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Ontario’s strong health and education systems insulate us from populist anger that carried Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency, Premier Kathleen Wynne said Monday, though the province’s uneven economy still has her “very worried.”
“There was a whole segment of the population that felt like they’d been left behind by an elite government that was out of touch with their needs. So much of what Donald Trump said tapped into that anger even though he probably doesn’t have the kinds of solutions he was holding up,” Wynne said in one of a round of year-end interviews. “I look at what are the opportunities that the families that feel left behind, or the kids — what are the opportunities that they have in front of them? They have to pay for health care, often way beyond their means, their kids may not be able to afford postsecondary education. The public education system in the States is much more uneven than the system here in Canada and in Ontario. That can create a real uneven playing field that I think can breed discord all by itself.”
Ontario is insulated from the Trump phenomenon but not immune. Wynne is massively unpopular and the next year will use up much of the time she has left before a 2018 election battle. Progressive Conservative leader Patrick Brown is certainly not Donald Trump but his angle is similar. He’s tried several lines of attack on Wynne and the Liberal government, and one he’s returned to is this: “Life is harder under the Liberals.” Electricity is more expensive, waiting lists for some kinds of health care are longer, traffic is worse.
Ontario’s economy as a whole is picking up steam after several bad years, but in much of rural Ontario — especially in the east and the north — jobs are still disappearing.
“We have the regional disparities,” Wynne said. “And I’m very worried about that. It really is a huge concern of mine, how do we make sure that everyone takes part in that recovery? How do we make sure that rural schools and rural hospitals are available to people? That we have community hubs that allow people to come together and provide the services that people need?”
Dozens of rural schools might be closed as the Ministry of Education pushes school boards to spend money more efficiently. Tight hospital budgets hurt in cities but they hurt worse in towns where there’s only one hospital for miles. They’re service providers and they’re employers.
Trump pinned a lot of blame on free trade, on foreign workers’ stealing Americans’ jobs. But most jobs, especially in manufacturing, have been lost to automation, not trade. They didn’t go elsewhere, they disappeared.
We’re used to one robot replacing a dozen people who used to affix the same parts on a car assembly line all day. But the more advanced technology gets, the deeper into cognitively demanding tasks the automation can extend. Self checkouts replacing clerks at the grocery store, automated cars and trucks and drones replacing drivers, accounting software replacing bookkeepers. Robots can turn a baseball box score or a corporation’s quarterly result filing into a flat but workmanlike story, replacing journalists. What automating these jobs costs in quality it makes up in efficiency.
The high-end versions of those jobs remain and always will in some form — you can buy a handmade car if you have enough money. And there are good jobs in the transition, as Blackberry’s promise Monday to hire 600 people for driverless-car research at QNX in Kanata shows.
Love the work that QNX is doing—another #Ontario company at the forefront of technological change & driving innovation in our economy. https://t.co/RcXuEhKAFI
— Brad Duguid (@BradDuguid) December 19, 2016
Ontario has a lot of “residual manufacturing acumen” (a term Wynne has used for years, always hopefully) that make us appealing for manufacturers who want to try new things.
“That’s our strength,” Wynne said.
But as a recent report from the University of Toronto’s Mowat Centre (an academic think tank that’s pretty much the Ontario Liberal Party’s outboard policy brain) points out, a job doesn’t have to be totally replaced by machines to be “unbundled,” its component tasks automated, handled by casual workers, contracted out, sent offshore, distributed as piecework. Broken up for parts.
This stinks if it’s your job. This is a major social problem if it’s a lot of people’s jobs and we’ve woven our social safety net so it depends on stable employment. Lots of things are like that: dental and drug benefits, old-age pensions, employment insurance (including our jury-rigged, EI-dependent system for maternity leave). If you’re a working parent, just having an unpredictable schedule makes daycare hard.
These social programs have always left some people out but most of the system has worked for most people most of the time. Or at least they used to. But consider this: In 1978, 82 per cent of Canadians who were unemployed were getting unemployment benefits. In early 2016, it was 39 per cent. Ontario’s number was below the average, at 28 per cent.
Under the Liberals, the Ontario government has tackled some of these problems with full-day kindergarten, a review of labour standards, better pay for early-childhood educators and personal support workers. Ontario pushed its own pension program until the federal Liberals took up the cause. The province raised the minimum wage and indexed it to inflation.
So we have a somewhat — somewhat — stronger social safety net. And we have record provincial debt, an opposition that hammers away at Ontario’s suitability as a place to do business, and an example to our south of what can happen when a sufficiently talented politician promises to bring industrial jobs back by the sheer force of his will. Trump made getting rid of Obamacare, an attempt to decouple health insurance from steady employment, part of his successful pitch.
Social programs don’t get enriched for free. Wynne acknowledged in a major Ottawa speech a few weeks ago that she’d paid too little attention to the way the nickels and dimes have added up into dollars that tax- and ratepayers can’t afford.
Wynne said she has ministers across the government figuring out what to do. They’re consulting city and county governments to see how the province can boost their local economic plans.
People will forgive a lot if they feel hopeful about the future. Wynne has 2017 to figure out how to make that happen.
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
“There was a whole segment of the population that felt like they’d been left behind by an elite government that was out of touch with their needs. So much of what Donald Trump said tapped into that anger even though he probably doesn’t have the kinds of solutions he was holding up,” Wynne said in one of a round of year-end interviews. “I look at what are the opportunities that the families that feel left behind, or the kids — what are the opportunities that they have in front of them? They have to pay for health care, often way beyond their means, their kids may not be able to afford postsecondary education. The public education system in the States is much more uneven than the system here in Canada and in Ontario. That can create a real uneven playing field that I think can breed discord all by itself.”
Ontario is insulated from the Trump phenomenon but not immune. Wynne is massively unpopular and the next year will use up much of the time she has left before a 2018 election battle. Progressive Conservative leader Patrick Brown is certainly not Donald Trump but his angle is similar. He’s tried several lines of attack on Wynne and the Liberal government, and one he’s returned to is this: “Life is harder under the Liberals.” Electricity is more expensive, waiting lists for some kinds of health care are longer, traffic is worse.
Ontario’s economy as a whole is picking up steam after several bad years, but in much of rural Ontario — especially in the east and the north — jobs are still disappearing.
“We have the regional disparities,” Wynne said. “And I’m very worried about that. It really is a huge concern of mine, how do we make sure that everyone takes part in that recovery? How do we make sure that rural schools and rural hospitals are available to people? That we have community hubs that allow people to come together and provide the services that people need?”
Dozens of rural schools might be closed as the Ministry of Education pushes school boards to spend money more efficiently. Tight hospital budgets hurt in cities but they hurt worse in towns where there’s only one hospital for miles. They’re service providers and they’re employers.
Trump pinned a lot of blame on free trade, on foreign workers’ stealing Americans’ jobs. But most jobs, especially in manufacturing, have been lost to automation, not trade. They didn’t go elsewhere, they disappeared.
We’re used to one robot replacing a dozen people who used to affix the same parts on a car assembly line all day. But the more advanced technology gets, the deeper into cognitively demanding tasks the automation can extend. Self checkouts replacing clerks at the grocery store, automated cars and trucks and drones replacing drivers, accounting software replacing bookkeepers. Robots can turn a baseball box score or a corporation’s quarterly result filing into a flat but workmanlike story, replacing journalists. What automating these jobs costs in quality it makes up in efficiency.
The high-end versions of those jobs remain and always will in some form — you can buy a handmade car if you have enough money. And there are good jobs in the transition, as Blackberry’s promise Monday to hire 600 people for driverless-car research at QNX in Kanata shows.
Love the work that QNX is doing—another #Ontario company at the forefront of technological change & driving innovation in our economy. https://t.co/RcXuEhKAFI
— Brad Duguid (@BradDuguid) December 19, 2016
Ontario has a lot of “residual manufacturing acumen” (a term Wynne has used for years, always hopefully) that make us appealing for manufacturers who want to try new things.
“That’s our strength,” Wynne said.
But as a recent report from the University of Toronto’s Mowat Centre (an academic think tank that’s pretty much the Ontario Liberal Party’s outboard policy brain) points out, a job doesn’t have to be totally replaced by machines to be “unbundled,” its component tasks automated, handled by casual workers, contracted out, sent offshore, distributed as piecework. Broken up for parts.
This stinks if it’s your job. This is a major social problem if it’s a lot of people’s jobs and we’ve woven our social safety net so it depends on stable employment. Lots of things are like that: dental and drug benefits, old-age pensions, employment insurance (including our jury-rigged, EI-dependent system for maternity leave). If you’re a working parent, just having an unpredictable schedule makes daycare hard.
These social programs have always left some people out but most of the system has worked for most people most of the time. Or at least they used to. But consider this: In 1978, 82 per cent of Canadians who were unemployed were getting unemployment benefits. In early 2016, it was 39 per cent. Ontario’s number was below the average, at 28 per cent.
Under the Liberals, the Ontario government has tackled some of these problems with full-day kindergarten, a review of labour standards, better pay for early-childhood educators and personal support workers. Ontario pushed its own pension program until the federal Liberals took up the cause. The province raised the minimum wage and indexed it to inflation.
So we have a somewhat — somewhat — stronger social safety net. And we have record provincial debt, an opposition that hammers away at Ontario’s suitability as a place to do business, and an example to our south of what can happen when a sufficiently talented politician promises to bring industrial jobs back by the sheer force of his will. Trump made getting rid of Obamacare, an attempt to decouple health insurance from steady employment, part of his successful pitch.
Social programs don’t get enriched for free. Wynne acknowledged in a major Ottawa speech a few weeks ago that she’d paid too little attention to the way the nickels and dimes have added up into dollars that tax- and ratepayers can’t afford.
Wynne said she has ministers across the government figuring out what to do. They’re consulting city and county governments to see how the province can boost their local economic plans.
People will forgive a lot if they feel hopeful about the future. Wynne has 2017 to figure out how to make that happen.
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
