Biggest thing for my family will be healthcare, but housing is an issue too. My wife and I are set, but I’m looking at my aging mom and my infant son.
Ontario Majority Government 2022-2026 (?)
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Well there's no quick solution to healthcare imo. We are dealing with decades of mismanagement there and something that all Western nations are dealing with as well just that we are worse.
We have what like 100x the administrators in health care as Germany?!?
Restricting positions in medical school since Bob Rae
not accepting immigrant credentials even though that is why we accepted them
my biggest concern with the housing right now is the number of people being laid off right now in the construction industry. My son just came back from a supplier that had 20% of his fleet parked for the first time ever, while temporary its not a good sign
Well yeah, no kidding. A problem that takes a generation to get into isn’t a quick exit. And the boomers aren’t even peaked into the heaviest healthcare consumption years yet.
Brad Sallows
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There's no quick solution to housing, either, so you're not going to get anything for your vote if "housing" is your price. If the provincial government could control migration into the province (it can't), then they could offer a migration/immigration plan to address the demand overhang, but there will never be any such animal. The shortage of supply is going to take a long time (years) to work through even if migration into Canada is halted, foreign money is excluded, and severely restrictive laws are passed to limit speculation and ownership beyond primary residence. The reason is simple: all the builders are already busy. A few tweaks can be done at the edges to speed things up for developers (permitting and whatnot), but the guys who swing the hammers and connect the pipes and wires are already working approximately as much as they can. It would be easy enough to do the arithmetic and calculate how many years - and it will be years - it will take them to catch up with demand.
There's also affordability, but the controls for fiscal policy are all federal, and the amount of money required to make a meaningful dent for a meaningful number of buyers exceeds all reasonable revenue by unattainable amounts. Any subsidization promises will be useful to only the handful of people lucky enough to get them - almost a lottery, except that there will be some qualifiers that decide which few actually get money and which many just pay the taxes to subsidize the few. And that money will just help those few people to kick a bit more into bidding wars, and will be unavailable for health care, policing, education, or any other issue in which a province objectively has much greater responsibilities than gifting money to people.
Whatever "housing" plans are floated will be, if subjected to demanding quantitative analysis, useless. But they will be talked about endlessly in qualitative terms for the benefit of innumerate voters.
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Well my experience in the construction industry doesnt lead itself to the housing industry being busy. We regularly run into trades people that are not busy in the last few month from approximately maybe late February on. Anecdotes aside we are building less every month and in Ontario alone we build less than BC, how exactly can the construction industry be busy in that scenario.
The housing problem is IMO a zoning and taxation issue. Land values are not taxed fully discouraging density and zoning restrictions on infill as well. With the Premier stated opposition on that point there can be no progress.
There is no regulatory restriction that is holding building up on the grand scale as there are well over1,000,000 approvals granted. The units are not being built due to the economics of the situation and it costs close to nothing to not develop. At 90,000 units a year thats a 11 year supply of approvals
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This.
In downtown Ottawa there's a derelict old hotel in a prime location that the owner tried to reno on their own without permits that started to collapse when they accidentally hit a support pillar in the basement with a forklift. In 2007. The owner can leave it there derelict.
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might even have got a tax break
Brad Sallows
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If the numbers show a slump anywhere, then I'm wrong. Where I live there's a lot of construction going on, and I've started to hear tales of people who book services of independent contractors who don't show up and essentially "ghost" them. That suggests the independent contractors - at least - have more work than they can handle. That some slack exists would be consistent with the problems created by the high cost of materials and financing.
I had a conversation with the liberal candidate when he came to my door last election. Told him that we needed a multi faceted approach to aging and asked him what their plan was. Told him that my father in law (now deceased) was in LTC but that the system was broken and taking a toll on my mother in law. He answered fairly well enough. I didn’t get a chance to talk to Goldie that election. But I’m not confident in either party addressing it.
I’ll be looking at healthcare closely as well. My parents are closer to 80 than they are to 70 are in really good health but that can change in the next few years. My mother in law is a different story and we may need to take her in this year.
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the numbers are bad. We should be able to build 250,000 a yr no problem. I dont know where you are, but we are in contact with province/nation wide suppliers weekly. It doesnt preclude some contractors from experiencing growth while others suffer from contraction but overall in Ontario the number of housing units being built is decreasing. Companies struggling with labour are probably just worse at that aspect of business versus those that suffer at marketing, yet we dont come up with excuses for them.
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we're definitely not going to fix them if we don't even try. The problems arent unique to us either as healthcare has substantial issues in much of the "western" world and the housing thing is in particular a problem for the Anglo-American one
OldSolduer
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they can be fixed or at least improved IF there are viable solutions and the WILL to change.
Health Care is but one area that needs fixing - and so does Education.
Brad Sallows
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Everything everyone thinks need fixing means a lot more spending, and ON is already in deficit.
There aren't many options. Increase revenues (taxation and other fees and whatnot that the government collects); borrow even more; terminate other programs to redirect funds; relax limitations on private services so that people can spend their own money.
lenaitch
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Well, they could have not dropped the vehicle registration fees. Ontario has a big budget but a $Billion in lost revenue isn't chump change. And now they are working towards uploading the Don Valley Parkway and Gardiner Expressway so Toronto will STFU about their vanity project at Ontario Place.
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OldSolduer
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Money talks Mr Whelan money talksSome more data points out there, and they're not polls
View attachment 85773
More from CBC.ca here, or Elections Ontario here.
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Cabinet shuffle .....
torontosun.com
globalnews.ca
news.ontario.ca
Lecce out as education minister as Premier Doug Ford shuffles cabinet
Ontario Premier Doug Ford is shaking up his education and energy portfolios in a cabinet shuffle.
torontosun.com
Ontario Premier Doug Ford announces new education minister, cabinet reshuffle | Globalnews.ca
Ford and Lieutenant Governor Edith Dumont swore in a "renewed" cabinet in a closed ceremony on Thursday afternoon after hours of meetings with ministers.
globalnews.ca
Ontario Newsroom
news.ontario.ca
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Survey says: lotsa support for Team Blue (14 points ahead of Red, 17 points ahead of Orange), but not so much for beer/wine in corner stores ....
How the survey was done
pallas-data.ca
How the survey was done
More here or in attached PDF
Pallas Ontario Poll: PC 39, OLP 27, NDP 23, Green 8 - Pallas Data
(TORONTO, 11 June 2024) – The governing Progressive Conservatives have a twelve-point lead over the Ontario Liberals, a Pallas Data poll has found. In a poll that first appeared in the Trillium, Pallas surveyed 1136 adults in Ontario, 18 years or older and eligible to vote through Interactive...
pallas-data.ca
Might be a different story if the threatened LCBO strike happens.