Liberals Release Official Election Platform
Finally! On Monday, the Ontario Liberal Party released their costed 2022 election platform. Thankfully it’s only 16 total pages so it makes for some easy reading. You can find the complete document here.
Let’s get into the nitty gritty: the platform is divided into seven sections as follows…
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• The Liberals focus on affordability in this section. They pledge to remove the provincial HST on all prepared food under $20 dollars to lower costs immediately. This will be paid for by a 1% surtax imposed on Ontario companies that make over $1 billion in profits and a 2% income tax increase for people earning more than $500,000 per year.
• Raising the minimum wage to $16 per hour while also developing a living wage that takes into account the cost of living in different areas across the province.
• To improve the housing situation, they promise to build 1.5 million new homes to meet the demand, eliminate red-tape to make it faster to build new homes, free up land for building like burying electrical lines and redeveloping underused strip malls and offices, and introduce new taxes on vacant homes and developers sitting on land.
• Rent support! The Liberals pledge to return rent control across the province!
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• In this section, the emphasis is placed on seniors. The Liberals plan on guaranteeing home care for anyone who needs it and increasing financial support for caregivers to help them pay for necessities like rails or grab bars.
• Ending for-profit long-term care ASAP while simultaneously promising to improve or create 58,000 not-for-profit LTC spaces. In the interim, they pledge to improve conditions, perform inspections more often, and go after abusive private care homes.
• To provide for the province’s senior population, the Liberals also promise to increase the Old Age Security top-up by $1,000 or more for eligible seniors (we love vague) while also increasing the eligibility threshold to $25,000 for single seniors and $50,000 for couples.
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• Delivering a $1 billion dollar investment into the public healthcare system to help clear the backlog of surgeries and diagnostics. This investment would assist hospitals in operating above pre-pandemic volumes into the evenings and weekends. They also promise to institute maximum wait times for surgeries and make a return to pre-pandemic wait times by the end of the year.
• Somehow increase the number of family doctors and nurse practitioners across the number, create a permanent option for virtual visits, and fund more team-based primary care clinics (like Family Health Teams, Community Health Centres, and Nurse Practitioner-Led Clinics) in an attempt to increase access to family doctors or nurse practitioners for all Ontarians.
• Mental health! The Liberals will train 3,000 new mental health and addictions professionals and hire 1,000 new professionals that focus on children’s mental health. They also promise to expand and reduce wait times for mental health and addiction care that’s publicly covered and make mental health responders available at 911 and in emergency rooms.
• The Liberals have also stated that they would be in favour of repealing Bill 124 which caps pay raises for registered nurses and other public sector employees at 1%.
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• Create a package of high-quality, affordable benefits that are available to all workers including self-employed, gig, contract, and creative workers while making it mandatory for employers without comparable packages to enroll their employees in the provincial option with the choice for workers to opt-out. They’ll also institute 10 paid, job-protected sick days for all workers and reintroduce the ban on employers requiring a sick note for workers to access leave. The Liberals would provide businesses with up to $200 per day to help make the costs of having workers take more sick days more manageable.
• Work with businesses and labour groups to design and evaluate a four-day work week model with the goal being to transition to one.
• Suspend the corporate income tax for small businesses impacted by the pandemic for 2022 and 2023. Relief would be scaled to revenue losses and the tax would be eliminated entirely for businesses that lost more than 50% of their revenues because of the pandemic. The Liberals will also scrap incorporation fees for new business start-ups and create a 311-type service to help businesses navigate available supports.
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• The Liberals will scrap the construction of Highway 413 and use that money to invest $10 billion in building new schools and repairing existing ones.
• They pledge to hire 10,000 new teachers and add one new special education worker to every school to help cap class sizes at 20. They’ll also end mandatory online learning.
• They’ll reinstate Grade 13 as an optional fifth year of high school. This will hopefully allow students to make up for learning and credits where needed and offer new credits in courses like mental health and resilience, financial literacy and taxes, civics (this course already exists?), experiential/co-op placements, and post-high school pathway planning.
• The Liberals would also end streaming and scrap EQAO testing. A difference between the Liberals and the NDP on this issue is that the Liberals have stated that they’ll provide supports to make de-streaming manageable such as smaller class sizes, teacher training, additional help for students that experience learning gaps, and address how streaming can perpetuate anti-Black racism and further segregate students from marginalized background and will also collaborate with parents, teachers, and education experts to develop a new strategy for assessing student achievement across the province.
• They’ll also reinvest in OSAP and provide more grants that students won’t have to pay back. They promise to stop tuition costs from rising and eliminate interest on current and future student loans.
• The Liberals have also promised to add the COVID vaccine to the list of universal vaccines required for public school students under the Immunization of School Pupils Act.
• You can read their more detailed plan for education here.
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• Transit! The Liberals will cut public transit fares to $1 per ride for one year and $40 for monthly public transit passes.
• A pledge to cut carbon pollution in half by 2030. No real specifics are provided in the platform document and this pledge sounds very precarious (sorry for the paywall).
• The Liberals will also expand the Greenbelt and designate 30% of the land as protected areas by 2030. This expansion will include creating five new provincial parks across the province. The Liberals will also plant 100 million trees a year over the next 8 years to help restore ecosystems, protect drinking water, restore tree canopy, and keep Ontario’s air clean.
• You can read their more detailed environmental plan here.
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• Increase Ontario Disability Support Program rates by 20% and advance Indigenous Reconciliation by increasing support for the option to learn First Nations languages, mandating the inclusion of residential school history across the K-12 curriculum, and investing in Indigenous-led mental health supports, childcare, housing, and infrastructure projects.
• Banning handguns. The Liberals will work with the federal government to ban the sale, possession, transport, and storage of handguns while also instituting a buy-back program to help get them off the streets.
• The Liberals will also require all police training to include de-escalation, anti-racism, cultural sensitivity, and mental health training. They’ll also make mental health workers more available to respond to emergency calls.
And that’s the platform! It sounds like it has the kind of great ideas that were present in the NDP platform while also being more realistic. The platform is short on details, but the Liberals have indicated that some of the funds necessary to enact these policies would come from contingency funds and renegotiated deals (i.e., childcare) with the feds. There’s lots to like in the Liberals’ platform, but it leaves a lot of questions unanswered and creates some new ones (i.e., What boards would absorb the 10,000 new teachers? Will any of these measures actually make homes more affordable?). With this platform out, all three of the major parties in Ontario have now released their marketing documents. We’ll see what Ontarians think of them and how achievable they believe each one to be.
We’ll keep following their campaign trails and bringing you any and all updates! Register to vote! Make sure you vote! Cheers!