Harris gets Ontario’s top honour, no matter what Ontarians think
Mikey’s still got it, the ability to rile up Ontarians with just the mention of his name.
The fresh start to the new year was spoiled for many with the Jan. 1 announcement that former premier Mike Harris was on the annual list of recipients of the Order of Ontario, billed as the province’s highest honour.
Social media erupted in outrage, with an online petition to stop Harris from receiving the honour quickly gaining thousands of signatures. There were angry posts about his record of slashing welfare rates, downloading costs on municipalities and closing hospitals while comparing nurses to hula-hoop makers. His detractors also vilified Harris for the tainted water tragedy in Walkerton and the death of First Nations’ protester Dudley George.
But most of the fury aimed at Harris, 75, was because of his $237,000 a year job as chair of the board of Chartwell Retirement Residences, which like other for-profit LTCs, had disproportionately more deaths from COVID-19 than the average non-profit or municipallyrun home in Ontario.
A Toronto Star investigation found Chartwell, Extendicare and Sienna Senior Living, all paid out huge dividends to their shareholders while also taking tens of millions of dollars in pandemic relief aid from Canadian taxpayers.
This is straight up corporate greed, companies deliberately putting profits ahead of the care they deliver to the most vulnerable members of society, seniors who can no longer care for themselves, and then using pandemic relief funding from the rest of us to enrich themselves.
No company should get away with such behaviour, especially when more LTC homes have COVID-19 outbreaks than in the first wave, and all of them face a staffing crisis.
The Canada Revenue Agency has already sent letters to 441,000 people who may need to repay the money they received under the Canada Emergency Response Benefit, scaring the pants off folks who are just trying to buy groceries and pay the rent until they can work again.
But where are the letters demanding these nursing home corporations that paid out dividends pay back every penny they received from taxpayers? Insisting the relief funds and the dividends are in different accounting silos or in another corporate shell company might work for the tax office, but it won’t satisfy a single Canadian taxpayer.
It certainly won’t be good enough for the families of 2,800 LTC residents and eight staff who died because of COVID-19.
Give us our money back, and put a serious effort into improving the level of care and living conditions in your facilities. Start by providing full-time jobs with a living wage so we don’t have to keep calling in the army and the Red Cross to feed and care for the residents in your homes.
The staff shortage was a long-standing problem that companies and governments ignored for years before the pandemic turned it into a crisis. Private and public sector leaders should be ashamed it has come to this.
Nearly two decades out of office and there’s still no bigger villain in the eyes of many Ontarians than Harris, not just because of his tumultuous two terms as premier, but also because of the Chartwell post he took a year after leaving office.
The only thing more tone deaf than awarding Mike Harris the Order or Ontario is Chartwell and other for-profit LTC operators taking emergency relief funding from taxpayers and then paying out dividends to investors.