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The Ontario government has stopped changes to how police are overseen, stopped new restrictions on smoking and vaping, and held off capping the price of re-sold event tickets, in a flurry of decisions the new Progressive Conservative cabinet made last week but didn’t publicize.
These calls were made in the meeting of ministers Premier Doug Ford scheduled for June 29, just after the new Progressive Conservative cabinet was sworn in at Queen’s Park. There might have been other such decisions that haven’t been made public as well, thanks to an ordinary lag in posting these things (compounded by the Canada Day weekend) and the Tories’ choice not to announce them.
These are early days for the Tories, but this isn’t a great beginning.
All the changes the Tories put off are in laws passed when the Liberals were in power — marched through the normal process at Queen’s Park and approved by majority votes. All of them came with built-in delays, which are commonly included in new laws to give everyone time to get ready for new rules: The legislature passes a bill with a line saying the lieutenant-governor (which means, in practice, the premier and cabinet) will decide when it comes into force.
A decision of the premier and cabinet can be undone by the premier and cabinet, even if they aren’t the same premier and cabinet, and that’s what happened.
Between the time the Liberal government chose June 30 as the day for changes to the Police Services Act and July 1 for the Smoke-Free Ontario Act and the Ticket Sales Act and the actual days, there was that election.
The Ford cabinet did these things last Friday. There’s an online repository of “orders in council,” as these cabinet decisions are called, but posting them there takes 10 business days for some reason. The Ontario Gazette, the official government publication, put an edition up June 30 but it only included notices up to June 18. The online database of Ontario laws was out of date — as late as July 3, it included copies of the affected legislation with notes saying their new provisions were not yet in force but would be July 1.
Finally, on Wednesday, the laws got updated with notes saying they weren’t in effect after all.
Holding back changes to policing were by far the biggest deal, and — to be fair — the Tories promised something like it in the spring campaign.
The legislature passed the so-called Safer Ontario Act in March, shepherded by former attorney general and Ottawa MPP Yasir Naqvi. It was a sprawling bill, the result of six years of work and consultations. It expanded the powers of overseers like the Special Investigations Unit and made their work more public in an attempt to rebuild public confidence shaken by cases like the death of Abdirahman Abdi in an arrest here in Ottawa and the beating of teenager Dafonte Miller by an off-duty officer in Toronto.
Nobody loved the whole package but it was an improvement over the antiquated rules it replaced. The association of Ontario police chiefs welcomed it.
Police unions hate-hate-hated it. The Ottawa police union endorsed the Tories after Ford promised to re-examine it. Other police unions didn’t quite go as far as an endorsement but did publish statements noting their approval of the Progressive Conservatives’ views on the Safer Ontario Act — that it restricted police unfairly and made it legal for civilians to do some tasks formerly restricted to badge-holding officers.
The unions were the first to know about the new government’s hold on the bill, thanks to a letter Ford sent them Friday promising “a full and thorough review of the legislation.” Police chiefs and their local civilian overseers got a memo from the Ministry of the Attorney General at 6:19 that night. No minister has said anything about that review publicly.
Same with vaping nicotine- and cannabis-based liquids instead of smoking. The Smoke-Free Ontario Act was about to treat those substances more like liquor — restricting sales to specialty shops, for instance. Public-health authorities were solidly behind the new restrictions.
“The changes to the Smoke Free Ontario Act that were set to come into effect on July 1, 2018 are being paused to give the new government the opportunity to carefully review the new regulations related to vaping. A new date for implementation has not yet been set,” a health-ministry spokesman said by email Wednesday, a day after I asked whether the law had kicked in or not.
And on ticket scalping, although the Tories put through most of a law passed under the Liberals that did things like outlawing automated “bots” that scoop popular tickets to events online, they held back one provision that limits markups on re-sold tickets to 50 per cent, on the grounds that it’s hard to enforce. The weird thing there is that it’s pretty difficult for the Ontario government to keep software running on servers in Kazakhstan from buying tickets by the truckload, whereas a StubHub or TicketExchange site unloading $50 tickets for $150 is pretty easy to spot.
In the legislature last year, before Doug Ford was Tory leader and revamped what they stood for, they voted against the Smoke-Free Ontario Act and the Ticket Sales Act but didn’t campaign on changing them. So those moves are more surprising.
The government’s not obliged to make announcements or put up ministers to give speeches. It sure would clear things up, though, especially if they’re going to give heads-ups to some people and be less than conscientious about keeping official sources for what they’re doing current. The premier who swears he governs for the people should make it easier for the people to know how they’re being governed.
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
These calls were made in the meeting of ministers Premier Doug Ford scheduled for June 29, just after the new Progressive Conservative cabinet was sworn in at Queen’s Park. There might have been other such decisions that haven’t been made public as well, thanks to an ordinary lag in posting these things (compounded by the Canada Day weekend) and the Tories’ choice not to announce them.
These are early days for the Tories, but this isn’t a great beginning.
All the changes the Tories put off are in laws passed when the Liberals were in power — marched through the normal process at Queen’s Park and approved by majority votes. All of them came with built-in delays, which are commonly included in new laws to give everyone time to get ready for new rules: The legislature passes a bill with a line saying the lieutenant-governor (which means, in practice, the premier and cabinet) will decide when it comes into force.
A decision of the premier and cabinet can be undone by the premier and cabinet, even if they aren’t the same premier and cabinet, and that’s what happened.
Between the time the Liberal government chose June 30 as the day for changes to the Police Services Act and July 1 for the Smoke-Free Ontario Act and the Ticket Sales Act and the actual days, there was that election.
The Ford cabinet did these things last Friday. There’s an online repository of “orders in council,” as these cabinet decisions are called, but posting them there takes 10 business days for some reason. The Ontario Gazette, the official government publication, put an edition up June 30 but it only included notices up to June 18. The online database of Ontario laws was out of date — as late as July 3, it included copies of the affected legislation with notes saying their new provisions were not yet in force but would be July 1.
Finally, on Wednesday, the laws got updated with notes saying they weren’t in effect after all.
Holding back changes to policing were by far the biggest deal, and — to be fair — the Tories promised something like it in the spring campaign.
The legislature passed the so-called Safer Ontario Act in March, shepherded by former attorney general and Ottawa MPP Yasir Naqvi. It was a sprawling bill, the result of six years of work and consultations. It expanded the powers of overseers like the Special Investigations Unit and made their work more public in an attempt to rebuild public confidence shaken by cases like the death of Abdirahman Abdi in an arrest here in Ottawa and the beating of teenager Dafonte Miller by an off-duty officer in Toronto.
Nobody loved the whole package but it was an improvement over the antiquated rules it replaced. The association of Ontario police chiefs welcomed it.
Police unions hate-hate-hated it. The Ottawa police union endorsed the Tories after Ford promised to re-examine it. Other police unions didn’t quite go as far as an endorsement but did publish statements noting their approval of the Progressive Conservatives’ views on the Safer Ontario Act — that it restricted police unfairly and made it legal for civilians to do some tasks formerly restricted to badge-holding officers.
The unions were the first to know about the new government’s hold on the bill, thanks to a letter Ford sent them Friday promising “a full and thorough review of the legislation.” Police chiefs and their local civilian overseers got a memo from the Ministry of the Attorney General at 6:19 that night. No minister has said anything about that review publicly.
Same with vaping nicotine- and cannabis-based liquids instead of smoking. The Smoke-Free Ontario Act was about to treat those substances more like liquor — restricting sales to specialty shops, for instance. Public-health authorities were solidly behind the new restrictions.
“The changes to the Smoke Free Ontario Act that were set to come into effect on July 1, 2018 are being paused to give the new government the opportunity to carefully review the new regulations related to vaping. A new date for implementation has not yet been set,” a health-ministry spokesman said by email Wednesday, a day after I asked whether the law had kicked in or not.
And on ticket scalping, although the Tories put through most of a law passed under the Liberals that did things like outlawing automated “bots” that scoop popular tickets to events online, they held back one provision that limits markups on re-sold tickets to 50 per cent, on the grounds that it’s hard to enforce. The weird thing there is that it’s pretty difficult for the Ontario government to keep software running on servers in Kazakhstan from buying tickets by the truckload, whereas a StubHub or TicketExchange site unloading $50 tickets for $150 is pretty easy to spot.
In the legislature last year, before Doug Ford was Tory leader and revamped what they stood for, they voted against the Smoke-Free Ontario Act and the Ticket Sales Act but didn’t campaign on changing them. So those moves are more surprising.
The government’s not obliged to make announcements or put up ministers to give speeches. It sure would clear things up, though, especially if they’re going to give heads-ups to some people and be less than conscientious about keeping official sources for what they’re doing current. The premier who swears he governs for the people should make it easier for the people to know how they’re being governed.
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
