‘CHANGE WILL NOT BE EASY’
Premier Doug Ford’s new Progressive Conservative government is signalling it will move quickly with dramatic reforms
Warning “change will not be easy,” Premier Doug Ford’s new Progressive Conservative government is signalling it will move quickly with dramatic reforms.
In Thursday’s speech from the throne — read in the legislature on by Lieutenant Governor Elizabeth Dowdeswell and titled “A Government for the People” — the new administration will convene a commission of inquiry into the previous Liberal government’s spending practices.
The Tories will also free police from “onerous restrictions that treat those in uniform as subjects of suspicion and scorn,” end “unaffordable green energy contracts,” and expand beer and wines sales to convenience and big-box stores.
While the speech did not specifically mention the $6 billion in spending cuts that Ford promised during the spring election campaign, it heralded a new era of restraint.
“We cannot afford to dither or delay. To overcome these challenges, we must challenge the status quo, reject the old compromises and embrace change,” the nine-page throne speech said.
“The road ahead will not be easy, but the path is clear.”
On education, the Ford government will replace the 2015 “sex education curriculum with an age-appropriate one that is based on real consultation with parents.”
In a sop to the social conservatives who helped him become Tory leader in March, the new premier’s administration will use the 1998 sex education syllabus, which predates Google, same-sex marriage, and social media, until a new lesson plan is developed.
Students will no longer be taught the “failed experimental ‘discovery math’ curricula” in favour of a focus on fundamentals.
NDP Leader Andrea Howarth said “this throne speech takes us backwards, it takes us back to a previous century, and is a race to the bottom of what families should be able to count on their government for.”
Interim Liberal Leader John Fraser said the “impact of the government’s decisions in our schools is of deep concern.”
But evangelist Charles McVety, an invited guest at the speech, said students can now “go and learn how to tie their shoelaces and do arithmetic and read and write and do what they should be doing in school instead of learning things that belong, really, in post-graduate studies.”
Green Leader Mike Schreiner countered that Ford has “declared war on the modern world.
“I mean, to have no climate change plan and to take our sex ed curriculum back to 1998 is taking the province backwards,” said Schreiner.
In contrast to recent speeches from the throne, there was no French spoken. Nor was there any acknowledgement of Indigenous peoples.
Although the income tax cuts Ford promised during the June 7 election will not take effect for at least two years, the speech promised “meaningful, necessary tax relief to parents, small businesses, and the working poor.”
“You should not be forced to pay more and work harder to make life easier for your government. Instead, your government should be working harder, smarter, and more efficiently to make life better for you.”
The Tories will call “a commission of inquiry into the financial practices of the government to identify ways to restore accountability and trust in Ontario’s public finances.”
However, the Tories will charge ahead with expanding the Liberals’ costly Fair Hydro Plan that Lysyk has also criticized as “bogus.”