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Ford government’s bottomless determination to convert our drinking into private profit should concern us all
Wednesday, November 29th, 2023
… making alcohol cheaper and easier to purchase unsurprisingly leads to higher levels of drinking and increases in harm… Our drinking is big business — almost $10 billion a year — and multiple players are fighting to grab a larger slice of that pie. And while the industry winners may be about to waltz off with a record windfall, the likely losers — the Ontario taxpayers — may be left to deal with increasing social and health harms, all on a shrinking budget.
Tags: Health, ideology, jurisdiction, privatization
Posted in Health Debates | No Comments »
Toronto is getting a fourth emergency service. That’s vital for helping people in crisis
Wednesday, November 29th, 2023
The service, which offers a non-police, community-based response to people experiencing mental health crises… will soon cover the entire city… Police are, after all, not trained mental health professionals, and police involvement has all too often ended in tragedy. In contrast, 93 per cent of the crisis calls were successfully completed, and 95 per cent of people served by crisis teams said they were either satisfied or very satisfied with the service.
Tags: crime prevention, disabilities, homelessness, ideology, mental Health
Posted in Inclusion Delivery System | No Comments »
Ontario’s colleges and universities are strapped for cash. A panel has wisely proposed a fix
Thursday, November 23rd, 2023
… salary and benefit costs in Ontario’s universities are, per full-time equivalent student, among the lowest of any province. And as the report said, all organizations that made submissions “emphasized the value of post-secondary education in creating and maintaining a highly qualified and relevant talent pipeline in Ontario.” As has become obvious, the government’s lack of vision on this file does not just fail a sector. It fails the future.
Tags: budget, economy, ideology, jurisdiction, standard of living, youth
Posted in Education Debates | No Comments »
Ontario’s regional universities are in jeopardy — and so are the future of our communities
Tuesday, November 21st, 2023
Increasingly… regional universities are alone in shouldering the costs of educating our future citizens and supporting our communities due to funding freezes from the province… Operating grants from the provincial government have been frozen since 2006 and the province has not funded for net new students since 2016… Then in 2019, the province cut domestic tuition fees by 10 per cent and has frozen them since… These cuts are not sustainable.
Tags: budget, ideology, jurisdiction, standard of living
Posted in Education Delivery System | No Comments »
We are walking down the dangerous path of health care privatization
Tuesday, November 21st, 2023
… medicare restrictions on physicians are provincially and territorially imposed, so many virtual clinics skirt the rules by employing physicians licenced in a different jurisdiction than the patient lives. Resolving these loopholes is not impossible — simply fold nurse practitioners into the same medicare legislation physicians work under and bring in nationwide physician licencing. Yet there seems to be no appetite on the part of health ministries to address these issues.
Tags: featured, Health, ideology, jurisdiction, privatization
Posted in Health Delivery System | No Comments »
Growing gas plants: a made-in-Ontario public health failure
Friday, November 17th, 2023
Air pollution prematurely kills at least 6,600 Ontarians annually… Breathing toxic polluted air, further worsened by gas expansion, causes disease throughout our bodies… Other jurisdictions worldwide are successfully combining energy conservation, storage, and safe large-scale renewable energy transitions using solar, wind and hydro. Overlooking these low-cost, ready and reliable solutions, the Ontario government deliberately cancelled pre-existing renewable projects, costing taxpayers approximately $231 million.
Tags: economy, Health, jurisdiction, standard of living
Posted in Health Debates | No Comments »
When did the erosion of Ontario’s universities and colleges start?
Friday, November 17th, 2023
In 2019 Ford cut tuition fees by 10 per cent and kept them frozen… It was destructive. Ontario’s per-student funding for universities was only 57 per cent of that in all other provinces while its colleges were at 44 per cent…This funding gap is causing such hardship that eight of 23 universities, including Queen’s University and Waterloo, are running deficits. Some may crumble or break, as did Laurentian University.
Tags: budget, ideology, immigration, jurisdiction
Posted in Education Debates | No Comments »
National pharmacare dream dying as Trudeau appears ready to cave to Big Pharma
Thursday, November 16th, 2023
… pharmacare would increase Canadian government spending by the equivalent of about one-third of one percentage point of GDP… Even so, politicians seem willing to conjure up the threat of a credit downgrade, scaring Canadians into falsely believing universal pharmacare is unaffordable. (Instead, the Liberals may propose a smaller means-tested program.) … don’t be fooled into believing it’s because we can’t afford it.
Tags: budget, Health, ideology, pharmaceutical
Posted in Health Debates | No Comments »
New Canadians have valuable work experience. A new law will knock down a barrier to putting those skills to work
Tuesday, November 14th, 2023
Studies have suggested that only about a quarter of internationally-trained immigrants in Ontario were working in regulated professions aligned with their training… Banning Canadian experience requirements from job postings and ads is another step toward eliminating systemic barriers newcomers face, creating a more inclusive work force, and addressing labour shortages.
Tags: economy, immigration, jurisdiction, participation
Posted in Policy Context | No Comments »
Family doctors are suffering and so are their patients
Monday, November 13th, 2023
The money that family doctors make is at the very bottom of the range of all physicians’ pay… when we are responsible for all the overhead costs of operating a clinic, which are rising every year, and our fees don’t increase to keep up, the difference has to be made up somewhere and it comes out of the doctor’s pocket… it is getting harder and harder to operate a financially sustainable family medicine practice.
Tags: budget, Health, ideology, jurisdiction
Posted in Health Delivery System | No Comments »
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