In today’s The Big Story podcast, in November 2019, months before the pandemic made heroes of public sector workers like teachers and (especially) nurses, Ontario’s government passed Bill 124, attempting to cap their pay increases at one per cent for the next three years. It didn’t go very well.
Earlier this month, after years of protests and bad press, and a legal challenge that went to the highest court in the province, the same government repealed the bill. And then announced in the budget that the entire fight, including years of back pay, has already cost the province $6 billion in taxpayer money, and could cost billions more.
Richard Southern is the Queen’s Park reporter for 680 News Radio Toronto. “The government tried to frame it as a way to get costs under control,” said Southern. ‘Here we are now with the Ford government in Ontario having tabled the biggest spending budget in Ontario history featuring the largest sub-national debts in the entire world.”
So … what happened here? Why did this fight drag on for years? And would the government have been better off just paying up in the first place?
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