O’ Canada…

Welcome to the February 2022 edition of The Green Wave, a contributing voice for The Green Party in Dufferin—Caledon.

I have written in the past about the need for us all to pay close attention to the threats against democracy here at home and around the world. ‘O Canada, we stand on guard for thee’ is a call to action that we cannot treat as a simple lyric in our national anthem. As we witness the chaos being caused by the so-called Freedom Convoy, we should be very cognizant that this is a not-so-subtle smoke screen for the far-right anti-government movement in North America. The pandemic has provided a convenient platform for their political position. The front runner for the national leadership of the Conservative Party has embraced this movement suggesting that the participants represent a legitimate political discourse, I wonder if our local MP agrees. Money is flowing in from the USA to help awaken the extreme right in Canada, some of whom have told our media that they are willing to face prison time or even die for their cause of Freedom. Perhaps they need to be reminded that many thousands of Canadians have already made the ultimate sacrifice that allows these protesters that same freedom to protest while at the same time restricting the freedoms of many of their fellow Canadians. What’s wrong with this picture? I wonder if sitting in the driver’s seat of a parked rig in front of our Parliament Buildings honking your horn incessantly feels anything like sitting in the front of a landing craft spearheading the D-Day Invasion of Europe. That was a real Freedom Convoy!

With the promise of spring, we look forward to the abatement of the worst effects of the pandemic and to electing a much greener parliament in our province. We must double down on our platform, get the electorate out to the polls and wage a passionate campaign that reminds the voters of Dufferin—Caledon about the things that are truly at stake in the near, medium, and long term. It is time to break with the robotic voting habits of the past and try something new and life affirming for everything that lives and breathes in this province and the planet.

In this issue you will hear from our Candidate Laura Campbell on the topic of childcare in Ontario a subject she writes passionately about. Our guest columnist Cody Wright continues to inform us about the dark side of stock market manipulation in favour of the uber wealthy, the reality of which cannot be underestimated. Jenni Le Forestier organized a Walk of Reflection, and David Rintoul provides us with excellent insight into lessons that Ontario can learn from our neighbours in Quebec on the subject of childcare.

Strong and effective campaigns cannot be waged on a shoestring budget. We urge you to donate whatever you can to help move us over the top in this election and send Laura Campbell to the Ontario Legislature. Please consider becoming a member of our volunteer team and helping us roll out an election winning campaign. It’s as simple as clicking a button, don’t wait, do it now.

Enjoy the read!

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Frank Buck
Editor
Dufferin-Caledon Greens

NOTE: Political opinions expressed are mine alone and are not endorsed by The Green Party of Dufferin—Caledon

Raising the Pan-African Flag at Mono Town Hall

Thank you Mayor Creelman of Mono and Alethia O’Hara-Stephenson of the Dufferin—Caledon Canadian Black Association for having us. It was a beautiful ceremony, and we are thankful to be a part of history in the making.

As flags symbolize the union of governance, people, territory, and freedom, this flag was created to give Black people in Canada and around the world a symbol that unifies the Diaspora.

$10-a-Day Childcare is Long Overdue

Life as a parent of small children is always a challenge. Even so, amid this pandemic, raising an Ontario family without affordable childcare is putting even the most resilient families to the test.

Today, a typical daycare space in the GTA costs families between $1,000 and $2,000 per child per month. That’s a monthly outlay of over $4,000 for parents with two children. One of the foremost reasons why I chose to be your Green Party of Ontario candidate is that Greens have always fiercely supported affordable childcare.

With the federal government’s $30 billion initiative to bring $10 a day childcare to every province and territory, we finally have the chance to make affordability happen. The Ford government announced recently that it had “almost” reached an agreement on the federal funding program.

Ontario is Now the Only Province that

Hasn’t Signed a Deal

“Almost” means that Ontario is now the only province or territory in the country that hasn’t signed onto the childcare deal. What’s taking so long? Updates on the negotiations have been few and far between.

Some reports suggest that Ontario’s share of the federal funding isn’t enough to meet the $10 per day target. While that be a stumbling block, Doug Ford promised to make childcare a priority back in 2018. He has failed. Ontario parents face some of the highest daycare costs in the country. After four years of the Ford government, childcare is still one of the largest household expenditures confronting families with young children.

Worse still, social distancing means that when children are sick, they can’t go to day care. So, parents find themselves footing the bill for expensive childcare they can’t use.

They often end up missing work to take care of them. Worse still, since Doug Ford won’t provide workers with paid sick leave, parents end up losing income on top of paying for that costly, empty childcare space.

Families Need Relief Now

Working families in Dufferin-Caledon face rising prices for housing, groceries, gasoline, and higher interest rates on their mounting household debt. Families across our province need relief now.

The Ford Government should have wrapped up this childcare deal months ago. I stand with Ontario families demanding $10 per day childcare starting
today.

It’s time for Doug Ford to stop playing partisan games. Families in Dufferin—Caledon and throughout Ontario are exhausted mentally, financially, and emotionally.

I hope I can count on your support on June 2 to help bring you and your family the affordable, quality childcare our kids deserve.

Laura Campbell
Provincial Green Party Candidate
Dufferin—Caledon Greens

Credit River ‘Walk of Reflection’

West Credit Watch

“A walk to reflect on how these lands and waters have held us up, and how it is time to have some introspection on our collective duty to reciprocate to them. To honour them. They have been subject to the traumas of unchecked extraction and development for generations. It is a time to reflect on how to bring them to a point where they can heal – that is the least we can do.”

un.org: United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

Jenni Le Forestier
VP, 2021 Federal Candidate
Dufferin—Caledon Greens

Wall St to English Dictionary:
Bustin’ (Out) Makes Me Feel Good

Who you gonna call? (When you want to sink the competition)

What Is “Busting Out”?

Despite the light tone set with reference to Ray Parker Jr.’s Ghostbusters theme, this strategy is more akin to the story behind the song, where Mr. Parker essentially lifted parts of his song directly from “I Want A New Drug” by Huey Lewis. Probably not breaking News for most people (Huey excluded), but sometimes certain things deserve a closer look.

Concept

The strategy is surprisingly simple, and very effective. It’s also devious, underhanded, and has brought an end to many well established, beloved franchises. It sometimes gets a fancy name like “dividend recapitalization”; sometimes it’s called a little more directly as “sleeper fraud”. If we used a single person as an example: John sees a struggling convenience store, and decides he’s going to “turn the business around”. John takes out a new line of credit, from his friend Jake’s bank and builds amazing credit. Enough credit that he uses his credit as leverage to get more credit. Now that John has this great relationship, and the business has earned the support of the bank, he extends his credit lines further, and has no intention whatsoever of paying a single cent of this overleveraged credit back. This continues, until the credit is spread as thin as possible, builds up to the point of collapse, and defaults, taking the business with it. John then sells the company to his old school buddy Jim, who happens to run Circle K.

The long version is much more disturbing. For example, Investment firms like Bain Capital, directed by former Presidential candidate and “turnaround specialist” Mitt Romney, used this strategy in the past. The firm would take a loan out to purchase the company, using the company itself as leverage. In the case of KB Toys, Bain took over, and almost immediately started issuing huge bonus payouts to the board and leadership, leaving KB to shortly thereafter declare chapter 11. Legal? We have to assume so, because no fines or sentences were handed out. There’s no question where that sits morally, a CEO gets a 18 million dollar payout, and 3,400 employees lost their jobs.

Evolution

Toys ‘R’ Us suffered the same sort of fate. Even scarier is we don’t actually know how many companies went out this way, and most of the companies in question may not have been unstoppable juggernauts, but they certainly weren’t headed towards bankruptcy beforehand. Scarier still is that companies like Bain did that on their own; what if they had a partner? A competing retailer who can set the targets, and corner the market when the crunch starts? Everyone’s favourite supermassive online retailer benefited greatly from the demise of poor Geoffery Giraffe. What if they partnered with a company of equally dubious morals, a company who can rival Bain’s legal-but-evil tactics in their own market, controlling prices to make acquisition of the company in the first place a snap of the fingers. Retail’s favourite dartboard, and market maker for a large sector of the US stock system, Citadel, has a long standing investment in Bain Capital. Terrifying to imagine, and very tricky to prove.

Lessons?

Not everyone needs to turn themselves into a Wall St Wizard, but the language and syntax used is confusing on purpose to bore people out of looking closer. The less scrutiny and oversight, the less poking and prodding they receive allows for the schemes to get bigger and bolder. The average person doesn’t need to re-enact Mr. Douglas as Gordon Gekko in either of the Wall St films, or DiCaprio’s turn as the “Wolf” Jordan Belfort, but the oblique nature of the financial business doesn’t leave any room for the average person to see the right from wrong, because they all look the same from the streets below the balconies where the traders keep a clear divide between the in and out crowds. These trades take place on public stock exchanges; you can see which companies are invested in which politicians, which politicians have their investments in conflicts of interest (To use an example from our southern neighbors, Senator Joe Manchin, Chair of the United States Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, who’s 170k + govt salary is easily doubled by his earnings from Enersystems, who’s main stream of revenue is coal).

We might not have been invited to the party, but we know where it is, and we’re starting to peel at the tinted windows to see what’s really going on.

Cody Wright
Guest Columnist

Good Things Happen Too!

Quebec Proves Provinces Can Deliver Affordable Child Care

Here in Dufferin—Caledon, we live in a housing market where most families find it takes two incomes to cover the cost of home ownership. As we’ve discussed in previous issues, part of the solution is to implement affordable housing solutions.

In addition, as a practical matter, affordable childcare for working families is a must. Although this is an issue in Ontario, we can simply look next door at Quebec to see how we could meet the demand for affordable daycare while respecting the needs of children and families.

Quebec started its program almost fifteen years ago. In a 2009 survey, 92% of families using Quebec’s low-fee childcare system said it met their needs. Eighty-five percent of Quebec women aged 20 and 44 take part in the labour force, as compared to 80% in the rest of Canada. Quebec is tied with Switzerland for the highest labour participation rate in the world for women of childbearing age.

When the program started, mothers with children five years old and younger had a labour participation rate of 64%. With the program in place, that rate increased to 80%. In the rest of the country, it rose from 67% to just 71%.

www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-31/affordable-daycare-and-working-moms-the-quebec-model

The Quebec program is popular because it contributes to families’ work-life balance. Every family with a child between newborn and five years old qualifies for the program. It’s not based on income, employment status or marital status. Instead, it’s universal, just like healthcare.

Families receive ten hours of service per day for up to 261 weekdays per year. The average Quebec family pays less than 20 percent of the cost of childcare delivered by licensed providers.

Can Quebec afford it? Day care subsidies cost Quebec taxpayers about $2.5 billon, which is about 0.6% of Quebec’s GDP. That’s in line with what most developed countries spend on early childhood development in one form or another.

A study from the University of Sherbrooke found that taxpayers recover more than the cost of the program. It pays for itself through increased personal income tax and payroll tax revenues and reductions in the cost of social assistance payments to one income families.

The researchers also found that this program could be extended to all provinces in Canada at little to no cost to the taxpayer. The increase in employment boosts the overall tax base for the provinces and for the federal government, which makes it self-funding.

In terms of quality, Quebec’s centres de la petite enfance (CPEs) receive excellent evaluations from psychologists and the medical profession. Five-year-olds who attended a CPE turn out to be less vulnerable cognitively or behaviourally than other children.

Not only that, but children from low-income families benefit the most. Even so, middle to high income families also saw improvements in this area.

Researchers find that the CPE program does away with the cognitive differences teachers often see between low income and better off children. This continues at least until Grade 6 and probably longer.

Quebec started its universal childcare program to do two things. They wanted to improve work-life balance for working families, and they wanted to enhance childhood development. It’s not a perfect system, but the province has made substantial strides toward both goals.

The Green Party will implement a similar approach for Ontario. So far, the Ford Government has failed to “get with the program.” That needs to change, and voters will get the chance to change it on June 2 of this year.

Acknowledgement & Reconciliation

There are many Indigenous Peoples, Communities, Treaties, and Territories within what we now recognize as the riding of Dufferin—Caledon: Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, Huron-Wendat, and Odawa. We acknowledge that the Communities of Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation; the Three Fires Confederacy; and the Six Nations of Grand River; have had their Treaty lands greatly reduced since establishment, and we, the Dufferin-Caledon Greens, would like to continue to reconcile relationships with the First Peoples who now walk this land and who have walked this land in the past.