Doug Ford’s first month in office offers ’90s nostalgia

DoFo ditches revenue and rewinds policies

Since taking office on June 29, Ontario Premier Doug Ford seems to think the best policy is an undone policy. In the last month, Ford has dismantled key progressive policies of the previous administration with haste and little regard for consequences. Rather than focusing on innovation and strategy to build on and amend established policies, Ford prefers to simply hit the undo button.Ford’s choices leave us with more questions than answers. Why are these policy changes being made and who is benefiting from them? Is Ford simply appeasing those who voted him into office? Does retrogression sustain reconciliation or new technological norms? Or, most troubling of all, does the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario genuinely believe in the efficacy of these outdated policies?

Find your pogs, stock your Y2K bunker with canned goods, and bring your Sony Discman because this throwback might get a little bumpy.

Pursuant to his brother’s claim to fame to end gravy-trains, Doug Ford’s Conservatives have introduced the end of cap and trade to Queen’s Park. The legislation will end $1.9 billion in revenue and leave businesses with minimal legal recourse to be fully compensated for the $2.9 billion in carbon credits left on their ledgers. That cap and trade revenue was leveraged by the previous government to pay for updates, revisions, and new initiatives, such as school repairs, curricula changes, and green technologies established since January 2017. It also satisfied the federal government’s provisions for provincial carbon taxes. The savings for each consumer crop up to be roughly seven dollars per month for utilities and less than five cents per litre at the pump, which is equal to a savings of less than two extra Big Mac sandwiches per month. No fries, no fountain pop.

On July 9, the Doug Ford administration cancelled all current or future funding to revise existing elementary and secondary schools’ history curricula in Ontario. The previous government — in an effort to uphold a few recommendations from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission — promised a portion of $250 million over three years to update social studies, history, and geography curricula. The money came from cap and trade. The updates included over 5,000 new maps and a focus on discussing lived-experiences during the epoch of residential schools within Canada. 

Once hailed as a “huge step forward” by Ontario Regional Chief Isadore Day, the defunding of the program deletes those movements towards reconciliation without regard for discussion or insight. Established in 1883, the last closing in 1996, residential schools are ingrained in Canadian history. Many of the 139 residential schools were centres of disease, ethnic cleansing, and sexual abuse.

Since the Conservative’s cancellation of future funding, Peggy Sattler — a New Democratic MPP of London-West — said that “[t]he curriculum in Ontario’s public schools is outdated, and we simply have to do better for our children.” Instead of doing better, however, Doug Ford failed Ontario’s youth again with his rewind of sexual health education all the way back to 1998. Backstreet’s back, alright.

A time before same-sex marriage was legalised, before the suicide of Amanda Todd, before the dot-com bubble burst, before PornHub.

In the late-’90s, roughly one in three Canadian households possessed a personal computer. Back then, a teenager’s access to pornography was often limited to stolen magazines, worn-out VHS tapes, and dial-up. There did not exist a need to discuss representations of sex in media in the classroom.

In 2012 — three years before the revised curricula was instated — Internet access was over four in five households: an increase beyond two-fold. The recently defunct 2015 curricula allowed optional discussions on pornography beginning in grade nine, opening a discourse about representations of sex in music, movies, magazines, and social media.

Under the 1998 standards, we never mandated that teachers inform elementary school students about the differences between wanted and unwanted touching. Nor did we explain that the overwhelming majority of sexual assault towards minors is perpetrated by familiar faces. The new standards did. Why ought we ignore two decades of tax-payer funded discussion and research? Why disarm youths’ ability to healthily confront abuse?It’s clear that Ford is more interested in appeasing his socially conservative voters than providing the necessary social training and linguistic arsenals for Ontario’s youth to know if and when they are being abused.

Last, we must not forget his recent attempt to reduce Toronto’s municipal representation from 45 seats to 25. Interpolation of historically-based increments to the number of councillors in Toronto between 1988 and 2007 would land this rewind back to 1992. A time when Kurt Cobain and Pablo Escobar were alive, and season four of The Simpsons premiered.

Doug Ford is cancelling the last quarter century in ways we all wish we could cancel our cell phone contracts. But, hey, dollar beers, right?

Photo Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons via CC0