The Slow-Motion Train Wreck of Doug Ford’s Would-Be Dictatorship
Photo Credit: (TBNewsWatch / Google Images)
Written by: Adam Riggio
We progressives are steamed about Bill 197, the really rather large omnibus bill whose ostensible purpose is to help the Ontario economy recover from the economic smack of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The actual content of the COVID-19 Economic Recovery Act, 2020, however, contains a huge variety of changes to laws and regulations. The opening summary of the legislation is itself more than 4,000 words long. The bill, which was passed thanks to the Conservative majority in Ontario’s parliament, contains provisions for the following.
It permits massive private real estate and highway developments to forgo any evaluation or monitoring by government officials for their ecological impacts or need. It also removes all processes for informing the public or getting their input into development projects that will harm or destroy important ecosystems.
What Makes Bill 197 So Inadequate to Our Challenges
Bhutila Karpoche, the Parkdale-High Park NDP MPP, wrote the following in a recent newsletter to her constituents. She summarizes the state of affairs over the deceptive and destructive Bill 197 better than I could.
“Bill 197, the COVID-19 Economic Recovery Act, passed after no consideration at committee, and only 50 minutes of debate at Third Reading. It is a giant piece of omnibus legislation with far-reaching changes, including gutting environmental oversight rules, overriding Collective Agreements, and opening up the judicial appointment process to partisan interests. It has no funding for education or childcare, no support for small businesses or tenants and doesn’t include a single change to safeguard long term care.
“Suffice to say, the bill’s contents had nothing to do with recovery from COVID-19. According to the Auditor General, Bill 197 broke the law because the Ford government did not consult with the public on its environmental changes, violating the Ontario Environmental Bill of Rights.
“Bill 195, the Reopening Ontario Act, also passed on Wednesday with no time at committee and little time at Third Reading debate. With this legislation, Premier Ford hands himself unprecedented undemocratic powers to run a provincial emergency from behind closed doors for the next two years. It’s a bill that even Conservatives don’t support with one of his own MPPs, Belinda Karahalios, voting against it and calling it ‘an unnecessary overreach on our parliamentary democracy.’”
The Ford Government Cares Nothing for School Safety
Even before the pandemic forced all schools to shut down in-person classes and work, Ontario’s schools were poorly ventilated, physically cramped, suffered constant shortages of basic cleaning supplies like soap, and literally crumbling. Repairing Ontario’s schools to basic standards of livable buildings will cost more than $16-billion. Protecting staff and students from COVID-19 while in those schools will cost even more money, and none of that is in Bill 197.
This is because the supposedly progressive Liberal governments of Dalton McGuinty and Kathleen Wynne did little to restore the destructive cuts and policies that the Mike Harris and Ernie Eves Conservatives set on the public education system. Without a massive infusion of cash and time to make these radical repairs to Ontario’s physical schools, it is quite likely that they will become COVID-19 death traps.
Pundits and politicians often minimize the danger of reopening schools on grounds that children under 10 tend to suffer less than tweens, teens, and adults from COVID-19. But infection can seriously endanger children who already have medical conditions. As well, infected but asymptomatic children can spread COVID-19 to their teachers and other school staff.
For example, Quebec schools outside the greater Montréal area reopened in May, and within two weeks, just over 40 COVID-19 cases were confirmed in different schools there. Despite adult staff making up a small minority of the people in public schools, more than half of those cases were among adult staff. As the Ford government opens schools without precautions or repairs this September, expect a lot of job openings over the 2020-21 school year to replace teachers and staff who become permanently disabled or die.
A Problematic Concentration of Power
As Bill 197 demonstrates, the Ford government believes that building condo towers, suburban home lots, factories, shopping malls, and redundant highways in more important for Ontario’s recovery from the COVID-19 catastrophe than ensuring that our public schools avoid becoming plague houses. These were the Ford government’s priorities when they first won election two years ago. Now, they are simply using the prestige and popular respect that Ford won during the initial lockdown, and the catastrophe of the pandemic itself, to ram these priorities into law faster than they otherwise could have.
The legislation itself is no different than the ecologically and socially destructive urban and suburban development projects that have always been priorities of the Ford government. Highways over trains, streetcars, and buses. Suburban and commercial real estate development over ecological preservation, diversity, and health. De-prioritizing and de-funding public education to make highly inequitable private schooling more attractive and prestigious. The content remains the same, but what Bill 197 and its companion the shorter Bill 195 does, is turbo-charge the processes of destruction.
At heart, these two pieces of legislation, passed without any opportunity for critique and revision in parliament committees, is about taking power to approve projects away from bureaucrats and into cabinet. The ministers responsible for different development projects can now bypass the approval and consultation processes meant to increase input of expert bureaucrats and the general public.
The most egregious example of this is the Transit-Oriented Communities Act, one piece of legislation folded into Bill 197. This act removes public hearings and consultations with communities affected by government expropriations of land, if that expropriation is for some kind of transit infrastructure, such as highway expansion. The new laws also give Cabinet alone the power to designate any particular patch of land in Ontario as a “transit-oriented community project.”
Popularity Is Not the Right to Do Whatever You Want
As such, Doug Ford’s Cabinet now has unilateral power to take land from its current owners and build whatever they want on it, as long as it has something to do with transportation. Bill 197 invests this unilateral power in Cabinet alone with regard to many other elements of urban development anywhere in Ontario.
Premier Ford has seen his approval ratings soar thanks to his basically decent response to the pandemic. But this does not necessarily amount to public endorsement of his and his party’s blinkered and superficial conception of economic prosperity, which confuses the growing wealth of real estate development companies, business robber barons, and foreign corporations for genuine growth in all people’s quality of life.
Ford has benefited in public opinion simply from responding like a human, particularly a human whose own family has been impacted by COVID-19. Given the inevitable contrast with particular leaders’ response south of our border, Ford’s character at his own pandemic press conferences as a concerned person taking a public health disaster seriously looks like the response of a saint.
Ford has felt and shown us the emotional impact of being in a position of such power while humanity faces a pandemic that will actually kill millions of people. That does not mean that his and his government’s actual policy and legislative responses to that pandemic are up to the challenge. Ford’s mother-in-law is 95 years old, and lives in a long-term care home. In April, she developed COVID-19. But Bill 197 contains no funding or action plans for reform of the elder-care homes where so many vulnerable people are dying. Ford’s own family tragedies humanize him, but are having no impact on his government’s policies.
Ford’s government passed Bill 195 and Bill 197 bypassing much of the parliamentary process, claiming that its purpose was to fight a great emergency. Neither bill contains any directive to reform or change the management model of Ontario’s long-term elder care homes.
Face the Tremendous Global Challenge
I want to conclude by reminding everyone that the pandemic has not stopped, and will not likely end until one or several COVID-19 vaccines are mass-manufactured and delivered en masse to the general public. Although the vaccine development process is progressing faster than in any less-than-catastrophic circumstances, initial clinical test results indicate that no COVID-19 vaccine will be a one-shot for immunity vaccine like that for polio or measles.
More likely, maintaining COVID-19 immunity will require annual (or maybe even more frequent) vaccinations, with all the problematic politics that accompany state-run public health laws and campaigns today. Not only is anti-vaccination conspiracy disturbingly popular in the only country that shares a land border with our own, but their near-entirely privatized health care system locks tens of millions of people from access to even the most basic care. In the United States, people are billed thousands of dollars simply for getting a single test for COVID-19 infection. The medical bills from actually being treated and surviving a severe case of COVID-19 run upwards of a million dollars.
The response of our current leaders to a global public health catastrophe that will certainly kill millions of people in North America alone is to bulldoze fragile, ecologically essential ecosystems across southern Ontario to build condo towers, wasteful suburban developments, and worthless highways. It is laughable to think that this polluted hellscape of asphalt, manicured lawns, and flooded cities will produce broad and equitable prosperity. Long-term prosperity can come only from an empowered population living sustainably.
Yet these are the people who won election to government in Ontario. Please, people, do not fall for their lies again. Fight their greedy, destructive plans, and mobilize across Ontario to vote the Ford government out of office in 2022 before they cause even more irreversible ecological and economic damage.
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