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Ontario’s health-care system is about to become a giant construction zone as the province blasts away bureaucratic walls to create a single super-agency that will run the entire $60-billion health delivery system.

When the dust settles all of the province’s hospitals, community health services, mental health agencies, cancer treatment centres, organ donation programs, home care and end-of-life care will be under the command of one still unnamed CEO and a board of directors who will be responsible for almost half of Ontario’s entire budget.

One agency to rule it all. It’s an image that causes some health experts to shudder.

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An Ontario court dismissed a legal challenge Thursday from elementary teachers and a civil liberties group over the Progressive Conservative government’s repeal of a modernized sex-ed curriculum.

The challenge from the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario and the Canadian Civil Liberties Association argued that changes made by the government infringed teachers’ freedom of expression and put students at risk by failing to be inclusive.

The Tories repealed a 2015 curriculum from the previous Liberal government that included lessons warning about online bullying and sexting, as well as parts addressing same-sex relationships and gender identity.

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It’s being called Ontario’s biggest health system reform in 50 years, since the advent of medicare. But what will it actually look like for patients?

The government of Premier Doug Ford is merging 20 agencies, which employ more than 10,000 people, into one big agency in what will be called Ontario Health. While much of the attention so far has been on its creation, the crucial part of the reform will be something called Ontario Health Teams.

The teams will also be crucial to whether the restructuring succeeds or fails.

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The provincial government has recommended that Ontario school boards implement a hiring freeze until the details of the upcoming budget are solidified.

“I am writing to you today to recommend that school boards exercise prudence in making hiring decisions in light of the upcoming Ontario budget and the recent consultation on class size and hiring practices,” said Nancy Naylor, deputy minister of education, in a memo sent to school board heads on Thursday.

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Today, more than 40 CUPE members from across the country met with Members of Parliament to support the creation of a national Pharmacare program and to discuss retirement security and pensions.

CUPE members, alongside 350 activists from the Canadian Labour Congress, participated in a lobby day in Ottawa.

The group met with over 192 parliamentarians throughout the day to support the creation of a Pharmacare program that provides coverage for all residents regardless of their income, age, or where they live. Any Pharmacare program must be patient-centred, integrated with our health system, and sustainable.

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TORONTO, Feb. 26, 2019 /CNW/ – Ontario’s largest union in the private sector expresses deep concern for the proposed amalgamation of healthcare oversight and delivery into an unaccountable partisan agency.

“First, Minister Elliot claimed that this bill didn’t exist. Now, this secret agency is just as damning in the light of day as it was when public sector whistle-blowers first released it,” said Naureen Rizvi, Unifor Ontario Regional Director. “Workers see this agency for what it is: an attempt to bring in privatization through the backdoor and reward the Conservatives’ corporate friends.”

If adopted, the bill will shift decisions about more than $60 billion of Ontario’s public spending and healthcare delivery to a small board of unelected, partisan appointees.

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Is this really what we have all been asking for? Us, the post-secondary students of Ontario. Set to come into effect September 2019, tuition fees for post-secondary education will be cut by a staggering 10 per cent.

The motion to cut tuition fees was announced by Premier Doug Ford on Jan. 17. It has been a long-anticipated cut for students across Ontario as undergraduate full-time tuition continues to outpace inflation. It is not a surprise most graduating students have a debt of approximately $28,000 upon completion of their undergraduate studies. This tuition fee cut introduced by the Ford government sounds like the perfect idea: it would save the average post-secondary university student approximately $660 a year. But is this tuition cut really all that great?

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OTTAWA — Students with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder are much less likely to go to college or university than those with no long-term health conditions, according to a new report from Statistics Canada.

The gap suggests teachers need better training in how to work with students whose behaviour can come off as disruptive and who might seem uninterested in their studies, advocates say.

“They are going to have one to three kids with ADHD in every class they teach for the rest of their career, and this is just regular classrooms, yet we’re not training them,” said Heidi Bernhardt, the executive director of the Centre for ADHD Awareness.

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With Peel Region expanding its “Butterfly” dementia care project to two more long-term care homes, direct care staff working on the Malton Village pilot site are speaking out publicly for the first time about the challenges they’ve faced to make the experiment a success.

“There is widespread commitment among care staff to improve the quality of life for residents with dementia and make the Butterfly expansion work,” says Salil Arya, president of Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) 966 which represents about 800 long-term care staff employed at four Peel Region homes.

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It’s hard not to be outraged by Ontario Education Minister Lisa Thompson’s recent announcement that her government is considering removing the caps on the class size of kindergarten and primary grades.

Anyone who teaches or has children in a primary school understands the critical importance of the teacher-to-student ratio and many will contend that they are already way too high. The current cap on kindergarten classes in Ontario is 29 kids; for primary (Grades 1 to 3), it’s 23.

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