The bark was certainly worse than the bite, Nickel Belt NDP MPP France Gélinas said, in reference to the much-anticipated Drummond Report.

That's not to say the majority of the 362 recommendations contained within the report wouldn't have a detrimental effect on the progress that has been made in Ontario, but the fact is the report contains no new information, at least in the health portfolio, she said.

Local politicians weighed in on the report. Sudbury MPP Rick Bartolucci and Mayor Marianne Matichuk said the report contains only recommendations, and that only time will tell which of those will be implemented by the province.

“We asked Mr. Drummond and the commission to provide advice, and they have, and now it's the government's job to analyze those recommendations to decide how we move forward on them,” Bartolucci said.

“I am not prepared to speculate on which recommendations we will or will not enact, but they are just that – recommendations. They're not directives, and now the government has to make the necessary decisions to grow the economy and tackle the ($16-billion) deficit.”

Matichuk echoed those comments and said it would be “unfair to guess what the government will do with the recommendations, so it will be jumping the gun at this point. I just hope the government is cognisant of the challenges municipalities face, and that they don't back down on their campaign promises.”

Gélinas, health and long-term-care critic for the NDP, had plenty to say about the report.

She was among a dozen members of the NDP caucus who were part of the lock-up leading up to the release of the report. They were joined by a number of their own economists, as well as NDP leader Andrea Horwath and the party's finance critic, Michael Prue (MPP for Beeches-East York). She was charged with the task of reviewing the 57-page health component of the report.

“The hype built up around the bits of the report that had been leaked out prior to its release (i.e, the province not paying for C-sections) was way worse than the report itself,” she said. “It's nothing I haven't seen before.”

On a scale of one to 10, the report, as a whole, ranks a four, mainly for the effort put into it and for being able to pull together that amount of information in that amount of time, Gélinas said.

“I put things into perspective,” she said. “It was a huge task, and you could write a 563-page report on health-care reform alone, but the report touches on many different things, and it was all done in six months.

“Taking all that into account, there are broad objectives that make sense and that we've already talked about and that we could support, but there are others where there is no way we could ever support it.”

Drummond's mandate was “skewed” from the very start when he was asked to look only at the expense side of government, and not even touch the revenue side, Gélinas said. Drummond, himself, even questions why the province is handing out $2 billion worth of tax cuts to profitable businesses, when there are numerous social programs that need money, especially in a time of a recession.

The conversation about increasing the revenue side of the government still needs to take place, she said, but there is no forum for it, and Drummond acknowledges that in his report.

The province paid Drummond $150,000 for his work on the report, but it is not known how much other members of the commission were paid, Gélinas said, and in her opinion, “we've paid a consultant to tell us things we already knew.”

“We've asked, but we still don't have any answers,” she said. “We may have to go through the Freedom of Information Act, but we're hoping that in the spirit of what he's doing, he will be forthcoming and tell us what the budget was.
The report contains “the good, the bad and the ugly,” she said. Some of it is good, some of it is bad, but a lot of it is ugly.

The most striking thing Gélinas said she took away from studying the report is that there is nothing new in (the health) section, which accounts for almost 10 per cent of the entire report, she said. It's just filled with a lot of ideas, some of which look like they could have been lifted directly from an NDP platform, to which Drummond lends support.

Amongst the many recommendations, the report puts forth the idea to have residents over the age of 65 pay for their medications, Gélinas said. Right now, anyone over that age is subsidized by the province. Medication consumption in northern Ontario is higher that the rest of the province, she said, and the cost to those residents would be extremely high.

“This recommendation would see seniors having to pay, to a certain extent, the cost of their drugs, and be reimbursed by the province,” she said. “For seniors, they would have to pay thousands of dollars for their medications before the government would step in and help.”

Furthermore, Drummond set the growth in health care at 2.5 per cent, but then acknowledged that inflation will be even greater, she said. With the population of Ontario growing, doing the same thing for more people will mean a cut in service.
The report also talks about cancelling the mining tax credit, Gélinas said. Nickel Belt is booming because of mining, and she is adamant this idea would be received with “a bit of a chill.”

“We have achieved a competitive tax system for mining in Ontario, and Drummond basically says that the extra incentive that Ontario provides to mining and agriculture should be done away with. This would not fit too well within Nickel Belt for many obvious reasons.”

In terms of education, there are some aspects of the report that are good, she said. For example, Drummond talks about increasing funding for on-reserve First Nations school, and “there are quite a few of those in Nickel Belt, and it's something I would wholly support.”

On the other end of the spectrum, the province has created 10,000 new non-teaching positions, and Drummond said in his report that 70 per cent of them have to be axed in order to achieve the savings.

“At beginning of the report, Drummond said he gets the fact that health-care costs are directly related to poverty, and he talks about prevention and the determinants of health, but when it comes down to one of the biggest determinants of health, that being education, and all of the progress we've made, he's ready to scrap it all for the sake of balancing the books.

The report also talks of freezing social assistance rates and shelter allowances. The province is supposed to see an increase in the Ontario Child Tax Benefit in 2013, but Drummond talks about freezing those rates, too, she said.

“In a way, he says he understands the link between poverty and a healthy economy, yet in his actions, he contradicts that,” she said. “A 0.5-per-cent increase in social programs directly means cuts, because inflation alone will be much higher than that.”

Social programs are a safety net that people rely on in times of need and in a recession, and it's during those times that demand for services goes up, she said.
The report is basically a document Gélinas said she “hopes gathers a lot of dust, much like many of the other reports I've read.”

“I have a feeling that, in the days that follow this report, the government will look at opinion polls to see what people do and do not support,” she said. “You have to realize the government is in a minority position.”

Posted by Arron Pickard