Thanks to Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives, chaos and confusion reign in Ontario

We’re over a year into this pandemic, but instead of the clarity and confidence that usually comes with time, we’re only getting more chaos and confusion from the Ford conservatives.

Just take a look at the headlines. “Younger people in COVID-19 hot spots confused about how to get vaccinated”; “Chaos, Confusion and Closures remain on the books for Ontario’s schools”; “Confusion, frustration expressed over stay-at-home order store closures”; “Excitement, confusion over Phase 2 of Ontario’s COVID-19 vaccine rollout”; “Playing politics with words”; “Experts confused by terms like lockdown, shutdown, circuit breakers,” etc.

“For the folks that find it confusing, 2.8 million people didn’t find it confusing,” Ford said about his government’s vaccine rollout plan and booking system during a news conference. “Folks, it’s very, very simple.”

So simple that he then gave us a phone number and website that don’t apply to the younger, eligible people in hot spots.

So simple that 10,000 residents of Scarborough, one of Ontario’s hardest hit communities, who made it through the complex appointment system and secured a spot, had their appointments cancelled due to lack of supply even as plenty doses sit in freezers.

It goes on. On April 11, Education Minister Stephen Lecce penned a letter to parents announcing that schools will be open for in-person learning after the April break. Within 24 hours, he announced a provincewide school closure.

And now, the Ford government is on the verge of passing a spring budget that only adds to the chaos and confusion instead of providing what it’s supposed to; clarity and confidence.

We’ve been here before. This is now the third budget or economic update from this government since the pandemic. And each time unions, community organizations and everyday Ontarians have said the same thing based on a growing consensus around what we need.

We called on the government to bolster funding for the public services that have done the heavy lifting of keeping us safe and keeping our communities going.

Instead, this government has failed to make up for past funding cuts and has relied on accounting tricks and confusion to make people believe they’re properly spending resources.

Take a look at the program spending increases the government has been trumpeting, leading Ontarians to believe that health care, education, child and social services, and other services, would see more support.

The reality is that over $10-billion of their spending is actually just made up of permanent tax cuts, massive electric subsidies and pandemic relief to businesses, benefiting many of the most profitable companies that don’t need the help right now. And these companies aren’t even being asked to create jobs for Ontarians desperately looking for work.

I called this “disaster capitalism” before because this government is using the chaos and confusion of a crisis to quietly restructure our province to benefit the wealthiest Ontarians, their supporters and friends, at the expense of the rest of us.

To this, I’m sure that Ford will tell us that he’s giving payments of $400 per child and $500 for a child with special needs to help with the costs of online learning. Or that his government is offering a one-time $250 child-care tax credit.

I’m guessing he’s hoping no one would notice the money is better used to actually ensure that schools can be safely opened. Or that a tax credit, even one more substantial than a paltry $250, doesn’t mean much when 170 child-care centres closed, and when safe and affordable child-care spaces are few and far between.

Just like the labour reforms we need. The budget fails to legislate paid sick days or fund the expansion of workplace inspections, despite the chorus of public-health experts pointing out that this wave is crashing on the backs of front-line workers even more than the first two.

And instead of recognizing and addressing the fact that front-line workers are disproportionately racialized and often live in communities where vaccinations are inaccessible, there is no plan to fund an inclusive, culturally-informed, vaccine rollout plan.

Instead, Ontarians are finding out their communities aren’t considered hot spots by the Ford Progressive Conservatives despite having more cases and higher rates of hospitalizations and death than postal codes that are now targeted.

This isn’t what we need now.

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A clear comprehensive plan to fight this pandemic would force the Ford Progressive Conservatives to confront their ideological blind spots and reverse themselves on issues like paid sick leave, smaller classroom sizes, and appropriately-funded social services.

Instead, they stubbornly continue to ignore any evidence that doesn’t fit with their worldview — and are choosing to just lurch ahead with more closures and lockdowns.

We’re now paying the price for this chaos and confusion.

Fred Hahn is President of CUPE Ontario.