{"id":22909,"date":"2019-02-07T11:58:32","date_gmt":"2019-02-07T16:58:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/?p=22909"},"modified":"2019-02-15T15:21:22","modified_gmt":"2019-02-15T20:21:22","slug":"health-care-top-of-mind-at-premiers-rally-in-newmarket-aurora","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/health-care-top-of-mind-at-premiers-rally-in-newmarket-aurora\/","title":{"rendered":"Health care top of mind at Premier’s rally in Newmarket-Aurora"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Brock Weir<\/strong><\/p>\n

It was billed as an \u201cOpen for Business\u201d rally with the Premier, but by the time Doug Ford arrived in Newmarket-Aurora on Thursday night, the Open for Business message had to take a momentary backseat to the future of healthcare.
\nPremier Ford, accompanied by Deputy Premier \u2013 and Newmarket-Aurora MPP \u2013 Christine Elliott rallied the local party faithful at a pasta dinner at the Newmarket branch of the Royal Canadian Legion.
\nThe Premier\u2019s visit to Aurora\u2019s northern riding came just hours after the Ontario NDP released what they said was a draft government bill that would, if enacted, dissolve the Province\u2019s Local Integration Networks (LHIN) in favour of a \u201csuper agency\u201d to oversee the Province\u2019s healthcare system.
\nThis, argued NDP leader Andrea Horwath would pave the way for more privatization of health care within the system, an idea dismissed shortly thereafter by Ms. Elliott, who also serves as Ontario\u2019s Minister of Health and Long Term Care.
\nThis was underscored hours later at the Newmarket-Aurora rally, where Ms. Elliott reiterated the Province\u2019s support for public healthcare.
\n\u201cWe want to make sure we can deliver on all the promises we made to people during the campaign of 2018,\u201d said Ms. Elliott before a crowd of nearly 150 Progressive Conservative supporters, who were seated alongside a number of other MPPs, including Aurora-Oak Ridges-Richmond Hill\u2019s Michael Parsa. \u201cJust this month, we had a couple of great events here, but what we\u2019re doing at Queen\u2019s Park is even more important in the sense that we are honouring our commitments. We\u2019re working on our priorities and trying to make sure we can unravel what happened after 15 years of Liberal mismanagement, 15 years and $15 billion debt. We want to balance the budget responsibly. We are going to continue to find efficiencies that are going to add to the bottom line to work away on the debt and make sure we deliver programs and services that are relevant and necessary here in Ontario. It is necessary to achieve fiscal balance and restore public confidence in Ontario\u2019s finances.
\n\u201cOne that I am responsible for, is to build a healthcare system of the future. You may have heard a few things about that today, but we are working hard on that because what we have heard from the people of Ontario is they want us to continue to invest in our public health care system, they want us to transform the system because it is not working for people right now.
\n\u201cWe have parts of our system that do work really well, but when you have 32,000 people that are waiting for a long-term care home and every single day you have at least 1,200 people in Ontario that are going to be treated in hallways or storage rooms of hospitals, you know something\u2019s not right and some things have to change. We need to know that we\u2019re going to be able to have a sustainable health care system both now and in the future, and we\u2019re taking that responsibility and working very hard.\u201d
\nBefore touching upon Open for Business themes, including his fight against a carbon tax, removing cap and trade, and fostering business growth, Mr. Ford, who was introduced by Ms. Elliott, lead with health.
\n\u201cChristine is in charge and responsible for a massive part of our budget,\u201d said Mr. Ford. \u201cWe always say in cabinet and Caucus, that this Province goes where health goes. It is [an] over 60-billion-dollars-a-year budget. 43 per cent of the overall budget is with health and you\u2019re doing an incredible job, sitting down across the Province, getting some of the greatest doctors and nurses and frontline health care workers out there because we have taken a different approach to the health care. We actually are doing things a little differently: we\u2019re actually listening to the experts.
\n\u201cWhen you see 15 years of not listening to anyone, now we\u2019re listening to the frontline doctors, listening to the frontline nurses and frontline health care workers. That is how we\u2019re going to make the changes. When Christine and I criss-crossed the province during the election\u2026we talked to the nurses and all we heard is, \u2018We have ideas, we have better ideas,\u2019 and who better to listen to than the people who do the job day in and day out?\u201d
\nOntario, he continued, is facing a time of \u201cunprecedented growth, opportunity and prosperity\u2019 and it is essential moving forward to cut red tape and regulations. This growth will be unlike anything the province has ever seen, he added, and that can be attributed to \u201cgetting out of the way\u201d of business owners, small, medium and large.
\n\u201cOur goal is to be responsible for the deficit as we\u2019re going through it,\u201d he said. \u201cI can tell you we\u2019re not going to go in there\u2026and pull out the chainsaws and start slicing and dicing; we\u2019re going to do it responsibly. There are better ways of building services at all three levels of government, no matter if it is a municipal government, provincial government or the Federal Government. There is tremendous waste and it is each and every one of your hard-earned dollars that are going to waste.\u201d<\/p>\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It was billed as an \u201cOpen for Business\u201d rally with the Premier, but by the time Doug Ford arrived in Newmarket-Aurora on Thursday night, the Open for Business message had to take a momentary backseat to the future of healthcare.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":22899,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22909","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general_news","category-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/2019-02-07-02.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3D2k4-5Xv","publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-23 00:42:21","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22909","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22909"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22909\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22899"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22909"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22909"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22909"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}