A little while ago, this set of tweets went viral (yes I’m still calling them “tweets”).
While the actual cancer screening statement has been debunked, I do want to make another point that I haven’t really seen anyone mention so far.
Doug Ford’s brother and former mayor of Toronto, Rob Ford, struggled with drug addiction. In fact, it created a huge scandal across the country. For a while, Toronto was known as the city with the mayor who smokes crack cocaine.
Rob Ford passed away in March of 2016 from cancer. Flash forward to today, his brother, Doug, is serving his second term as premier of Ontario. He has recently implemented The Safer Ontario program, which essentially is making it harder for people suffering addiction to get the help they need.
In my last post about the safer Ontario program, I wrote a lot about how this will damage our community but I didn’t explain why Doug Ford is implementing this program.
To summarize my last post, Doug Ford’s Safer Ontario Program aims to close safe injection sites near daycares and schools, which will inevitably increase the number of people getting arrested for using drugs in parks near schools and daycares without the protection of people trained in overdose prevention and care. He is also aiming to clear encampments without any efforts to move them to the “HART hubs” he’s investing in. He is also “strengthening” the bail program which will make it harder for people to post bail. His intention with this is to “keep criminals behind bars” while actively creating more criminals.
The question is- why is he doing this? The answer is simple. Minimum wage for inmates is way lower than the provincial average. In prison, the minimum wage ranges from $5.25 to $6.90 an hour. In Ontario, minimum wage for folks not in prison is $17.95 an hour. Several large corporations use prison labour in Ontario.
This program, if implemented while Rob Ford was alive, would have harmed him and everyone else suffering from addiction. Why is Doug Ford criminalizing something that directly impacted his own brother?
As we approach another municipal election in Toronto, we are presented with two main options. Brad Bradford, and Olivia Chow. We have seen that historically, Brad Bradford has been a huge supporter of Doug Ford and his policies, including closing shelters and safe injection sites, clearing encampments, and raising police funding. He now also wants to open data centres in Toronto which will use up an unnecessary amount of our natural resources and no doubt make more money for the already rich and powerful.
Olivia Chow has paused the plans to build data centres here. As I mentioned in my last post, she also wants to open homeless shelters near schools and daycares, which will keep homeless people out of public parks and in shelters that will no doubt save their lives during our upcoming winter.
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