THREAD: Here are the locations of the 15 parcels of land (totalling 7,400 acres) the Ford government is proposing to remove from the Greenbelt for housing development. #onpoli
cbc.ca/news/canada/to… King township:
•east of Dufferin St, south of Miller’s Sideroad, west of Bathurst St.

NEW: I’ve got up-to-date stats about how many kids are coming to Ontario ERs / getting hospitalized with respiratory illnesses.
The numbers over the past week are nearly *triple* the usual for this time of year. cbc.ca/news/health/ch… VIDEO: Here’s the story that aired last night on @CBCTheNational

cbc.ca/player/play/20…

NEW: Premier Doug Ford names 43 of his MPPs to be parliamentary assistants, which gives them each a $16,600 bump in pay above the standard MPP salary of $116,500.
Added to his 30-member cabinet, this means 73/83 PCs have extra duties & extra pay. #onpoli By the way, salaries for all Ontario MPPs (whether backbenchers, parliamentary assistants, Leader of the Opposition or Premier) have been frozen since 2008. #onpoli
cbc.ca/news/canada/to…

BREAKING: The Ford government’s plan to tackle the high cost of buying a home is coming today.
⁦⁦⁩⁩⁦@CBCNews⁩ has learned that new legislation will aim to speed up municipal approvals of housing projects as “first part of long-term plan.” cbc.ca/news/canada/to… The government will give reporters more detail on its housing plan at 12 noon during a technical briefing, then the legislation is to be tabled around 1pm, with a news conference to follow at 1:15. #onpoli
cbc.ca/news/canada/to…

NEW: Premier Doug Ford’s government is asking the Supreme Court of Canada to hear its case to keep cabinet ministers’ mandate letters secret. #onpoli
Story by ⁦@CBCToronto⁩’s ⁦@nicolebrockbank⁩ cbc.ca/news/canada/to… Ontario’s @IPCinfoprivacy commissioner first ordered the mandate letters released back in 2019, under the provincial Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act. #onpoli
ipc.on.ca/why-i-ordered-…

BREAKING: The Ford government is boosting Ontario's foreign buyers tax on residential real estate to 20%, and expanding it to apply province-wide.
(Currently it's 15% and only applicable on homes in a stretch of southern Ontario in & around GTA.) #onpoli
news.ontario.ca/en/release/100… This is big news. It's the first substantive thing the Ford government has done to address demand factors in the astonishingly rapid rise of the cost of buying a home in Ontario. Average home sale price has jumped 44% in two years. crea.ca/housing-market…

BREAKING: Ontario reaches $10-a-day child-care deal with federal government: sources #onpoli cbc.ca/news/canada/to… The deal commits the federal government to providing $10.2 B to Ontario over 5 years. That is the same amount that the Trudeau government offered to Ontario when talks on the child-care plan began last year. #onpoli #cdnpoli
cbc.ca/news/canada/to…

Premier Doug Ford, at a groundbreaking ceremony for the Ontario Line, says governments have talked about a new subway for Toronto for years. Then in an echo of his "Get It Done" re-election campaign slogan, says "We're the government that got it done." #onpoli With the help of the federal government, Doug Ford's @OntarioPCParty govt is on a streak of saying they got stuff done. 1. Earlier this week: a $4.9B electric vehicle battery plant in Windsor.
cbc.ca/news/canada/wi…

BREAKING: Not only did all board members of FH Health each donate max permitted amount to @OntarioPCParty within a few days of each other last fall, so did a bunch of their family members and colleagues, the @OntarioNDP has revealed. #onpoli As first reported by @Alan_S_Hale, the company FH Health recently got a sole-sourced contract to run vaccine clinics. @TarasNatyshak is holding news conference right now calling this egregious and is asking @ElectionsON to investigate. #onpoli
politicstoday.news/queens-park-to…

Ontario reports another 89 deaths of people with COVID-19, 56 of them occurring in the past three days alone.
Here's a statement from the Health Minister's spokesperson. #COVID19Ontario Unclear to me: why is the government now stating the specific days when these newly reported deaths happened?
In previous waves, the government didn't parse deaths this way.
Deaths were counted on the day they were reported, not day they happened.
Insights @EdTubb? @MoriartyLab?

NEW: 337 schools in Ontario reporting absence rates of 30% or higher among staff & students.
That's almost 1/10 of the schools for which data is available.
(Absences tallied Friday, reported today, the first day Ontario has made this data public.) #onted
data.ontario.ca/dataset/summar… 30% threshold is considered to be high absence rate, possibly indicating high Omicron spread.
Another 262 schools reported absence rates of 25 to 29%.
Added together: one in six schools reporting 25%+ absence rate.
(3,453 of Ontario's 4,800 schools reported data today.) #onted

Ontarians aged 50+ (including me) are now eligible to book #COVID19 vaccine booster shots. cbc.ca/news/canada/to… So I got into Ontario's vaccine booking queue for my booster, entered my health card info, and here's what happened.
"Unable to check at this time" ... three times straight.

BREAKING: The provincial government gave more than $200 million in #COVID19 relief to businesses that weren't eligible.
That's the biggest finding in today's new report from @OntarioAuditor. #onpoli
auditor.on.ca/en/content/ann… @OntarioAuditor The auditor also found nearly half of all the businesses that *were* eligible got far more in public money than they lost as a result of COVID ... $714 million more, in fact. #onpoli

SCOOP: Premier Doug Ford's government has left Ontario without a trade representative in Washington, D.C. for weeks, just as U.S. lawmakers pushed forward with legislation that could damage the province's auto sector. #onpoli cbc.ca/news/canada/to… The post was previously filled by @ianhctodd. Ford appointed him in 2018, after Todd served as tour director for the @OntarioPCParty. He had no previous experience in international trade. Ontario taxpayers paid his $348,000/yr salary. #onpoli
cbc.ca/news/canada/to…

TODAY: Premier Doug Ford is scheduled to make an announcement at 10am in Guelph, related to Ontario’s auto sector. Here’s background, from a piece I wrote last week. #onpoli cbc.ca/news/canada/to… Meanwhile, US President Joe Biden is in Detroit today. He + Democrats in Congress have proposed nearly $50B in tax breaks, incentives for government agencies to buy electric vehicles, loans for retooling factories, and aid to auto plant communities.
theglobeandmail.com/business/inter…

BREAKING: Ontario's deficit for 2020-21 was less than half the $38.5 billion the Ford government was projecting as recently as March. Newly released Public Accounts (financial statements) show actual deficit was $16.4 billion. #onpoli #covid19ontario
news.ontario.ca/en/backgrounde… Why was the government's math so far off? In part, tax revenues were much higher than projected. But also expenses were $5.6B below forecast "because the third wave of COVID-19 in Ontario peaked later than anticipated," says govt news release. #onpoli
news.ontario.ca/en/backgrounde…

"One thing threatens all the progress we've made," says Premier Doug Ford. "One thing threatens the summer everyone hopes to have, and that's the weak and porous border measures that the federal government has kept in place." #COVID19Ontario There's strong pushback from the medical community against this claim by Premier Doug Ford. I'll put some of it into this thread.

https://twitter.com/drmwarner/status/1392892156365393921

BREAKING: Ontario is pausing first doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine as a result of an increase in VITT blood clot incidents, and growing availability of other vaccines, says Dr. David Williams. #COVID19Ontario
cbc.ca/news/canada/to… Data from the UK show people who did *not* have a VITT blood clot incident with their 1st dose of AstraZeneca have just a 1 in 1 million risk of an incident with the 2nd, says Dr Williams. There's no current plan for administering Ontario's remaining supply (50,000 doses) of AZ.

NEW: @OntarioPCParty has begun an ad blitz against the federal Liberal government.
"Mutant COVID variants are flying into Canada. Trudeau didn't close the borders when the pandemic started. He didn't close the borders when it got worse." #onpoli #cdnpoli
fb.watch/5jHbZmqO4z/ It's not exactly clear what the Ford government wants the Trudeau government to do re the borders.
Here's a cabinet minister saying the feds should "shut down international borders!" and "freeze incoming flights immediately." #onpoli #cdnpoli

https://twitter.com/SteveClarkPC/status/1390318661320286208

NEW: Ontario is on track to administer at least one dose of #COVID19 vaccine to 65% of the adult population by the end of May, officials told journalists in a briefing. #COVID19Ontario Ontario is scheduled to receive 8.2 million doses of vaccine by the end of June, nearly all of them Pfizer. #COVID19Ontario

NEW: The ⁦@OntarioPCParty⁩ is buying Facebook ads encouraging people to sign a petition that the federal government ban all non-essential travel to Canada.
(The federal government actually banned foreigners / non-residents from non-essential travel to Canada in March 2020.) @OntarioPCParty The @OntLiberal Party spotted that @Sflecce ad on Facebook and in a news release said it's "tapping into the cynical Conservative political playbook of sowing division."