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Tags: Annex · Editorial · Columns · Opinion
Ontario’s Progressive Conservative government is cancelling 758 renewable energy contracts, including a newly constructed wind farm in Prince Edward County, a move that will cost the Ontario taxpayer at least $231 million. The PCs are not only hard pressed to justify the move from a fiscal perspective, but it also makes no sense from a political vantage point when the electorate is increasingly concerned about climate change.
Don Cherry made it easy for Rogers’s-owned Sportsnet to fire him on Nov. 11. His attack on newcomers for not wearing symbols of allegiance (the poppy) advances a very non-Canadian agenda that is entirely contrary to the values that our soldiers and allies fought for over several wars. It’s not so much that times have changed and Cherry’s views have failed to evolve, but that we believe Cherry is advancing views that were never very Canadian. The fact that he was fired on Remembrance Day is the real tribute to those troops.
Tags: Annex · Editorial · Opinion
As they look to win votes in Ontario, federal Liberal candidates point to Doug Ford as a sort of warning about the dangers of casting a vote in favour of the Conservative Party of Canada. It seems even the Conservatives are buying into this narrative, as party leader Andrew Scheer brought Alberta Premier Jason Kenney to Ontario to give his campaign a boost this month. The distraction does little to veil the similarity between Conservative leaders, particularly when it comes to their climate plans.
Tags: Annex · Editorial · Opinion
Just ask Doug Ford. Ford lost $42 million selling pot last year. Then he botched the roll-out of retail licences so badly that it is now under judicial review. Illegal pot is widely available and is in fact necessary to satisfy the market demand that the province has failed to meet.
After a five-month break from public scrutiny, enabled by not having a sitting legislature, the provincial government of Premier Doug Ford should emerge from the rock it has been hiding under. A new modus operandi is needed, one that respects cabinet and treats ministers as more than mere Premier’s pawns.
A recent poll confirms that Doug Ford’s favourability ratings are falling hard and fast. His level of support is lower than Kathleen Wynne’s was at the end of her tenure, lower, as the president of Mainstreet Research Quito Maggi says, than any incumbent premier has ever seen this soon after being elected.
The most recent Ontario budget targets Toronto for over $177 million in annual provincial funding cuts. The targeted cuts are to Toronto’s programs in healthcare, child care, legal aid, tourism, and transit. In exchange, Premier Ford’s province-wide base gets a few shiny trinkets, and as a whole the budget still fails to resemble the kind of plan that could lead our province in the direction of fiscal balance.
Tags: Annex · Editorial · Opinion
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Tags: Annex · Editorial · Opinion
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Tags: Annex · Editorial · Opinion
When an Ontario public servant decided to leak the province’s secret plan to overhaul the healthcare system to the media, Premier Doug Ford shifted into attack mode and demanded an investigation by the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP). It seems the Premier has an affinity for calling in the police, in the hopes they’ll do his bidding. The leak story is, as Liberal MPP Mitzie Hunter, and former Minister of Education stated, “Exhibit A of why Ron Taverner cannot be OPP commissioner… the OPP is not the Premier’s private police force.”
Premier Doug Ford’s latest plan to restructure funding for post-secondary institutions would mean the average college student can look forward to saving $340 in tuition fees this September, while the average arts and science student in university can look forward to saving $660 per year. The plan, however, is little more than a reckless ruse that does nothing for the people it purports to help. The ten per cent cuts to tuition fees for colleges and universities effective in Sept. 2019, and locked down for 2020, are nothing but a shiny populist penny on a regressive policy pie.
After axing his predecessor’s carbon tax policies, the premier has offered the province a new climate change plan that asks more questions than it answers.