Wikimedia Commons photo The future of Ontario Place is up for grabs. Will Toronto’s waterfront park be a reinvigorated public space beside the natural wonder of Lake Ontario? Or a glitzy commercial zone, where enjoying the view means shelling out big bucks? Last month, the Ontario government clearly backed the…
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By Sheila Block and Randy Robinson During last year’s election campaign, Ontario voters didn’t get many details about Doug Ford’s plans for the province. The PC leader said he would cut taxes. He said he’d cut public spending by four per cent. He said he’d let breweries sell beer for…
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Construction is a growing sector of Ontario’s economy, and unlike other expanding sectors, one that creates quality jobs. Good wages and decent working conditions are a result of the relatively high union density in the industry. The recently introduced Bill 66, Restoring Ontario’s Competitiveness Act, will weaken these protections for…
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Ontario’s economic update, released today, is Act II of a financial fearmongering stunt. Act I was the line-by-line review that contends public expenditures have grown by an exorbitant 55 per cent over the past 15 years. We analyzed the out-of-context figures and coded language and described it as a frame…
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The Ontario government’s attempt to discredit the former Liberal government by ordering a line-by-line review of the books has yielded its desired consequence: framing the Liberals as out-of-control big spenders. The review, written by Ernst and Young, claims total real public spending in Ontario ballooned by 55% over the past 15…
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In Ontario’s first-past-the-post electoral system, it’s not just a matter of counting votes. Here are a few things to think about that may help determine who wins—and who loses—on June 7: Geography matters Governments change when the same people vote differently, or when different people vote the same—but in a…
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Back in March, the Ontario Liberals put all of their chips on the table with their election-style provincial budget. They promised free child care, more support for dental care and drugs, and a reinvestment in health care—bankrolling it by deficit spending for the next six years. That left the opposition…
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Another week, another business lobby report that exaggerates the potential negative impact of Ontario’s plan to increase the minimum wage to $15 by 2019. Actually, we’ve seen this one before: the business lobby group that bills itself as the Keep Ontario Working coalition has re-released a report by the Canadian…
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With the 2017-18 Ontario budget officially tabled, the terms of the June 2018 provincial election have now been set — and it’s both a good and bad news story. The good news is that Ontario will go into the election with a balanced budget, which opens the door to a…
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The experts at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives’ Ontario office have been tracking economic developments in Ontario throughout the year. Some problems persist: the gender pay gap, social assistance poverty, the use of expensive payday loans as a last resort because traditional banks fail to serve low-income customers as…
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