News   GLOBAL  |  Apr 02, 2020
A Message to Our Readers
 8.9K     0 
News   GLOBAL  |  Apr 01, 2020
EarthCam Time-Lapse Documents Rafael Viñoly-Designed New Stanford Hospital Construction
 40K     0 
News   GLOBAL  |  Apr 01, 2020
Resort Town
 5.1K     0 

Northern Light said:
Crawford fell materially short, finishing second behind the Liberals, and only 3 points ahead of the NDP, in Scarborough-Guildwood.

I should add here, the NDP managed over 26%, which for them, in this seat is quite solid.

The Conservatives also lost former Minister Fullerton's seat in Kanata to another Liberal contender.

Click to expand...
And that Kanata Liberal was even higher-profile (a former Liberal MP and leadership contender). And even w/that factor, the NDP did even *more* surprisingly solidly there--in a seat which, technically, had been provincially Tory since...Confederation?
 
adma said:
And that Kanata Liberal was even higher-profile (a former Liberal MP and leadership contender). And even w/that factor, the NDP did even *more* surprisingly solidly there--in a seat which, technically, had been provincially Tory since...Confederation?
Click to expand...
Hopefully this bodes well in the next general election. It’s about time again that someone other than the austerity-kings or the waffling centrists who routinely fall over backwards to court that first party’s voters get in. One can hope, anyway.
 

Why Doug Ford auditing Toronto’s finances again just doesn’t add up​

An accountant can tell you how much you’re spending, but determining whether those things are worth it is a question of political values.

From link.

Look, if you ask around Toronto city hall, they’ll tell you that what they need is more dollars. But what the province is sending at the moment is more accountants. The city has got lots of those, filling digital cabinets with reports and audits and investigations — and the tendency when you read those numbers is to notice that more dollars are needed. Still, more number crunchers — from Ernst & Young, reporting to the province — are on the way to Toronto, as well as other cities.

New Mayor Olivia Chow says she’s “optimistic” the audit by that outside accounting firm will show the city’s claims to need urgent support are valid, specifically that Toronto will need an injection of $200 million or more per year to be “made whole” (as the province has promised to do) for Ford’s changes to development charges on affordable housing. That new hole in the city’s budget is the justification for this particular audit. Casual observers would be wise to note that it is separate from the city’s usual general claims to impoverishment, and separate again from the more urgent claims of COVID- and refugee-prompted financial emergency.

The dire circumstances pile up around here.
Click to expand...
And you know, if an audit like this one would once and for all (or even just once-for-a-while) settle the arguments about whether the clamshell on Queen Street is a cesspool of waste churned by irresponsible and wasteful spending, it would be totally worth it. City leaders from across much of the political spectrum, from the tight-fisted John Tory centre-right to the bleeding-heart left, have for decades looked at the city’s finances and said there’s not a lot of fat to cut. If an audit would either conclusively prove or finally contradict that claim, it would be worth it.

But here’s the thing: we did this before, and it settled precisely nothing. Premier Doug Ford’s late brother Rob, when he was mayor, commissioned the accounting firm KPMG to conduct an audit of city spending. That investigation concluded that almost all the things the city spends money on are required or essential. It suggested the city could, if it wanted, save a relatively tiny amount ($150 million or less) if it did things like stop clearing snow on side streets, cut the size of the police force or close library branches.

Some will recall that this stark assessment by outside experts — and the outcry of support for city services from residents it inspired — did nothing to dim the zeal of the brothers Ford for claiming vast amounts of waste and inefficiency could be cut. And then to their completely gibberish claim that they had done such cutting to the tune of $1 billion.

The point here is not that every dollar spent by the city is maximized. Those of us who interact with the city government often — or even occasionally — can see that there are places it is inefficient, like layers of unneeded management, expensive and wasteful mazes of paperwork bureaucracy.

But there’s an old advertising maxim that says “I know half of my ad dollars are wasted, I just can’t figure out which half.” The thing about that, from an advertiser’s perspective, is that if they cut the wrong half, it would be a disaster, since that’s what is driving their revenue. I see a similar problem in government. Whenever cuts big enough to make any difference are proposed, they aren’t made with a scalpel to find the inefficiencies, but with a thresher that massacres front-line or essential services people depend on.
Click to expand...
The answer to that is not one-time outside audits, which are by their nature cursory if they’re going to examine $15 billion of spending in a few months, but constant re-examining of how things are done and could be done better. Which the city government already does, through the auditor-general and its regular processes, finding savings of a few hundred million dollars each year, pretty much every year, no matter who is mayor.

Could that ongoing process be supercharged, with more staff or resources devoted to hunting waste or finding better methods of doing things? Maybe. But that’s something entirely different from getting some accounting firm to glance over the books and propose which services maybe shouldn’t be delivered.

The answer such an auditor can provide is not to an accounting question: it’s a political question. Is it worth it to provide free access to swimming pools, or to keep libraries open evenings and weekends, or to have a fire station in every neighbourhood, or open restrooms in every park, or to increase the number of homeless shelter beds so people aren’t sleeping on the street?

An accountant can tell you how much you’re spending, and where the dollars are coming from. But determining whether those things are worth the dollars is a question of political values. And everyone in power — and most of those they govern — already has a sense of their own political values, and has made up their mind about what makes living in the city worthwhile and what looks like a waste of money.

I am skeptical that a report from an auditor is going to change opinions on those questions. Or that their mandate is even going to be made broad enough to try to answer them.

I hope I’m wrong. I hope the audit is generally useful, and enlightening, and provides a path to more stable budgeting in Toronto, where everyone suddenly agrees on what’s needed. But past experience makes me hesitant to expect anything like that.

Instead, what we’re most likely to get — despite the determination of the provincial government and the optimism of the mayor — is a report that costs us millions of dollars and takes months to produce that convinces everyone they were right to begin with.

And then they can begin arguing about it again, all the more certain they’ve been proven right.
Click to expand...
The current Toronto budget had started and was approved by John Tory and his council, just before he resigned. Tory stayed on to see his budget approved. John Tory is a Progressive Conservative, and was leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario. Olivia Chow, as Mayor of Toronto, had nothing to do with the current budget, and will not be submitting her budget until 2024.
 
Northern Light said:
Crawford fell materially short, finishing second behind the Liberals, and only 3 points ahead of the NDP, in Scarborough-Guildwood.

I should add here, the NDP managed over 26%, which for them, in this seat is quite solid.

The Conservatives also lost former Minister Fullerton's seat in Kanata to another Liberal contender.

Click to expand...

I wonder if Crawford will come crawling back to council and ask to be appointed rather than have a by-election.
 
These are very interesting stats!

1690995274744.png
 
DSC said:
These are very interesting stats!

View attachment 496939
Click to expand...
Canadaland's Wag the Doug podcast did an episode on this recently. It's worth a listen to. Most of the enrolment is being done in satellite campuses; ie; three units in an industrial park far away from everything. Lots of shadiness all around, from both the government and the schools.

www.canadaland.com

#56 Students in Strip Malls

How did a Doug Ford policy move from 2019 lead to 10,000s of international students schlepping their backpacks to strip malls across the GTA?
www.canadaland.com www.canadaland.com
 

Stabbing victims arrive at southwestern Ont. emergency department overnight only to find it’s closed​

From link.

Three teenagers who were stabbed at a sweet 16 birthday party in Clinton, Ont. late last month were driven to the local hospital, only to find out the emergency department (ED) was closed.

Following a triple stabbing at a house party on Raglan Street in Clinton on July 30, a citizen who was driving took the wounded teenagers less than 2 kilometres to Clinton Public Hospital (CPH) only to find out the ED closes at 6 p.m.

OPP confirmed the driver and victims immediately made the 20 kilometre trek to Goderich where the three teens — aged 15, 16 and 17 — were assessed.

Two of the victims were held at Alexandra Marine and General Hospital, while the third victim with a much more serious puncture wound was transported to London Health Sciences Centre (LHSC) in London.
Click to expand...
“We are playing Russian roulette here, sooner or later something is going to happen here and it’s going to cost someone their life and it came close this time,” explained Jim Ginn, mayor of Central Huron.

He added, “That’s why we need as many emergency rooms as possible because we have big distances to other hospitals in other municipalities. We are somewhat fortunate in Clinton that Goderich and Seaforth aren’t too far away.”
Click to expand...
For those that do arrive at the CPH after hours, they can either use the phone available inside the ED which patients can call 9-1-1 and paramedics will re-route to the nearest available ED.

There is also signage with a list of the closest 24-hour EDs including addresses and distance.

“This is going to lead to a tragedy beyond anything we can comprehend,” said Peter Bergmanis of the Ontario Health Coalition. “While this is a fortunate story in the end, that all these gentlemen actually received care and it was timely enough for them to go to another hospital, I can only imagine a more serious trauma and there is no other options.”

Bergmanis said there are a multitude of reasons why these EDs are closed.

He said nursing staff collapsed during the COVID-19 pandemic and have never recovered. He added that they are still fighting the 11 per cent wage hike and they are still looking for primary care in those areas.
Click to expand...
“We’re looking at 158 ER closures, predominantly all in rural Ontario because they are a decade behind all these hospitals being underfunded,” said Bergmanis. “These communities built their hospitals over generations. We are begging the Ford government to get off those $22 billion that they are sitting on and fund these hospitals. They need to automatically flood the resources into these rural communities.”

CTV News London spoke with Huron-Bruce MPP Lisa Thompson Wednesday, as the drama unfolded in her riding. She said the Huron-Perth hospital Alliance (HPHA) is responsible for the administration of hospitals in Clinton, Seaforth, Stratford and St. Marys.

“I know that the Huron-Perth Hospital Alliance, the Huron Health Services, and the Listowel and Wingham Health Care Alliance, they are all working together on a regional effort to make sure services are available to people when they need them,” said Thompson.

CTV News London asked Thompson if it would take a death to get these rural EDs back to being open 24 hours.
Click to expand...
I know that our professional health care providers are doing everything they can to ensure whether you live in small town Ontario or an urban centre, that everyone has access to quality care,” Thompson said in response. “I really believe in the management of our hospital alliances and their commitment to making sure the best services are available when they are needed.”

Two of the teens have since been released from hospital in Goderich, while the third victim remained in LHSC as of Tuesday evening.

The teen who hosted the party is thankful her friends will all survive.

“My cousin had taken them to the hospital, so I’m grateful they got there in time,” said the 15 year old who wished not to be identified. “But it was sad to hear the Clinton Hospital was closed and they had to drive all the way to Goderich.”
Click to expand...
clinton-public-hospital---aug-2023-1-6504096-1690998119845.jpg


Under Doug Ford, do not get stabbed in rural Ontario.
 
zang said:
Canadaland's Wag the Doug podcast did an episode on this recently. It's worth a listen to. Most of the enrolment is being done in satellite campuses; ie; three units in an industrial park far away from everything. Lots of shadiness all around, from both the government and the schools.

www.canadaland.com

#56 Students in Strip Malls

How did a Doug Ford policy move from 2019 lead to 10,000s of international students schlepping their backpacks to strip malls across the GTA?
www.canadaland.com www.canadaland.com
Click to expand...

Usually affiliated with or operated by private career colleges, and often very far from the public college’s main campus. Sault College’s satellite “campus” is on Queen Street, Brampton, adjacent to Trios. Why are they in Brampton? Because it’s a lot easier to recruit international students.

IMG_0459.jpeg
 
You must log in or register to post here.

Back
Top