Ontario NDP Launch Election Platform
Hey all and welcome back! It’s been a busy few weeks so MMP hasn’t really been able to stay on top of the 24 hour news cycle. The good news is that we’re here to not only catch you up, but also catch ourselves up to date! Let’s look at what we missed, starting with the Ontario NDP releasing their 2022 election platform.
On Monday, April 25th, Andrea Horvath unveiled the NDP’s 2022 election platform. Now it’s important for me to say at the beginning that I believe parties that don’t exactly have the most favourable odds of forming government have the luxury of making bold promises and moonshot ideas that don’t necessarily have to be reasonably possible since they won’t have to actually make them happen. I preface this article with this because the Ontario NDP has consistently polled in third place behind the Conservative and Liberal parties and so their platform may not exactly be achievable, but it might be bold. You can read the platform document in its entirety here. Let’s get into the nitty gritty:
The platform is divided into thirteen chapters that we’ll discuss individually before discussing the platform as a whole.
-
• If you didn’t notice it in the 2022 federal budget, hopefully by the end of this article you notice that housing is a big deal. On their end, the Ontario NDP have promised to end exclusionary zoning, encourage responsible development in existing, liveable urban boundaries, and link growth to transit investment. They pledge to increase the supply of affordable housing (duplexes, triplexes, and townhomes). You can read more extensively about their complete housing plan here.
• They also pledge to crack down on speculation by introducing a yearly speculation and vacancy tax on property that is modeled after the tax used in British Columbia. The tax rate will be 2% of the assessed value and will be gradually phased in over the next two years,
• The NDP also place a focus on rent. This involves bringing back rent control for all apartments and scrapping vacancy decontrol to ensure renters pay what the last tenant paid. They also pledge to create a portable housing benefit based on recommendations made by the Ontario Non-Profit Housing Association and Co-Operative Housing Federation of Canada to assist renters who can’t afford to pay rent alongside basic necessities. They also pledge to rework the Landlord and Tenant Board to ensure tenants and landlords have a right to in-person, prompt, and fair hearings.
• Big news for Vaughan residents! The NDP pledge to eliminate the practice of tying someone’s auto insurance to their postal code! They also make a very generic/vague promise to explore every avenue in the hopes of lowering auto insurance rates. Enforcing transparency at the Financial Services Regulatory Authority and “putting drivers first” is another vague promise made by Horvath’s NDP.
• Child care is a big one! The NDP pledge to get Ontarians their $10-a-day child care faster by working with the federal government; increase the minimum-wage for Registered Early Childhood Educators to $25 per hour while raising the minimum wage to $20 per hour for all other program staff; work alongside the child care sector to create a workforce strategy that involves developing and implementing a wage grid and work standards, benefits and a pension, on-site paid planning, paid professional development, and a strategy to help workers boost their qualifications; and ensuring high-quality inclusive child care options that fit different circumstances are available to all children regardless of disability, race, or being a member of a norther, rural, or Indigenous community.
• The NDP also plan on expanding child care to make it more accessible and equitable. They plan on achieving this by building a community-driven model that includes providing stable funding for licensed home child care providers and offering them access to a pension and benefits plan, expanding both public and non-profit child care services through federal collaboration, and reducing fees for before and after school child care immediately. It’s nice to see some sort of support for smaller child care providers who risk being left out in the cold by Ford’s deal with the feds.
• Expand the capacity of Ontario’s hydroelectric sector while increasing wind and solar power outputs to bring more clean, renewable energy into homes. They also plan to enact a retrofit program to help families and businesses pay for retrofitting in order to help with energy conservation.
• Affordable groceries! The NDP promise to create a Provincial Food Strategy that makes locally sourced food more accessible, supports agriculture jobs in food processing, transportation, biofuels, and retail, and helps farm families and first-time farmers maintain their business. The NDP also promise to regulate the price of gas in order to keep shipping costs low for food through the Ontario Energy Board’s ability to regulate the retail price and wholesale mark-up of gas.
• The NDP also plan to establish a Borrower’s Bill of Rights and a Payday Loans Taskforce with the goal of replacing the predatory payday loans industry. They also want to establish an independent Consumer Watchdog to handle complaints and investigate accusations of consumer protection laws violations.
-
• Mental health care seems to be the big target for the NDP healthcare plan. They promise to create universal, publicly funded mental health care that would see an expansion in counselling and therapy services by bringing them into OHIP. They also pledge to create Mental Health Ontario which would be a co-ordinating organization responsible for identifying and publicly reporting on mental health needs, developing a comprehensive wait list for services, establishing province-wide mental health standards, creating a basket of services, and ensuring that programs (including addiction programs) are delivered comprehensively across the province. Making mental health supports more accessible for kids is also a priority and the NDP believe they can accomplish this by investing $130 million over the next three years to build intensive treatment and specialized consultation services, boost access to psychotherapy and counselling, family therapy and supports, and scale 24-hour crisis support services to ensure kids have an alternative to going to the emergency department. These points all stem from the Make Kids Count Action Plan developed by the Children’s Health Coalition.
• Funding boosts! The NDP pledge to immediately boost funding by 8% for frontline mental health and addiction agencies, invest $10 million more into mobile crisis services, raise pay for PSWs by at least $5 above pre-pandemic levels while hiring an additional 10,000 of them, and hiring 30,000 new nurses while (finally) scrapping Bill 124 to give all health care workers a much-needed pay raise.
• To address the opioid crisis, the NDP pledge to declare it a public health emergency, invest in addiction rehab and detox centres, remove the current cap on supervised consumption sites, decriminalize personal drug use, and work to provide safer alternatives to the street supply of drugs.
• Addressing the barriers to healthcare in Northern communities by hiring 300 new doctors, creating more residency rotation positions, support nurse practitioner partnerships, and fund travel accommodations for medical residents.
-
• The NDP pledge to establish provincial standards for home and community care services. They’ll do this by creating a basket of core services for Ontarians (i.e., meal preparation, nursing care for medication). They also pledge to tailor these home and community services to the needs of the community and creating a Caregiver Benefit Program that will provide support to family caregivers that don’t qualify for the federal tax credit program.
• Ending for-profit care systems by building new public and non-profit systems.
• I find it interesting that this section of the platform is so short considering what LTCs and seniors have been through over the course of the pandemic. While ending for-profit care is a good start, I believe that more could be done and at the very least, more specifics/details could be given.
-
• The NDP pledge to enact an annual $1 raise over the next 4 years in order to raise the minimum wage to $20 in 2026 and legislating 10 permanent personal emergency leave days for all workers. The NDP also seek to create Ontario Benefits which would provide benefits to part-time, casual, app-based, and contract job workers.
• The NDP also plan to make it easier for workers to unionize by enacting legislation that would allow any workplace to unionize if 55% of workers support it while also putting an end to contract flipping.
• There also seems to be an emphasis being placed on the trades with the NDP promising to create more trades and shop classes in high schools, establish trades training in Northern Ontario in collaboration with colleges, unions, and training institutes, and the creation of thousands of green jobs through collaboration with universities, colleges, unions, and employers in fast tracking workers with industry experience into programs geared towards expanding an environmentally friendly/efficient economy.
• Releasing two payments (one in 2022 and the other in 2023) from the Small Business Recovery Grant to help small businesses recover from the pandemic.
• Incentivizing Ontarians to buy zero-emission vehicles by building a charging network across the province and providing up to $10,000 to Ontarians who purchase ZEVs with an emphasis placed on Ontario-made ZEVs.
-
• The NDP pledge to hire 20,000 new teachers and educational workers and invest in in-school remedial learning programs to help close student success gaps created by the pandemic disruptions. The aforementioned repeal of Bill 124 would also open the door for teachers to seek wage increases and a fairer deal. The NDP also pledge to reduce class sizes by capping grades 4 through 8 at 24 students and kindergarten at 26 per class as well as promising an unspecified reduction in high school class sizes.
• Overhauling the funding formula through collaboration with parents, front-line educators, students, and educational experts, and launching a comprehensive review that would be completed within the year.
• Increasing overall funding for special education! The NDP also pledge to hire more mental health workers, child and youth workers, and other education workers while also creating a new position within school boards to assess and improve mental health program delivery in schools.
• Ensuring all schools have up-to-date ventilation systems in response to the pandemic.
• The NDP also pledge to support de-streaming, an issue we touched on in an earlier article. It’s clear that the NDP has placed an emphasis on addressing racism, discrimination, antisemitism and all those other pervasive nasties that rear their ugly heads one way or another in education. I’m personally still not sold that the benefits of de-streaming outweigh its drawbacks, but I’m not the one running to form government.
• An interesting initiative that I can definitely get behind though is the NDP’s pledge to eliminate EQAO testing! Instead, an NDP government would work with educators to determine how random sampling could spot early trends and help determine where educators need to focus in order to help students improve. There isn’t another method of standardized testing being proposed and while the random sampling could be an interesting alternative, it will be important to know how the government would plan to measure student achievement across the province without the imperfect standardized tests.
• Another initiative that I can definitely get behind is their commitment to reverse Ford’s cuts to OSAP. That’s it. That’s the proposal and I'm ALL for it.
• This section is full of bold, imperfect ideas. The NDP promise to overhaul the funding system for post-secondary education by converting student loans into grants and bursaries while simultaneously retroactively eliminating student loan interest on owed or paid loans by any student or past student who still holds a provincial loan.
-
• Another promise from another government to get emissions to net-zero by 2050.
• Establishing a cap-and-trade system that would force big polluters to pay for their emissions and ensuring that at least 25% of the revenue generated from cap-and-trade goes to supports for rural, Northern, and low-income families that are disproportionately impacted by carbon pricing.
• The NDP has also pledged to create roughly 1,000,000 jobs over the course of the plan by partnering with labour and industries to ensure anyone who wants to pick up a skilled trade can get the education, training, and job to do so. There’s a lot of wiggle room in this area since no specifics have been provided on where those jobs will come from or how they’ll contribute to the net-zero economy.
• The NDP promise to expand the Greenbelt, create a Youth Climate Corps that’ll give young Ontarians hands-on skills and experience in nature while earning a decent wage and credits towards post-secondary education, and promising to plant ONE BILLION trees by 2030.
• Creating a Provincial Water Strategy to ensure decisions about water are based on public interest and guarantee public access to sustainable water sources. The NDP also promise to end drinking water advisories and review the Permit-To-Take-Water process in order to protect against bottled water companies.
-
• The NDP pledge to implement the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples; a move that aligns with the federal government’s plan in Budget 2022.
• Another pledge that’s in lockstep with the feds is the NDP’s commitment to ending boil water advisories across the province. There are currently 23 long-term drinking water advisories in Ontario.
• Establish the Treaty Commission of Ontario to help settle land claims and assist negotiations in an independent and impartial manner.
• Glad to see the NDP expressing a plan to address the suicide crisis among First Nations youth. Their stated promise doesn’t include any real specifics, but the acknowledgement alone is a great step. In 2019, Global News reported that the suicide rate among First Nations people was 24.3 deaths per 100,000 people and was highest among youth aged 15-24.
• The NDP also make various pledges to make care and services more culturally competent and responsive for First Nations communities such as healthcare, child welfare, and justice.
• They also plan to implement a mandatory Indigenous curriculum for Ontario classrooms after consulting with Indigenous Peoples.
-
• The NDP plan to take action on various aspects of equity. They promise to launch a provincial anti-racism strategy and appoint a minister responsible for anti-racism, introduce anti-oppression and anti-bias training for all public employees and legislators, specifically target anti-Asian racism, take action to dismantle white supremacist groups, erect a Holocaust memorial at Queen’s Park, make pre-exposure prophylaxis (a prevention/treatment drug for HIV) and transition drugs/medications free, and make contraception free.
• There are more initiatives planned that follow the same general ideas as the ones stated above including some designed to protect Francophone culture. For the most part, this section outlines plans to deal with racism, discrimination, gender-based violence, and white supremacist groups. It sounds promising!
-
• Here’s a point the NDP should really be hammering the Premier on: autism. The NDP are promising to fix the Ontario Autism Program by ensuring that clinicians and parents are deciding what services children receive and making OAP fully needs-based with no caps to ensure care and support will follow those that need it throughout their lives.
• The NDP plan to establish a system that will lift everyone out of poverty. A VERY ambitious plan with few specifics to explain how it could be accomplished.
• Increase Ontario Works and Ontario Disability Support Program rates by 20% and ensure all future raises reflect inflation.
• Another bold promise is to re-start the basic income pilot! Again, no real details are provided.
• Another great idea is to end the practice of having people reapply for disability supports once they turn 18. It just makes more sense in my opinion.
• The NDP also pledge to end chronic homelessness within 10 years. This will involve making transitional and permanent housing available for Ontarians that is safe and accessible and would also include temporary housing like hotels.
-
• The NDP want to restore municipal public transit and paratransit system funding back to 50% of their net operating costs. They plan to work with municipalities to improve services and reduce wait times while also working to implement a two-hour, flat rate fare across municipal transit systems in the Greater Toronto-Hamilton Area in the hopes of encouraging people to use public transit in a post-pandemic world.
• They also pledge to make Metrolinx transparent and accountable to the public by sharing their progress, decision making, financing, contracts, and consultant studies. The NDP will also make board meetings open to the public and will increase municipal participation on the board. Another bold move is to require Metrolinx to dedicate their surplus lands to social and affordable housing.
• The NDP would also invest in mental health responses in order to provide alternative first responders to mental health, addiction, homelessness, and school discipline calls. These responders will receive training in anti-racism, anti-oppression, de-escalation tactics, and culturally responsive care. They also plan to increase resources for criminal diversion programs and courts to ensure people don’t get caught up in a system that provides no possible benefit to them.
-
• Voting reform alert! The NDP want to create a mixed member proportional voting system!
• They also want to pass Bill 121 which will force provincial governments to give public notice, conduct consultations, and get municipal approval before cutting the size of councils or making changes to city wards.
-
• A tax freeze for low- and middle-income families while ensuring the wealthiest Ontarians and big corporations pay more. That’s it. That’s the plan.
-
• Launching a public inquiry into the government’s response to COVID-19 that’s independent and judicious.
• Prepare Ontario for any future public health crises by expanding sick days, retention pay, forming proper stockpiles of PPE, establishing triage protocols that are accountable to vulnerable communities, suspending evictions, and protecting health workers from harassment.
• Long Covid makes an appearance! The NDP promise to ensure that Ontarians suffering from Long Covid don’t have to do it alone and are supported by their primary care providers and health teams while also investing in researching causes, symptoms, and treatments.
And that’s it! That’s the NDP’s 2022 election platform. Again, it’s full of some great, bold ideas that are by no means perfect or comprehensively thought out. There’s a lot of promises that will cost a lot of money and, like all marketing documents, the platform doesn’t really say how the NDP would pay for it all. I would assume their plan would probably be to use the money gained from their increased taxes on wealthy Ontarians and big corporations, but that very well may not be enough. It’s full of ambitious ideas that one should expect from a party that probably won’t form government and will never have to fully explain how they’ll make them all happen. It’ll be interesting to see if the other parties pull from the NDP’s platform while making the ideas more reasonable and achievable. Cheers to election 2022!
Further reading: