 'defund the police' movement really made their case difficult to argue for with their 'name'. What many want is for police budgets to be used better by improving the 'mix' of personnel - many would continue to be be 'trained police officers' while many more would have training in conflict resolution, mental health support etc etc
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I think the other issue is many groups don't agree on what they want some say cut the budget others say invest in better training and mental health and then some say we want no police.
 
DSC said:
The 'defund the police' movement really made their case difficult to argue for with their 'name'. What many want is for police budgets to be used better by improving the 'mix' of personnel - many would continue to be be 'trained police officers' while many more would have training in conflict resolution, mental health support etc etc
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I think the name "police" has been made difficult to swallow through the actions of their own ilk.

We currently base almost all of our policing policies and funding on one of the smallest portions of their actual job — dealing with violent calls. If you rename the police to "Toronto Violent/Violence Response Services", the idea of sending a "Violence Response Team Member" to a mental health call, welfare check, civil dispute, crowd control or paid security makes them seem awfully ridiculous, or downright Orwellian.
 
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Towered said:
Try telling that to any casual conservative!
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(Progressive) Conservatives still talk or believe in the myth of trickle-down economy. See link.

The gap between rich and poor is reaching new extremes. Credit Suisse recently revealed that the richest 1% have now accumulated more wealth than the rest of the world put together.

This occurred a year earlier than Oxfam’s much publicized prediction ahead of last year’s World Economic Forum. Meanwhile, the wealth owned by the bottom half of humanity has fallen by a trillion dollars in the past five years. This is just the latest evidence that today we live in a world with levels of inequality we may not have seen for over a century.

Progress – but not nearly enough

Since the turn of the century, the poorest half of the world’s population has received just 1% of the total increase in global wealth, while half of that increase has gone to the top 1%.

wGve-o3w6kCCr3jkTlWOkzUltf-YSIqZFeODYfvIQ8o.png
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Ontario Failed to Renew Its Online Learning Subscriptions. It Cost Toronto Schools Hundreds of Thousands of Dollars.

From link.

Although Doug Ford’s government is a big fan of online learning, his government apparently forgot to renew its online textbook and learning program subscriptions — ahead of this year’s COVID-19 school reopenings.

Over the weekend, the Hamilton Spectator noted teachers had discovered that Ontario’s Ministry of Education allowed subscriptions to a number of online learning programs to expire.

In fact, it looks like subscriptions could be set to expire province-wide.

Norm Di Pasquale, a Toronto Catholic District School Board trustee, said that “everything” from the Ontario Software Acquisition Program Advisory Committee — which includes encyclopedias, virtual math apps, virtual books, virtual science labs, and more — appears set to expire this year.

“This was an Ontario-wide central purchasing initiative,” Di Pasquale told PressProgress. “This would affect all boards across Ontario.”
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A spokesperson for the TCDSB confirmed to PressProgress that “the Ministry used to secure the applications for the province. As of June 2020, most contracts have expired depending on when the contract ended.”

“The Ministry in turn provided funds for Boards to use to offset costs of securing their own licenses,” the TCDSB spokesperson added.

Di Pasquale told PressProgress that the TCDSB has been forced to renew its own subscriptions.

According to the board’s most-recent procurement report, that includes $120,500 to resubscribe to social studies textbooks published by Nelson, plus $84,500 to resubscribe to the teaching app MathUP, and another $112,000 for Gizmos special education, math and science licenses.

Ontario’s Ministry of Education did not respond to multiple requests for comment from PressProgress.
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Minister of Education, Stephen Lecce is no Bill Davis.
stephen-lecce-minister-of-ed.jpg

From link.
 
Ontario Hasn’t Proactively Inspected 98% Of Care Homes Since March
Over seven months of the coronavirus pandemic, the Ford government thoroughly inspected 11 of 626 homes.

From link.

The Ford government proactively inspected 11 — or less than two per cent — of the province’s 626 long-term care homes from March 1 until October 15 this year, the province’s commission said in a report Friday.

The government’s 2018 decision to cut proactive inspections meant issues with infection prevention and personal protective equipment (PPE) weren’t identified ahead of the COVID-19 pandemic, the commission said.
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Under the previous Liberal government, almost all long-term care homes received annual “resident quality inspections” (RQIs). The Ford government now focuses on inspecting high-risk homes, leaving out the vast majority.

Only 27 homes had an RQI in 2019, the first full year the Progressive Conservatives were in power, the commission’s report said.

“This reduction in RQIs which are intended to provide a holistic review of operations in the homes left the Ministry with an incomplete picture of the state of Infection Prevention and Control (IPAC) and emergency preparedness,” the commission said in its new interim report.

“This is a key gap as RQIs are the only resident-focused inspections that must include a review of IPAC. By their nature, a complaint about day-to-day issues in a home is very unlikely to identify problems with equipment and processes that would be used in an emergency.

‘No indications’ the government did inspections when pandemic began

“Importantly, we have found no indications that proactive RQIs were initiated by the [ministry] when COVID-19 outbreaks began globally.”

The government still does inspections when there is a critical incident, like an injured resident, or when a resident or family member complains.

Ontario announced the commission into what went wrong in long-term care in May. It started its work early after soldiers exposed horrific conditions in five homes that were hit particularly hard by the virus.

The majority of Ontario’s COVID-19 deaths are linked to long-term care. More than 8,700 residents have been infected and 2,265 have died as of Friday. Families have said that residents were not isolated from roommates who had the virus or showed symptoms and in one case, that staff refused to transfer patients to a hospital or give them oxygen.
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Minister of Long-Term Care Merrilee Fullerton has insisted throughout the autumn that homes with outbreaks of COVID-19 have adequate staff and PPE. But a worker at one Scarborough, Ont.-home where 39 people have died recently told HuffPost Canada that isn’t true.

“It’s just amazing. Sometimes even gloves — basic gloves — they don’t have,” the worker said.

Premier Doug Ford vowed to fix the system after he made the soldiers’ report public on May 26.
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It’s “appalling” that the homes were failing to follow “standard operating procedures” like cleaning patients or lifting them up before feeding them, Ford said at the time.

“I know the public wants answers and I promise you … I will get those answers.”

Fullerton said in a statement Friday that the government was already working on some of the problems the commissioners identified in their new report.

“We thank the Commissioners for their continuing guidance and for providing additional recommendations in such a timely manner,” she said. “We struck this Commission so that residents, families, and staff could get answers quickly, even as we are in the midst of the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.”
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The Ontario NDP’s deputy leader said the report was proof of the “devastating consequences” of cancelling comprehensive inspections.

“Doug Ford tried to save a buck by cancelling annual comprehensive inspections … That cut is costing us so much more. It’s costing us lives,” MPP Sara Singh told reporters by teleconference.

“Doing the bare minimum and denying that there is a crisis isn’t working.”
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