Prime Minister Doug Ford now has a four-year term to “get it right,” according to his conservative progressive Ontario election slogan.
These are the main promises he and his party made during the election period and in the run-up to the campaign.
Present an (almost) identical budget
The government introduced the 2022 budget in late April, then immediately postponed the legislature for the election campaign, so the budget was not even debated, let alone approved. Ford (and, after a bit of a drag, his finance minister Peter Bethlenfalvy) said the PCs, if re-elected, will present the budget without any significant change.
However, that changed less than two weeks later, when computers added a $ 450 million promise they had neglected to put in the budget: raising rates for the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP) by one. five percent.
Reduction of the gas tax
This will probably be the easiest promise for the government: the fuel tax will be reduced by 5.7 cents per liter of petrol, from 1 July. PCs have only pledged to maintain the tax cut for six months. The loss of revenue for the provincial treasury during this period is estimated at $ 645 million.
Keep housing costs low
Rising housing costs in Ontario were a major concern for voters in the 2022 provincial election. (Evan Mitsui / CBC)
This will undoubtedly be the most difficult promise fulfilled by the government. Polls during the campaign repeatedly showed that rising housing costs were a major concern for voters. Housing affordability was also the topic most often mentioned by a representative sample of Ontario’s nearly 24,000 residents who responded to CBC News Vote Compass’s online civic engagement tool.
Ford gave more details about his party’s housing plans during a campaign stop on May 21 in London. He said the PC plan “will help reduce costs for households by building supply that meets the demand for home ownership.”
While it’s hard to gauge whether a promise to “keep costs low” is really being fulfilled, there are some more specific promises set out in a PC Party press release. These include “a re-elected Ontario PC government will build 1.5 million new homes over the next 10 years” and “repress and punish land and housing permit speculators who are artificially drowning the supply of new homes and increasing costs “.
At that campaign break, Ford met three families who he said had a price outside of home ownership.
“I gave them my word that we will not stop at anything to make sure we address the housing crisis in Ontario,” he later commented.
Build Highway 413
This campaign promise became the perfect wedge problem for PCs, helping them sweep all the seats in the Peel, Halton and York regions. Given the strength and frequency with which Ford pledged to build Highway 413, it’s hard to imagine that it won’t deliver on that promise. However, he has been deliberately vague about cost and timing, buying himself some leeway to see if he arrives on time and on budget.
This is what the Ontario government describes as its preferred route for Highway 413 that connects the northern and western parts of the Greater Toronto Area, between existing Highways 400 and 401. (Hailley Furkalo / CBC)
PCs made other promises to build highways during the campaign in the province, including widening the 417 in Ottawa and rebuilding Highway 7 between Kitchener and Guelph, something their government had already promised by 2020. .
Expand, renovate hospitals
In a flurry of government announcements in the weeks leading up to the campaign, Ford and his then-health minister Christine Elliott toured the province to promise hospital construction work in numerous places, including Barrie, Brampton, Brantford, Kitchener. Ottawa, Scarborough and Windsor. The timelines for when several of them will actually be built are still unclear, with some of the promises of future construction only for the next planning phase.
During the campaign, Ford pledged to “shovel the ground this year” at a new 469-bed hospital in the Niagara region, a project that provincial governments have been talking about since 2014.
Long-term care
The government has pledged to create 30,000 new long-term care facilities by 2028, and this latest budget graph shows that most of them will have to be built by the time the next election arrives in June 2026. In a press release in April, the Ministry of Long-Term Care said that the 365 projects that are now in the planning and construction phase exceed this target.
Ontario PCs 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 each long-term care resident will receive an average of four hours a day of direct care for fiscal year 2024-25. The latest government reform package promises tougher inspections of long-term care homes and tougher fines for those who break the rules, but does not implement all the recommendations of the commission that investigated what went wrong in the care system. ‘Ontario during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Plan to stay open
One of the five points in the PC Party’s “Get It Done” campaign publication refers to Ontario’s plan to stay open, the government’s long-term plan to deal with the post-Omicron phase of the pandemic. COVID-19.
In its campaign press releases, Ford’s party pledges to “hire more nurses, doctors and support staff, allowing more seniors to stay home and produce more critical vaccines and supplies such as PPE here even in Ontario. ”
All of these promises are specific enough to be measurable, though setting the bar to “more” makes the promises less difficult to achieve.
Exploding the ring of fire
The Ford government is directly linking the future of the electric vehicle industry in southern Ontario to the mineral-rich deposit in northern Ontario, nicknamed the ring of fire. The region is said to have a supply of critical minerals essential for the production of electric vehicle batteries.
The Ford government says growing demand for electric vehicles will stimulate the need for minerals in the “Ring of Fire” in northern Ontario that can be used to make electric vehicle batteries. (David Donnelly / CBC)
“This will bring prosperity to the entire region,” Ford said at a news conference on May 12. “As part of the entire supply chain, it will create thousands of jobs in the north, with critical minerals, and where I am heading today in southwestern Ontario.”
At the forefront of the PC’s five-point campaign promise is the promise of “a mining plan that will finally open the ring of fire,” once the previous Liberal governments in Ontario began talk about the mineral deposit. in 2010.
In a previous campaign change across northern Ontario, Ford promised that its government would build a $ 1 million road to the remote ore field, which it had really promised to do in 2018, even “if I had to get on that excavator myself.”
End political party subsidies
Ford promised for the first time in 2018 to abandon the taxpayer-funded grant provided to Ontario political parties. Instead, his government denied this last year, announcing that it would extend the grant until 2024 but would end it by then.
The amount provided to each party is based on the number of votes received by each party in the most recent election. Following last week’s results, the PC Party is about to receive about $ 4.9 million in each of the next two years, at the current subsidy rate, with the NDP and the Liberals getting about $ 2.8 million. dollars and the Green Party set at about $ 2.8 million a year. $ 700,000.
Climate change goals
The deadly storm that hit southern Ontario on May 21, causing damage like this in Ottawa, briefly put climate change on the agenda of the election campaign. (Justin Tang / The Canadian Press)
It was not something Ford highlighted during the campaign, but his government has repeatedly insisted that it will achieve the 2030 target of reducing Ontario’s greenhouse gas emissions by 30% from 2005 levels. As CBC News reported in April, the government has quietly reviewed its plan on how to achieve this, but is still predicting success.
Previous liberal governments had led the province more than two-thirds of the way to the 30% emission reduction target when Ford came to power in 2018, mainly by phasing out coal-fired electricity.
Promising to keep promises
The day after his resounding victory in the election night, in which the PCs occupied more seats than any party since 1987, Ford offered one last promise: “We will make sure we keep all our promises,” he told a press conference.