By
Colin D'Mello &
Isaac Callan
Global News
Published September 13, 2023
10 min read
After a sweeping and emphatic victory in the 2018 provincial election, effectively wiping the Ontario Liberals off the political map, Premier Doug Ford had a clear message for his ministers of health and education: it was time for dramatic change.
The ministers of the province’s largest ministries were both given sweeping mandates to roll out significant — and potentially controversial — changes.
The tasks and reforms handed to Christine Elliott in health and Lisa Thompson in education were contained within the mandate letters Ford wrote in 2018. The letters, which were closely guarded secret by the government for years, can now be exclusively revealed by Global News in an ongoing series, ‘Mandated.’
In the Progressive Conservative party’s 2018 election platform, A Plan for the People, Ford took aim at Ontario’s education system, campaigning along on the idea of a woke, culture war.
“More and more of our schools have been turned into social laboratories and our kids into test subjects,” the platform read.
Ford pledged to get “back to basics” by changing the math curriculum, fixing testing scores and coming up with a new sex education plan. Those promises were among the dramatic changes included in the mandate letter sent to Ford’s first education minister.
“Repeal discovery math and work with education experts to replace this failed ideological experiment with a math curriculum that teaches the building blocks needed for a successful future,” Ford told his new education minister.
Instead, the minister was directed to concentrate on a key metric — standardized math test scores — and to reverse the decline.
“Ensure mathematics is a focus throughout the education system,” the education minister was told. “Ultimately, your goal should be to dramatically improve Ontario’s math scores.”
Five years later, test scores under the Progressive Conservatives continue to falter.
In October 2022, the latest data showed that after more than a term in government, the majority of of Grade 6 students were failing their standardized math test, which the Ford government blamed on pandemic-related learning loss.
Ford, in 2018, also ordered his education minister to repeal the “current inappropriate sex education curriculum” and replace it with a new “age appropriate” version after consultation.
The overhaul outlined in the mandate letter was a nod to the social conservative wing of the Ontario PC party, which helped propel Doug Ford into the leadership in March 2018.
Ultimately, when the new sex education system was announced, experts widely said it was the same as the version introduced by the former Liberal government.
While the mandate letter also instructed the education minister to “increase supports for students in the classroom,” the document doesn’t offer specific instruction on what types of supports the ministry was intended to invest in. It just mentioned a larger $3.8 billion mental health services budget.
Between 2018 and 2022, the overall education budget increased by 8.7 per cent from $29.8 billion to $32.4 billion, leading to criticisms that the Ford government has been underfunding the province’s school system because the increases have not kept up with the pace of inflation.
Missing from the mandate letter are any bargaining objectives with Ontario’s various education unions, although all ministers were told to “adhere to the program-spending guidelines” established by the treasury board and to expect a “disruptive” response as a result.
Before the Ford government decided to split up the responsibility for Health and Long-Term Care into two separate portfolios, the combined ministry was given the task of creating an “efficient” and “cutting edge” health-care system that still put patients at the centre of the decision making.
In July 2018, Premier Doug Ford’s instructions to his then-Minister of Health, Christine Elliott, were clear: reform and restructure the system to keep in line with spending restraints.
“The administration of health in Ontario has undergone several large changes in recent years … report back with additional reforms to help invest precious health-care dollars in front line care instead of back room administration,” the mandate latter read.
“Review the structure of health-care oversight from the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care and its agencies to create a health-care system that is patient and family centred,” read another bullet point from the minister’s mandate letter.
The result was a sweeping consolidation of the health-care system with the creation of Ontario Health in 2019, and the dissolution of five health agencies including Cancer Care Ontario, Health Quality Ontario and eHealth.
The government also announced the clustering of local health integration networks and attempted to downsize the number of public health units. The government’s plans, however, were disrupted by the COVID-19 global pandemic, shortly after the creation of Ontario Health.
Weaved throughout the mandate letter to the health minister is a repeated theme of finding savings and efficiencies, where possible, and reinvesting the money into the front lines.
OHIP+, a late-stage policy by the former Liberal government that made prescription medication free for anyone 25 and under, became an early target for the Ford government.
“Repurpose OHIP+ into a government as second payer system,” the mandate letter stated. “Consider how the structure of the province’s various prescription drug programs could be enhanced to save precious healthcare dollars, reduce red tape, and enhance patient experiences.”
When it came to negotiations with Ontario doctors, the minister was directed to resolve the labour dispute with the Ontario Medical Association while also looking for savings.
“Ensure the province is getting adequate value-for-money while also treating doctors with respect, such as on conscience rights issues,” the mandate stated without elaborating on which issues the minister was to focus on.
Even the instructions on ending hallway medicine, a significant problem plaguing Ontario’s hospitals and one Ford promised to fix, focused on delivering a health-care system that is “efficient, patient focused, cutting edge, and world class.”
Despite the focus on savings and efficiencies, pandemic-related spending forced the government to dramatically scale up spending on Ontario’s health-care system between 2019 and 2022. The health-care budget was increased from $63.5 billion to $75.2 billion, an increase of 18 per cent over the course of the government’s first mandate.
Shortly after 2022 re-election, however, the Ford government announced the introduction of more private, for-profit healthcare facilities in the province’s OHIP-funded system, after the government claimed the “status quo” could not continue.
The government faced accusations that the PC party deliberately underfunded health care to create the context for the publicly funded, private delivery model.
Here is the mandate letter given to the Minister of Education in 2018:
Here is the mandate letter given to the Minister of Health and Long-Term care in 2018:
This story is the fourth story in the new Global News series ‘Mandated.’ Over several days, a series of stories will reveal the contents of the Ford government’s first set of mandate letters, handed to ministers after the party formed government in 2018. The letters have been kept secret since Doug Ford’s first election — a battle that has gone all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada.
Photo illustration by Janet Cordahi
Comments