🤬"We are in a terrible situation Ontario and Ford is spending half a BILLION on parking garage for a secret spa deal? It is shameful! I can't take it anymore!" ER closures. Homeless crisis. AG Report confirms worst. My full rant ▶️ https://t.co/473H3KHmkb #ONpoli #ON #OnHealth pic.twitter.com/1l34iXbIqW

— Laura Babcock (@LauraBabcock) December 6, 2023

The Trillium:Critics of the Ford government got hundreds of pages of ammunition in a massive report released by Ontario’s auditor general Wednesday morning.

Acting auditor general Nick Stavropoulos’s annual report contains a dozen value-for-money audits, many of which back up long-standing criticisms of the government on its most sensitive issues.

The 800-plus page report contained criticisms of the government’s plan to move the Ontario Science Centre to Ontario Place, its stewardship of the environment, the staffing crisis in health care, and how partisanship has been infused in taxpayer-funded government advertising.

Conservatives like to oppose governments redistributing wealth. But the auditor says @FordNation is redistributing public health care dollars to the private sector – Redistributing the money of common people to ultra wealthy people. Medical question: Are all scum bags hypocrites? https://t.co/VhviEdNbbY

— Charles Adler (@charlesadler) December 7, 2023

When Stavropoulos delivered the report at Queen’s Park in the morning he told reporters he was hoping to learn if he’d lose “acting” from his title, which would put in him the role for a decade.

Hours later, MPPs agreed to appoint Shelley Spence, who’s worked as an account and auditor for thirty years and was selected by a bipartisan committee.

The government then moved to adjourn the chamber’s business until the New Year, a move that was cast by opposition parties as an attempt by Premier Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives as an attempt to flee from accountability for the tumultuous fall sitting that was capped by revelations in the auditor’s report.

Apparently stealing from Ontarian’s requires 5 months of paid time off…
We live in an autocracy/kleptocracy/idiocracy.
Fucken wild. https://t.co/fe7hnEluzk

— Dean Blundell🇨🇦 (@ItsDeanBlundell) December 6, 2023

NDP Leader Marit Stiles said the report confirms what she’s been saying all along: “The Conservatives have spent a whole year unilaterally ramming through unpopular policies with complete disregard for how their bad planning was impacting regular people. They’ve wasted Ontarians’ time and they’ve wasted their tax dollars too.”

Ontario Liberal Leader Bonnie Crombie wasn’t at Queen’s Park, but said on X that the report “reaffirms just how incompetent and out of touch this failed Conservative government really is.”

And Green leader Mike Schriner said it “clearly shows that the Ford government doesn’t really give a damn about what ordinary Ontarians think about, doesn’t ask them, doesn’t listen to them.”

Paving paradise at Ontario Place

https://twitter.com/jm_mcgrath/status/1732429105126162865?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1732429105126162865%7Ctwgr%5Ea0e226d7656f5fa3d6a1126c958c74e5ee2a73b5%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fpublish.twitter.com%2F%3Furl%3Dhttps%3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com%2Fjm_mcgrath%2Fstatus%2F1732429105126162865

One audit validates a key criticism of the government’s decision to move the Ontario Science Centre to Ontario Place: its relocation is being used to justify a taxpayer-funded parking lot for a private spa on the waterfront.

Hundreds of new nearby parking spots must be comped by provincial taxpayers to accommodate leases signed by spa-builder Therme and amphitheatre-operator Live Nation at Ontario Place, the auditor’s report revealed.

If new parking isn’t built between 2028 and 2030, taxpayers will be footing an unspecified bill as a penalty.

The auditor’s report also poked holes in the business case for the Ontario Science Centre’s move that Infrastructure Ontario released earlier in the week and the government has used as justification for the facility’s move. That business case lacked key considerations, Stavropoulos’ report determined, including proper consultations.

Health-care emergency

In a trio of reports, the auditor general documented the deterioration of Ontario’s health-care system caused by the cascading effects of staffing shortages.

The report finds Bill 124, which limited annual wage increases for many public workers, including nurses, to one per cent for three years, was a contributing factor to the staffing crisis — a primary concern of the government’s critics.

Another factor identified by the AG is the proliferation of for-profit staffing agencies, which critics charge the government has failed to control.

The AG detailed how the impact of the staffing flight from health care is felt across the system, centring on overcrowded — or closed — emergency departments.

AG report says doctors paid 5 times more than nurses to give COVID shots, slams Ford for ‘ignoring’ own experts on Highway 413 https://t.co/NXFZ2oNwD2 via @torontostar

— Althia Raj (@althiaraj) November 30, 2022

Patients are waiting longer to be seen by doctors in emergency departments and waiting longer for in-patient beds — and that’s when emergency departments are open. While unplanned ED closures were very rare before 2019-20, the auditor tracked over 200 of them by June 2023, by which point the province had not yet made a comprehensive plan to prevent them.

Staffing shortages are particularly acute in the north, where hospitals have to rely more on agency nurses, paying about three times the cost of staff nurses, including profit margins for the companies, in addition to travel costs. The overreliance on agency staff was primarily caused, according to one northern hospital, due to a mass exodus of nurses because of the pandemic and Bill 124.

The crunch is also felt in long-term care, where at least a quarter of all homes failed to consistently reach the province’s vaunted targets for direct-care hours in 2021-22 and 2022-23.

Health Minister Sylvia Jones defended her government, citing its efforts to increase health-care workforce through immigration and training and her overall budget of over $80-billion.

Environmental oversight, democratic input lacking

Stavropoulos found the Ford government is playing fast and loose with the Environmental Bill of Rights, which ostensibly enshrines Ontarians’ rights to provide feedback on laws that affect the environment. 

Among other examples, he pointed to the “sweeping” and now-reversed Greenbelt and municipal plan legislation, writing that the government “made key changes quickly and without adequate public consultation. These changes affected conservation authorities, heritage protection, municipal parkland and infrastructure, wetlands, regional planning and planning appeal rights.”

Stavropoulos’ report also found little oversight of aggregate extraction — the sand, gravel and stone dug or blasted out of pits and quarries and used in nearly all construction projects. Ministry inspectors found less than half of inspected sites satisfactory between 2018–2022, with operators failing to submit reports, pay annual fees or keep to their extraction limits. Three companies blew past their annual extraction limit by over 1,000 per cent but the province didn’t pursue penalties, the AG found.

Self-promoters

The Ford government’s two highest-cost advertising campaigns “would not have passed” the auditor’s review under previous, stricter government ad-spending laws, the report said. These ad campaigns were focused on promoting the government’s health-care and education policies. Of the $28.86 million in advertising spending that the auditor general had the authority to examine — which, under current law, excludes many digital ad buys — about 80 per cent was spent on these two campaigns alone.

The Ford government stole $25 million from us while emergency rooms closed, infrastructure fell apart, people on ODSP starved, and homeless people froze in the streets. https://t.co/ko0GgAaJwF

— David Moscrop (@David_Moscrop) December 6, 2023

“Our office concluded that the primary objectives of these ads and/or information on their respective websites was to foster a positive impression of the government,” the auditor general wrote in his report.

These two campaigns, however, complied with “the narrow definition of ‘partisan’” under current government advertising laws. Under former premier Kathleen Wynne, the Liberals changed these laws to loosen the definition of “partisan.” Before then, the auditor’s office used its discretion to determine what crossed the line, and the PCs had promised to restore the previous level of oversight.

When the Wynne government gave the auditor authority over digital ads, some forms of advertising weren’t included. As a result, $4.86-million worth of digital ads — 14 per cent of all government advertising spending — weren’t scrutinized by the auditor general’s office. 

In total, the provincial government spent $33.72 million on advertising in the last fiscal year. Twice as much taxpayer dollars were spent in each of the past two years, which is attributed to increased advertising during the pandemic for campaigns to promote things like health guidance and COVID-19 vaccination.