MULRONEY AVOIDS MUCK DEFINING PCs’ LEADERSHIP BATTLE
Candidate sets herself apart with actual ideas as party looks for Brown’s successor
Caroline Mulroney wants to build more nursing homes, license home daycare operators, teach guidance counsellors about work in the trades and help more terminally ill people get palliative care.
In a Progressive Conservative leadership campaign that’s been mostly about personalities and attitudes, devolving lately into a mud-wrestling match between Christine Elliott (a secret Liberal!) and Doug Ford (erratic and out of control!), Mulroney has tried to distinguish herself with some actual ideas, rolling them out like platform planks in a full election campaign.
She’s not as comfortable a campaigner as Elliott, not as forceful as Ford or Tanya Granic Allen. But she’s given her plan some thought.
Take the nursing home promise. Ontario has about 77,500 long-term-care beds and a waiting list of about 32,000 people. On average, they wait 143 days for a placement and it’s longer in some parts of the province, including Eastern Ontario. We obviously have a shortage and it’s getting worse by the month.
The Liberals promise to open 5,000 new long-term-care beds over the next five years and 30,000 over the next decade. The People’s Guarantee, the PC party platform, promises to get moving faster, adding 15,000 beds in five years on the way to the same 30,000 target.
Mulroney promises 30,000 new beds in five years in addition to speeding up renovations in existing nursing homes to bring them up to modern standards.
Even the Ontario Long-Term Care Association calls for only 10,000 new beds over the next five years in its latest funding submission to the government (existing homes want much better funding for nurses, support workers and programming, too). Getting 30,000 beds’ worth of planning and building done in that little time is, let’s say, ambitious, especially since the provincial government doesn’t own nursing homes directly. Not to mention hiring the thousands of workers it’ll take to staff them.
Mulroney is quite properly keen on homes that serve particular ethnic and linguistic communities, which are usually run by nonprofit groups, which will have even more trouble working that quickly. For-profit companies will no doubt be willing to step up if the province is willing to pay.
Creating a licensing system for unlicensed daycare providers — typically a home operation where a mom takes in other people’s toddlers in addition to her own kids — is something advocates have wanted for years. Ontario has licensed home-based daycares, in which private caregivers work with an agency the government monitors, but thousands of kids are looked after by adults who aren’t regulated at all.
The idea is parents can decide for themselves whom to trust with their kids and you shouldn’t have to get government approval to take care of a child for a friend down the block and that’s reasonable as far as it goes, but plenty of parents who use unlicensed providers because they can’t find licensed ones would be happy to have a stamp of approval to look for.
Accrediting individual providers house by house and inspecting them regularly wouldn’t be cheap, though, and most homebased daycares run on shoestrings. Charging them a lot for licences wouldn’t work. There’d be a cost to the government to make this work.
Mulroney proposes that guidance counsellors should know more about jobs in the trades so they can direct high school students toward them. And she pledges to “develop a framework which will lead to improved access and greater education about hospice and palliative care.” Not much meat on those bones, but they’re fine ideas. Neither one is in the People’s Guarantee, so they’re Mulroney’s to tout.
(She’d also form a “blue-ribbon panel of leading entrepreneurs and investors to help inform government policy and efforts to attract entrepreneurship, investment and hiring across the economy.” Throw that report on the pile with the rest.)
A whole section of promises has to do with internal reforms in the Progressive Conservative party, including hiring a chief information officer ( because the party’s computer systems were a mess under Patrick Brown) and an ethics adviser and coming up with a sexual-harassment policy. These are responses to a lot of Brown-era problems, possibly all of which could have been avoided by just having better people in charge. People with properly calibrated moral compasses don’t need ethics counselling.
A lot of what Mulroney promises is plucked from the People’s Guarantee, the 80-page, magazine-style platform with Brown’s name and face all over it that the party’s new leader will have to quickly figure out whether to keep or ditch.
Cuts to the provincial tax rates on the first two income brackets, up to about $64,000, increasing the tax credit for people who care for loved ones with disabilities, making more generous loans for novice tradespeople’s first sets of tools — these are all People’s Guarantee pledges, remade as some of Mulroney’s “priorities for a better, brighter Ontario.”
She also promises to cancel the People’s Guarantee’s carbon tax, a $2.4-billion-a-year moneymaker that would cover most of the $3.2 billion the provincial government would give up in those income-tax cuts. All the candidates promise this, competing only on how hard they’d cancel it. Whoever wins, it’s going to be a problem.
But Mulroney has some clear ideas about what she’d do if she were premier beyond asserting she’d be better at it than anybody else. That’s worth something.