Defend Public Healthcare

Attribution: Joshua Sherurci j The Liberal plan to obtain a majority by targeting public sector workers went askew last night, with the Liberals falling to a distant third place in the Kitchener-Waterloo by-election. But they are not deterred in their chosen path. After the defeat, Dalton McGuinty promised to continue pushing his current bill imposing concessions on school board workers through the legislature, but also added  that his government plans to introduce additional legislation targeting the broader public sector this fall.   “We’ve got to find a way to hit the pause button on public-sector pay rather than make cuts to our services,” he said. What this might mean is anyone's guess. Presumably, McGuinty is not yet counting on legislating provincial government 'professional' and 'supervisory' staff -- as they are still in the midst of bargaining.  McGuinty may mean legislation targeting essential service workers -- like hospital workers -- somethi

Dalton McGuinty has once again inserted himself into the collective bargaining process and  given  the union representing over 11,000 "professional" and "supervisory" civil servants until September 9th to settle their collective agreement.    Or else.  The government and the union, AMAPCEO, have been in bargaining since July 3.  Apparently, the government believes two months is enough bargaining to allow them to fend off any constitutional challenge to legislation overriding free collective bargaining rights.  The president of AMAPCEO has said that the union has offered a wage freeze, but that the government wants the equivalent of  2% to 3% in cuts of one sort or another.  As was his method with the teachers, McGuinty talks as if he was simply stopping wage increases, rather than imposing concessions and takeaways (a line often repeated by the media, in their innocence).  “We don’t have any money for pay hikes... We may come to a point in time when we can

Dalton McGuinty has craftily stoked his campaign to change the rules for interest arbitration -- the system imposed on essential service workers who are forbidden by law from striking to settle collective bargaining disputes. The Liberals had tried to tilt the system in favour of the employers in their Budget Bill in early summer.  But they failed miserably when the New Democrats and PCs opposed the changes (for opposite reasons). After that setback, McGuinty said he would bring back legislation in the fall, with some hope of working with the PCs to pass it. On Wednesday McGuinty flagged some perks earned by police and firefighters and sternly called on municipalities to deal with them -- as he had with the teachers. The (predictable) response from local officials was renewed calls for McGuinty to introduce legislation that would tilt interest arbitration towards employers. Newspaper articles appeared and saps like the Windsor Star editorialists vigorously  demanded  that M

This morning while touring a french catholic school , Dalton McGunity tried to make nice with school teachers and suggested  that restraint was "just for a couple of years". That is not the official Liberal plan. The Liberal finance minister's July statement proposes a compensation freeze (including benefits) for new collective agreements. Even progress through an established wage grid "must be fully offset from within the total compensation package." If a collective agreement is for more than two years, the minister says the period beyond two years must also have a compensation freeze . So a change in policy? One can always hope, but I doubt it. This is more likely a bit of twisting before the crucial by-elections Thursday. It certainly wouldn't be the first time Liberal election promises were revealed to be howlers -- post-election.  (Indeed on the same school tour, McGuinty suggested  that all he is asking from the teachers is a 'pause' -

The growing crisis of public private partnership (P3) hospitals in Britain has now forced the health minister to announce that he will be sending in “hit squads” to make savings at twelve hospitals where the P3 contracts have gone “horribly wrong” the conservative   Daily Telegraph  reports. This is a follow up from the government's February  announcement  that seven health care trusts with P3 (or, as the British call them, "PFI") hospitals would get  £1.5 billion in emergency funding to help them avoid cutting patient services as a result of their P3 deals. The Health Minister Simon Burns told the   Press Association , "there are these seven which are at the top of the scale, which are having a significant drag on their day-to-day running because of the PFI costs. The trusts have got significant problems as a result of these irresponsible PFI schemes that the last Labour government allowed, and we have said, with those, that if they have a regime in place th

In its dispute with teachers, the Ontario Liberal government sometimes tries to claim that one union's offer of a wage freeze is not in fact a wage freeze. The rationale here is that even though no teacher would get a general wage increase for two years, some junior teachers would progress up the wage grid as they accumulate service. This is an unusual take on wages.  And as noted in an earlier post , it is particularly peculiar point for the Liberals to harp on as they actually have agreed to service based pay increases in their deal with the catholic teachers association. But the Liberal argument is also a rather one-sided interpretation of a wage freeze. Pay based on service doesn't just go up -- it also goes down.  Pay based on service gradually increases as junior workers gain experience, but it also falls sharply when senior workers retire or quit and are replaced by a new worker.  The "gradual increase" and the "sharp fall" in pay is especiall

A 2011  Conference Board of Canada  report done for the for-profit long-term care (LTC) facilities in Ontario estimates (based on population projections and utilization by age) that 238,000 Ontarians will be in need of long-term care by 2035.  This compares with about 98,000 today. So we are looking at a need to increase long-term care 143%.   With a 1.5% annual increase in the number of LTC beds, the Conference Board estimates Ontario would be 127,000 beds short of need, with the gap gradually increasing year by year until 2035.  That's an increase of 103,000 from the current wait list of 24,000. The report notes that government policies could affect utilization. Certainly, this is what the government appears to be hoping to achieve. But even moderating the  huge growth in need would require some big leaps in policy handiwork. A more likely scenario may just be to provide less care to those in need. Compounding the problem,  the Liberal government may not choose to in