Prime Minister Doug Ford already has a four-year term to “finish” it, as stated in his Ontario Conservative Conservative campaign slogan.
These are the main promises he and his party made during the election period and before the campaign.
Present an (almost) identical budget
The government submitted the 2022 budget in late April, then immediately postponed parliament for the election campaign, so the budget was not even discussed, let alone adopted. Ford (and after some deliberation, his finance minister, Peter Bethlenfall), said computers would pay the budget without significant changes if re-elected.
But that changed less than two weeks later when personal computers added a $ 450 million promise they had failed to make to the budget: raising Ontario’s Disability Support (ODSP) rates by five percent.
WATCH: Miss what happened on election night? Here are the key points:
Election night in Ontario in 2022 in less than 2 minutes
Did you miss what happened in last Thursday’s election? Here are the key points.
Lower tax on gasoline
This will probably be the easiest promise for the government to fulfill: the fuel tax will be reduced by 5.7 cents per liter of gasoline, effective July 1. The computers only promised to keep the tax cuts in place for six months. The loss of revenue to the provincial treasury during this period is estimated at $ 645 million.
Reduce housing costs
Rising house prices in Ontario have been a major concern for provincial voters in the 2022 election (Evan Mitsui / CBC)
This will probably be the most difficult promise for the government to fulfill. Surveys during the campaign have repeatedly shown that rising house prices are among the biggest concerns of voters. Housing affordability was also the most frequently asked question by a sample of nearly 24,000 Ontarians who responded to CBC News Vote Compass’ online civic engagement tool.
Ford spoke in detail about his party’s housing plans during the May 21 campaign stop in London. He said the computer plan “will help reduce the cost to families by building a supply that meets the demand for home ownership.”
Although it is difficult to judge whether the promise to “cut costs” has actually been fulfilled, there are some more specific promises set out in a PC Party announcement. These include “the re-elected Ontario government will build 1.5 million new homes in the next 10 years” and “breaking and punishing speculators with land and housing permits that artificially stifle the supply of new homes and increase costs.”
At this campaign stop, Ford met with three families he said had been bought from the home.
“I promised them that we would stop at nothing to make sure we deal with the Ontario housing crisis,” he said.
Build Highway 413
This campaign promise has become an ideal problem for computers, helping them sweep away any location in the Peel, Halton and York regions. Given how strongly and how often Ford has promised to build Highway 413, it’s hard to imagine that it won’t keep that promise. However, he was deliberately unclear about the cost and schedule, buying a place to move on whether to arrive on time and within budget.
This is what the Ontario government describes as the preferred route for Highway 413, connecting the northern and western parts of the Greater Toronto area, between the existing highways 400 and 401. (Hailey Furcalo / CBC)
Computers have made other promises to build a highway during the campaign around the province, including expanding 417 in Ottawa and rebuilding Highway 7 between Kitchener and Guelph, something his government has already promised in 2020.
Expand, renovate hospitals
In a stream of government announcements in the weeks leading up to the campaign, Ford and then-Health Secretary Christine Elliott toured the province to promise construction work on a hospital in many places, including Barry, Brampton, Brantford, Kitchener, Ottawa, Scarborough and Windsor. The timing of when several will actually be built remains unclear, with some of the promises of future construction only for the next planning phase.
During the campaign, Ford promised to “shovel this year” for a new 469-bed hospital in the Niagara area, a project the provincial governments have been talking about since 2014.
Long-term care
The government is committed to creating 30,000 new long-term care sites by 2028, and this chart in the latest budget shows that most of them need to be built by the time of the next elections in June 2026. In a press release in April, the Ministry of Long-Term Care said 365 projects currently under planning and construction exceed that goal.
Computers in Ontario have promised that the government will create more than 30,000 new spaces in long-term care homes by 2028 (Michael Charles Cole / CBC)
The government also promises that every resident in long-term care will receive an average of four hours a day of direct care until fiscal 2024-25. The latest package of government reforms promises tougher inspections of long-term care homes and tougher fines for violators, but does not follow all the recommendations of the commission investigating what went wrong in the Ontario system during the pandemic. COVID-19.
Plan to stay open
One of the five points in the literature for the PC Party’s Get It Done campaign points to the Ontario Plan to stay open, the government’s long-term plan to tackle the post-Omicron phase of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In its campaign news statements, Ford’s party is committed to “hiring more nurses, doctors and personal support staff, allowing more older people to stay in their own homes and produce more vaccines and critical supplies like PPE right here.” in Ontario. ”
All of these promises are specific enough to be measurable, although setting the bar at “more” makes promises not particularly difficult to achieve.
Extraction of the ring of fire
The Ford government directly links the future of the electric vehicle industry in southern Ontario to the mineral-rich deposit in northern Ontario called the Ring of Fire. The region is said to have supplies of critical minerals that are essential for the production of batteries for electric vehicles.
The Ford government says growing demand for electric vehicles will boost the need for minerals in Northern Ontario’s Ring of Fire, which can be used to make batteries for electric vehicles. (David Donnelly / CBC)
“It will bring prosperity to the whole region,” Ford told a news conference on May 12. “As part of the entire supply chain, this will create thousands of jobs in the north, with critical minerals and where I’m heading today in southwestern Ontario.”
The first point of the five-point PC campaign promise promises a “mining plan that will finally open the Ring of Fire,” a swing against previous Ontario liberal governments that began talking about mineral deposits back in 2010. .
During an earlier campaign in northern Ontario, Ford promised his government to build a $ 1 billion road to a remote mineral deposit, something he actually promised to do back in 2018, even “if I have to get on this bulldozer alone. “
Abolition of subsidies for political parties
Ford has for the first time promised in 2018 to abolish the taxpayer-funded subsidy provided to political parties in Ontario. Instead, his government dropped it last year, announcing it would extend the subsidy until 2024, but end it then.
The amount allocated to each party is based on the number of votes received from each recent election. Following last week’s results, PC Party is set to receive about $ 4.9 million in each of the next two years, at the current subsidy rate, with the NDP and the Liberals receiving about $ 2.8 million a year and the Green Party set to about $ 700,000.
Climate change targets
The deadly storm that hit southern Ontario on May 21, causing damage like the one in Ottawa, briefly put the issue of climate change on the campaign agenda. (Justin Tang / Canadian Press)
This was not something Ford emphasized during the campaign, but his government has repeatedly insisted that it will meet its 2030 target of reducing Ontario’s greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent from 2005 levels. As CBC News reported in April, the government silently reconsidered its plan for how to achieve this, but still predicted success.
Previous liberal governments have led the province more than two-thirds of the way to the 30 percent emission reduction target by the time Ford comes to power in 2018, largely by phasing out coal-fired electricity.
Promising to keep promises
The morning after his resounding victory on election night, in which computers took up more space than any party had made in the 1987 election, Ford made one last promise: “We will make sure we keep every promise,” he said. he. press conference.
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