Premier Doug Ford (left) and Minister of Education Stephen Lecce (right). Ontario students return to in-person learning on Monday – and it’s about time. Photo credit: The Canadian Press/Carlos Osorio    After an extended Christmas break, Ontario appears set to once again open the schools to in-person learning on Monday, barring some unexpected circumstances that […]

Former head of the provincial Liberal Party and Premier of Ontario from 2013 to 2018 Kathleen Wynne. Photo credit: The Canadian Press/Chris Young   Perhaps the COVID vaccines have a little bit of truth serum in them, as some painful truths are finally emerging from various quarters.   One of the more recent instances involved former […]

To promote a distorted sense of equality, the Ontario Superior Court recently ruled that prospective teachers no longer need to pass a simple math comprehension test to serve as educators in the province. Photo credit: Getty Images/Sam Edwards   One of the developments over the Christmas holidays that didn’t get the attention it deserved was […]

One way to promote unity may be to force public officials – those making all the pandemic-related decisions – to experience the same economic hardship many Ontario residents must endure every time further restrictions come into place. Photo credit: The Canadian Press/Nathan Denette   The ever-quotable American economist Thomas Sowell said that “It is hard […]

Prediction number four: following another electoral defeat in June, the 2022 provincial election will be Andrea Horwath’s last as leader of the Ontario NDP. Photo credit: The Canadian Press/Chris Young   ‘Tis the season for predictions, and as an economist and political junkie I can’t resist the urge. Here are five shots in the dark […]

Photo credit: Getty Images   As promised, I have reviewed my prognostications made a year ago to see if my track record has improved any from previous years. Overall, it looks like my crystal ball got a little clearer, but still leaves much to be desired.   My first prediction involved whether Canada would have a […]

Premier Doug Ford (pictured) heads into the holidays with a sizeable lead over his NDP and Liberal competitors, according to a recent opinion poll. Photo credit: The Globe and Mail   It seems that the Ontario Progressive Conservatives just received an early Christmas present in the form of the latest opinion poll on how voters […]

Having been thrust into multiple lockdowns since the start of the pandemic, more and more Canadians starting to view the cure as worse than the disease. Photo credit: Toronto Star/Richard Lautens   Just in time for Christmas, the most recent COVID-19 variant has come on the scene to once again induce fear and loathing in […]

A new report released by the Fraser Institute found that Canadians waited on average 25.6 weeks between doctor referral and treatment in 2021.    The Fraser Institute has been doing an annual survey of physicians across 12 medical specialties since 1993 to document the length of time Canadians need to wait for various medical procedures. […]

Primary author of the ‘Report of the public inquiry into anti-Alberta energy campaigns’ Steve Allan. Photo credit: Postmedia/Jim Wells   Alberta’s public inquiry into the activities of environmental groups opposing the oil sands and other fossil fuel developments released its report a couple of months ago and continues to be controversial.  The inquiry, headed by […]

Per a recent study conducted by Leger on behalf of Second Street, two-thirds of Canadians are in favour of provincial governments hiring private clinics for surgeries to reduce wait times. Photo credit: LCM Architects    For decades, the prevailing wisdom has been that most Canadians are quite satisfied with the state of our health care […]

A recent Leger poll revealed well over half of Canadians would shun the unvaccinated and not allow them to attend gatherings this holiday season. Photo credit: SciTechDaily   Maybe it’s the prospect of another COVID Christmas, but it seems like Canadians are getting mean these days. A couple of recent public opinion surveys have shown […]

Ontario’s Auditor General Bonnie Lysyk. Photo credit: CTV   The report of Ontario’s Auditor General (AG) was released earlier this week, and it was a doozie. The main focus of the report was, not surprisingly, the waste entailed in disbursing major amounts of money during the pandemic. The AG analysis found that: over $200 million […]

Peel District School Board headquarters in Mississauga. Photo credit: Toronto Sun/Craig Robertson   The last couple of weeks have seen some truly unfortunate policies emerge from various parts of the Ontario government that are more likely to be divisive and harmful rather than accomplish anything positive. Not surprisingly, our always “woke” provincial public education system […]

Premier of Saskatchewan Scott Moe. Moe recently floated the idea of Saskatchewan pursuing more autonomy as a province, an idea seemingly well-received amongst his constituents. Photo credit: Government of Saskatchewan   Premier Scott Moe of Saskatchewan recently came up with an interesting concept that attracted attention from across Canada. Moe’s idea was that Saskatchewan should […]

Alberta Premier Jason Kenney announcing the province and federal government reached a deal regarding $10-a-day daycare, Nov. 15, 2021. Photo credit: Edmonton Journal   There was a supremely awkward press conference that took place last week in which Alberta Premier Jason Kenney “signed on” to the federal Liberal government’s so-called $10 per day daycare plan, […]

Tesla supercharge station. Photo credit: Drive Tesla Canada   In the wake of the Biden administration’s apparent intention to introduce significant subsidies to the tune of US$12,500 per vehicle to purchasers of electric vehicles (EVs) manufactured in the US, Ontario Premier Doug Ford seemed to have some softening of his views on EVs and measures […]

  Ontario Liberal leader Steven Del Duca (left) and Premier Doug Ford. Photo credit: The Canadian Press/Frank Gunn and The Canadian Press/Richard Lautens   Is it just me, or does it seem like every policy initiative being put forward by governments of all political stripes these days involves discouraging people from working in one way […]

Photo credit: Pexels/Vlada Karpovich   We’ve been hearing about Canada’s aging population for decades, and the most significant impacts will soon be manifesting themselves in a number of different ways. Most developed countries around the world experienced a post Second World War baby boom, and the boom in Canada was proportionately larger than in most […]

 Ontario’s Minister of Finance Peter Bethlenfalvy. Bethlenfalvy presented the province’s 2021 fall economic update on Thursday, Nov. 4. Photo credit: The Canadian Press/Christopher Katsarov    Ontario Finance Minister Peter Bethlenfalvy presented the province’s fall economic update last week, outlining many areas of new spending as well as the continuation of some existing programs geared to […]

Minister of Labour, Training and Skills Development Monte McNaughton at an announcement in early 2020. McNaughton’s ministry has introduced a number of labour reforms over the past several weeks, including raising the minimum wage, that many in the business community have questioned as untimely or wholly unnecessary. Photo credit: Postmedia Network/Paul Morden   After rejecting […]

Canada’s easternmost province set to impose sin tax on sugary drinks next year.   The Newfoundland and Labrador government has recently announced its intention to levy a tax on sugary soft drinks, to be introduced on September 1, 2022. The amount of the tax is slated to be 20 cents per litre of any beverage […]

The province’s Ministry of Labour, Training and Skills Development recently introduced legislation that if passed would, amongst other things, force employers with over 25 employees to establish “right to disconnect” policies, such as no emails before or after work hours. Photo credit: Pexels/Greta Hoffman   At a time when we desperately need to get the […]

Photo credit: Pexels/Ksenia Chernaya   The Ontario government and optometrists in the province are currently at war and, as usual, the dispute is over money. The bottom line is that the government currently compensates optometrists at a rate of $44 per patient visit, and optometrists say the cost of such a visit is actually $75.  […]

  Calgary mayor-elect Jyoti Gondek. Gondek was one of several progressive candidates that benefitted from big union spending in Alberta’s 2021 municipal elections. Photo credit: CBC News   Once again, the biggest spenders in the recent Alberta municipal election were unions. This has been generally acknowledged as contributing significantly to the election of a so-called […]

Ontario Liberal Party leader Steven Del Duca. Photo credit: The Canadian Press   Interest in different systems of voting was revived in Canada following the recent federal election which saw the Liberals re-elected with a record low percentage of the popular vote. Canada’s ‘First Past the Post’ (FPTP) electoral system, in which the candidate who […]

Vancouver, BC. According to recent data, BC saw Canada’s largest increase of inter-provincial migrants in 2020-2021.   Some recently released population data from Statistics Canada showed some interesting trends for the migration of Canadians among the provinces, and potentially worrisome developments for some parts of the country.   The data pertained to the 12 months ending […]

Green policies working to make life more and more unaffordable for average Canadians, with utility prices set to soar this winter.    Leading up to the Thanksgiving weekend, it was hard not to notice the sky-high prices for gasoline as many people travelled to family gatherings for the holiday. Some of this was explained away […]

Supreme Court of Canada judges. Chief Justice Richard Wagner pictured in centre. Wagner was part of the majority that dismissed the City of Toronto’s appeal against the Ford government earlier this month. Photo credit: Facebook/Prime Minister   Last week the Supreme Court of Canada rendered a decision that supported the contentious 2018 action of the […]

Lieutenant Governor of Ontario Elizabeth Dowdeswell delivers the provincial parliament’s latest throne speech, Oct. 4, 2021. Photo credit Toronto Star/Rene Johnston   This week the Ontario government launched the second legislative session of the 42nd Parliament with the usual throne speech, read by Lieutenant Governor Elizabeth Dowdeswell. The speech was supposed to be read several weeks […]

Artist impression of facial recognition technology. Photo credit: SmartCitiesWorld   Artificial Intelligence – AI – is very much on the agenda of many governments these days. While the use of this sophisticated technology can have many benefits, it also has enormous potential negative implications for privacy and the misuse of personal information, as well as […]

“Build Back Better” (and its many variations) is a slogan that has been adopted by a number of political figures on the political left as of late, including U.S. president Joe Biden. Photo credit: MSNBC   During the recent federal election period, the phrase “Build Back Better” was heard from time to time, mostly from […]

Photo credit: The New York Times   The post-mortems are underway from the federal election, and they are not pretty. Seems that virtually every political party was a loser, with the possible exception of Maxime Bernier of the People’s Party of Canada, which increased its share of the popular vote but still failed to win […]

Alberta premier Jason Kenney at a Sept. 15, 2021 press conference. Photo credit: The Canadian Press/Jeff McIntos    A few months ago, Alberta premier Jason Kenney decided to roll the dice and, in concert with the support of health authorities in the province, pursued the most aggressive opening of the economy that has taken place […]

President of CUPE Alberta Rory Gill. Photo credit: CUPE   A few days ago, a story broke that deserved to get a lot more attention than it did. In response to some new labour legislation passed by the majority Alberta government, some union leaders commented that they do not intend to obey these laws. For […]

Premier of Quebec Francois Legault. Legault has been the only Canadian premier to really wade into the current federal election at any considerable depth. Just a few days ago, the leader of Canada’s second largest province came out in support of the Conservative Party’s Erin O’Toole, calling the NDP and Liberals “dangerous”. Photo credit: The […]

Photo credit: Pexels/Werner Pfennig   The ongoing and highly contentious debate over whether or not governments should implement vaccine passports or similar has prompted a range of different stakeholders to express their views in support or opposition.  In Ontario and some other provinces, a key justification given by governments for choosing to proceed with vaccine […]

Photo credit: Pexels/Rodnae Productions   Back in the mid-1990s, the issue of tax bracket creep was very much on the public policy agenda at the federal level. Now that inflation is increasing after years of modest change, it is once again time to look at this unfairness in the tax system and implement measures to […]

Ontario teachers’ unions protest alleged cuts to education outside of Queen’s Park, April 2019. Photo credit: The Canadian Press/Tijana Martin   For many years and throughout the pandemic to date, some of the most vocal and constant complainers could be found in the teachers’ unions. These unions have claimed incessantly that horrible cuts to education […]

Photo credit: ExPat Care   As more and more Ontarians have become fully vaccinated, support for some type of passport seems to have been increasing. A growing number of cases of the Delta variant of the virus has also prompted demands for a form of proof of vaccination as a means of avoiding or lessening […]

Photo credit: Pexels/Laura James In recent weeks the federal Liberals have been desperately trying to find an effective “wedge” issue they can use in the election to make Conservatives look bad and divide Canadians. Early in the campaign, they trotted out the good old standby abortion question, claiming as they have so many times before […]

Former Alberta premier Peter Lougheed talks to then-prime minister Pierre Trudeau. Lougheed’s government established the Alberta Heritage Fund in 1976. Photo credit: Globe and Mail   The Alberta Heritage Fund was set up in 1976 as a means of countering Alberta’s historical boom and bust economy. The pattern was for the province to have huge […]

Premier-designate of Nova Scotia Tim Houston, Aug. 17, 2021. Defying all the polls, Houston led the Nova Scotia PC Party to a majority government for the first time in decades. Photo credit: CTV News   With most political attention focused on the federal scene in recent weeks, the fact that a provincial election was underway […]

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau offers his hand to Alberta Premier Jason Kenney, May 2, 2019. Photo credit: The Canadian Press/Sean Kilpatrick As a surprise to no one, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called the long-awaited federal election this past weekend. While it is still uncertain whether provincial politicians will choose to get involved in campaigning for […]

Jerry Dias, head of Canada’s largest private sector union Unifor. The union recently launched an attack ad campaign against Erin O’Toole and the federal Conservatives, claiming O’Toole will just institute “more cuts” and provide “more money to big corporations”. The irony, as Swift writes in the piece below, “is that the current federal Liberal Party, […]

Photo credit: The Canadian Press/National Observer  Three years into the Ford government’s term, one of its major promises – to fix the overpriced and inefficient hydroelectric power system that Ontarians have endured for many years – has still not come to pass. The serious problems with the system are proving very difficult to change, and […]

Premier Doug Ford and Minister of Education Stephen Lecce walk the halls of a Whitby high school last August. Photo credit: The Canadian Press/Nathan Denette   Ontario’s long-awaited plans for the return of students to school next month were announced this week, adding some certainty for parents and teachers but also raising questions. Key elements […]

 Alberta’s Chief Medical Officer of Health Dr. Deena Hinshaw. Photo credit: Flickr/Government of Alberta Late last week, the Alberta government announced the most comprehensive lifting of pandemic restrictions that has taken place in Canada.  All provinces have opened up their economies to varying degrees in recent weeks, as vaccination rates continue to rise and case […]

Premier of Saskatchewan Scott Moe (left) and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (right) wait for media to leave the office after a photo-op on Parliament Hill, November 12, 2019. Photo credit: The Canadian Press/Justin Tang  A recent dispute between the federal government and the province of Saskatchewan got very little media coverage, yet should be of […]

What will a fall return to school look like for Ontario students, teachers, and parents? Photo credit: Pexels/RODNAE Productions As August approaches, the thoughts of Ontario parents and policy makers begin to turn to the school year and, in this most exceptional time, whether or not schools should open after months of closures due to […]

Peter Weltman, Ontario’s current Financial Accountability Officer. Weltman’s office recently announced some positive fiscal news for the province. Photo credit: FAO  Ontario’s Financial Accountability Office (FAO) announced earlier this week that, for the first time in a while, there were actually some positive aspects to the province’s financial status. For the fiscal year ending on […]

Photo credit: Pexels/Ketut Subiyanto The Ford government recently announced a new task force on women and the economy, with the stated goal of advising the government on how best to support women as they re-enter the workforce post-pandemic, promote female entrepreneurship and remove barriers to women entering some fields of study in which they are […]

The question of whether we should be requiring some form of vaccine passports or similar proof of vaccination is heating up in Canada, with strong feelings on both sides of the issue. Prime Minister Trudeau has been trying to hand off this hot potato to the provinces, but the provinces are pushing back.

Photo credit: PlayTheTunes There have been many child care promises made by various provincial and federal governments in Canada over the years, but very few have come to fruition. Liberal governments in Ottawa have been making grandiose daycare announcements for decades, with little delivery of the goods. The most recent promise made by the Trudeau government […]

As if we needed any more proof, a recent study from the Public Health Ontario (PHO), in concert with the University of Toronto and several hospitals, has shown the overwhelming effectiveness of all three major COVID-19 vaccines: Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca. As more people are vaccinated, data on vaccine effectiveness has become more accurate than earlier numbers based on smaller sample sizes.

Most Canadians take our health care system for granted and greatly appreciate the fact that they can access a comprehensive range of health care services “for free” whenever needed. Canadians regularly cite health care as one of the defining characteristics of being Canadian, and many believe we have one of the best systems in the world. However, health care is anything but “free” in Canada, and cost pressures indicate that there are major changes in store for our cherished system in the future, as illustrated in a recent CD Howe Institute analysis on provincial health care spending trends.

Now that we are just under a year away from the next Ontario election scheduled for June 2, 2022, the gloves are off. Opposition leader Andrea Horwath and Steven Del Duca have really ramped up the criticism of Premier Doug Ford and his PC government of late. Much of the criticism concerns how the government handled the pandemic, and there is surely lots to criticize on that basis. But considering that every single government across Canada, and for that matter the world, made many faux pas in their dealing with a once-in-a-lifetime health crisis, it is pretty difficult to argue that an NDP or Liberal government in the province would have done any better.

Have we ever seen such a fraught Canada Day? The amount of negativity and self-flagellation championed by many politicians and other elites is truly exceptional this year. The appalling discovery of the unmarked graves of many Indigenous children has sparked much of this reaction in 2021, but if we look back at the last few years it becomes clear that a negative pall has been cast over our national holiday ever since the Justin Trudeau administration came to power in 2015.

When are parents and taxpayers going to finally get fed up with the threats to our public education system posed by militant and obstructionist unions, politicized school boards, and special interests that are dragging down the quality of education in Canada?

Remember how just a couple of months ago we were hearing regularly about how there were all kinds of “vaccines in freezers”, supposedly languishing there instead of being injected into the arms of an anxious citizenry? Funny how we don’t hear that claim anymore as it has become glaringly obvious that provincial governments have been doing a bang-up job distributing available vaccines. Looking back, this narrative was apparently promoted at the time as a smokescreen for the failure of the federal government to access sufficient amounts of vaccine as it became painfully clear that Canada was falling badly behind in the global vaccination sweepstakes.

This week will see yet another step in the longstanding crusade of Dr. Brian Day to permit the private provision of health care services to Canadians who face long waits in the public health care system. Dr. Day, a surgeon, operates the private Cambie surgical clinic in British Columbia. This clinic has a history of providing high quality health care to patients who were not being treated in a timely manner in the public system. Dr. Day’s long legal battle to enable private clinics to provide relief to patients suffering from the many shortcomings of the public system will continue this week in the BC Court of Appeal.

Responding to a court decision which overturned the Ford government’s changes to election advertising rules for third parties, the Ontario PC government has said it will impose the notwithstanding clause of Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms to follow through with its plans. The legislation that was struck down in Ontario’s Superior Court extended the period from six months to 12 months prior to an election in which the election-related spending of so-called “third parties” was limited.

The May 2021 labour market data was released last week. Once again, it showed the heavy impact of the pandemic lockdowns on employment. The differences between Canada and the U.S. were particularly stark, as Canada lost 68,000 jobs last month, while the U.S. added 559,000.

Recent weeks have seen a battle of words between the Ontario government and the federal Liberals over the issue of whether or not the Trudeau government has been imposing sufficiently effective controls at our border to keep out COVID-19 cases and its many pernicious variants. Throughout the pandemic to date, the federal government has announced various border policies with great fanfare, and then done very little if anything to actually implement them. This is a hallmark of the Trudeau government – make sweeping, self-congratulatory policy announcements on a wide range of issues, then do little or nothing to ensure the policy comes to pass.

NDP leader and head of Ontario’s Official Opposition Andrea Horwath got into some hot water last week because of a tweet she sent commenting on the case of Regis Korchinski-Paquet, the woman who died in Toronto after falling from her balcony a year ago. Horwath blamed police for the death, ignoring all available information about the tragic case and the results of the ensuing police investigation.

After enduring the many deprivations of the COVID-19 pandemic for well over a year, we are now seeing the post-mortems come in on how the various Canadian provinces dealt with the crisis. A recent analysis by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute (MLI) calculated a “Provincial COVID Misery Index” which evaluated the misery inflicted by the disease itself, misery caused by governments’ response to the crisis, and economic misery imposed because of the pandemic and actions taken by decision-makers.

Congratulations! As of May 24, you officially started working for yourself. As reported every year by the Fraser Institute, Tax Freedom Day fell this year on the Victoria Day long weekend. For the almost five months leading up to May 24, if you had to pay all taxes up front, every cent of your earnings would have gone to various levels of government in the form of income taxes, sales taxes, payroll taxes, carbon taxes, property taxes, fuel taxes, health taxes and so many more. Last year, Tax Freedom Day fell on May 17, so in 2021 we were paying government for a week longer than in 2020.

Ontario’s Minister of Health Christine Elliott (foreground) and Premier Doug Ford (background). Photo credit: Queen’s Printer for Ontario 2020 Saskatchewan led the way. Over two weeks ago, the ‘Wheat Province’ published a detailed, comprehensive three step plan to reopen the provincial economy, tied to meeting various vaccination thresholds. The first step in Saskatchewan’s plan is […]

During his much-awaited press conference on the state of the lockdown in Ontario late last week, Premier Doug Ford took a shot at the teachers’ unions when commenting on the issue of school closures. While disappointing many Ontarians by extending the current stay-at-home order for a further two weeks until June 2, Ford also said, “On the one hand, we have some doctors saying they want to open the schools. On the other hand, we have the teachers’ unions saying we can’t do that right now.”

The direct costs of the COVID-19 pandemic have been painfully clear since the beginning, with illness and death documented in the data we see every day. The indirect costs of the pandemic – a sharp increase in mental health problems, the negative effects on children of such massive disruption in their lives, the economic fallout and so many other impacts – are also legion but are likely to take many years to fully manifest themselves and as such are more difficult to quantify. A recent report from Ontario’s Financial Accountability Office (FAO) shed some light on one of these indirect pandemic impacts, and the news was not encouraging.

For those who pay attention to politics and public policy in Canada, it is no secret that Newfoundland and Labrador is on the brink of bankruptcy. Decades of out-of-control government spending, an expensive and bloated public sector, the disastrous high-cost Muskrat Falls energy project, the exodus of Newfoundland’s youth for greener employment pastures elsewhere, and other factors have led to Newfoundland’s debt crisis.

It’s been a banner week for those of us who don’t buy in to the “climate emergency” narrative that so many activists, globalists, and some governments are trying to push these days. This is not to say that we should not be concerned about environmental issues and do all manner of sensible things to have a positive impact.

Have you tuned in to a Toronto Maple Leafs’ hockey game lately? Perhaps watched the news, or pretty much any other current affairs show on television of late? If so, you have likely noticed that there were almost constant ads sponsored by various teachers’ unions critical of Ontario Premier Doug Ford in one way or another.

Ontario’s Auditor General (AG), Bonnie Lysyk, released her report on the provincial long term care (LTC) sector this week, and its findings were dire. The overall conclusion, not surprisingly, was that LTC homes were not equipped or prepared to deal with the urgent and pervasive range of issues involved in the COVID-19 pandemic, and the government departments involved in overseeing the sector were similarly incompetent. The result was a horrific death count of 3,756 LTC residents and 11 staff members.

Niagara Regional Chair Jim Bradley. Photo credit: YouTube/Niagara Region An odd statement came from Niagara Regional Chair Jim Bradley last week, as he called for the federal government to do even more to protect the news media sector than it is already doing. Bradley claimed that as the industry continues to struggle, and many local […]

Earlier this week, the Trudeau government introduced the biggest spending budget in Canadian history – by a long shot – encompassing a doubling of Canada’s federal debt to $1.4 trillion by 2025-26, with a very “liberal” spreading of large quantities of taxpayer dollars to almost every constituency possible. One interesting and potentially troublesome aspect of the budget was that it contained measures in several areas that are in provincial government jurisdiction, which could cause difficulties down the road for federal-provincial relations.

The one-year anniversary of the horrific mass murder in Nova Scotia took place this past weekend and
reminds us all of how poorly victims of crime are treated in Canada. Few Canadians are aware that Canada is seriously out of step with other developed countries with respect to our treatment of victims of crime. Virtually all other Western nations have well-established regimes of legal rights for victims, fair and equitable rules around compensation and support for things such as mental health treatment.

This week the leader of Ontario’s Liberal Party made a presentation – virtually, of course – to the Greater Niagara Chamber of Commerce (GNCC) about his plans to govern the province, should he become premier in the next election expected to take place mid-2022.

As a diversion from the endlessly negative pandemic news these days, we recently heard some other negative news about an iconic and archaic Ontario institution: The Beer Store. It appears that The Beer Store lost a whopping $50 million in 2020, which followed similarly large losses of $46.5 million in 2019 and $18.5 million in 2018.

Now that we have passed the one-year mark in our collective pandemic nightmare, more and more information is emerging regarding how very poorly the various government bureaucracies throughout Canada have handled the emergency. Politicians have understandably attracted most of the criticism, and they certainly deserve their share of the blame, but Canada would surely have had a much less drastic pandemic experience if more government bureaucrats had been doing their job.

Ever since Canadians started to finally receive Covid-19 vaccines – initially in dribs and drabs – back in December 2020, there has been an ongoing narrative placing the blame on provincial governments for the slow pace of Canada’s vaccination effort as they were supposedly keeping vaccines in freezers instead of putting them into people’s arms. This accusation has been mostly levelled at the Ontario government, which continues to be accused of keeping excessive quantities of vaccines on ice, supposedly due to the inefficiency of its distribution network.

It is no secret that government debt has increased dramatically over the past year because of the pandemic. And although most Canadians are understandably supportive of increasing our national debt at the present time because of the once-in-a-lifetime (we hope) crisis of COVID-19, we were heading for trouble before the virus hit. Typically when we see debt numbers for Canada in international comparisons, and things like debt/GDP ratios, it only refers to the federal government debt. But to get a true picture of our debt situation, the cumulative debt of all governments needs to be factored in. A recent Fraser Institute study looked at the total government debt situation in Canada, and the news is not good.

Last week, the Ontario government floated the idea of making online learning a permanent fixture in provincial public schools. Education Minister Stephen Lecce commented that the government was currently seeking input on the proposal, and that a decision would be made in the coming weeks.

It’s not surprising that the opposition parties really had to work hard to be critical of the Ford government’s annual budget presented this week. Even the usually big-spending NDP and Liberals would have had trouble outspending the Conservative government in this budget, prompting many to dub this a Liberal budget.

As if things weren’t already bad enough over the past year, the Ontario Sunshine List just came out to remind us how much better off those folks we pay to be “public servants” were in 2020 as compared to the rest of us.

This week the Manitoba government announced sweeping changes to their Kindergarten to Grade 12 public education system, including the elimination of elected school boards and the role of school trustees.

It’s that time of the year when most governments look to present a budget outlining their financial position and spending plans for the coming fiscal year. The pandemic and its dramatic impacts on government spending and revenues will make putting together a budget this year more challenging than ever before.

Following several months of delay and uncertainty as the Trudeau government failed to procure supply of the various COVID-19 vaccines in a timely manner, meaningful quantities of vaccine are finally beginning to flow to the provinces, who bear the responsibility for their administration.

Back in early 2018 when Doug Ford was in pre-election campaign mode, he vowed to end the per-vote subsidy of political parties if he was elected Premier. At that time, Ford even referred to the subsidy as “political welfare”. Yet just last week, he not only said he would reintroduce the subsidy as part of Bill 254, but would actually increase it. He was right the first time.

Maybe it’s that the number of the Highway is unlucky, but recent months have seen opposition grow to a proposed new 400 series highway, called the GTA West Transportation Corridor or Highway 413.

At a time like the current pandemic, you would think all governments were exclusively focused on how they could be most helpful and supportive to the voters that elect them and taxpayers that compensate them generously when many of those taxpayers are themselves in dire financial straits.

Most Ontarians are unaware of the major upheaval in Ontario’s school bus industry that has taken place over the past decade. This disruption, precipitated by bad Ontario Liberal government procurement policy, decimated many small family businesses, reduced service on school bus routes and created more unnecessary bureaucracy. The original intent of the policy change was supposedly to save money – something that the McGuinty/Wynne Liberals were rarely concerned about – yet ended up costing taxpayers more while wreaking havoc on the industry.

Discussion in recent months on the issue of government-imposed paid sick leave has been revived because of the pandemic and the dangers around sick people going to work because they cannot afford to take unpaid time off.

This was not a banner week in the Ontario Legislature for anyone. NDP Leader Andrea Horwath continued with her ongoing opposition to opening up the economy, even a little, to give small businesses and their employees, among others, a chance at survival. The left in general, including public sector unions, have consistently favoured ongoing shutdowns despite the damage they are doing. That is of course easy to do when their livelihoods are not affected by the lockdowns, and in fact many in government are working less for the same or better money.

Last week the Ontario government announced that March Break would be postponed until the week of April 12.  This makes sense for all kinds of reasons, including those that are health-related and in the interest of students receiving some minimal amount of education during this school year. The timing appears to be right for students […]

When Joe Biden was elected US President last November, much of Canada breathed a huge sigh of relief.
There were many media stories about how this development was great for Canada and that the US-Canada relationship could now be much more positive than it was during the Trump years. And although Biden, who has been in US politics for almost 50 years, will certainly be a more typical politician than the mercurial and unpredictable Trump, it is by no means clear that his presidency will work to the benefit of Canada.

The COVID-19 pandemic and its drastic economic impacts have revived debate around a number of policy issues, one of them being the Universal Basic Income (UBI).

Despite much evidence to the contrary, some people continue to believe that governments and government entities simply cannot go bankrupt.
In fact, there is a whole school of thought called Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) that promotes the view that governments can spend without constraint, and encounter virtually no downside. MMT has become increasingly popular during the pandemic, as government spending everywhere has skyrocketed and many public officials and others would like to believe that through some magical accounting tricks and governments creating infinite supplies of money, this will not create massive problems for future generations faced with gigantic government debts.

My old alma mater, the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB), has released its annual report on red tape, its negative impact on business, and how the various provincial governments are faring in getting a grip on this important component of economic competitiveness. Considering that 2020 was dominated by the pandemic, it is commendable that any province actually improved their red tape ranking in the CFIB analysis for that year. Ontario was one such province, with an A- grade overall, behind Manitoba, Alberta, Nova Scotia and Saskatchewan which all received an A rank.

The ever-unhappy Ontario teachers’ unions have been consistently very vocal throughout the pandemic, complaining that school conditions were unsafe no matter how many mitigation measures were being taken by the government and school boards. It seemed that the unions would only be satisfied if all schools remained completely closed, with of course full pay for teachers who were working at reduced capacity and sometimes not at all. This week we obtained some more insight into one of the ways a teachers’ union was working toward this objective.

The city of Kingston, Ontario has become the most recent jurisdiction to fall prey to the siren song of the environmental activists as its municipal council just passed a motion to phase out natural gas-fired power plants “as soon as possible”. Other cities in Ontario that have passed similar motions include Kitchener, Hamilton, St. Catharines and Windsor. Kingston was apparently the first Ontario municipality to declare a climate emergency – whatever that means – in 2019, and has vowed that the city will become carbon neutral by 2040.

The online learning experiment in the Ontario public school system that has been necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic is having some unintended consequences for teachers and parents, and providing lessons that were not anticipated.

Once the prospect of a vaccine for COVID-19 became realistic, public opinion polls have shown an ever-increasing willingness among Canadians to partake in the inoculation. Surveys taken by the Angus Reid polling firm show that back in November 2020, about 40 per cent said they would get the shot. By December, almost 50 per cent said they would get vaccinated as soon as possible, and another 31 per cent would be willing to get the shot after a brief wait. A more recent Ipsos poll conducted for Global News showed 72 per cent of Canadians would get a COVID-19 inoculation as soon as possible, and about two-thirds believed the vaccinations should even become mandatory.

The best that can be said about this week’s “stay at home” order and the invocation of the Emergency Management and Civil Protection Act by the Ontario government is that it could have been worse.

Labour Force data for December 2020 was released last Friday, and the news was not good for most Canadians.
For the first time since April, overall national employment dropped by 63,000 and the unemployment rate increased from 8.5 to 8.6 per cent. This was more than double the decline that was anticipated by analysts. The labour force participation rate (the number of people looking for work) declined as well, tempering somewhat the increase in the unemployment rate. The sectors hardest hit included accommodation, food services, culture and recreation – hardly a surprise as these sectors were some of the key targets of restrictive public health policies. The December data also showed that over 28 per cent of Canadians were working from home in the month, as compared to the previous peak of 41 per cent in April.

One of the aspects of the pandemic that has affected pretty much everyone to some extent is that we are all staying home more. In virtually all situations, this will mean that we are consuming more electricity than we otherwise would. And once again, it will come as no surprise to Ontario residents that they are being put at a disadvantage relative to their fellow citizens in other provinces as they continue to pay the highest hydro power rates in the country.

Undaunted by the inaccuracy of my forecasts for 2020 – most of which were thrown off by the immense dominance of the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on pretty much all elements of our lives – I will nevertheless proceed with making a few predictions for the coming year. So here goes…..

Before the saga of Rod Phillips and his ill-timed tropical vacation took over the headlines, the Ford government was being criticized for temporarily pausing COVID-19 vaccinations for a couple of days over the Christmas holidays.

The end of a year is usually accompanied by celebrations and thoughts of resolutions for the year soon to come. But for 2020, the only celebration will be relief that this awful year is finally over, and hope that next year can at best return us to some semblance of normal.

Last year at about this time, I took it upon myself to make five predictions about what would be happening in 2020. After a long career as an economist, where predictions are typically guaranteed to be wrong and the only thing in doubt is by how much, I should have known better. I did however promise to revisit my prognostications of a year ago to see how far off they were. In most instances, the answer is – very.

In reacting to the shocking surprise announcement by the federal government recently that the carbon tax was going to increase by over 500 per cent during the next few years, Premier Doug Ford went on one of his classic rants. He was criticized by some in the media for saying such things as “this carbon tax is going to be the worst thing you could ever see” and “you don’t have to protect the environment on the backs of the hard-working people of this province and this country at a time that people are just holding on by their fingernails”.

There was very little attention paid to an interesting development that took place this week, a development which should augur well for future economic growth in Ontario.
The governments of Ontario and the US state of Maryland have signed a free trade agreement. Although country-to-country trade agreements are nothing new, this is the first time a Canadian province has reached such an accord with a US state.

Last week Ontario Premier Ford announced that he would no longer hold the daily briefings on Ontario’s COVID-19 situation that he had been conducting for the roughly nine months of the pandemic to date. Although Ford did not give any specific reason for the change, it did coincide with the adjournment of the Ontario legislature until Feb. 16, 2021. Ford also noted that he would now do briefings when there was new information to report, not just as a daily routine that took place whether or not anything had changed or if there was something different to discuss.

It has been said that perception is reality.
In addition to the actual facts of the COVID-19 pandemic, how it is progressing and how different governments are dealing with it, the perceptions of Canadians in different parts of the country have frequently had little to do with reality but are nevertheless having their impact.

Earlier this year, the Strategic Mandate Agreements between the Ontario government and public colleges and universities that had been operational since 2017 expired, and were recently replaced with agreements that had a new and welcome twist.
Going forward, funding for these institutions will be based to a greater extent than previously on their performance, measured by the success of their graduates to find employment in their field of study. In previous agreements, virtually all of the funding was tied to enrolment numbers. Under the new regime, it is anticipated that by 2025, 60 per cent of operating funding will be contingent upon meeting performance criteria.

These are indeed crazy times, but there is some craziness taking place these days that has nothing to do with the COVID-19 pandemic.
An example of this erupted recently in Alberta, over some fairly mild wording in a government document and the question of whether or not government employees actually pay taxes.

In examining how the various Canadian governments have handled the COVID-19 pandemic to date, it seems that provincial governments, and occasionally municipalities, have been getting the lion’s share of the blame.
Considering that the provinces have jurisdiction over health care, and municipalities have public health responsibilities, this is perhaps not surprising. That still should not let the federal government off the hook, however, as many mistakes they made early in the pandemic, and continue to make today, ensure that the provinces have faced a heavier burden than they would have otherwise.

Ontario Auditor General (AG) Bonnie Lysyk has done a terrific job for the province throughout her seven-year tenure to date (of a ten year total term) in the job. She has ably identified many areas of wasteful government spending over the years, and was especially scathing in her numerous reports on the mess made by the previous Liberal government of the hydro policy file, the many billions of tax dollars squandered for little progress on environmental issues, and the excessive burden of high hydro rates inflicted on Ontarians to this day because of that failed policy.

In the mishmash of COVID-19 measures taken by governments across Canada to attempt to stem the expansion of the virus, a disturbing trend is emerging.
More and more often, government policies that shut down the economy to varying degrees are having a disproportionately negative impact on small businesses. The new lockdown mandate for Toronto and Peel regions in Ontario, for example, permit big box stores to stay open while small businesses must close. Small firms are still permitted to do delivery and offer curbside pick-up, which is cold comfort at a time of year when many businesses do half or more of their entire annual business because of the Christmas shopping season.

The Ontario government has announced the creation of a new agency to centralize and streamline government procurement in the province. This new entity – Supply Ontario – is intended to oversee all procurement for the entire public sector, including the extended public sector such as schools, universities and hospitals.

Some recent changes the Ford government has proposed to the Conservation Authorities Act (CAA) and the Planning Act is causing consternation among some of those bodies and environmental groups around the province.
There are currently 36 conservation authorities across Ontario, which are responsible for protecting, restoring and effectively managing impacts on the province’s water resources such as lakes, rivers, streams and groundwater.

Like her or loathe her, Kathleen Wynne had a significant impact on Ontario that will last for some time to come. Her recent announcement that she would step away from politics after the end of her current term as MPP in mid-2022 brought the Wynne era to an end after a long run of what will be almost 20 years in provincial politics.

Last week’s Ontario budget contained several big and long overdue wins for small- and medium-sized businesses (SMEs). The most significant involves hydro rates, which have been a serious burden on SMEs since the early days of the McGuinty government’s Green Energy Act (GEA) in 2009. As hydro costs steadily increased in the years following the GEA’s introduction as subsidies were provided to inefficient and unreliable wind and solar energy generation, governments put in place some measures to help households and large businesses reduce their bills, while SMEs faced the worst impacts of the rate hikes. Many smaller firms went out of business, downsized or left Ontario as the excessive hydro rates made them uncompetitive with other jurisdictions in Canada and the US.

A number of Ontario municipalities have opted to make pronouncements regarding a ban on natural gas of late.
The first city involved was Kitchener, Ontario, whose city council last week called on the provincial government to phase out natural gas power generation by 2030. Kitchener was following the example of the town of Halton Hills, which previously made this demand.

Most Canadian governments have emphasized the importance of “buying local” and “buying Canadian” in recent months during the pandemic. This has been partly motivated by the fact that Canada endured shortages of many pandemic-related items such as personal protective equipment (PPE), which opened people’s eyes to the value of producing essential equipment domestically and not having to depend on imports that might not always be available at reasonable cost.

While most parts of society are attempting to be constructive during our current difficult times dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, labour unions continue to make life more difficult than necessary at a time when things are already plenty difficult enough.

The BC NDP won a strong majority government last week in Canada’s second provincial election taking place during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Premier John Horgan took a chance in calling a snap election only three years after the last election – in violation of the fixed election date provision in BC’s Constitution Act – with the hope of turning his minority government into a majority. That risk clearly paid off as his previous minority seat count of 41 was converted into a solid 55-seat majority.

Ontarians recently found out that they will be facing yet another increase in their already-inflated hydro rates, starting in November 2020.
This change will put an end to the fixed rate pricing that has been in place since June 1, when the provincial government suspended time-of-use pricing because of the pandemic. The increase is expected to amount to about two per cent on average – not a massive hike but still another cost increase when so many people are financially stressed because of pandemic-related economic factors. High hydro rates were causing problems for low- and middle-income Ontarians before the pandemic hit, and this recent price increase will worsen energy poverty in the province.

In the private sector, where most people work, if an employer said their goal was to hire the best person for the job they would probably be mocked for belabouring the obvious. 

Not so in the public sector, however, where union rules mean that employees with seniority are routinely given preference, whether or not they are the person best qualified for the job at hand.  This is especially true in Ontario’s public school system, where self-serving union rules often prevail over common sense and good employment policies.  A recent announcement by Ontario Education Minister Stephen Lecce aims to change this long-standing practice as it pertains to supply teachers, and it can’t come soon enough. 

The last week has seen some interesting developments in Canada’s labour market, although much uncertainty remains because of the unpredictability of the ongoing pandemic.
Statistics Canada Labour Market Survey Data for September showed that overall employment increased by 378,000 jobs nationally, bringing the unemployment rate down to nine per cent from its peak of 13.7 per cent in May 2020. The vast majority of new employment was full-time, as many jobs which had moved to part-time during the pandemic had once again assumed full-time status. There was also a slight decline in the number of people working from home in the month.

A big announcement took place with much fanfare this week, as the federal and Ontario governments committed a total of $590 million, divided equally between them, to the development of electric cars and batteries at the Ford plant in Oakville.

Ontario teachers marched on the Ontario Legislature during a one-day province-wide strike last February.

Last week the Ontario Labour Relations Board (OLRB) rejected an appeal from the province’s teachers’ unions that claimed health and safety measures taken by the Ontario government were insufficient and that teachers were being put at risk.
All four major teachers’ unions were involved in putting the case to the OLRB – elementary school (EFTO), secondary school (OSSTF), Catholic school (OETCA) and francophone school (AEFO).
The union complaints dealt with a number of issues, including class sizes, student and teacher cohort sizes, ventilation, masking and busing. In addition to asking for smaller class sizes, more physical distancing and some other more stringent measures, the unions also asked that measures taken in the schools be reviewed monthly by the Ministry of Labour.
In its rejection of the unions’ appeal, the OLRB noted that it was being done on jurisdictional grounds, and said that the unions needed to make their cases individually, not jointly. The Board noted that any complaints should pertain to situations faced by individual teachers and any specific health and safety concerns they may have.
It remains to be seen whether any individual teachers or their unions will file complaints of this nature in the weeks and months ahead, and whether or not they will be successful with the OLRB.
For its part, the Ontario government continues to contend that the health and safety measures it has put in place in schools are sufficient. Experience with public school reopenings to date would appear to back up the government’s position as there have been few significant outbreaks of COVID-19 in schools and those that did occur have been dealt with quickly and effectively.
Looking across all of the provinces, a number of teachers’ unions in various provinces have complained about safety issues regarding the reopening of schools, but the Ontario teachers’ unions have as usual been the most vocal and militant. When comparing the school reopening plans of the provinces, Ontario’s precautions are among the most stringent in the country, so the unions’ accusations that the Ontario government is being irresponsible don’t hold water. In fact, some parents in other jurisdictions have commented that they view Ontario’s plan as one to be emulated, not constantly criticized.
No one should be surprised to hear the teachers’ unions respond to the OLRB’s action by saying they will continue their actions against the government, and a press conference is apparently planned for this week to outline the unions’ next steps.
History has shown that the Ontario teachers’ unions like to fight with governments of all political stripes, even those who bend over backwards to appease them as the McGuinty/Wynne Liberals did at immense cost to taxpayers accompanied by deteriorating education quality despite all the additional money spent.
Even though the unions fought with the Liberals, they will always save their most potent vitriol for a Conservative government. In light of the immense amount of money the unions have to play with, receiving forced dues from every teacher in the province funded by tax dollars, one can only imagine what a positive impact they could have for teachers, students and public education in general if they chose to be constructive instead of constantly confrontational.
It doesn’t look like that will be happening anytime soon.

Amid all of the concerns about the increasing numbers of people contracting COVID-19 in recent weeks, there was some good news regarding what is taking place in the public school system.
After about a month of most schools having re-opened across the country, there appears to be very little worry among health officials that schools will become a hotbed for infections. Some cases of the virus have been experienced but, in the vast majority of cases, it has been only one or two cases in some schools which were rapidly and effectively dealt with, and the schools involved did not need to be closed.

The Ontario Divisional Court this week made a decision that will likely end up costing Ontario taxpayers more money for health care, at a time when the provincial health care budget is already under considerable stress.
The decision concerned a Ford government policy change announced last May which intended to cancel out-of-country traveller’s health insurance. The amount of money involved in this case is not massive – about $10-12 million in the multi-billion health care budget – but the principle is important. Should courts be able to make decisions that affect government finances – often significantly – without having to at least consider the question of whether taxpayers have the ability to pay?

After pressuring all provinces into imposing various forms of carbon taxes on their citizens, as well as policies to deal with greenhouse gas emissions from heavy industry, this week the federal government accepted Ontario’s plan to impose carbon pricing on industry.

Last week the Ford government reconvened the Ontario legislature and announced its fall legislative agenda, a plan for “growth, renewal and long-term recovery”.
The top priority cited was health preparedness, but there was also a focus on job creation, skills training, attracting investment, strengthening communities and fortifying the front lines of the health care system – all commendable and necessary objectives. In the intervening week, however, the rather sudden increase in recorded cases of COVID-19 has effectively wiped most other priorities off the table for the time being.

This week saw a big win for the Conservatives in New Brunswick.
Progressive Conservative Premier Blaine Higgs had been overseeing a minority government for the past two years, and opted to call a snap election to seek a majority mandate from voters. The four political parties in the province had been in the midst of negotiations about a proposal from Higgs that his minority government be permitted to stay in power until October 2022, or until the end of the pandemic, to provide continuity during the COVID-19 crisis. The provincial Liberals pulled out of these discussions in mid-August, providing the impetus for Higgs to trigger the snap election.

Last week in British Columbia, a BC Supreme Court judge rejected a request to reverse some provincial health care regulations – notably a ban on private health insurance for medically necessary procedures. 

The case was put forward by Dr. Brian Day, a physician who has long been an advocate for choice in health care options.  Although there are many complex legal arguments involved, the BC judge effectively concluded that although the current public health care monopoly imposes significant wait times on Canadian patients and consequently considerable suffering and even unnecessary death, this cost is not sufficient to permit private health insurance as in the judge’s opinion private insurance would undermine the feasibility of the public system. 

This week the Premiers of Ontario and Quebec convened their first-ever “summit” to discuss important matters of mutual interest.
Topics on the agenda included economic recovery and job creation in a post-pandemic environment, health care preparedness for a possible second COVID-19 wave, collaboration on trade issues and the safe opening of the Canada-US border and the promotion of domestically made products, as well as other issues of concern to both provinces.

As the opening of school gets closer in Ontario and has begun in some other provinces, and teacher union scare tactics escalate to reach even higher levels of desperation, some interesting trends are emerging.
It seems that a significant number of parents are opting out of sending their kids back to public school and are finding alternatives in private schools, tutors, home school variations, distance learning and “learning pods” of a few students, or some combination of these options. Surveys show that in Ontario and some other provinces, as many as one-quarter to one-third of parents will not send their kids to public school this September.

Anyone who has worked in the private sector for any period of time is likely familiar with the reality that things are not always rosy and difficult circumstances for any business usually creates a need for pay freezes, pay cuts, working longer hours for the same pay or, in the worst case scenario, job loss.
In the public sector, it used to be the case decades ago that workers earned lower pay than the private sector, which was offset by greater job security and better pensions.

Now that the worst of the pandemic is hopefully behind us, data are starting to come out measuring the impact of COVID-19 on the Canadian economy. It seems that the news is even worse than originally thought.
Statistics Canada data for the second quarter of 2020 registered the steepest decline in quarterly Gross Domestic Product (GDP) ever recorded since data were collected on this basis in the early 1960s, with an annualized drop of 38.7 per cent. Not surprisingly, consumer spending, investment and international trade all showed sharp declines. By way of comparison, the US economy shrunk by 31.7 per cent, significantly less than in Canada.

Earlier this week the Financial Accountability Office (FAO) for Ontario confirmed that the province’s credit rating by the four major credit rating agencies would remain at its current level of AA- or A+, and has not to date been downgraded because of the sharply increased government spending during the pandemic.
The FAO cautioned, however, that to avoid a downgrade in the near future the province would have to pursue a post-pandemic fiscal path of reducing annual deficits and overall provincial debt.

Canadian companies move to America and pay one-third the hydro costs. At the end of Part I of this two-part series, we left manufacturer Acme Inc. forced to make some difficult decisions as Ontario Liberal government policies on hydro rates, labour legislation, employment standards and taxes were making it increasingly difficult to do business in […]

Many debates about government economic policy – both good and bad – tend to take place in a theoretical and ideological context without consideration for the effects of those policies once they are implemented.
What really brings the impact home is the real-life experience of an individual business. This is the story of a business in Ontario which struggled for years to keep its head above water in the face of adversity. Some of the difficulties arose from the natural ebb and flow of the business cycle, which is challenging but fully expected by any sensible business owner. What was surprising is that most of the problems this business faced were created by the bad policies of the McGuinty and Wynne Liberal governments.

Ontario’s Environment Minister Jeff Yurek says the data gathered under the province’s first-ever climate change impact assessment will help the province and local communities plan their infrastructure to mitigate climate change risks.

Last Friday a rather unusual press release was issued from the Ontario Ministry of Environment, Conservation and Parks, announcing that the province was launching the province’s first-ever climate change impact assessment, supposedly to “strengthen the province’s resilience to the impacts of climate change”.

This week Finance Minister Rod Phillips broke the bad fiscal news in an update on Ontario’s finances and it was grim indeed.
Citing all of the increased spending due to the COVID-19 crisis, the Minister stated that this year’s deficit would hit $38.5 billion, roughly a quadrupling of last year’s deficit of $9.2 billion. Expenditure increases were, not surprisingly, significant in health care where current year spending jumped to $7.7 billion from earlier forecasts of $3.3 billion. Billions more were directed to support for municipalities, transit projects and education.

It’s not the students that have the back to school blues this year, but the unions and some teachers are working hard to whip up fear among parents and others that Ontario’s plan is going to expose students and their families to unacceptably unsafe conditions when they return to the classroom in September.

The Ford government has now been in power for just over two years – the half way point in a four-year mandate.
Virtually every government of any political stripe tries to get the difficult stuff over with in the first half of its term, then spend the final two years with voter-friendly measures geared to getting them re-elected. The Ford government came into power with big plans in a number of areas to fix the many problems left by their Liberal predecessors, and put in place new elements of their own agenda. So how well have they done in accomplishing these goals in their first two years in power?

As the messy and complicated WE Charity scandal continues to unfold, a number of provincial governments have weighed in to question the involvement of WE with their province’s education systems.

In the last issue of the Niagara Independent, an article described a recent meeting of the Niagara Regional Council, during which significant amounts of time were spent on things such as complaints, councillors insulting or apologizing to each other, tedious procedural issues and other matters raised by leftist special interest groups.

Last week the Ontario legislature adjourned after a session that was unprecedented in many ways.
It began on February 17. At that time, the priority items on the agenda were teachers’ strikes, various blockades of key rail transportation corridors and the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. The Ford government announced plans to proceed with some previously-introduced legislation on issues such as health teams, justice, transportation and the budget that was upcoming at that time. As we now know, the rapid worsening of the pandemic quickly took precedence over other issues and became by far the top priority for government action.

In recent weeks most provinces across Canada have been focused on how they are opening up their economies again after months of COVID-19 lockdown. Most of the attention has been paid to exactly which businesses are permitted to reopen and under what conditions, what sizes of groups are allowed to congregate, whether or not masks will be mandatory in certain circumstances and how those rules are to be enforced by governments.

Most Ontarians are well aware that they are paying far too much for hydro – significantly more than pretty much any other jurisdiction in North America.
Most Ontarians also know that the reason for our outrageously high hydro costs is the ill-conceived Green Energy Act (GEA) of the previous Liberal government, which involved signing long-term contracts with solar and wind energy providers, guaranteeing them rates far in excess of any sensible market rates for electricity, while doing little if anything for the environment that would justify the massive added costs.

“Time is up” was a recent ultimatum declared by Ontario’s Mayors to other levels of government. The reason for this sabre rattling was that municipal governments are demanding more money from provincial and federal governments or they threaten to dramatically increase taxes or reduce services.

As the Conservative Party of Canada’s leadership races enters its final weeks, more attention is being paid to the platforms of the four candidates. One important segment of the Canadian economy that has been consistently neglected and mistreated by the Trudeau Liberal government is small- and medium-sized businesses (SMEs). Considering that the SME sector represents about half of Canada’s economy and employment, it is pretty foolish for any government to not work to bolster the strength of this sector. But the current Liberal government clearly has no respect for SMEs, as indicated early on by Trudeau’s own erroneous characterization of small business owners as “tax cheats”, and their subsequent punitive changes to small business tax policies that were completely unnecessary.

Following the Alberta NDP’s implementation of a number of very union-friendly policies during their tenure in government from 2015 to 2019, Premier Jason Kenney just introduced legislation to reverse many of those changes and restore some balance to labour relations in the province.

In somewhat of a surprise announcement, Ontario Education Minister Stephen Lecce stated this week that the Ontario public education system would be abandoning the practice of “streaming”, which entails separating students as they enter Grade 9 into two “streams” – an applied course of study or an academic course of study.

Ontario’s recent success in “flattening the curve” of new COVID-19 cases and to date preventing a second wave of infections means that the province can hopefully move to Stage 3 of its plans to further re-open the economy.

One of the key government policies conventionally deployed following a crisis is to undertake large scale infrastructure projects to create employment by building or repairing the roads, bridges, sewers systems, transit and other public works that underpin any successful economy. In our modern era we can add high-speed internet to the fundamental infrastructure list as all parts of Canada do not yet have this capability that is routinely enjoyed in urban centres yet still not in many rural areas. The current COVID-19 pandemic is no exception as governments are now looking to these types of projects as one means of helping Canadian workers and the economy recover from our current depressed circumstances.

You have to wonder if Stephen Lecce looks back and wonders if he did the right thing in accepting the appointment to Ontario Education Minister just over a year ago. As a rookie Member of Provincial Parliament for the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party and a first-time Cabinet Minister, it wasn’t exactly a light job to take on, although it certainly is one of the most important portfolios and the second-highest spending area after health care. It has also been the undoing of many Ministers of all political stripes over the years, so the stakes were high.

The Ontario government recently announced its plans to bring students back to school in September after the pandemic-driven school closure that has taken place over the past few months.  Premier Ford emphasized that student safety was the number one consideration, and that ongoing close consultations with health experts would continue to ensure students were not at risk. 

Canada broke the 100,000 mark in terms of COVID-19 cases this week, even as new cases of the virus have continued to trend downward in virtually all parts of the country. There have been many comparisons made among the various Canadian provinces as to how the different jurisdictions have fared in handling the Covid-19 pandemic to date, and Ontario and Quebec are regularly cited as the two provinces that have had the worst time dealing with the virus. But has Ontario really done so badly, considering that it is by far the most populous province and as such would be expected to have a very high number of cases?

For some time now, labour unions have been a source of increasing problems in Ontario and in fact across Canada, and this has become even more evident during the COVID-19 pandemic and the recent protests over racial issues. Police unions are an excellent example. In all too many of the high profile cases of police brutality over the years, including the current cases in the US that have sparked protests and riots in that country and Canada, the offending police officers were shown to be long time bad cops that had been protected time and again by their union until finally tragedy struck.

The 25th anniversary of the election of Mike Harris in Ontario and his Common Sense Revolution just took place on June 8 with little fanfare. At that time in 1995, Harris’s majority victory came as a surprise to many political observers who believed there would be a return to Liberal rule in the province after Ontario’s brief and unfortunate experiment with the first – and only to date – NDP government that had ever been elected with a majority in the province. But something about Harris and his common sense platform appealed to voters after the big-spending days of the David Peterson Liberal government in the late 1980s and the even bigger-spending days of the Bob Rae NDP government in the early to mid-1990s.

Last week’s appointment of Jane Philpott, former federal Liberal Member of Parliament and Health Minister in the Trudeau government, as a Special Advisor to the Ontario Health Minister was seen by many as a smart move by the Ford government on a number of fronts. As a medical doctor with extensive relevant experience, Philpott is well suited to perform in an advisory capacity during the current COVID-19 crisis. She also stepped in as a volunteer at Participation House, a care home for people with disabilities, earlier during the crisis as that facility was left seriously short-staffed when many of the unionized employees walked out and left the vulnerable residents at considerable risk. From a completely objective standpoint, Dr. Philpott would seem to be a perfect fit for this position.

Premier Doug Ford’s decision this week to extend the emergency orders until the end of June attracted a great deal of criticism from many quarters. This decision meant that gatherings of more than five people would continue to be prohibited and many businesses such as restaurants and bars had to remain closed except for limited operations like take-out service for restaurants. Most criticisms were based on the fact that since the vast majority of deaths from COVID-19 had taken place in facilities such as long term care homes among highly vulnerable populations, there was little if any reason to continue to restrict the activities of others not in these situations. Other critics noted that as the biggest Covid-19 problems were concentrated in the Toronto area, other parts of the provinces should be permitted to open more extensively as they did not face the same circumstances.

Most schools in Canada have been closed over the past couple of months, but there have been some developments in education policy of late that are worthy of attention. In Alberta, the provincial government has introduced Bill 15, the Choice in Education Act, which facilitates the establishment of charter schools. Charter schools are independently-run, non-profit institutions within the public system which typically have a focus on a particular group of students – for example, children with learning disabilities, a particular vocational emphasis or an all-girls school.

What can be said about the horrible crisis in long term care (LTC) facilities that has been revealed by the COVID-19 crisis? That our society has been negligent regarding the care of our elderly population? Absolutely. That there was not sufficient attention being paid to conditions in LTC facilities for many years? Definitely.

Last week saw a worrisome development at the St. John’s Telegram in Newfoundland. The Telegram is a venerable Canadian publication, having been around since the late 1800s. It seems that one of their desk editors, Brian Jones, in a column entitled “Pandemic is an Extended Holiday for Public Sector Workers”, had the nerve to question why government workers were mostly sitting at home doing nothing at full pay and benefits, while those in the private sector who pay for the public sector were seeing their jobs annihilated and being asked to live on a paltry $2,000 a month.

One would have to presume that Kelly McParland had his tongue firmly in cheek when he penned a recent column for the National Post on the glories of working for the government over the private sector. Recent experience with the COVID-19 crisis would certainly support this premise, however, as we see the carnage in private sector employment while the vast majority of public sector workers are underworked, if they are working at all, while enjoying full salary and benefits courtesy of taxes paid by the beleaguered private sector.

Ontarians have been spending a lot more time at home since the COVID-19 lockdown began, and have had much less ability than usual to manage the timing of their electricity consumption to use hydro at off-peak times and avoid peak usage pricing whenever possible. In response to this situation, back in March the Ontario government temporarily suspended time-of-use pricing for hydro so that all electricity consumed would be billed at the lowest rate, and this was recently extended until the end of May 2020.

It’s no secret that Alberta and to a lesser extent Saskatchewan have been seriously disadvantaged for years by policies pursued by the Trudeau government in the oil and gas sector. Those two provinces rewarded the Liberals’ approach by not electing one Liberal Member of Parliament in the October 2019 federal election, but that doesn’t seem to have changed the government’s approach one bit. If anything, the Trudeau Liberals are doubling down on policies that hurt the energy-producing provinces, to the detriment of all of Canada.

As would be expected with such a serious crisis such as the COVID-19 virus, there has been much handwringing, second guessing and criticism about what governments have done to contend with the emergency. The Canadian health care system has understandably been a focus of much commentary, positive and negative, and many different suggestions are being made regarding what changes should happen to better prepare Canada for such a crisis in future.

As all Canadian governments continue to monitor the number of new COVID-19 cases by the day – and thankfully see a fairly consistent reduction in new infections – stark differences among some of the provinces and their experiences with the pandemic have emerged. Many of these differences are easily explained by factors such as urban/rural population numbers, the location of international airports where most of the initial cases came into Canada and the prevalence of long term care facilities which have seen the most frequent outbreaks of the virus.

A number of provincial Premiers have come out guns blazing – figuratively of course – in response to the federal Liberal government’s announcement last week that it was banning a number of types of firearms. Ontario Premier Ford weighed in by emphasizing the need to focus on putting an end to smuggling and increasing border measures, as it is well known that the vast majority of guns used to commit crimes illegally enter Canada from the US.

Now that the minds of policy makers and others begin to turn to how our economy will operate after the COVID-19 crisis has passed, one issue arising is how will Canada’s relationship change with its major trading partners. In any given year, Canadian exports and imports each represent about one-third of our Gross Domestic Product, so any change in our international trading arrangements is a big deal. Over the last couple of decades, Canada has also signed several substantial trade agreements, further broadening our economic involvement with other countries. The economies of all Canadian provinces are significantly dependent on trade, with Ontario and Alberta being particularly vulnerable to trade disruption.

Last Sunday, Ontario Education Minister Stephen Lecce announced that there would be a further extension of school closures, with the government now planning to keep kids home until at least May 31 as opposed to the previously cited date of May 4, due to ongoing uncertainty with the COVID-19 pandemic. The Minister also assured Ontarians that students would not lose their school year, noting that three-quarters of the school year had been completed while classes were still taking place. He also said that graduating students would be able to move forward with whatever post-secondary education plans they had prior to the pandemic lockdown.

After many weeks of draconian measures to stem the spread of COVID-19, it is wonderful to see that Canada is making progress on “flattening the curve” and people are now starting to discuss when and how we will be planning to open up our economies in the future.

Ontario, it seems, is blessed with an NDP official opposition that has perfect 20-20 hindsight.
When the Ford government recently announced it was devoting $20 million for research into the development of a COVID-19 vaccine, the NDP responded that if cuts had not been made earlier then there would be no need to allocate further money now. In fact, the exact quote from NDP Research and Innovation Critic Catherine Fife was “Researchers could have been working on the global challenge of a COVID-19 vaccine earlier if Doug Ford hadn’t cut their funding and wound down their work a year ago.” Really? Perhaps seeing as the NDP has such perfect hindsight, they should have been recommending vaccine research months ago. Of course that statement is just as ridiculous as the NDP’s groundless criticism.

It was only a few weeks ago that the Ontario government launched its OntarioTogether.com website, established to receive proposals from businesses and others for goods and services to help deal with the COVID-19 crisis. The response from Ontarians has been spectacular. Since the website went live on March 21, 14,000 submissions have been received, resulting in 7,500 leads for various types of emergency supplies and services to date.

As the COVID-19 crisis has progressed in recent weeks, a number of provincial governments have stepped up to take charge of areas that are supposedly the responsibility of the federal government, but where the federal government has turned out not to be been sufficiently diligent or responsive. Although it is encouraging that some political leaders are undertaking positive, constructive action to fight the Covid19 menace, it does beg the question as to why the federal government is not implementing policies it claims to support in key areas of its jurisdiction.

As the duration of the COVID-19 crisis gets longer and health officials learn more about the virus, the issue of testing has gained increased importance. We see the daily numbers outlining how many people have been found to be infected with the virus, how many are under investigation, how many have recovered and how many have died. Understandably, people pay particular attention to the fatality data and it is generally believed at this time that the COVID-19 virus is more deadly than many other flu strains we have experienced in the past.

While all governments understandably are scrambling to keep up with the latest Covid19 developments, best practices and developing policies on the fly, some stark differences in the way governments are handling things are emerging. Last Friday, the Ontario government chose to make public the findings of the models the Ford government is using to forecast the impact the virus will have on the province in terms of confirmed, pending, recovered cases and deaths. Prior to this release, the Premier warned that the news would be stark, and it was.

We have by now accepted the reality that all governments are spending our money like water with our full support in response to the COVID-19 pandemic that is upon us. All of this money will be added to our collective debt, and will need to be paid back at some future time. Despite the current turmoil and the imperative to get money out the door quickly, it is still worth examining where this money is going and whether it is truly being used constructively and for valid pandemic-related matters.

While we all hunker down and wait out the Covid19 health and economic crisis – and dearly hope we see some light at the end of the tunnel sooner than later – there will also be opportunities to consider once the worst has passed and we move into recovery mode. One longstanding inequity that has become even more glaringly obvious during this crisis is the large and growing gap between the compensation and benefits of the vast majority of public sector workers and the private sector taxpayers who pay for them.

While many Canadians are looking for ways to be constructive in the COVID-19 crisis gripping the country, many of our political opposition parties are being anything but helpful.
It is true that in normal circumstances the key job of any opposition party is to oppose the government of the day. But these are not normal times, and an opposition that behaves constructively and makes positive contributions to our current situation would be a refreshing development. Unfortunately, not many thus far have lived up to this goal.

As the initial shock starts to wear off regarding the COVID-19 crisis and life settles into a “new normal” of social distancing, working from home or not working at all, business closures, quarantine and other drastic but necessary measures, more energy is being devoted to making a positive contribution to lessening the impact of the virus. Governments in Canada and abroad have launched efforts to develop a COVID-19 vaccine, test the viability of existing medications to prevent or reduce the severity of the virus and find ways to stretch essential health care resources that are in short supply. Some creative Canadian doctors, for example, have found a way to “MacGyver” a ventilator so that it can be used for more than one patient at a time.

As so many Canadians are extremely worried about their economic health as well as their physical health in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a privileged class that does not face the same economic anxieties. I refer, of course, to the vast majority of government employees who not only enjoy on average better salaries, benefits, pensions, much greater job security, shorter work weeks and earlier retirements than the rest of us in normal times, but who so far are mostly unaffected financially by the drastic shifts in our lives caused by this new virus.

At this time of crisis with the Covid19 pandemic, the major priority for Canadians is to get as much factual information as possible so we can do our best to protect ourselves and our loved ones. The reality that there are still many unknowns about this new virus doesn’t help the situation, but we do have many facts and can learn from the experience of other countries that faced the outbreak earlier than Canada.

As if we didn’t have enough to worry about in these days of uncertainty around the impact of COVID-19 on our lives, the ongoing labour dispute between the City of Toronto and the city’s insider workers, CUPE local 79, is looking more and more ominous. Workers could be off the job as early as this Saturday if no agreement is reached, which would mean the loss of a number of important services. Most concerning is that Toronto Public Health employees are included in the mix, including nurses who are currently involved in testing for COVID-19, staffing call centres fielding questions about the virus and other related services.

After a very low key, rather boring leadership contest, Steven Del Duca easily prevailed over his rivals to become the new leader of the Ontario Liberal Party this past weekend. Del Duca won on the first ballot with an impressive 58.5 per cent of the vote, well ahead of the second-place finisher, Michael Coteau, with 17 per cent. Del Duca had done a very effective job of signing up Liberal party members throughout the course of the leadership campaign and had been the clear frontrunner for many weeks leading up to the vote.

This past Monday, the Ford government announced that it would be launching environmental and other studies for an infrastructure project to build a Northern Road Link to the Ring of Fire mining development in Northern Ontario. The announcement was made at the annual Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada conference, in conjunction with leaders from the Marten Falls and Webequie First Nations, who expressed their strong support for the initiative. The key objective of the project is to establish a permanent, all-season access route to mines in the Ring of Fire, and also connect a number of First Nations communities to Ontario’s highway network. Other benefits include the establishment of high speed internet and reliable cellular service for First Nations and other communities in the area.

If we were not painfully aware of the many fiascos that have taken place in the implementation of Ottawa’s new light rail transit (LRT) system, it would be difficult to believe that even government could screw things up so very badly. The new transit system in the Nation’s Capital was launched in September 2019, a year later than scheduled. Since then, it has been plagued by delays, mechanical problems, lack of co-ordination between the LRT and connecting buses and general dysfunction. And of course more public money is being thrown at the project over and above the initial budget to fix the many emerging problems.

While the country is grappling with the very serious issues of a potential corona virus pandemic and national gridlock as a result of various rail blockades and other protests causing major difficulties for the economy, there have also been some less critical but nevertheless odd and problematic political miscalculations in recent days. 

The news late Sunday that the Teck Frontier oil sands project was to be “temporarily” put on hold was shocking in some ways, yet predictable in others. Despite the fact the project had been in various planning and evaluation stages for the better part of a decade, opposition by the usual suspects, many of whom are funded by offshore monies and are just fine with inflicting damage on Canada, had grown sharply in recent months as the end of February deadline for Cabinet approval approached.

For those folks who seem to think that government deficits and debt don’t matter, a recent Fraser Institute report is an eye-opener. All too often taxpayers view government debt as an abstract concept that really doesn’t affect them very much, and short-term thinking encourages taxpayers to favour consuming more government services today and put off paying for them until sometime in the indefinite future. The study examined the growing amount of interest being paid on debts incurred by the federal and provincial governments in the fiscal year 2019-2020, and the findings ain’t pretty.
For Ontario, interest on the province’s debt comes in just under $13 billion, which is more than the province allocates for post-secondary education. $13 billion could buy a lot more help for autistic children, boost health care services and otherwise be used much more productively than merely covering debt interest.

Caught up amid all of the attention being paid to the protests paralysing many parts of Canada is a looming deadline for a very important Alberta oilsands project on the cusp of being approved – or not – by the federal Liberal government. The Teck Frontier project, located in northeastern Alberta, has been in the planning and approval stages since 2012. The project has successfully achieved all of the environmental and other regulatory requirements mandated by various levels of government, and has reached agreement with every one of the 14 indigenous communities in the affected area. It is estimated that the project will employ as many as 7,000 full time workers during its construction and about 2,500 workers on an ongoing basis. The project has a value of $20.6 billion and is expected to contribute $70 billion in tax revenues to governments during its 40-year lifespan. It’s fate currently stands to be determined by the federal Liberal Cabinet by the end of this month.

The term Third Sector is typically used to include a range of organizations that are neither private sector companies nor government departments or agencies, and whose goal is usually to promote a particular social objective or represent the interests of a specific group in society. Examples of third sector entities include not-for-profits, charities, various associations, social enterprises and co-operatives. Trade unions are sometimes also included in the third sector. In recent years, the third sector has been growing by leaps and bounds in Canada and around the world.

Most Ontarians know how badly under-capacity our vital health care system is at present, and how things like long waiting lists, hallway health care, patients having to stay in costly hospital beds due to the lack of long-term care beds, doctor shortages and other problems plague the system. Sadly, needed reform is being prevented by a slavish devotion to a monopoly public system that is not performing effectively for citizens yet is costing us a fortune. Although the Ford government is attempting some significant reforms, more fundamental structural change is needed if we are to see the system truly improve, and our aging population makes the need for major changes especially urgent.