Home care next on Ford’s privatization hit list

Re Ontario changed, and Ford changed with it, Cohn, June 13

Martin Regg Cohn asks if Doug Ford is truly a premier transformed. He cites Ford’s stealthy purging of Ontario’s quasi-judicial tribunals and refusal to restore paid sick leave days as evidence that he is continuing to remake the province in his own ideology of deficit reduction and deregulation, which made him so unpopular.

Sadly, Bill 175, the Connecting People to Home and Community Care Act, seems to have slipped under the radar. This bill will deregulate or, in Ford-ese, “cut the red tape” to expand privatization of home-care services in Ontario.

The staggering death rate of seniors in this pandemic has revealed the results of privatizing our long-term-care system.

A similar lowering of the quality of services to all those people who rely on home-care services to stay in their homes will magnify the disaster. It will also lengthen the wait for long-term care, when we already have too few beds to meet the demand and needs of Ontario seniors.

I had hoped the premier had truly been changed by the unnecessary deaths and suffering of Ontario citizens during COVID-19. He may be a better actor, better able to sound caring and sincere, but clearly his agenda is the same.

He cut funding for long-term care, including inspections, despite many warnings of problems in the system. Are we going to let him destroy the home-care system next? Marcia Zalev, Toronto