Dalton McGuinty’s Election Sugar Pill

By Gary Morton September 2007

    Greg Sorbara and Dalton McGuinty were feeling good on Labour Day. As the Ontario Election officially began they came forward with a sugar pill in the form of a new Family Day public holiday for February. Sorbara says Ontario is now doing well and we can afford such measures. Meaning he must have missed the Labour Day parade and hundreds of manufacturing workers complaining about continued job losses. 

   Skeptics will say that the promise will never be delivered, and with housing woes in the US sending that economy toward recession, any incoming government will dose us with a bitter pill of new taxes or cuts. That is what happened last time around with the introduction of the health tax. 

   The Liberal sugar pill if anything highlights the disconnect between the haves and have nots in our society. Let’s start with public holidays. We already have a two tiered system with the elite of the work force and government getting paid holidays like Easter Monday and Remembrance Day while the rest of us get the shaft. So how about legislation guaranteeing that all Ontarians get equal treatment when it comes to paid holidays?

   More and more people now work on a contract basis and get no paid holidays. To make the system fair legislation is needed that guarantees all workers paid stat holidays after three months of work, whether for a company or an agency. 

   Employment Insurance is supposed to be a guarantee for Canadians, yet the province has let that slip away. Bring in a bill making EI deductions mandatory for all workers so the hundreds of thousands working on contract basis can apply for benefits. And also put pressure on Ottawa. A part time worker in Ontario has to work about thirty weeks just to get benefits. That standard should be reduced and benefits increased with a demand that the feds end the fraudulent practice of taking billions from the EI fund every year. 

   Another part of the sugar pill is the Liberal announcement of a dental plan for the working poor. The denticare plan is a good idea but the Liberal plan is really an NDP plan that they’ve already cut as the NDP was going to spend 100 million in comparison to 45 million the Liberals are promising. 

   The working poor in Ontario can’t pay for their teeth because of other underlying problems the Liberal sugar pill doesn’t address. First, the minimum wage is too low so why not raise it to a Living Wage and index it to inflation. And again, more has to be done to outlaw contract labour as workers in that area don’t get benefits.

   The Liberal health tax should either be eliminated or left as a tax on the wealthy only. This insulting blow to the pay packets of the working poor is the easiest item to eliminate as even the Liberals admit it is no longer needed. 

   Pathetically low welfare rates need to be raised as does ODSP. All of these being simple measures to reduce the growing gap between the rich and the poor. Meaning the pill we all have to swallow is standard medication that tastes quite foul to Liberals, Tories and the wealthy. To heal society we have to heal those we’ve cast into growing poverty, and that costs money in many areas, not just the big ticket areas of hospitals and health care.

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