Wynne backs casino plan
Premier-designate won’t interfere with push for Ontario gambling expansion,
Critics of the provincial government’s plan to expand casino gambling in Ontario don’t have an ally in premier-designate Kathleen Wynne, who said Thursday she will be staying with the plan.
“I understand that the reality of casinos is with us. There’s no plan on my part to change that reality,” she said in a conference call with reporters from Eastern Ontario.
Wynne also talked about job cuts at the Ottawa Hospital and the need to give cities like Ottawa more power to tax residents to pay for their needs.
Her comments on casinos will put paid to any idea that the successor to Premier Dalton McGuinty is going to change the government’s gambling plans. The Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corp., the provincial agency that runs legal gambling, is seeking bids from operators who will run new casinos in numerous zones across Ontario, including Ottawa and Kingston.
“What I have said, over and over, is that I do not want the provincial government or an arm of the provincial government to be interfering in terms of municipal process, and I want municipalities to have the autonomy to decide whether they want a casino and where they want it to be,” Wynne said.
The OLG (whose chairman, Paul Godfrey, is chief executive of Postmedia Network Inc., owner of the Citizen) is working on plans for an Ottawa casino with the permission of city council, which voted 19-5 in the fall to say the city is in favour of a casino in principle. Another vote is to come when the agency has chosen a winning bidder with a particular location and plan, and presents them publicly sometime in the next year.
Wynne said during the campaign to replace McGuinty as leader of Ontario’s Liberal party and as premier that she’s not personally a gambling fan. “When I talk about my discomfort, that’s personal discomfort, that’s my own personal disposition, and that’s not a policy statement,” she said Thursday.
The Ottawa Hospital’s announcement Wednesday that it’s cutting 290 jobs to help close a $31-million deficit is part of a basic restructuring of health care in Ontario, Wynne said.
The specific cause of the cuts is that funding from the province hasn’t kept pace with inflation. Wynne said there’s a method to it.
“What (Health Minister Deb) Matthews is doing right now is really transforming the health-care system so that services that need to be delivered in a hospital setting are delivered in a hospital setting, but services that don’t are delivered elsewhere,” she said. “So making sure that if people want to stay at home, if they have the capacity to stay at home, that they have that support. That they have a doctor who can come and visit them at home.”
A day in hospital is just about the most expensive way there is to provide health treatment, and governments — even before McGuinty took over in 2003 — have debated ways to cut the costs by having patients get only as much treatment as they need.
The same hospital, for instance, is planning a birthing centre where midwives, who are cheaper than obstetricians, can deliver babies. They’ll be close to full-blown hospital care if a mother or newborn needs it, but they won’t take up the most expensive resources the system has if they don’t.
Similarly, the hospital has struggled for years with patients, usually elderly ones, who’d get care both better and cheaper in nursing homes, but who are stuck in hospitals because there are no beds for them in long-term care.
“Those kinds of changes, which we’ve talked about for many years, are really happening now, so that’s the change of culture that we’re involved in,” Wynne said. “It means there will be alterations in the health institutions in our cities and our towns.”
Finally, Wynne talked about increasing Ontario cities’ “autonomy” by giving them more power to raise revenue — meaning, in practice, taxing powers beyond simple levies on real estate.