Doug Ford attacks federal Housing Accelerator agreements
Why isn't Ontario implementing the recommendations from Ford's own task force?
'Jurisdictional creep': Doug Ford slams feds for directly giving municipalities funding for housing. Katherine DeClerq, CTV News.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford is calling on the federal government to end a program that offers municipalities funding to boost their housing supply, suggesting that Ottawa is overstepping its jurisdiction.
It’s pretty galling to see this, considering that the Ford government hasn’t moved forward on the recommendations from Ford’s own Ontario housing task force back in January 2022, including that four units and four storeys should be legal. This is exactly the kind of housing that Sean Fraser is legalizing, using the Housing Accelerator Fund: latest summary.
I assumed they were happy the feds were doing the hard work for them. That was when I was convinced they want to reduce housing prices, which I'm less certain of right now.
Doug Ford and international student numbers
On top of its inaction on housing supply, the Ford government is also fuelling the demand side, through its policies on international students and public-private college partnerships. Alex Usher:
In 2022, as housing pressures in the 905 became more palpable, the Ford Government intervened to mess things up still further. It repealed its 2019 Ministerial Policy with a new one, which put a hard cap on each institution’s [public-private partnership] enrolment…at 7,500. Doesn’t matter how big the home campus is. Call it the David Bowie/Cat People approach to public policy management (i.e. Putting Out the Fire With Gasoline). And since virtually all the anglophone non-GTA schools have schools, we’re talking about max enrolment in these PPPs of something on the order of 120,000 next year, or about twice what it was in 2021-22.
The “Wag the Doug” podcast did an episode on this: Students in Strip Malls, July 2023.
Why? Because Ontario provides a lot less per-student funding compared to other provinces. The Ontario government is basically exploiting international students so that it can continue underfunding colleges and universities.
Yes, the sleazy way provincial politicians blame their own failures on the federal government just about makes my blood boil. I had hoped that at least something worthwhile would come from Ford's flailing on the housing file, but it seems he's just too stupid and ideologically-driven to ever choose good public policy---.