Ontario’s Action Plan: Protect, Support, Recover

2020 Budget provides more resources to strengthen frontline health care, support people and employers, and lay the groundwork for Ontario’s recovery Mississauga

The Voice of Canada News:

Finance Minister Rod Phillips released Ontario’s Action Plan: Protect, Support, Recover – the next phase of a comprehensive action plan to respond to the serious health and economic impacts of COVID-19. Ontario’s Action Plan now sets out a total of $45 billion in support over three years to make available the necessary health resources to continue protecting people, deliver critical programs and tax measures to support individuals, families and job creators impacted by the virus, and lay the groundwork for a robust long-term economic recovery for the province.

“The next phase of Ontario’s Action Plan makes available every necessary resource to continue protecting people’s health during the second wave of COVID-19 and beyond,” said Minister Phillips. “We’re providing new support to those who have been hardest hit, including parents, seniors and small business owners, while making sure we are removing barriers to enable the necessary growth for job creation and Ontario’s long-term economic recovery.”

The 2020 Budget is protecting frontline health care, supporting people and employers, and laying the foundation for economic recovery across the province, including people in Mississauga by:

• Investing an additional $116.5 million to create up to 766 more beds at 32 hospitals and alternate health facilities across the province. Making more beds available to patients will help reduce surgical backlogs and improve access to care during COVID-19. This funding builds on the province’s $2.8 billion COVID-19 Fall Preparedness Plan, Keeping Ontarians Safe: Preparing for Future Waves of COVID-19. The new hospital beds are in addition to the $234.5 million investment for 139 critical care beds and 1,349 hospital beds included in Ontario’s fall preparedness plan.

• Building smarter to get shovels in the ground faster for long-term care homes in places like Ajax, Toronto and Mississauga and committing to collaborating with hospitals and municipal partners to accelerate project delivery for the benefit of seniors and their families.
• Welcoming and supporting the decision by Roche to invest $500 million over five years to establish a Global Pharma Technical Operations site to oversee its global supply chain in Mississauga. This investment is expected to create 500 jobs ― 200 by the end of 2020 and up to 300 more by the end of 2023. It will enhance Ontario’s competitiveness and leadership in the life sciences sector.

“The 2020 Ontario Budget ‘Ontario’s Action Plan: Protect, Support, Recover’ build’s on our government’s actions and commitments to do everything we can to get Ontario through the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Nina Tangri, MPP for Mississauga-Streetsville. “The plan lays out how we will protect the people of Ontario in the near term, support people and businesses in the future, and how we will recover from the health and economic impacts in the long term through infrastructure and capital investments.”

“The plan also addresses how we will approach other issues, including high auto insurance premiums, gridlock and transit accessibility, modernizing government services, supporting small business, and employment supports – especially for those looking to retrain or enter the skilled trades,” continued Tangri.

Protect

In total, Ontario’s COVID-19 health response is now a projected $15.2 billion. The government is making available $4 billion in 2021-22 and a further $2 billion in 2022-23 to ensure the Province can remain responsive to evolving needs in the fight against the pandemic. The 2020–21 spending includes $2.8 billion to support the Province’s Fall Preparedness Plan for Health, Long- Term Care and Education – the most comprehensive and robust plan in the country to respond to the second wave of COVID-19. It also includes additional funding to support hospital beds, address the surgical backlog and purchase additional influenza vaccines.

The government is also investing an additional $572 million in Ontario’s hospitals to support additional costs of COVID-19 including testing, assessment centres, laboratory and medical equipment, and PPE. This brings the total funding to hospitals above and beyond what was provided last year to over $2.5 billion. The Province is investing more than $18 billion in capital grants over 10 years to build new and expanded hospital infrastructure and address urgent upgrades, including repairs and maintenance to help modernize hospitals across Ontario.

To protect loved ones in long-term care from a second wave, and to address long standing issues in the system, Ontario is providing over half a billion dollars to enable necessary renovations and measures to improve infection prevention and control, allow for the purchase of more personal protective equipment (PPE), and to build a strong health care workforce. While Ontario’s Long- Term Care COVID-19 Commission is completing its review, the government is acting immediately to protect Ontario’s most vulnerable people. The Province plans to increase average daily direct care of long-term care residents from a nurse or personal support worker to four hours a day.

This additional care will be phased in over the next four years and will make Ontario the leader among Canadian provinces. This ambitious plan will require significant changes in the long-term care sector, including recruiting and training tens of thousands of new staff.

“Since day one of the pandemic, protecting people has been our government’s number one priority,” said Minister Phillips. “The health risks of COVID-19 remain extremely serious. We are making available every necessary resource to keep people safe, including our loved ones in long- term care and our frontline health care heroes during the second wave and beyond.”

Support

The government is now delivering an estimated $13.5 billion in total support for people and job creators as part of Ontario’s Action Plan. This additional relief will ensure families, seniors, businesses and workers are supported through the second wave of COVID-19 and beyond.

To help offset some of the additional costs of COVID-19, parents will once again receive $200 per child under age 12 and $250 for children and youth with special needs age 21 and under. This means a family with three young children, one of whom has special needs, would receive $1,300 in 2020.

The government is taking significant steps to protect seniors and allow them to stay in their homes longer. The Province is proposing a new Seniors’ Home Safety Tax Credit for the 2021 taxation year, which would provide a 25 per cent credit on eligible renovations of up to $10,000. Seniors would be eligible regardless of their incomes and whether they owe income tax for 2021. Family members who have a senior living with them would also be eligible.

The Ontario government remains committed to supporting job creators through this unprecedented time. The government is making available$300 million in relief is available for eligible businesses in regions where the Province determines modified Stage 2 public health restrictions are necessary, or, going forward, in areas categorized as Control or Lockdown. This will help cover fixed costs such as property taxes and energy bills. The government is also providing an additional $1.8 billion in the Support for People and Jobs Fund over the next two years to remain responsive to emerging needs and continue providing supports for the people of Ontario.

“COVID-19 has caused a global recession and Ontario has not been immune,” said Minister Phillips. “Every negative economic statistic represents a person who has lost their job, an anxious small business owner or a family struggling to make ends meet. Today we are providing new support to those who have been hardest hit, including parents, seniors and small business owners, while building on what has already been provided.”

Recover

While COVID-19 will impact Ontario and the entire world for the foreseeable future, the 2020 Budget begins to build the foundation for a strong economic recovery fuelled by growth. The government is planning to invest $4.8 billion in initiatives that will support jobs now, while removing barriers that would hold Ontario back from a strong recovery from COVID-19. Among the major initiatives proposed by the government are a reduction of job-killing electricity prices, reducing taxes on jobs, connecting unserved and underserved communities with a historic investment in broadband infrastructure, and providing workers with skills training – including those impacted by the pandemic, such as tourism and hospitality workers – to help them connect to jobs needing high-demand skills.

The government is also acting immediately to reduce taxes for job creators and level the playing field by lowering high provincial business property tax rates to a rate of 0.88 per cent for over 200,000 properties – or 94 per cent of all business properties in the province. This would create

$450 million in annual savings in 2021, representing a 30 per cent reduction for many employers.

Ontario is going a step further to make available additional support for the employers most affected by COVID-19. The government has heard from some municipalities that they would like additional tools to provide more targeted tax relief to job creators in their community. Ontario is responding to requests from local governments by proposing to provide municipalities with the ability to cut property tax for small businesses and a provincial commitment to consider matching these reductions. This would provide small businesses as much as $385 million in total municipal and provincial property tax relief by 2022–23, depending on municipal adoption.

The province is also ending a tax on jobs for an additional 30,000 employers by proposing to make permanent the Employer Health Tax (EHT) exemption increase from $490,000 to $1 million. This would save private-sector employers $360 million in 2021–22 that could be reinvested in jobs and growth. About 90 per cent of employers would pay no EHT with this additional relief.

When employers are looking at Ontario as a place to do business, it’s clear the province’s high commercial and industrial electricity prices are a barrier to investment that causes some of them to go elsewhere. The 2020 Budget outlines a plan to reduce the burden on employers of Ontario’s high-cost contracts with non-hydro renewable energy producers, which will be wound down once and for all. Starting on January 1, 2021, a portion of the cost of these contracts, entered under the previous government, will be funded by the Province, not the ratepayers. This electricity cost relief would free up money that could be better spent creating jobs. Medium size and larger industrial and commercial employers would save about 14 and 16 per cent respectively, on average, on their bills starting in 2021. This means Ontario will go from having some of the least competitive electricity prices to prices that are more competitive than the average in the United States.

“All of us in Ontario are focused on getting through COVID-19,” said Minister Phillips. “It may be difficult to think about the future while still dealing with a global pandemic, but if we all do our part, COVID-19 will eventually be behind us. Our government has a responsibility to remove

barriers to the growth necessary for job creation. The cost if Ontario falls behind while the rest of the world recovers is simply too high. We can’t afford to wait.”

The 2020 Budget provides transparency amidst a world of uncertainty, by outlining a flexible medium-term fiscal plan based on the latest economic projections. It also presents alternative scenarios demonstrating how the province’s fiscal outlook could change depending on the pace of the economic recovery. The government is projecting a deficit of $38.5 billion for 2020–21, which is unchanged from the deficit forecast at the time of the 2020–21 First Quarter Finances and reflects urgent spending necessary for the fight against COVID-19. Over the medium term, the government is forecasting steadily declining deficits of $33.1 billion in 2021–22 and $28.2 billion in 2022–23. Acknowledging the continued uncertainty of the global pandemic, the government plans to table a multi-year plan including a path to balance in the 2021 Budget by March 31, 2021.

Quick facts

• Since June, employment in Ontario has risen by 838,000 net jobs and, as of September, employment reached 95.8 per cent of the February 2020 level.
• Ontario’s real GDP is projected to decline by 6.5 per cent in 2020 and rise by 4.9 per cent in 2021. Ontario’s economic growth is expected to continue after 2021, with real GDP projected to rise 3.5 per cent in 2022 before moderating to 2.0 per cent growth in 2023.
• The Fiscal Sustainability, Transparency and Accountability Act, 2019 (FSTAA) requires the government to publish a recovery plan in the event a balanced budget is not projected in the final year of the multi-year fiscal plan. The Act also recognizes the need for flexibility and provides the ability to respond to changing circumstances. Given the continued and unprecedented uncertainty and risks associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, the government is proposing amendments to FSTAA to pause the requirement to include a recovery plan in the 2020 Budget.
• Ontario was the first jurisdiction in Canada to release a fiscal outlook that reflected the impacts of the COVID-19 crisis in its March 25, 2020 Ontario’s Action Plan: Responding to COVID-19.