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Please! No more Doug Ford

May 5, 2022   ·   0 Comments

By Constance Scrafield

The destructiveness that has hit this province during the last four years of Doug Ford’s administration will be years healing and that is only if he is NOT re-elected. Immediately he came into power, he began his attack on the environment, health care and education, the three fundamentals to be protected and supported, one would think.

I could fill this page with numbers, like the $1.6 Billion cut to education in his 21/22 budget which looked forward to cutting teachers’ jobs, creating larger classes and enforcing more online instruction with a view to “modernizing” education. Cutting costs is behind the push for more virtual instruction not the welfare of students, for it has been clearly illustrated over the two years of lockdown that students suffer from learning remotely and that lower numbers of students in a classroom make a better education and support better mental health – all round.

Here are two more: he scrapped the math discovery program in schools and eliminated early learning programs.

Thinking of the overwhelming cuts made to the broad span of health care by eliminating safe injection sites, mental health programs and payments to help sick children, here is a comprehensive list of the cuts made by the Ford government to the health care system since June 2018 which is well worth perusing:

ontariohealthcoalition.ca/index.php/update-mounting-health-care-cuts

Be sure to make at least a cursory browse through this list to get an idea of where Doug Ford’s focus is: it is on business. There are many mentions of privatizing labs, testing centres, and patient transportation. There has been plenty of talk about selling off parts and whole structures to the private for- profit business sector, flying directly in the face of what Canada holds dear and for which we are rightly praised: our free health care system – well, it is not “free;” it is paid for by taxes and the federal government allocates huge sums to the provinces to pay for their health care systems.

Speaking of which, there is a bit of a mystery about where the huge federal funding to support Covid affected individuals and business in Ontario, most of which was not distributed: where did it go or what it was used for instead?

For many of us, the Ford government attack on the environment is equally egregious. His refusal to consult with the public and his drive to push new highways, most specifically the 413 is deeply worrying. This proposal has been inspected by a Federal Environmental Assessment which found the 413 to be NOT advisable, given the certain destruction of 400 acres of the Green Belt and 2,000 acres of prime farmland.

Considering that the underused Highway 407 follows the same line, it has been demonstrated clearly that no time – 30 to 60 seconds! – is saved for commuters by constructing the 413. The $6 to $10 Billion, the uncertain cost of this 59 kilometer passage would be much better spent on public transportation to assist in taking vehicles off the road.

The proposed 413 will “destroy important archaeological sites as the project passes through land that has long been inhabited by the Huron-Wendat.
Highway 413 would bisect the sensitive headwaters of four watersheds within Mississauga of the Credit First Nation’s territory and impact their physical and cultural heritage, including ceremonial sites, burial sites, and the cultural landscape,” according to environmentaldefence.ca/stop-the-413-3

As soon as he was voted in, it was clear who he loved and who had his attention, who may have benefitted his party’s purse; there have been questions about this, in view of Mr. Ford’s close relationship with various developers. In their interests, he has curtailed the power of the Conservation Authority who oversee government policy with reference to wetlands.

He cancelled the Green Energy Act which protected the Oak Ridges Moraine and the Green Belt and opened it up to developers. He reduced the Flood Management budget, axed the planting program of 50 million new trees and cancelled Trees Ontario. Repealed the Toxic Reduction Act.

He gutted the Endangered Species Program.

Honestly, it is such a litany of harm and intent to harm, intent to keep people poor and keep education and medicine down, saving money to balance the books – by all but cutting the Legal Aid budget?

Well, well, Doug Ford, your neglect of the disabled and the disadvantaged; your contempt for the impoverished, the addicted, women and their school aged children – the Indigenous, all those whom you forget, can still stand against you now; they can bring forth your bad news and they can tell their stories online, in print. Your sweet predictions and promises, your slick websites extolling the virtues of your administration will be denied and proven …overstated.

Your campaign hinges to a large extent on false promises – you made them before – of construction on hospitals and schools but we are sure you will drive forward with highways because those suit the developers, your friends and you will build where they don’t need to be but where they will do too much harm.

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