Ontario health care policy under the Ford government is driven by a belief that there should not be any such thing.
"Privatization" is "give some guys access to a captive revenue stream", but none of Dougie's owners are old money who own insurance companies. They're new money mammonites, generally developers, and they've decided that the revenue stream from taxes constitute their money. Public spending is an affront before God unless the money goes to them.
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Truer words never spoken. Also: Let's ram the 413 through, then make it a private toll road! (The second bit hasn't been mentioned yet, but it wouldn't surprise me).
If only there had been an election before this sh*t started happening. DoFo could have been out on his ass. Oh well.
I also really don't like DoFo hauling out the Notwithstanding Clause to preempt strikes. Is there anything the Federal Government can do to say "No, this isn't a legitimate use of the Notwithstanding Clause"? Or is this just an unbeatable trump card for the provinces?
2022-11-02
Probably fair to say this applies to education too.
Notwithstanding clause was the carrot to get the provinces to agree to the 1982 Constitution, particularly the Charter. Their negotiating position prior was that they all had their own various Bills of Rights.
It was inevitable that a province would overreach and start using it for trivial things. I always thought it would be Alberta or Quebec, but that may just be my relative ignorance of Ontario politics.
Most gains in labour rights were done extralegally. The bargain of the past 100 years has been that labour would submit to rule of law if management (in all its forms) would as well. There is no reason labour should continue to respect the law if management does not.
A parallel example is when Alberta doctors announced an intention to quit if the government continued treating them terribly. Government spokesmodels at the time were seen expressing some bizarre twisted things like 'of course anyone is free to change careers or employers, but they aren't allowed to all do it because that looks like job action'.
+arborman Exactly that; the provinces wouldn't accept the Charter if it was binding. The architects of the Constitution wanted to attach as much political cost as they could to not abiding by the Charter, which meant formalizing the breaches. They weren't planning on mammonism as state religion or the takeover of the information space by billionaires.
The labour bargain was, for the first half of the twentieth, pretty close to "the money behaves or it dies"; the veterans of the Great War and survivors of the Great Depression were not on the whole tolerant people. An awful lot of work on generational time scales has gone into undoing that.
+lynch it absolutely does. Also any conceivable regulation or anything else perceived as a barrier to profit.
+JReynolds
There's no current constitutional fix. There's a couple obvious things like petitioning the feds to dissolve Ontario. (The provinces are hangovers from early 19th century communications technology at best; at worst they're fossil oligarchical factions. We'd be much better off without them.)
I hope the General Strike works; I worry the organizers don't recognize that once there's a General Strike the only acceptable outcome is the government resigning. (And nobody currently in cabinet standing for election in the consequent election.)
To my immense surprise, DoFo backed down when faced with serious opposition to his union-crushing plan. I was sure that this whole issue was going to play out over weeks of pressure. Instead: bathos.
2022-11-08
+JReynolds
I would say the labour movement hasn't internalized certain things.
Dougie's going to come back with a worse offer. He can no more agree to increase public spending than he can fly to the moon by sheer force of will, the capacity isn't in him. And he's not honest and sees no reason not to exploit anyone's inability to remember that.
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