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Critics of the Ford government have been given plenty of pages of ammunition in a report released Wednesday morning through Ontario’s auditor general.
Acting Auditor General Nick Stavropoulos reports annually on a dozen value-for-money audits, many of which verify the government’s long-standing criticisms of its most sensitive issues.
The more than 800-page report contained complaints about the government’s plan to move the Ontario Science Centre to Ontario Place, its control of the environment, the physical care crisis and the way partisanship has been infused into taxpayer-funded government advertising.
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.
A few hours later, MPs agreed to nominate Shelley Spence, who worked as an accountant and auditor for 30 years and made the decision through a bipartisan committee.
The government then suspended the House session until the New Year, a move opposition parties portrayed as an attempt by Prime Minister Doug Ford’s progressive conservatives to shirk duty from the tumultuous autumn session that culminated in revelations in Parliament.
Treasury Board President Caroline Mulroney thanked the acting auditor for his report.
“Each year, our government is pleased to participate in this exercise of accountability to let other Ontarians know how their tax dollars are being spent,” Mulroney said.
Opposition parties also welcomed the report.
NDP leader Marit Stiles said the report confirms what she has been saying all along: “The Conservatives have spent an entire year unilaterally pursuing unpopular policies, with the full effect of their flawed plans on ordinary people. They’ve wasted Ontarians’ time and their taxes.
Ontario Liberal leader Bonnie Crombie was not in Queen’s Park, but said on X that the report “reaffirms how incompetent and disconnected this failed Conservative government is. “
And Green Leader Mike Schriner said it “makes it transparent that the Ford government doesn’t care what ordinary Ontarians think, it doesn’t ask them, it doesn’t pay attention to them. “
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 parking lots nearby will be funded through provincial taxpayers to cover leases signed through spa builder Therme and amphitheater operator Live Nation at Ontario Place, according to the auditor’s report.
If no new parking lots are built between 2028 and 2030, taxpayers will pay an unspecified bill as a penalty.
Infrastructure Minister Kinga Surma, who is responsible for the Ford government’s Ontario Place redevelopment project, said after the report’s release that “these sanctions are meant to ensure that we meet our deadlines. “
While the precise main points of a new parking lot at Ontario Place, which in the past was planned to be built underground at the man-made waterfront site, are still being negotiated, the auditor’s report also found that the provincial government is contractually obligated to meet certain needs in the interest of Therme and Live Nation.
Last week, the Ford government agreed, as part of its “New Deal for Toronto” with Mayor Olivia Chow, to build a new parking lot at Exhibition Place, the mainland across from Ontario Place.
The auditor’s report also highlighted flaws in the business case for the relocation of the Ontario Science Centre that Infrastructure Ontario released this week and which the government used to justify the facility’s relocation. This business case lacked key considerations, the Stavropoulos report found, adding appropriate queries.
In three reports, the Auditor General documented the deterioration of Ontario’s physical care formula through the cascading effects of staffing shortages.
The report reveals that House Bill 124, which capped annual salary increases for many public servants by adding nurses to 1% for three years, contributed to the workers’ body crisis, one of the main fears of government critics.
Another fact known through the General Assembly is the proliferation of for-profit employment agencies, which critics accuse the government of failing to control.
The General Assembly detailed how the effect of the exodus of health care personnel is being felt system-wide, focusing on overcrowded or closed emergency departments.
Patients wait longer to be seen by doctors at emergency branches and wait longer to get inpatient beds, and that’s when emergency branches are open. While unplanned closures of emergency branches were very rare before 2019-2020, the auditor knew more than two hundred as early as June 2023, when the province had not yet come up with a comprehensive plan to save 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 crisis is felt in the long-term care sector, where at least a quarter of all homes have consistently failed to meet the province’s much-vaunted direct care hours targets in 2021-2022 and 2022-2023.
Health Minister Sylvia Jones defended her government, citing the efforts it has undertaken to increase health-care workforce through immigration and training and her overall budget of over $80-billion.
Stavropoulos found that the Ford government is playing with the Environmental Bill of Rights, which ostensibly enshrines the right of Ontarians to have a say in legislation that protects the environment.
Among other examples, he pointed to the “radical” and now-repealed Green Belt law and municipal plans, writing that the government “made key adjustments temporarily and without good enough public consultation. These adjustments affected the authorities of conservation, heritage protection, municipal parks and infrastructure. “, wetlands, development of regional plans and development of rights appeal plans.
Stavropoulos’ report also shows little about aggregate extraction: sand, gravel, and stone quarried and quarried and used in nearly every structural project. The ministry’s inspectors found that less than a portion of the sites inspected were passable between 2018 and 2022. Three companies exceeded their annual extraction limit by more than 1,000 percent, but the province did not impose penalties, the attorney general found.
Despite the low compliance rate, Ontario imposed a total of $1,230 in fines between 2018 and 2022, a fraction of the more than $300,000 in unpaid payments (on which the province applies interest). It is less expensive to pay the penalty ($300) for non-payment of the annual payment than to pay the payment ($394 minimum).
And only a fraction of the sites are inspected for starters. During the Ford administration’s tenure, overall site inspection rates decreased by about two-thirds, from 1322 inspections in 2018 to 479 in 2022. Some of this decline is due to the pandemic, however, the trend began before COVID and continued after the Ford government’s tenure. One main explanation for the decline: There are only 34 inspectors for the entire province and almost a portion of them have been on the job for less than a year. Stavropoulos noted. Even aggregate companies complained to the attorney general, claiming that the inspectors’ inexperience “damaged the symbol of the entire industry. “
The Office of the Auditor General is also guilty of reviewing and approving government advertising expenditures. He again expressed considerations about what he sees as overly partisan publicity by the Ford administration, a factor for which they criticized liberals when they were in power, and which Ford’s progressive conservatives vowed to crack down on when they came to power.
The Conservatives have now abandoned that promise and made plans to “maintain the prestige quo,” according to the government’s reaction in the auditor’s report.
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.
“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.
However, both campaigns met the “narrow definition of ‘partisanship'” under existing government advertising legislation. Under the leadership of former Prime Minister Kathleen Wynne, the Liberals amended that legislation to loosen the definition of “partisanship. “The workplace used its discretion in what exceeded the limits, and conservatives promised to repair the previous point of supervision.
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 last fiscal year. Twice as much taxpayer cash has been spent in each of the last two years, attributed to increased advertising during the pandemic for campaigns advertising things like fitness and COVID recommendations. -19 vaccination.
The amount the government spent on advertising in 2022-23 is a few million dollars lower than it spent in 2019-20, which included the first few weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic, and about twice as much as in 2018-19, which marked an all-time low for the government since the auditor’s office was given oversight of the provincial advertising spending in 2005. That was also the Ford PCs’ first full year in power.
The Auditor General’s report also put the tourism sector to the test. Stavropoulos found that investment delays and the lack of an “effective long-term strategic plan” for the tourism sector are restricting economic growth.
His report said events such as art, food and music festivals had been cancelled because the ministry “did not always approve support in a timely way,” resulting in lost opportunities for local economies.
Citing research conducted through Destination Ontario, Stavropoulos’ report also says the province could see a greater economic boost if some advertising dollars were reallocated from marketing to Ontarians to those living south of the border.
Stavropoulos also said travel industry oversight could use a “comprehensive review.” In particular, he said the Travel Industry Council of Ontario, which regulates travel agents and wholesalers, has a similar structure to the ‘90s when people booked travel in-person or over the phone. Despite travel bookings moving online, “consumers are only protected by TICO when they purchase travel from those with a physical location in Ontario.”
Meanwhile, Toronto and Ottawa possibly lost out on a more than $50-million boost to their economies since 2018 because the Metro Toronto Convention Centre (MTCC) and the Ottawa Convention Centre (OCC) were too focused on profits, Stavropoulos’ report stated.
The government-operated convention centres “set their bid price too high in efforts to achieve greater profitability” for a total of 19 events, the report stated. These two centres have also seen a combined 50-per-cent drop in bookings compared to before the pandemic, with some of the contributing factors including hotel room shortages and limited flights.
However, another report looked at the long-standing practice of seeking a less difficult position to take the driving test, and the auditor general concluded that those who travel to big cities to get their licenses elsewhere face demanding situations, more common collisions than those who take the driving test. urban streets where they live.
Orangeville is a popular destination among Brampton residents, who account for 42 percent of all drivers checked at the city’s control center in a recent 15-month period reviewed by the auditor’s office. Only two percent of the other people were screened on the Orangeville DriveTest. The center lived in the city.
In another example from the same era of testing that began in January 2022, 1,000 new drivers drove five hours from the Greater Toronto Area to Hawkesbury, in the lower Ottawa Valley, to take a driving test.
Serco, the company overseen by the Department of Transport to administer driving tests, and its parent company Pleno, have been deemed “ineffective” by the Auditor General.
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