It appears jobs – to be more precise, people to fill them – topped the wish list of many businesses large and small, for Ontario Budget 2023.
Whether the measures announced in the budget mean workers with the right skills filling the province’s many job vacancies, remains to be seen.
Logic tells us the current critical shortage of health-care professionals was years in the making; it will take more than one provincial budget to fix.
Successive provincial governments cut hospital budgets and medical school admissions for decades, leading to a bare-bones system that lacked the resilience to withstand much of anything. At a time when fewer health resources were available, the “bulge in the hose” known as the post-war baby boom hit a point in their lives where they required more health care. The nurses who had the seniority to survive the layoffs were also retiring en masse, as were doctors, leaving the system not only short of personnel, but desperately short of experienced people in leadership positions.
Then the pandemic hit.
Meanwhile, Ontario as a whole was changing.
Prices, especially for fuel and housing, were rising at an astronomical rate, while wages stagnated, especially for low-paid jobs in the hospitality and retail sector. However, opportunities were opening up in careers with better pay. The people who left retail and hospitality jobs during the pandemic are not going back. They have either retired or retrained.
There are indications the province hopes to fill the labour shortage by increasing immigration. One has to wonder how immigrants are expected to find housing and feed and clothe their families on minimum wage, with modestly priced rental accommodations already as rare as hen’s teeth, and an increasing number of minimum wage workers forced to use food banks.
A number of years ago, at the height of the oil boom in Alberta, the lure of fast food and grocery clerk jobs paying $20 an hour drew many people from Ontario. They discovered the jobs were available as promised, but there was nowhere to live. After a winter of sleeping in a car, or renting a bunk in a tent, what had gone west returned east. At least here they had community supports.
A successful immigration program requires housing, as well as a support system to assist people until they can become independent. And that requires planning.
Simply bringing in foreign workers to fill an immediate need is a short-sighted solution. The Ontario Chamber of Commerce’ Provincial Budget Submission calls for education and training, removing barriers to labour mobility and foreign credential recognition, as well as other measures.
We have to get the health-care mess sorted out. Immigration will mean more families in need of health care, and we cannot provide it for the people we already have. This community alone has literally hundreds of families, if not thousands, who have no doctor. Their sole point of access to the health-care system has become the local emergency department, which is stretched to the limits.
It would seem to be a case of “build it, and they will come” for both health care and housing.
Until we get more nurses and doctors into the system, we will continue to have ER closures and surgery backlogs. To get more of the right kind of people into health care, be they home-grown or foreign-educated, salaries and working conditions have to be attractive.
Until we get more affordable housing built – not the million-dollar estates that sell quickly to investors and wealthy exiles from the city, but homes ordinary working people can afford – we will have trouble finding people to fill job vacancies.
Neither will happen overnight. Both health care and housing will take a lot of attention over the long term to fix.
We have a province that prides itself on being open for business and supportive of growth – not flash-in-the-pan, Alberta oil-boom, style growth, but stable and sustainable.
One can hope this budget paves the way for that type of growth. Quick fixes do not work. Long-term, careful planning and investing do.
