Milton NDP Blog

Hospitals are short term care and 95% of Canadian hospitals operate on a non-profit basis . So why are we happy with for-profit Long Term Care? Why is the idea of profiting from the sick repulsive but allowing the corporate and political elite to rake in millions from poorly run, understaffed LTCs OK? As of June 2020 5% of for-profit LTC residents died from Covid 19 in Ontario compared to 3% in non-profit homes and 1.1% in municipal homes. A CBC Marketplace report shows that decades long delays in safety upgrades are a major factor in the spread of this disease. The case for eliminating profits from LTC is clear. What do the Liberals and Conservatives think? No way! Last week they voted down an NDP motion to take the word “profit” out of Long Term Care. So here is our first campaign promise. NDP plan to fix the system in the long term We need a government on the side of seniors, their families, and frontline health care workers – instead of on the side of wealthy investors New Democr...

Are political parties about power or service? The events of the last few weeks have made one thing abundantly clear. The red and blue parties aren’t in it for public service - they’re in it for the power. All they want is to be in power and they will say anything to get there. The Liberals claimed that the provinces would never agree to the NDP Pharmacare plan and so they voted it down despite promising it during the last election. What are they really saying? They are saying that we’ll never get Pharmacare until all the provincial governments are red too! We just promised it so that you would vote for us. This past weekend we saw the Conservative leader turn his back on two large factions of his own party, the climate change deniers and those that would deny a woman’s right to decide what happens to her own body. It sounds like the leader of the blue party is going to set his own platform all by himself with no regard for democracy or what his members stand for. Where does that leave ...

Last week’s events in Pickering are a warning for Halton. A company that offers low paying non-unionized jobs, is looking to build a warehouse in the east end of the GTA. The folks in Pickering thought it would be a good idea to build it right on top of protected wetlands. They thought to override the “protected” piece with an MZO, a Ministerial Zoning Order from the Provincial Government. When the CBC figured out that it was Amazon looking to use the space Amazon quickly backed out. Pickering’s mayor who initially championed the project did a 180 and said wait a minute. Wetlands and green spaces form buffers between developed lands that allow wildlife to thrive, filter our water, sequester carbon, cool the air and prevent flooding. In Halton we rely on our green spaces for a place to walk in peace. We rely on wetlands to absorb sudden rainfalls and prevent the kind of flooding experienced during hurricane Hazel in 1954. The Ontario NDP Green New Deal states that we should promote th...

Imagine yourself walking down Main Street this fall. Restrictions are lifted and everyone can open up. Only wait, that bistro you like to have lunch at is shuttered. A little further on and that art store that sells those really good brushes is gone. The place you used to go for a haircut is being redeveloped. This is not the Twilight Zone. This is what a post-Covid Canada may look like. To date in Canada 1 in 6 small businesses are considering closing with 7 in 10 having to borrow an average of $175,000 to stay afloat. That’s a total of $135 billion across Canada! 2.4 million jobs are at risk. These figures come from Global News and newswire.ca. In the meantime big corporations are making record profits. Both the Liberals and the Conservatives shouted down Jagmeet’s call to tax corporate pandemic profiteering. Now we are calling on the government to support a plan to help small businesses to Hold on to their workforce by making sure the wage subsidy program continues until the pandemi...