Toronto, Ont. – We are extremely disappointed by the federal government’s decision today to accept Ontario’s proposed carbon pricing system for industry. By pricing a smaller share of industrial carbon emissions, Ontario’s proposed system is clearly weaker than the federal system currently in place, and should not have been accepted.
Ontario’s system lets industrial polluters off the hook for more of their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions than the federal government’s system and should have never been granted equivalency. According to Ontario’s Auditor General, Ontario’s industrial carbon price will reduce only one mega tonne of GHG emissions per year. Meanwhile, Ontario is currently facing a more than 20 mega tonne annual gap to meet its 2030 climate targets.
While Ontario’s Ford government has proven to be an able defender of health in the face of COVID-19, it continues to be a profound threat to the environment, gutting established protections, hobbling climate action at every opportunity and, most recently, hamstringing the province’s environmental review process.
With the recent passage of Bill 197, which purports to support economic recovery from the pandemic, full environmental reviews will no longer be a default requirement for construction or industrial projects in Ontario, writes David Israelson in an op-ed for the Toronto Star.
With cabinet effectively now in charge of deciding whether a given piece of infrastructure— a road, gas plant, or water treatment facility, for example—needs a full environmental review, the province has reverted back to 1970 in terms of protecting the environment. And the law was rushed through, too, adds Israelson: “The Ford government waived the usual 30-day time for consulting the public before passing this legislation.”
Bill 197 is the latest in Ford’s barrage of regressive assaults against environmental health: from hollowing out of Ontario’s endangered species protection laws, to repealing laws that forced companies to keep a record of the toxins they use or create, to closing the office of the province’s environmental commissioner.
Now into the third year of its mandate, the Ontario government under Premier Doug Ford is being assessed for its handling of the COVID-19 crisis. The impressions are mixed.
On a personal level, the premier’s responses to the pandemic have generally been regarded favourably. He has at times conveyed deep personal empathy for those affected by COVID-19 and their families.
At the same time, the province has struggled to provide effective responses to the COVID-19 crisis, seemingly uncertain of what direction to take or of the scope of its own authority and capacity.
Controversies over the government’s plans to reopen elementary schools without reducing class sizes are the latest in series of stumbles in managing the crisis.
‘Have fun’
The Ontario government was initially slow to recognize the scope of the pandemic and the risks it posed. COVID-19’s global spread was apparent by early March, yet the premier confidently advised Ontarians to “go away” and “have fun” over the March break holiday.
By the time a provincial lockdown was imposed on March 18, most of those travellers were already back in Ontario. Some brought the virus with them, where it began to spread into the community, most critically to long-term care facilities.
The disaster that ensued in long-term care centres has been well-documented. More than 1,450 long-term care residents have died of COVID-19. More may have perished due to neglect as portions of the care system, particularly in for-profit facilities, effectively collapsed.
The province was again slow to respond, despite well-known risks in the sector, especially its increasing reliance on part-time itinerant staff, and more general concerns over the quality and level of care being provided in long-term care facilities. Many of these issues had been highlighted less than a year earlier in the July 2019 report of the inquiry into the murders of nursing home residents by nurse Elizabeth Wettlaufer.
Elizabeth Wettlaufer is escorted by police from the courthouse in Woodstock, Ont., in June 2017. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Dave Chidley. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Dave Chidley
The province’s promise of an “iron ring of protection” for care facility residents failed. The government then studiously avoided a formal judicial inquiry into the COVID-19 care home disaster, opting for a less formal commission, which will lack public testimony, under oath, by key officials in system.
Seasonal workers
Early warning bells were also sounded around the potential risks to large numbers of temporary foreign farm workers employed in Ontario. Crowded, unsanitary living conditions, as well as the vulnerability to deportation for workers who lack permanent resident status if fired by their employers, were again well-known long before the arrival of COVID-19.
Yet the province failed to take proactive action, despite having substantial legal authority to set and enforce standards and practices for farm operators under occupational health and safety, public health and agricultural legislation.
Those responsibilities were left to the ad hoc efforts of local health units, most notably in Windsor-Essex. The result was more than 1,000 cases of COVID-19 among temporary farm workers and at least three deaths.
School reopenings
The government’s latest missteps have been around the reopening of schools in September. Major concerns are being raised by health experts, school boards, teachers and parents about the government’s approach to opening elementary schools.
The government seems to be proceeding on a largely business-as-usual model with normal, pre-pandemic class sizes. Personal protective equipment will be provided for teachers, and masks are required for students in grades 4 to 8, and are recommended for younger children.
But health experts and public health authorities have highlighted the need to reduce class sizes to control COVID-19 in schools. With smaller classes, any outbreak would be limited to a smaller group. Teachers are also far more likely to be able to manage the behaviour of their students in smaller classes.
The Ford government, overall, has presented an image of deep concern and empathy for the victims of the pandemic. But it’s flailing when it comes to delivering the kinds of concrete, proactive measures that COVID-19 requires. The premier’s own management style remains more like that of a city councillor — someone who is genuinely trying to help his constituents, but suggests he’s up against forces beyond his control.
‘Final sign-off’
This is an odd stance for a premier who once declared that he had “final sign-off on everything in this province.” At times the government has seemed unable to grasp the scope of the many tools at its disposal to deal with the pandemic.
The province is spending nearly $6 billion annually to keep hydro rates artificially low. In that context, it should be able to find the means to implement a safer and more effective plan for reopening public schools, where there are significant risks of triggering a second wave of COVID-19.
Despite its challenges in dealing with COVID-19, the province has been quietly efficient in the ongoing pursuit of its pro-business agenda. In fact, in many ways, that agenda has accelerated under the cover of the pandemic.
The land development industry continues to be a favourite of the government. Proposed revisions to the Growth Plan for the Greater Golden Horseshoe region released in June would compel municipalities to make land available to developers to accommodate doubtful projections of population growth to 2051.
Migrant workers in Leamington, Ont., wave hello at one another. The Ford government has failed to ensure temporary foreign farm workers were safe from COVID-19 duing the pandemic. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Rob Gurdebeke
The same proposed amendments would permit aggregate extraction operations (for example, gravel pits and quarries) in the habitat of endangered and threatened species. The province’s environmental assessment process, in place since the mid-1970s, was largely dismantled through the government’s omnibus “Economic Recovery Act” pushed through the legislature in July.
Where the government’s combination of empathy, administrative ineptitude and responsiveness to whatever developers and other industries seem to ask of it will lead is unknown. But that doesn’t serve the interests of Ontario residents very well. Nor does it provide a very strong basis on which to head into an election less than two years away.
Ontario health care workers, angered that their workplace rights are being trampled on by the same government that called them heroes at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, will escalate political protests throughout the summer and fall.
Beginning August 17, 22 regional rallies are planned in communities across the province. The protests are in response to the passing of Bill 195, the Reopening Ontario Act (A Flexible Response to COVID-19), which suspends many fundamental workplace rights, although the Bill declares the pandemic emergency over.
“The PC governments recognized hospital workers as heroines one minute, then stripped away their basic rights at work the next,” says Michael Hurley, President of the Ontario Council of Hospital Unions/Canadian Union of Public Employees (OCHU/CUPE). “The Ford government calls these women heroines, but is actually hurting them very badly by taking away their basic work place rights.”
Under the Act, which was rushed through legislature, health care employees can have their shifts changed from days to nights, be reassigned to another job, re-located to another community, laid off without notice, and even have their parental leaves cancelled.
As school boards across Ontario consider reopening in September, parents worry about two things: Will my children and I be safe, and will my children learn appropriately?
A student tries out a new face shield to fight the coronavirus pandemic at a school in Cologne, Germany, in May 2020. (AP Photo/Martin Meissner) (AP Photo/Martin Meissner)
The Ottawa School Board proposes to reopen its 72 schools five days a week in September. Dr. Vera Etches, Ottawa’s medical officer of health, supports the board. She recommended “starting with five days of school in-person and working to make this as safe as possible through reasonable and feasible infection prevention and control measures ….”
Unsafe premise
The error of Dr. Etches’ analysis begins with an unsafe premise — schools must reopen in September.
The first question should be whether schools can implement public health measures by September that will reduce risk of virus outbreaks to acceptable proportions. The answer to that question in many Ontario municipalities is no.
Furniture sits in an empty corridor at a school in Brampton, Ont., on July 23, 2020. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chris Young
Other Ontario school boards are considering hybrid solutions — bringing back half their students on Mondays and Tuesdays, the other half on Thursdays and Fridays, and variations of this concept. This idea is unsafe.
Asymptomatic carriers among the returnees could transmit the virus to their classmates whether half, a third or a quarter of the student body attends.
Ontario boards failed woefully to educate students online from March through June. Since the proposal contains no measures to improve the education children will get online, the hybrid concept will simply continue this failure. It will also compromise face-to-face classrooms by deleting 60 per cent of instruction in them.
Reopen in January at the earliest
Ontario school boards should plan to reopen schools in January or September 2021. They should start now to renovate schools for safety protocols. Boards should work with the federal and provincial governments to develop resources to test each child for the virus every day.
Several companies and academic laboratories are developing easy-to-use diagnostic tests that could be used by schools, including a spit-test that looks for traces of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Federal and provincial governments should organize, fund and fast-track getting this, and similar tests, into schools for January or September 2021.
Boards should invest heavily now in remote education. Remote learning is a relatively new science that arose out of a revolution in educational theory and produced distinctive educational practices. It is interactive, student-centred, digital — altogether different from reproducing existing classroom practices online, as occurred from March through June.
Six-year-old Peyton Denette works on her speech and language skills with speech-language pathologist Olivia Chiu of Two Can Talk remotely from her home in Mississauga, Ont., in March 2020. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Nathan Denette
Specialists to help teachers transform their courses into proper remote formats need to be hired, tech resources for universal and equal access must be purchased and people trained how to use them. Educators and staff should be trained in remote learning techniques.
Teachers, students need support
All of this will take time, leadership and investments. Teachers cannot become experts at remote education on their own. And students need help to adapt.
Children should return to school when the virus is sufficiently under control in their community and their school is made safe. Until then — which will not be this September — boards should concentrate on providing leadership and resources to make schools safe and enable superior remote learning.
The investments made now will pay back for years to come as elementary and secondary education is transformed.
We have in front of us a challenge and an opportunity, both of monumental importance. We have tens of thousands of great teachers waiting to rise to the challenge. Boards should empower them to seize the opportunity.
Toronto, Ont. – We are extremely disappointed by the federal government’s decision today to accept Ontario’s proposed carbon pricing system for industry. By pricing a smaller share of industrial carbon emissions, Ontario’s proposed system is clearly weaker than the federal system currently in place, and should not have been accepted.
