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At her re-election campaign launch, incumbent York-Simcoe MPP Caroline Mulroney announced the base annual funding for Southlake Health will rise.
Health care in Ontario is in crisis. York Region has the province’s third-highest population growth rate, so obviously more demand accrues for hospital resources. Funding increases should naturally keep pace with inflation/cost-of-living increases, not be an election headline. The government Mulroney represents promised in 2018 to end hallway health care. It’s now at an all-time high, according to Ontario Council of Hospital Unions president Michael Hurley.
The Ford government has continued austerity bombing our public healthcare system and pushing an agenda of privatizing our hospital and healthcare services. Private providers have been paid through public funds as much as three times the cost of the same procedure if done in a public hospital. Can we rely on Mulroney, if re-elected, to steer public health money to public hospitals and living-wage-compensated workers rather than sickness and pain profiteers snatching from the public purse?
The Bradford Bypass project rolls on and Mulroney is bullishly confident of its completion one day.
That’s unfortunate. Wildlife and wetlands will be sacrificed for the construction and its induced demand traffic on another dubious highway. Oh, there are paper commitments to monitor fish and bird life. But what about people’s lives? Where are the Traffic Related Air Pollution (TRAP) impact projections on children, seniors, and homeowners in populated areas the bypass will cross through? Black carbon, nitrogen oxides, and fine particulate matter are the Ford government’s superimposed new burdens landing on schools, daycares, retirement homes, parks and playing fields. Medical research connects TRAP to increased risks of cancers, heart and lung complications, leukemia and ADHD. We acknowledge the premier’s lust for mounting bulldozers and getting roads ploughed. But would he live in the fallout zone of the Bradford Bypass? Would candidate Mulroney move her family into its daily dust of disease?
The Holland Marsh phosphorous runoff reduction facility inches forward as Mulroney also shared in her re-election campaign launch.
The Ford government is spending $24 million, its largest single investment in phosphorous runoff reduction, on an end point tech treatment with a target of two tonnes of phosphorous runoff abatement annually. The yearly average phosphorous load into Lake Simcoe is over 90 tonnes. That’s double the lake’s sustainable load of 44 tonnes. Holland Marsh polders are hardly the biggest source of Lake Simcoe’s phosphorous, though cleanup of its watercourses is needed. This writer doubts candidate Mulroney would champion a properly funded Ontario government plan, goal and timeline to educate, coordinate and legislate a serious campaign to rescue and protect Lake Simcoe for its economic, cultural and natural value.
If Mulroney seeks credibility as a builder of Ontario’s clean economy future in this riding, that’s work worth promising and getting it done.
David Hawkins
Bradford West Gwillimbury
