Systemic issues in Ontario

[A_Britishcolumbian]

oneh2obabe, please clarify, i am unaware which story you are referring to.

[ifwisheswerehorses]

oneh2obabe, please clarify, i am unaware which story you are referring to.

I think oneh2obabe is referring to this thread you started,
viewtopic.php?f=27&t=54637, Staff-Sgt. Ian Matthews

[Drip_Torch]

Another systemic issue showing up in Toronto Ontario today.

Santas Down!

(I have it on good authority this has nothing to do with City Hall's annual Christmas party)

[rvrepairnut]

[color=#0000BF]check your pm/comment removed. Trip[/color]

[A_Britishcolumbian]

who would think ontario is a 'have not' province? but then again, who is making that decision/designation?

Ontario's 'have not' status sets up a divided Canada

Off balance: Six of 10 provinces now receive equalization payments, pitting resource-rich against the others

TROY MEDIA JANUARY 21, 2014

Equalization - ostensibly designed to help provinces provide roughly equal government services - has long been defended by some as akin to a federal government "Robin Hood" scheme to help out "poor" provinces. Last year, Ottawa transferred $15.4 billion in equalization payments to six "poor" provinces, known as "have-nots."

In 2008/09 - the year before Ontario became eligible to receive equalization payments - "have-not" provinces represented 32 per cent of the 10-province population, or about 10.8 million people. But with Ontario's entry into the club in 2009/10 (think of a big sumo wrestler at a soup kitchen), 71 per cent of the population, or 24.7 million people, now live in a province that receives an equalization cheque from the federal government. (The others are Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Quebec and Manitoba.) The entry of Ontario into relative poor-province territory has resulted in a massive shift in dependency in Canada, one that portends future inter-provincial conflict.

Any program that counts six of 10 provinces with 71 per cent of the population as relatively "poor" is an arrangement that needs a re-think.

Maybe that re-think should begin in Ontario. It is, after all, its own policies - including expensive green energy schemes that drove up the cost of power and drove out business, a regulatory approach and labour legislation that has further made Ontario an uneconomical place to invest, and chronic budget deficits and weak public finances - that have contributed to its relative economic weakness.

Ontarians can now look ahead to a future of higher deficits, higher debt interest payments and increased pressure for higher taxes, which will lead to even less investment, higher unemployment and eventually an exodus of wealth creators. (Quebec is the most notable example of such folly in practice.) Furthermore, Ontario has been receiving an ever increasing share of the equalization cash available from Ottawa, which might result in the have-not provinces demanding Ottawa increase its equalization payouts. In 2009/10, Ontario received $347 million or 2.4 per cent of the $14.2-billion equalization pie; last year, it received almost $3.3 billion or 21 per cent of the $15.4-billion available.

This presents a problem for resource-rich, and only "have" provinces. You see, under the current equalization program, calculations for equalization eligibility and payouts are based on what's known as "fiscal capacity," that is, the ability of a province to raise revenues.

Unfortunately, the factors that go into such a calculation are not above political machinations. There have been efforts in the past to include 100 per cent of resource revenues - as opposed to current 50 per cent - in the calculations, under the justification of "more sharing," to use the words from a 2006 report presented to the Council of the Federation, made up of Canada's premiers.

Problematically, including all resource revenues would mean even more federal tax dollars (which on a net basis originate more in resourcerich provinces) transferred to "have-nots" - the explicit aim of those who back this idea.

Why does this matter? Because all the resource-rich provinces - British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Newfoundland and Labrador - are now lined up on one side of the equalization divide while Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Quebec, Manitoba and now Ontario, are on the other.

That potential for conflict means the resource-rich provinces should expect to see attempts made by the equalization-receiving provinces to get at their resource revenues via the federal government, either through dramatically higher equalization payouts, or through some other federal program.

It has happened before.

Mark Milke is a senior fellow at the Fraser Institute and author of Equalization, Ontario, and the Politics of Division.

http://www.vancouversun.com/Ontario+hav ... story.html

[LoneWolf_53]

i believe this story gives credence to the idea that there are major systemic issues with the toronto police.

Only systemic issue I see is that of a poster repeatedly making mountains out of molehills, reading things into news reports, that simply put, are nothing more than the product of an overly imaginative mind, borne of boredom no doubt.

The bait is losing its appeal, the audience shrinking, thus soon it will be time to pursue a perhaps more productive hobby.

[A_Britishcolumbian]

the rob ford story is far from over so not worthy of mention here yet, but the gas plant scandal can be summed up in a single post ...

$1.1-billion gas plants scandal was the result of politically corrupt choices by the Liberals

BY LORRIE GOLDSTEIN FIRST POSTED: SATURDAY, JUNE 07, 2014 07:00 PM EDT

Progressive Conservative Leader Tim Hudak made a good point in last week’s leaders’ debate about why Premier Kathleen Wynne doesn’t sound convincing when she apologizes for the “mistakes” the Liberals made in their $1.1-billion gas plants scandal.

While Wynne has said she’s “sorry” hundreds of times since becoming premier, as Hudak observed, the Liberal leader describes it as “a ‘mistake’ like it’s some sort of parking ticket.”

Wynne, and before her, Dalton McGuinty, talk about the gas plants scandal as if they were innocent bystanders to errors they couldn’t prevent.

To them, costing Ontario taxpayers and hydro ratepayers up to $1.1 billion to cancel two gas plants in Mississauga and Oakville, to save five Liberals seats in the 2011 election, was apparently one of those annoying but unavoidable things that sometimes happen in life. Who knows why?

The fact is, as journalist Andrew Mitrovica tweeted after the debate, the Liberals didn’t make a “mistake” in the gas plants scandal. They made a choice.

They decided they could not afford to risk the anger of voters in five Liberal ridings in and around Oakville and Mississauga, who were furious about the gas plants heading into the 2011 election.

So they used public money for partisan political gain, which is the definition of political corruption, regardless of whether any criminal charges are ever laid by the OPP in this sordid affair.

So let’s be clear. None of it was a mistake.

It was a cynical, politically motivated choice by the Liberals to use our money for their gain.

How cynical? Consider this.

Despite suggesting they were replacing “dirty” coal power in Ontario with wind and solar power, what McGuinty and Wynne actually did was to replace coal-fired electricity with nuclear power and natural gas.

That’s why the Liberals were building so many gas plants, leading to one of McGuinty’s favourite explanations for the gas plants scandal.

As he testified before the Legislature’s justice committee: “We got 17 gas plants right, but we got Oakville and Mississauga wrong, so we needed to fix that.”

But, according to McGuinty’s own logic, there was nothing to fix.

The secondary purpose of the gas plants was to back up wind power, described by the Auditor General in 2011 as a multi-billion-dollar Liberal boondoggle that lacked any business plan and will increase our hydro bills significantly for decades to come.

Aside from supplying an absurdly small and expensive amount of electricity to the grid, wind power is unreliable.

It has to be backed up by natural gas, a fossil fuel like coal, although it burns more cleanly, because wind cannot supply base load power to the electricity grid on demand.

In inflicting wind power on rural communities, the majority of them in Progressive Conservative ridings, McGuinty decreed he would not tolerate any “NIMBYISM” (“not in my back yard syndrome”) from local residents.

Ontarians, that is, who opposed having up to 50-storey industrial wind turbines with blades comparable to the wingspans of 747s, being imposed on them as little as 550 metres away from their homes.

Not only did McGuinty strip municipalities of their planning powers through his Green Energy Act, he said he would not entertain any objections to wind turbines except for legitimate health and safety reasons.

In fact, the Liberals were getting hundreds of health-related complaints about wind turbines from across Ontario — which they suppressed — with people complaining of sleeplessness, migraines, nausea, heart palpitations and other symptoms, which they blamed on the noise, low-frequency vibration and shadow flicker produced by wind turbines.

The Liberals dismissed these complaints after Dr. Arlene King, the province’s Chief Medical Officer of Health, concluded after a literature review of existing research there was no evidence of direct causal links between turbines and ill health.

That was controversial in itself, but the hypocrisy of McGuinty, Wynne and the Liberals is that they moved the Oakville and Mississauga gas plants out of what they said was their concern for the health of local residents.

This despite the fact Dr. King concluded the gas plants, like the wind turbines, would not have any adverse health effects on the residents.

So the Liberals ignored health concerns about wind turbines in Conservative ridings, but found them valid about gas plants in Liberal ridings.

They didn’t make “mistakes.”

They made bad, wasteful, and politically partisan and hypocritical choices, just as they did in the e-Health and Ornge scandals.

Re-elect them Thursday and they’ll do it again

http://www.torontosun.com/2014/06/07/11 ... e-liberals

[sooperphreek]

guess people are tired of hearing about fiscal responsibility and not seeing it for big business or the rich. so now the government has to find their new political hastag. because people are getting sick of hearing about the economy ad nauseum.

[A_Britishcolumbian]

Ontario ombudsman slams ‘systematic government ineptitude’ for daycare deaths

Andre Marin issued an unprecedented 113 recommendations Wednesday to improve safety for the estimated 823,000 children cared for in unregulated settings across the province.

Despite the “legacy of dysfunction” he found at the Ministry of Education, Marin lauded the government for “its genuine and focused efforts,” which have already addressed the majority of his recommendations, including a dedicated enforcement unit to investigate complaints about unlicensed daycares.

Marin noted that new daycare legislation, which was introduced last December and received second reading Wednesday, will address 35 of his recommendations once it is passed. Although he stopped short of calling for all daycares to be licensed, Marin urged the ministry to consider tougher standards for the unlicensed sector, including a centralized registry.

“Our investigation revealed just how bad it was — and believe me, our title, Careless about Child Care, is putting it mildly,” Marin said in a written statement. “The momentum spurred by these children’s terrible deaths must not be lost.”
(Both Marin and Education Minister Liz Sandals cancelled scheduled news conferences about the report following the shootings in Ottawa.)

The ombudsman’s investigation was prompted by the “shocking” death of 2-year-old Eva Ravikovich in a “brazenly illegal” unlicensed home daycare in July 2013, his report said. Eva was found without vital signs in an operation that cared for 29 children in adjoining houses on Yellowood Circle in Vaughan, which were “fraught with unsanitary and dangerous conditions.”
Dirty diapers in the kitchen, potentially toxic bacteria in rotting food and 14 dogs, their feces and urine soiling the floors, were found by public health officials after her death.

Marin called Eva’s case the “canary in the coal mine” because in the year before her death, four complaints about the home were lodged with the ministry, but never followed up. Out of 448 complaints about overcrowding between January 2012 and July 2013, officials failed to do site visits in 25 cases, he noted.

read more http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2014/10 ... eaths.html

[A_Britishcolumbian]

apparently in ontario, you can enter a hospital, die by/for whatever reason, and the hospital does not have to tell anyone the hows or whys of the circumstances.

ebola could rage in ontario without the public ever becoming aware.

Hospital mum on reasons for woman's death after a dental abscess
A provincial secrecy loophole shields St. Joseph's from a grieving family's questions.

Pamela Minocha, 33, died in a Toronto hospital after a toothache. Because of a provincial secrecy loophole, her family doesn’t know why.

Her parents don’t know if her unexpected death could have been prevented, because what happened is a secret shielded by the sweeping Quality of Care Information Protection Act (QCIPA).

Invoking the act is discretionary, and critics say some hospitals interpret the act to mean they don’t have to share how an incident happened or what’s being done to prevent it from happening again.

“It’s very common for a hospital to first of all hide behind a QCIPA shield and secondly to be very inaccurate and sloppy in their quality-control investigations because of it,” Harte said.

In September, Ontario Health and Long-Term Care Minister Dr. Eric Hoskins launched a review of QCIPA to improve the legislation after a Star investigation.

The series included a family unable to get answers after their 20-year-old son committed suicide under psychiatric care, and a hospital that refused to release any information about how a newborn baby was wrongly declared dead. Hoskins’ review is due to be completed in mid-December.

http://www.thestar.com/life/health_well ... picks=true

[GordonH]

http://www.e-laws.gov.on.ca/html/statut ... 4q03_e.htm

http://www.oha.com/KnowledgeCentre/Libr ... oolkit.pdf