Budget document Reality cheque: What Ontario really needs (and it’s not tax cuts!) Reality cheque: What Ontario needs (and it's not tax cuts!) Ontario Alternative Budget 2003 Budget Document Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives ISBN 0-88627-322-6 March 2003 Ontario Alternative Budget 2003 CAW 567 OTTAWA Ontario Alternative Budget 2003 Acknowledgements The Ontario Alternative Budget Working Group is a coalition of labour, social action, community and church groups which have come together to develop alternatives to the Common Sense Revolution of the Harris- Eves Government. The participants in this year’s budget project are listed below. The OAB is a project of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives–Ontario Office. Participants in this year’s Ontario Alternative Budget Working Group were: Armine Yalnizyan, Co-Chair Economist Hugh Mackenzie, Co-Chair United Steelworkers of America Pedro Barata Campaign 2000 Sara Blackstock Ontario Coalition for Social Justice Sheila Block United Steelworkers of America Jeffrey Brown Interfaith Social Assistance Reform Coalition Cheryl DeGras Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care Martha Friendly Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care Shelley Gordon Canadian Union of Public Employees Kira Heinecke Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care Amy Kaufman-Dickieson Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations Dale Leckie Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation Tim Little Ontario Public Service Employees Union Henry Mandelbaum Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations George Martel Campaign for Public Education Patricia McAdie Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario Natalie Mehra Ontario Health Coalition Bill Murnighan Canadian Auto Workers Michael Oliphant Daily Bread Food Bank Sinead Rafferty Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care Henry Mandelbaum OCUFA Chris Schenk Ontario Federation of Labour Chris Slosser Daily Bread Food Bank Michael Shapcott Centre for Urban and Community Studies, University of Toronto Rick Telfer Canadian Federation of Students The Ontario Alternative Budget is a project of the CCPA-Ontario. www.policyalternatives.ca The 2003 Budget was printed by the Ontario Federation of Labour OPEIU local 343. 2 Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives Ontario Alternative Budget 2003 Section I: Legacy and renewal Since his election as Conservative Party leader cies, and its ham-handed and insensitive re- last year, Premier Ernie Eves has been engaged sponse did nothing to dispel the impression in a complicated political balancing act. To people have of an arrogant government that have any chance of re-election, he had to cre- just does not care. ate distance between his government and the Even the core policy of tax cuts seems to constant flow of bad news about the impact be running out of gas. The relationship be- of the policies of the Harris Government. At tween taxes and our ability to pay for public the same time, his government needed to ap- services is anything but abstract. The link be- peal to a core support that still buys into the tween the diminished fiscal capacity created idea that tax cuts are the cure for all ills. by years of tax cuts and the widening and This new strategy has not exactly been a deepening crisis in public services funding roaring success. Issues like Hydro and educa- couldn’t be more obvious. tion funding have forced the government to And the Tory touchstone of good manage- run hard and change direction often to catch ment now has to fight for space with tales of up with an electorate that has become increas- mismanagement and extravagant spending on ingly hostile to Harris-era policies, as the con- consultants and advertising. sequences of those policies become more ob- In key areas, the acknowledged conse- vious. quences of the Conservative Government’s On issues like housing and homelessness, policies make the case for this year’s Alterna- water quality and support for cities, limited tive Budget. In the critical big-ticket areas of and largely symbolic policy responses are seen, public services — health care, education and correctly, as inadequate. As a result, they have environmental and civic infrastructure — it had no impact on the public’s confidence in is no longer necessary to make the case that the government. massive additional investment is needed. The Other issues — child care; post-secondary Romanow Report on health care; the Rozanski education — are in the wings, waiting to blow Report on elementary and secondary educa- up in the government’s face. tion funding; the Walkerton Inquiry; and In almost every area of public policy, national and provincial organizations of mu- Harris-era chickens are coming home to roost, nicipalities have taken care of that. And it is and the Eves Government looks anything but equally clear that the Government’s responses smooth in its efforts to respond. to date leave much of the job undone. Harris-era franchise issues like the welfare In other areas that have received less pub- wedge are losing their appeal. The Kimberley lic attention, such as social assistance and early Rogers inquest in Sudbury exposed the nasty childhood programming, the case is there to underside of the Government’s welfare poli- Reality cheque: What Ontario needs (and it’s not tax cuts!) 3 Ontario Alternative Budget 2003 be made for massive reinvestment in public while the cost of living has increased by services. 18.9%.1 In total, the purchasing power of the The task of this year’s Alternative Budget poorest families in the province will have been is to collect the evidence that makes up the reduced by 34% since the Government was legacy of the Harris-Eves era, point the way elected in 1995. Or to put it another way, we for new directions in public services renewal, have reached the point where benefits would and demonstrate that, even after eight years have to be increased by 50% from their cur- of unrelenting emphasis on tax cuts, Ontario rent levels to get the real value of benefits for can generate the fiscal capacity that renewal poor families back to the level they were at requires. when Mike Harris’ government was elected. The government went after so-called “red The Conservative legacy tape”, and proceeded to dismantle much of Ontario’s environmental regulatory system, Most, if not all, of the critical issues facing with the rest off loaded to the private sector Ontario in 2003 have direct roots in conscious or downloaded to municipalities. decisions of the Conservative government Walkerton alerted Ontarians to the conse- dating back to their first days in office in the quences in dramatic fashion, as a public in- summer of 1995. quiry placed environmental deregulation and The government started out in August de-funding directly in the chain of events that 1995 with its campaign “wedge” issue: an at- led to that tragedy. tack on the poor. Social assistance rates were The government made a frontal assault on cut by 21.6% and frozen; landlord-tenant law the child care system, undermining a service was tilted towards landlords; and Ontario’s co- that is both essential for the survival of work- operative and non-profit housing program — ing families and an important contributor to the only successful affordable housing pro- early childhood learning. Its answer to the cuts gram in Ontario in the past 30 years — was was to appoint Margaret McCain and Fraser eliminated. Mustard to a task force to study early years We see the consequences today. Record programming. But when the task force ap- participation in food banks. Record numbers pointed came up with solutions it didn’t like, of homeless. Unprecedented numbers of it simply ignored the report. homeless families. Stories of desperate pov- We see the result today. No coherent policy erty repeated over and over again across the on children’s early years. Huge waiting lists province, from the Kimberley Rogers inquest for child care spaces. Provincially mandated in Sudbury to the streets of all of our major cuts to special all-day kindergarten programs cities. in low-income areas of Toronto. Not one unit of affordable rental housing In health care, the government pointed its has been built in Ontario since the Harris budget cutting guns at the hospital sector. It Government was elected. Thousands of poor appointed a restructuring commission, ac- tenants are evicted every year. cepted all of the recommendations for cuts, Since social assistance was cut by 21.6% ignored the recommendations for new invest- in 1995, there has not been a rate increase ments and shut down the commission when 4 Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives Ontario Alternative Budget 2003 the chair objected. Hospitals were closed could no longer be dismissed, its own task across the province and hundreds of millions force chaired by university president of dollars in severance payments were made Mordechai Rozanski confirmed everything to thousands of laid-off health care workers. the critics had been saying, finding that bil- Then when the consequences of the cuts lions had been cut from the system, and mak- became too visible politically, it reopened ing recommendations that would require an beds, and funded new construction of long- increase in annual funding of over $3.5 bil- term care facilities, diagnostic facilities and lion over a four-year period. hospitals and pumped hundreds of millions Even with nearly $600 million in new of dollars into a campaign to attract nurses funding in 2002-3 in response to the Rozanski back to Ontario to staff the system. report, we go into the 2003-4 budget cycle It touted private sector initiatives in health, with funding still two billion dollars short of making a new cancer treatment facility at what Rozanski said would be needed to sta- Sunnybrook Women’s College Hospital in bilize the system, with even more required to Toronto the poster child for its privatized enable education to begin to recover.