Ontario is facing some major reality checks if it is going to get it's house in order according to a report released by Don Drummond. He predicts that by 2018 Ontario will have a $411 Billion debt which represents 50% of GDP.
While BC is in far better shape than the once proud Ontario, many of the same challenges face us when it comes to controlling public spending, realizing the purse is not bottomless and sooner or later all that deficit financing has to be dealt with.
The follwoing are some of the highlights from Drummond's recommendations to wrestle with the problems Ontario will be facing and perhaps BC could implement some of them before we too find ourselves in the same predicament as Ontario.
Without question education and health care are two massive expenses which consume a huge amount of our wealth and need to be dealt with. However, it will require genuine leaders and not simply the usual politicos who pander for votes by promising they can solve all our ills. It is those kinds of promises that have led us to the point we currently are.
EDUCATION
- Cancel full-day kindergarten program
- Raise classroom sizes in elementary schools to 23 from 20; junior schools to 26 from 24.5; and secondary schools to 24 from 22
- Phase out 70 per cent of 13,800 non-teaching staff by 2017-18
- Encourage secondary schools with low attendance to expand to a Grades 7-12 model
- Scrap 25 per cent of money allocated for textbooks and classroom supplies
- Consider raising the retirement age for teachers. Currently, the average teacher retires at 59 after 26 years of service and collects a pension for 30 years
- Encourage colleges and universities to specialize so they're not all offering the same type of programs
- Keep current annual tuition increases to a maximum of five per cent but consider eliminating a new 30 per cent tuition grant
HEALTH
- Introduce a wage freeze for doctors, who are the highest paid in the country
- Revamp Local Health Integration Networks (LHINs) by giving them more responsibility over funding and integration
- Link drug prices to income as opposed to age for seniors and those on social assistance
- Shift treatments currently done in hospitals to home care and clinics
- Create more nursing programs and make better use of nursing practitioners
- Expand role of pharmacists to permit them to give routine injections, inhalations and immunizations
- Create online system for prescription refills, test results and appointment scheduling
Let's hope the Ontario government has the good grace and sense not to punish the young for the sins of adults, including policy consultants like Don Drummond, who've recommended and cheerleaded for trade agreements which have hollowed out Ontario's industrial base and produced the problems he now purports to fix -- with his gaze predictably set on all the wrong things.
ReplyDeleteThe answer to neocon-generated problems is not neocon fixes designed to reduce Canada's living standards to those akin to the third world countries where the jobs have all gone. The answer is to dispense with the kind of advice Mr. Drummond provides and address the real problems undergirding weakened economic performance, namely growing inequality and the mal-distribution of wealth.
Recall: Only when the early 20th century economists of Mr. Drummond's stripe were pushed aside in favour of a mixed economy based on neo-Keynesian ideas and principles did the great wheels of progress finally turn favourably for greater and greater numbers of people.
A return to that agenda is what is required in the 21st century, not the continued promotion of a new plutocracy in the spirit of the robber barons of the 19th century. A Liberal government should have no truck with a neocon agenda.