Underdog (12 page)

I'm not sure what Hammond had to whine about at that meeting in August 2013. Just months before, newly appointed premier Kathleen Wynne, knowing she'd have to face voters sooner rather than later, decided to give ETFO some extra TLC once she became leader. She reopened their collective agreement, handing them a nice little 2 per cent pay hike and grandfathering sick-leave payouts for teachers with ten years of service or more – about 60 per cent of ETFO membership. What was good for ETFO was good for all other Ontario teachers' unions, and before we knew it, Wynne's little dose of TLC cost taxpayers an extra five hundred million dollars. The Liberals, desperately in debt and with a deficit climbing every day, couldn't even stick to their guns on one very important issue. It was pathetic.

Fast forward to August 2015 and seemingly the same meeting with the same cast of militant elementary teachers. A now out of control Hammond didn't just tell them they would be fighting to “Heave Steve” – meaning Stephen Harper (what that has to do with education is certainly way beyond me). He also let his militant troops (and the media) know that they'd be back at it with a work-to-rule campaign the first day of school if they weren't treated with “fairness and respect.” There's that “fairness and respect” comment again – which is really code for “Give us everything we want, and then some, or else we'll hold students ransom.” I couldn't for the life of me figure out exactly what the teachers wanted. Certainly they wanted more money, but we already knew Ms. Wynne couldn't afford that – not that unaffordability ever stopped her. I realized that besides their desire to get paid more,
what they were arguing for was so inane they'd lost all perspective on how the public perceived them. One big sticking point was Regulation 274, brought in by Mr. McGuinty, which forced school boards to hire teachers based on seniority and
not
their skills, talents, and fit with a particular school. The regulation so completely tied principals' hands that they were left with no choice but to hire incompetent teachers or the deadwood ahead of fresh, energetic, tech-savvy new graduates. It was absurd. But the unions clung on to the regulation because they wanted to protect the deadwood and were afraid young, enthusiastic, quality candidates would show up the incompetents.

It was a bit of an eye-opener to see the militant teachers come out of the woodwork in August 2015 when I simply dared to write about their pay, perks, and some of the special concessions they'd already won from the Liberal government under both Dalton McGuinty and Kathleen Wynne, and that they still wanted more, more, more. They attacked me on social media for days afterward, claiming I'd lied and that I hated teachers – the furthest thing from the truth. I simply think teachers are so insulated from what is happening in the private sector (mergers, layoffs, people being forced into contract or part-time work) that they sound like whiny, self-serving brats. I guess I had forgotten how childish and petulant they can be. If anything, they'd become more churlish in the eighteen years since I'd last covered teachers' unions. It has left me to wonder how much of a quality education kids are actually getting in the classroom, with their teachers so busy protesting about how hard done by they are and deciding whether they'll work to rule or not.

A big part of the problem – in addition to a union empowered by a Liberal government that panders to their every desire, judging from the contract deals struck with them in August 2015 – are the trustees who are selected and elected largely with union and NDP support. Fourteen of twenty-two, or two-thirds, of trustees on the TDSB owe their election win in October 2014 to their links with the NDP councillor located in their particular ward (for example, councillors Mike Layton and Joe Cressy ran on the same ticket as Muslim and Hezbollah supporter Ausma Malik) or to union financial and manpower assistance. Naturally the unions expect, actually demand, their quid pro quo. So it is not the least bit surprising that even as school enrolment has gone down in the Toronto board, the number of teachers has increased and that Toronto's lefty trustees fought vociferously in the spring of 2015 against selling off any of the 130 – yes, 130! – schools that are operating at 65 per cent capacity or less. Fewer schools would mean fewer teachers and the unions would never allow that. Never mind that maintaining these underutilized schools makes absolutely no economic sense!

WHEN I WAS SENT
to City Hall in 1998, I made myself a promise that I would not allow myself to run with the pack, focusing instead on my own personal mission of demanding accountability and trying to help those who found themselves caught in red tape or bullied by either bureaucrats or politicians, many of whom were adept at abusing their power. I kept hearing the words of one of my
Toronto Sun
mentors, Bob MacDonald (the father of my good friend Moira), who never
gave up on a story lead. I wanted to be just like the late Peter Worthington, one of the
Toronto Sun
's founders, whom I admired for his tell-like-it-is style and tremendous work ethic. Both Mr. MacDonald and Mr. Worthington were old-time journalists who knew how to work a story and their sources, and who didn't back down from what they believed was right. I suspect they would be horrified by the number of dilettantes in the news business these days.

I gravitated toward those politicians I felt were truly there for the right reasons: Doug Holyday, Frances Nunziata, Mike Del Grande, Jane Pitfield, Cesar Palacio, Case Ootes, and yes, Rob Ford. Before long, I'd found my first cause: the plight of the homeless. It all started when, in 1999, I witnessed Jack Layton bring 450 homeless people, as well as assorted industry hangers-on, to council in an attempt to guilt councillors into declaring homelessness a national disaster. His message would have been music to the ears of anyone who actually wanted to help the homeless if the whole stunt wasn't really about getting his hands on more money for his pet agenda, something then mayor Mel Lastman was only too eager to comply with. Over the years, seeing that most councillors – bleeding hearts all – didn't have the intestinal fortitude to challenge the idea of endless money being thrown at what was considered a sacred cow at City Hall, I tried to inject a voice of reason into the homelessness debate. I did an investigative series on the high cost of the homeless in 2002, which pointed out that more than thirty-two thousand dollars was being spent per hard-core homeless person while they remained out on the street as a kind of testament to the so-called need for affordable housing. I pointed out the
absurdity of keeping 112 Tent City squatters on contaminated Cherry Street land for four years – a move propped up by Mr. Layton and his wife, Olivia Chow, until the city's bureaucrats finally got the guts to evict them in September 2002. That decision, I believe, was made only because the
New York Times
had written about Tent City three months earlier and the politicians were shamed into doing something. I presented the face of residents who felt the streets in their downtown neighbourhoods were being hijacked by the homeless and drug dealers let out of shelters at 7 a.m. to wander wherever they pleased. I served as the voice for ratepayers whose councillors were ramming more homeless shelters into their neighbourhoods without consultation or any concern for the homeowners around the site being considered. With the support of Mr. Holyday, Ms. Pitfield, and Mr. Ootes, I advocated persistently for an anti-panhandling bylaw, a street census to count the homeless, and a program that would put the homeless in the many available private apartments using rent supplements instead of waiting for federal government funding to build not-so-affordable affordable housing units (costing upwards of $250,000 per unit). I was successful on the latter two issues, but despite two attempts by Mr. Ootes and Ms. Pitfield, council never had the guts to impose an anti-panhandling bylaw similar to the ones put in place in Vancouver, Calgary, Winnipeg, Moncton, Fredericton, and Montreal. Never mind that Toronto was the place where panhandlers were known to flock every summer, like Canada geese returning north. I never gave up exposing the huge amount of money that went to the homeless to support misguided and often useless initiatives that ostensibly made the
lefties on council feel good at night but did little or nothing to tackle the problem and give the homeless a hand up – that is, get them on their feet and off the street.

As David Miller's term went on, I honed my skills as the go-to gal who could be trusted to keep off-the-record sources secret and who took up the causes of taxpayers who found themselves on the wrong side of the socialist regime's draconian policies or its sheer arrogance toward those who paid the city's bills. Who knew that trees would interest me so much, but I became very much incensed with the city's ridiculous private-tree bylaw, which allowed the city's tree police to dictate who was allowed to take down a tree and who was not. I soon discovered, not surprisingly, that the tree removal rules were applied very selectively. Developers regularly got the green light to take down the same trees that poor residents without money or the same kind of influence were forbidden to touch. I even brought the issue to the city ombudsman in 2009, but as I was to discover, Fiona Crean (big surprise!) proved to be far more interested in investigating issues that fulfilled her leftist agenda than in the bread-and-butter concerns of residents with City Hall red tape. I was not to know it at the time, but my intervention in what appeared to be an ongoing but little known problem at City Hall in 2008 – refunding money on a timely basis to those who overpaid for work done by the city's Water Division – earned me a campaign supporter when I ran the next year for MPP in St. Paul's. Property manager Gerry Kawaguchi did not live in St. Paul's, or in Toronto, for that matter, but as a thank you for helping to get him back the $5,106.54 he was owed for seven months, he turned up to help on my campaign – more than once. He wasn't the only one. In late February 2012, still
hobbling around on my broken ankle, I met another whistle-blower at another coffee shop by the name of Cecilia Leung. The tiny thirty-five-year-old computer specialist had been fired a week before her wedding in May 2011 for trying to make the TTC's blue suits and chair Karen Stintz aware of the tremendous mismanagement, the inability to get projects done on time and on budget, and the misuse of tax dollars at this monolith. A few weeks after our meeting, Chief General Manager Gary Webster – the root of many problems – was turfed. Unfortunately, it was too late for Ms. Leung, who had been put through the wringer for daring to speak up and whose warnings have proven to be prophetic, particularly with respect to the tremendous cost overruns on the Spadina subway extension.

WHEN I LEFT CITY HALL
for Queen's Park, I was determined to continue focusing on the vulnerable, deciding that health care and mental health services would become my newest crusade. I felt it was something that hadn't been well-covered at all by the media to that point. As at City Hall, but far worse, most journalists at Queen's Park were concerned with the daily sideshow and whatever they were fed by the three political parties. The PCs were doing an almost non-existent job of addressing what I called very basic bread-and-butter issues. That inability to connect with what really concerned voters would add to the party's devastating loss in the June 2014 general election. Kathleen Wynne and her gal pal health minister, Deb Matthews, made my job quite easy when they tried to quietly cut the number of diabetes strips available through OHIP to those diabetics who were not insulin-dependent,
and to nickel-and-dime frail seniors who were covered by OHIP for physiotherapy services in clinics or in retirement homes. It started with the tale of Wayne Beatty, a then sixty-eight-year-old Welland man who had managed to keep his type 2 diabetes in check without the need for insulin by testing his blood sugar four to six times a day using those strips. With the Liberal cutbacks, he'd only be able to test himself once a day unless the Canada Pensioner forked out an extra $1,000 a year. The Liberals told me they would save $15 million to $25 million a year from this move – mere chicken feed when you consider the $1.1 billion they blew on the gas plant scandal and the $1 billion on eHealth. But besides that, the cut showed that Ms. Wynne and Ms. Matthews had absolutely no vision whatsoever. Did they need someone like Mr. Beatty to remind them that diabetes, left unchecked, could easily escalate into strokes, heart attacks, or blindness – all far more costly to treat than any amount they'd save on those measly strips? But the Liberals truly showed their meanness with the cuts to physiotherapy – a desperately needed service that helped keep frail seniors mobile and able to continue living independently either in their own homes or in retirement homes – and their decision to put in a quota system for cataract surgery. There were no greater underdogs – in my view – than vulnerable seniors who'd worked hard and paid taxes all their lives, only to find the Liberal government, under the aforementioned stewardship of Ms. Wynne and Ms. Matthews, prepared to virtually toss them out on an ice floe, hoping they'd quietly drift away.

Unluckily for the Liberal Gruesome Twosome, seniors were living far too long and were needing those services, the money for which had already been squandered not only on
various fiascos of the past but on the Pan Am Games, green energy schemes, and contracts for Liberal insiders, including Ms. Wynne's wife, Jane Rounthwaite. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry when I visited a Toronto retirement home called St. Hilda's Towers in August 2013 and met two feisty centenarians, Ida Hall and Eva Altay, who'd been dependent on physiotherapy to keep them mobile. Ms. Hall, then on the verge of turning 105, proudly showed me the physio workout with two-pound weights she did three times weekly to keep from stiffening up, and which allowed her to get out of bed each morning. Eva Altay, who was just about to turn 102, credited the physio with getting her from wheelchair to walker to walking on her own again after she broke her hip doing tai chi the January before. When I turned up that Friday morning, there was a sign on the door of the retirement home's physiotherapy room indicating services would no longer be provided at the $12.20 billed per visit to OHIP, and that Ms. Matthews's friends at the Community Care Access Centres (CCACs) – stuffed with more middle managers than frontline service providers – would be taking over at $120 per visit. It would be two months before the CCAC would get their act together to assess these seniors and start providing services again. When the dust settled, seniors would be granted $312 per episode of care, meaning physiotherapists would make the same from a particular case whether they visited a senior three times or thirteen times. In most cases, three-times-weekly visits shrank to three visits over a period of months. Heaven forbid it should have mattered to Ms. Matthews that the change was poorly communicated and poorly managed, and that seniors were suffering. They were dispensable. The same appalling lack of vision and the
penny-wise pound-foolish mentality of the Liberals applied in this case as well. Their tunnel vision has also been evident in the case of cataract surgery, which has been subject to cutbacks and a quota system – meaning that hospitals now have the funding to do just so many per year, and once that money dries up, prospective ophthalmology patients are put on a waiting list for six months. Does it ever dawn on Ms. Wynne and her health minister that seniors who are able to see are able to keep driving, live in their own homes, and remain independent? Does Ms. Wynne not think she'll get old some day? By offering these preventative services, the Ontario government might just avoid the drain of costly health care programs down the road. Isn't it far better to keep aging baby boomers active and living in their homes rather than forcing them to be a drain on the already over stretched hospital and chronic care systems?