Education: Post Secondary

Making Campuses Safe for Ideas

Post-secondary education is of greatest value to students when ideas can be explored freely. Sadly, numerous reports and studies show that free inquiry and open debate is being stifled in Ontario’s colleges and universities. Presenting credible arguments that challenge the preferred viewpoint of administrators or powerful faculty groups can lead to the cancellation of guest speakers, the demotion or firing of dissenting faculty, or the disciplining or expulsion of students. An Ontario Party government will protect freedom of expression and ideological diversity in post-secondary education.

An Ontario Party Government will:

• Prohibit the censoring of speech on campus, such that universities may not restrict the content of legal expression of their faculty, students, or invited visiting speakers beyond what is acceptable off campus.
• Require universities to create transparent guidelines for students protesting speakers that offend them. Specifically, the guidelines must clearly prohibit protesting students from disrupting or interfering with the rights of others to speak and to listen.
• Stop universities from imposing security fees on recognized campus groups, staff or faculty for lectures or visiting speakers they sponsor.
• Incentivize universities to achieve ideological diversity amongst their faculty in each department.
• Establish simple and effective legal means by which faculty and students, individually or collectively, can enforce the provisions of the above initiatives in civil court.

The experience of the Covid-19 pandemic has shown that post-secondary education can be delivered in innovative, non-traditional ways. An Ontario Party Government wants to make it easier for pedagogical entrepreneurs in our province to establish new ways of delivering high-quality, less expensive post-secondary education.

An Ontario Party Government will:

• Seek proposals from new consortiums or established educational entities for alternative post-secondary institutions and experiences. These new institutes of accredited post-secondary learning will not receive provincial government funding; however, if approved for operation, their students could access provincial government loans available generally for certain post-secondary education.

Currently the Ontario government, or more precisely our province’s taxpayers, cover nearly half--about 46%--of a post-secondary student’s program costs. That funding is not allocated by job market need: a student in a program proven to have few related job prospects after graduation can access the same levels of government funding as others (while their levels of funding are the same, their levels of defaulting on repayment is significantly higher). An Ontario Party Government will incentivize students to funnel into those post-secondary programs for which there is the most labour market demand and greatest opportunity for personal career success.

An Ontario Party Government will:

• Lower the cost of tuition for those post-secondary programs leading to careers with the most labour market demand. Ontario Student Assistance Program (OSAP) loans will also be made more easily available to students accessing those high demand programs.
• Make it virtually free for qualified applicants to train in the skilled trades.
• Remove most, or all, of provincial subsidization for post-secondary programs for which labour market demand is low. OSAP loans for these degrees will be made more competitive. Conversely, to ensure highly qualified applicants are not excluded from such programs, a limited number of government scholarships will be created for top high school graduates who choose to enrol in these now-more-expensive programs.

Over the past two years, the Covid-19 pandemic has led our federal and provincial governments to implement extreme measures as a way of mitigating harm to citizens. However, as time and research has shown, many of those measures have done more harm than good. In Ontario, the economic and societal harm done by our current government’s misguided measures has been compounded by sitting politicians who—despite the growing body of empirical evidence that exposes the folly of their decisions—refuse to admit their errors or commit to a full and speedy reversal of their damaging actions.

The Ontario Party is committed to restoring what our current politicians decimated in the name of Covid-19 and is equally committed to ensuring the government-imposed mistakes and abuses of the last two years are never repeated again.

An Ontario Party Government will:

• Immediately end any remaining restrictions on personal autonomy and liberty that have been instituted by the Ford government in the name of the Covid-19 pandemic.
• Pass legislation that virtually outlaws the provincial government’s ability to impose lockdowns, restrictions, and mandates like those of the last two years by establishing clear and onerously high criteria that must be met before any measures overriding citizens’ Charter rights can be enacted.
• Require businesses and organizations that fired or suspended employees without pay for vaccine non-compliance return those workers to their original positions of employment. Post-secondary students deregistered for non-compliance must be readmitted, course credits lost due to removal before semester’s end must be amended to reflect the grade at which the student stood before being unjustly banned from campus.
• Assist Ontario residents who suffered permanent injuries caused by any of the Covid-19 vaccines in pursuing legal actions against responsible parties including pharmaceutical companies, government & bureaucratic officials, employers & educational administrators.
• Ensure resources and staff in Ontario’s hospitals, retirement homes, and other related facilities are sufficient to keep the medically vulnerable, in particular the elderly, safe and healthy.
• Enforce extreme penalties against employers and other organizations requiring private medical information as a condition of employment or education or using coercive methods to compel subordinates to endure an unwanted medical procedure.
• Pass legislation that gives the citizens of Ontario the strongest protections for freedom of conscience, freedom of religion, freedom of expression, and freedom of assembly, while simultaneously inflicting the greatest penalties upon those who would obstruct those freedoms. In particular, places of worship will be deemed essential services with the rights that affords.

The government of Doug Ford has announced it will be bringing in a digital identity system this fall. All your government issued identification and potentially other official identification issued by cooperating organizations that are currently held as physical cards will be transferred and contained in an app on a smartphone.

The government will have the ability to monitor and control all use of your electronic identification.

Your new electronic identification will be used to apply for government services, perform banking, or participate in other daily activities.

Doug Ford’s government claims that the digital identification system is being implemented for the purposes of convenience. He vigorously denies that the new system will be used to track citizens, violate privacy, or punish those opposed to government policies.

Recent events show that current politicians are not to be trusted.

In 2021 our federal government illegally tracked the cell phones of over 30 million citizens to determine if members of the public were following Covid-19 lockdown orders. When your digital ID reveals your every move, how will the provincial government make use of that information?

In February of this year, the Trudeau Liberals, as punishment for disagreeing with their government, froze the bank accounts of citizens who legally supported the anti-mandates Freedom Convoy Protest in Ottawa. Doug Ford gave his full support to this extreme government overreach.

Specific to Ford, in the summer of 2021 he explicitly promised his government would not require proof of Covid vaccination as it would violate individual citizens' medical privacy. He lied.

Ford further claimed that his government would not allow citizens to be fired or face other punishment for exercising freedom of conscience when it came to vaccination. He lied.

We’ve seen the harm that can be inflicted by governments who do not protect privacy or ideological diversity. Giving them more power to inflict more harm makes no sense.

An Ontario Party Government Will:

• Oppose attempts provincially or federally to institute a centralized digital identification system.

Ontario’s health care system is overpriced and underperforming. Despite being near number one in terms of funding, compared to other jurisdictions and countries providing universal health care (i.e., access to care regardless of ability to pay), our wait times are among the highest, we have fewer physicians, acute care beds, and medical technologies such as MRIs and CT scanners.

In 1993 Ontario residents waited 9.3 weeks to see a medical specialist. Specialist physicians surveyed in 2021 now report a median waiting time of 25.6 weeks between referral from a general practitioner and receipt of treatment.

As government, the Ontario Party will explore alternative care methods including strategies employed in countries such as Australia, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. Each of these countries maintain universal access health-care systems funded at levels near that of Ontario, but they surpass our province in access to health care, health-care outcomes, or both.

Key to their success has been their willingness to allow the private sector a role in the delivery of hospital and surgical care. They also allow residents the choice of purchasing private medical insurance to supplement existing public medical coverage. Such private, supplementary measures facilitate faster access to medical treatments and a wider selection of providers.

The argument that allowing private hospitals or private insurance will lead to less wealthy Ontario residents receiving substandard medical care is incorrect and misses the larger, positive, impact of these proposals. It has been observed in European countries employing this mixed approach that as some citizens access private options, within the public system wait times decrease significantly and access to procedures increases.

An Ontario Party Government Will:

• Permit non-profit organizations and private corporations to build, own, and manage hospitals and will permit citizens to hold supplemental, private medical insurance.
• Provide funding for greater public hospital bed capacity and the hiring of thousands of more healthcare workers.
• Streamline the process for accreditation of foreign-trained healthcare professionals who have been trained in jurisdictions with similar accreditation standards as Canada.
• Open up more spots in Canadian medical schools, which have become notoriously challenging to gain entry. Many smart, young prospective Canadian medical students are travelling to schools in Ireland, the Caribbean and elsewhere, and then finding jobs in the USA. Time to keep these smart students at home.
• Explore broadening the role of nurse practitioners and the creation of other, new healthcare provider roles.
• Protect and assist private and charitable organizations providing alternatives to established medical providers when caring for individuals and families in crisis situations (e.g., Crisis Pregnancy Care Centres; Covid Care Alliance).

In all aspects of governance, an Ontario Party Government is committed to the protection of children and the promotion of individual rights, parental rights, and fiscal responsibility. We will bring those commitments to our restoration of the healthcare system.

An Ontario Party Government Will:

• Prevent the use of non-reversible treatments or procedures for children and youth under 18 experiencing gender dysphoria/gender confusion.
• Require consent by a parent or legal guardian for any medical procedure (including vaccination) on minor children.
• Ensure complete privacy and protection of citizens’ medical records.
• Require medical personnel to inform all potential recipients of medical treatments (including those receiving vaccinations) of the potential benefits and risks. Medical personnel who do not comply will face fines or greater punishments.
• Reduce costs and duplication in our health system through reduction in directors, managers, supervisors, and other administrators.
• Establish clear and transparent bookkeeping protocols to keep managers and administrators financially accountable.
• Stop funding of medically unnecessary procedures and treatments.

Home prices in Ontario have risen 180% in the last decade while average incomes have risen just 38%. In the last year alone, the average price rose by about 25%. With an average home in the province now listing above one million dollars, working class Canadians can no longer afford a place of their own to raise their family.

In other G7 nations, there is an average of 471 housing units per 1,000 residents; in Toronto a study by Scotiabank found just 360 housing units per 1,000 residents.

Simply put, the supply of homes is too low and demand for homes is too high, and, on both fronts, our current politicians are mostly to blame for this crisis.

The solution is not government funding funnelled to new homeowners. As recent history shows, when government money is made available the market responds with proportional increases to home prices.

The solution is a new government with bold new policies.

Currently, related to supply, policies of Doug Ford’s provincial government intentionally restrict the building of types of homes that could significantly alleviate our province’s housing crisis. Specifically, through prohibitive zoning regulations in many urban areas, Ford’s government prevents construction of family dwellings that are not single-family homes. Duplexes and fourplexes are forbidden where they are most needed.

Related to demand, the immigration rates established by Justin Trudeau’s Liberals and fully supported by Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives are putting significant and unequal pressure on housing prices and availability in the urban areas of Ontario.

How unequal is the current situation? Ontario alone settles almost half of all immigrants to Canada.

Research from the Conference Board of Canada and various Canadian universities has shown that high and unequal rates of immigration in Ontario are driving down housing availability and driving up prices.

For example, a study recently published in the Canadian Journal of Urban Research showed high immigration rates have fueled housing prices. Lead author, University of BC geographer Dan Hiebert, concluded: “First and foremost, immigration policy is, essentially, also a form of housing policy.” 

While immigration is, in large measure, a federal jurisdiction, in 2019 Justin Trudeau reaffirmed and strengthened Quebec's right to set its own immigration policy. To the disadvantage of all Ontarians, Doug Ford’s government has made no effort to achieve this same right. 

A final factor driving scarcity of houses and increases in prices is the purchase of Ontario homes by foreign owners. In some rare cases, foreign ownership has been linked to money laundering schemes and organized crime. Again, little action is being taken.

An Ontario Party Government Will:

• Introduce sweeping urban-planning reform to adjust single-family zoning in Ontario’s most housing-deprived cities. In particular, property owners will be given more freedom to construct two- and four-unit residential buildings amidst neighborhoods traditionally reserved for single-family homes.
• Secure the same right to set immigration policy as the Province of Quebec and use those powers to adjust immigration rates and settlement patterns with the ultimate outcome of reducing unsupportable housing demand in many of Ontario’s urban areas.
• Establish an Ontario-focused foreign purchasing ban on residential homes.
• Strike a money laundering task force charged with rooting out corruption and instituting needed regulatory changes related to real estate sales and purchases.

In Canada generally, and Ontario in particular, citizens who hold Pro-life views experience the greatest levels of hostility and discrimination from the medical system, news media, academia, and current governments.

On pain of job loss, health care providers are forced to betray their conscience and provide referrals for abortions and euthanasia.

The media regularly demonize and misrepresent pro-life citizens. They even refuse to call them by their preferred moniker, “pro-life,” in favour of the more negative sounding epithet, “anti-abortion.”

On university and college campuses across the province pro-life student groups are refused official club status or are subjected to punishment by administration.

Federally, in contravention of citizens’ Charter right to freedom of conscience and religion, Trudeau’s Liberals denied funding to summer camps, soup kitchens, and other charitable organizations run by Ontarians with pro-life views.

Provincially, the Ontario government of Kathleen Wynne passed the infamous “bubble-zone” legislation, Bill 163, restricting free speech and criminalizing peaceful, pro-life demonstrators outside of abortion clinics and hospitals performing abortions. Other legislation has allowed children to get an abortion without parental knowledge or consent.

Up to now, no provincial government has ever stood up to this bigotry. None has even acknowledged it exists.

An Ontario Party Government Will:

• Introduce conscience rights protections for health care workers including protecting workers’ jobs if they choose not to participate in any procedures, including abortion and euthanasia.
• Repeal the “Bubble Zone” legislation, Bill 163, and restore and protect free speech for all legally held views, including pro-life views.
• Withhold provincial funding to any university or college that does not protect campus pro-life clubs and afford them equal status and treatment.
• Introduce legislation that: 1) protects a parent’s right to be informed in advance of any procedure, treatment, or medication administered to their child; 2) ensures no child can obtain a procedure, treatment, or medication without explicit parental consent.
• Provide additional funding and support for crisis pregnancy centers.
• Make it easier to adopt and will introduce measures to better assist pregnant women who may wish to put their child up for adoption.

The Ontario Party believes that it is the right of every private citizen to own and enjoy private property. However, government interference with private property has become increasingly noticeable in Ontario. In every community across our province, there are horror stories of various government authorities entering private property and making unreasonable demands with the property owners. Government interference can include fines for trees cut on private property or the general harassment of landowners by officials. Lately, we have also seen private homes deemed ‘Heritage Properties’ without the owner’s consent, which often results in the property being worth significantly less.

As government interference with private property becomes increasingly common, the Ontario Party’s plan to protect private property is needed now more than ever.

An Ontario Party Government will:

• Limit the interference of Conservation Authorities and other provincially regulated bodies on private property. This will be done by:
  • Requiring all Conservation Authorities to either receive the private property owner’s permission, or a court order, before entering any privately owned property.
  • Establishing a firm property line with respect to all bodies of water in Ontario. Currently, cases involving the debate of property lines with respect to bodies of water are subject to the ruling judge’s discretion.
• Redirect Conservation Authorities focus from privately owned property, which only accounts for 13% of all land in Ontario, back to publicly owned and Crown land.
• Require the consent of the private property owner(s) before any property is labelled a ‘Heritage Property’.
• Reduce permits required by the provincial government to do safety upgrades and maintenance to ‘Heritage Properties’.
• Advocate for a ratification of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, to include specific protection of private property rights.
• Remove bureaucracy surrounding the maintenance of established water drainage systems on both private and public property.
  • This would include the removal of the requirement of permits and environmental studies to clean and maintain existing Municipal drains.
• Remove the ability of Conservation Authorities to halt the construction of buildings and other structures on private property, where all building permit requirements have been met.

There is little accountability for elected representatives in Ontario once they get elected. The past two years have highlighted the limited means that Ontario voters have to keep their MPPs accountable. Many Ontarians are frustrated with the fact that they only have a say in holding their MPP accountable on one day every four years during a provincial election, and after that, they have no means to ensure that their MPP follows through on their campaign promises.

During election time, most candidates say and promise whatever they need to garner enough votes to get elected, and then forget about their campaign promises and constituents afterwards, focusing instead on toeing the party line. The result of this is declining voter turnouts and a growing distrust in our representative democratic system, which is broken and in need of fixing.

The focus of most MPPs is on voting according to the party whip so they do not get expelled from the caucus and are able to keep advancing in their political career by never stepping out of the party line. This always comes at the expense of them being able to represent their constituents' voices in Queen’s Park.

True representative democracy is not about toeing the party line. It is about ensuring that MPPs are able to make change for their constituents in Queen’s Park. Being able to speak and vote freely on the issues that matter to their constituents is an integral part of this process.

To ensure that the voices of Ontarians are heard and properly represented in Queen’s Park, an Ontario Party government will:

• Introduce MPP recall legislation that would establish a process for voters to recall their MPP if they fail to represent them in Queen’s Park.
• Allow Ontario Party MPPs to have free vote on all bills, ensuring that they are able to vote according to their conscience and represent their constituents' voices.
• Encourage Ontario Party MPPs to introduce private member bills and not prevent the voting or passage of them.

The counterfeit “conservative” Doug Ford has betrayed genuine conservative policies in every aspect of governing. He’s happy to implement the disastrous left-wing policies of both Justin Trudeau’s Liberals in Ottawa and those of his Ontario Liberal predecessors in the Premier’s office. Throughout the COVID crisis, he has followed the dictates of the globalist World Economic Forum in imposing brutal, independent business-killing lockdowns and supported the federal policy of telling everyone to stay home, turning on the money spigots and hoping for the best, or maybe not even that!

Even in the area of outsourcing his party’s economic policy direction to union activists, Ford followed the hard-left lead. He raised the minimum wage to $15 per hour, a policy he had correctly denounced as a “job killer” when Kathleen Wynne proposed it a few years previously. Ford explained this dramatic policy flip-flop by saying he had consulted with labour leaders and raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour was their number one priority. 

Snuggling up to unions that only eliminate competition and erode the earning power of most workers while ruining the economy is not good enough for Ontario.

The Ontario Party will take action to make Ontario fertile for economic growth and career creation by encouraging a return of the spirit of initiative, entrepreneurship, and industry.

An Ontario Party government will:

• Encourage entrepreneurship by reducing the paperwork and cutting all fees associated with starting a business.
• Provide generous tax benefits and wage subsidies to businesses in the agricultural, food service, and manufacturing sectors to employ native Ontarians, in order to reduce demand for temporary foreign workers.
• Spearhead the revitalization of the domestic automotive industry in Ontario to compete with foreign auto companies, put trade leverage back into Ontario’s hands, and open up thousands of careers for Ontarians.
• Ensure that is it mandatory that businesses accept cash as payment for goods and services.

Doug Ford campaigned on promises to scrap the “Green Energy Plan”, make Hydro leadership more accountable, and deliver a 12% rate reduction. But Justin Trudeau’s best friend just couldn’t say no to the Green Energy Lobby.

Ford has flip flopped on everything to do with energy affordability. First, he gave in to Trudeau and embraced Canada’s Paris Agreement commitments to reduce emissions to 30% below 2005 level. 

Then, Ford introduced his own carbon tax with an industrial tax on “big emitters”, which would only be passed on to consumers.

He handed out hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars in subsidies for purchasers of electric vehicles. 

All of these things mean a higher cost of living.

Ford should have said “NO!” to the Paris Agreement and the impossible spending that always goes along with “green schemes”.  He should have said “NO!” to an industrial carbon tax that only drives up prices and discourages business growth. He should have said “NO!” to electric vehicle subsidies.

Ontario already had a huge electricity debt load thanks to the bad management of his predecessors. He’s made it worse because Justin Trudeau says that’s the way it has to be and has turned out to be no different from Wynne and McGuinty.

The Ontario Party will take immediate steps to make energy more affordable to Ontarians by eliminating “Green Energy” scams and partnering with those who want to make Ontario and our entire country energy self-sufficient.

An Ontario Party government will:

• Partner with western provinces to push for an energy corridor between Ontario and Alberta.
• Eliminate the PST on gasoline and diesel while the price is at elevated levels - saving 16 cents per liter at today's gas prices.
• Eliminate the provincial carbon tax and the industrial carbon tax, and seek to challenge the federal carbon tax.
• Develop a strategic oil reserve to cushion consumers during supply shocks and bolster demand in times of crisis.

The Ontario Party believes in clean air, clean water, and clean soil. 

We don’t believe in the kind of climate alarmism that leads to ever more stringent regulations on Canadians, while countries like China and others continue to increase their emissions and take a greater share of our manufacturing overseas. Much of our obsession with this issue has resulted in disappearing manufacturing jobs, oil pipeline projects scrapped or delayed, and skyrocketing energy prices brought on by “green energy” schemes embraced just as much by Doug Ford as they were by his Liberal predecessors.

Doug Ford has been persuaded by his friend Justin Trudeau to comply with the goals of the Paris Agreement on limiting emissions. The Ontario Party will never bind our province’s economy to unattainable and meaningless goals that destroy our natural resource industries, increase the cost of living for all Ontarians, and give China a carte blanche to pollute. 

The Ontario Party will always pursue rational, not radical, measures which result in healthier lives.

An Ontario Party government will:

• Support right-to-repair laws to keep appliances and equipment out of landfills.
• Completely ban the dumping of untreated waste into bodies of water (which currently happens to the tune of billions of liters per year in Canada)
• Provide municipalities with funding to upgrade sewage treatment to make this a reality
• Focus on cleaning garbage out of our forests, lakes, and rivers.
• Direct conservation authorities away from private property and towards the management of public crown land.
• Find more environmentally friendly pest control management solutions that reduce reliance on pesticides and airborne spraying of urban, suburban, and rural areas.
• Create more connections between green spaces across Ontario and pass legislation to further protect the Green Belt in order to restrain urban sprawl from encroaching on agricultural land.

Not enough attention has been paid to the deterioration of Ontario’s roads and other infrastructure over the past decades. Damaged roads and bridges must be repaired, and the Ontario Party has a plan to shore up resources to perform these repairs.

Ford’s PC party likes to say Ontario is ‘Open For Business’, but these are just words when not accompanied by the development of communities, particularly in Northern Ontario, that will be capable of attracting and supporting businesses who want to set up shop there. 

Northern Ontario communities must be able to attract qualified employees by having all the amenities, like health care services and schools. The communities must also be made more accessible by highway and railway. 

The Ontario Party will take all measures necessary to open up Northern Ontario.

An Ontario Party government will:

• Reducing environmental red tape for construction projects in Northern Ontario.
• Shore up resources to repair damaged roads and infrastructure across Ontario.
• Expand railroad lines in Northern Ontario.
• Add arteries from the Trans Canada Highway to townships in Northern Ontario.
• Develop Northern townships with public amenities.