For Ontario Premier Doug Ford and his Progressive Conservative government, 2023 will be a year to push forward with the “get it done” agenda they promised voters in the provincial election campaign.
If the first six months of Ford’s second term are any indication, you can expect his government to move on that agenda with tactics and policies that raise plenty of controversy.
Since forming his new cabinet this summer, Ford’s ministers brought in a raft of legislation ostensibly designed to increase the pace of housing construction.
The changes drew criticism because they also open up pockets of the Greenbelt to development, weaken the powers of conservation authorities, limit what municipalities can charge developers for infrastructure costs and give the mayors of Toronto and Ottawa the power to push through bylaws with the support of only one third of city council.
One of the government’s most controversial tactics so far in its new mandate was invoking the notwithstanding clause of the Charter of Rights to ban education workers from striking.
Ford’s 83-seat victory in 2022 marks the first time since 1955 that an Ontario premier has increased the size of his majority in his second election. (Carlos Osorio/CBC)
CBC News requested a year-end interview with Ford in early December, but the request was not granted.
So to find out what to expect from the premier and his government in 2023, CBC News interviewed three PC insiders:
Kory Teneycke, co-founder and CEO of Rubicon Strategy. He managed both of Ford’s provincial election campaigns.
Karl Baldauf, vice president at McMillian Vantage, a public affairs firm. He served as chief of staff to the Treasury Board president during Ford’s first term.
Shakir Chambers, a principal at Earnsclliffe Strategies and former PC staffer at Queen’s Park.
1. Focus on the economy
All three insiders believe the high rate of inflation and the risks of an economic downturn will preoccupy Ford and his government in the coming year.
“There are a lot of economists out there that are concerned that we’re going to be in a recession, and that would by far be the biggest challenge facing not just the government of Ontario, but every government,” said Teneycke.
With inflation running high and Ontario facing the risk of a recession, Progressive Conservative insiders say the economy will be Ford’s top focus in the coming year. (Evan Mitsui/CBC)
Chambers believes the government will dole out more “money in your pocket” rebates along the lines of its pre-election scrapping of vehicle registration fees and the $200 per child payments to parents of school-age kids.
“Those little $100 here, $50 there really matter to people and really resonate with the average voter,” said Chambers.
Baldauf warns that financial measures that are too broadly-based could fuel inflation rather than tackle it.
“If the Ford government takes actions to put money in people’s pockets, it’s going to be in a very targeted way,” Baldauf said. “They have to ensure that the money going out the door is going to those who are most struggling to deal with the inflationary pressures.”
2. Health care in crisis
Ensuring the viability of Ontario’s health-care system will be “one of the biggest political challenges” facing the Ford government in 2023, said Baldauf.
“Health care is in people’s face in a way that few other issues are,” he said. “If somebody’s waiting in an emergency room for a dozen hours on end, you can’t get around that, you can’t sugarcoat that with messaging. That’s an issue you have to deal with through system change.”
In October, Ford visited CHEO, the children’s hospital in Ottawa and was given a personalized hard hat by Alex Munter, CHEO’s president and CEO. (Justin Tang/The Canadian Press)
He predicts a big push by the government in 2023 for greater private sector involvement in the delivery of publicly funded health care. If he’s correct, you can expect that to become pretty contentious.
Chambers notes that the government is yet to put forward a comprehensive policy on fixing the health-care system, instead offering piece-by-piece measures such as attempting to recruit more nurses and moving hospital patients into long-term care placements farther from their homes.
He expects there will be changes to health care because Ford and his government believe the status quo is not acceptable.
An open question is whether Ontario will put significantly more money into its $75-billion health budget. That could largely depend on whether Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s federal government ponies up.
3. Sparring (and partnering) with Trudeau
Ford and the rest of Canada’s premiers are engaged in a campaign calling for an increase to federal transfer payments for health care that would amount to an extra $28 billion a year. Trudeau has said he’s willing to offer up money, but not how much and not without conditions.
Teneycke predicts the Trudeau government will reach some sort of deal with the provinces on health-care funding.
“I think the pressure is sufficient that you’re going to see a movement on the federal side,” he said.
Ford and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau marked the launch of Canada’s first full-scale electric vehicle manufacturing plant in early December at the General Motors CAMI assembly plant in Ingersoll, Ont. (Nicole Osborne/The Canadian Press)
But if there isn’t a deal soon, you can expect Ford to bang the drum about federal funding more often and more loudly.
“I think you’ll see the premier become more pointed in this regard especially through the winter months as Ontarians struggle with the challenges of the health-care system,” said Baldauf.
Ford and Trudeau are “more than willing to work together to get results, because they share a lot of the same voters in ridings that decide elections,” said Chambers.
4. Will controversial moves deliver housing?
Critics say the Ford government is using the housing crisis as a pretext to make changes that help housing developers maximize their profits. The coming year will be a test of whether the government’s measures actually do more than that.
Since 2020, new housing starts in Ontario have been at all-time highs, but have yet to exceed 100,000 per year, according to statistics from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. That means the pace of construction must pick up dramatically for Ford to keep his promise of 1.5 million new homes built in a decade.
Ford has promised that 1.5 million new homes will be built in Ontario in the coming decade. However, the government’s own recently published economic outlook forecasts just 240,000 housing starts over the next three years. (Chris Young/The Canadian Press)
But with an economic environment of high interest rates, inflation pushing up construction costs and a slumping real estate market, there are plenty of predictions that new home starts will actually decline in 2023 rather than rise. Even the government’s own forecasts show housing starts failing to total more than 85,000 annually in each of the next three years.
“I think there are a lot more things that the government’s going to try to do,” said Teneycke. “But a lot of what has to happen is more on the execution and implementation side.”
Teneycke says the government was right to make structural changes to housing development policy early in its new mandate.
“You need to have time for those changes to actually take effect and to work their way through the system so that you’re starting to see outcomes by the time the next election rolls around,” he said.
Chambers says Ford and his government have done a lot of talking about housing.
“What they want to see now is progress. Are we actually building?”
5. Expect the unexpected
Ford’s time as premier has shown it can be difficult to predict his government’s moves with great accuracy. From slashing the size of Toronto city council in 2018 to raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour in 2021 (after previously freezing it) to breaking his oft repeated promise not to touch the Greenbelt in 2022, Ford has done things as premier that he’d not signalled ahead of time.
So it’s likely safe to expect in 2023 that Ford will do something you don’t expect.
Ford’s government brought in legislation to give the mayors of Toronto and Ottawa the power to push through bylaws with the support of only one third of city council. (Carlos Osorio/CBC)
Asked what issue they think the government will tackle in the coming year that has not been making headlines, both Teneycke and Baldauf independently flagged the skilled trades workforce.
“We’re just desperately short of people in the skilled trades,” said Teneycke. “These are the people that you need to build the highways and dig the subway tunnels and build the new condo towers and the new houses.”
“Ensuring people can work in the jobs of the future … will be an important priority, I imagine, for this government,” said Baldauf.
NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. syphilis epidemic slowed dramatically last year, gonorrhea cases fell and chlamydia cases remained below prepandemic levels, according to federal data released Tuesday.
The numbers represented some good news about sexually transmitted diseases, which experienced some alarming increases in past years due to declining condom use, inadequate sex education, and reduced testing and treatment when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
Last year, cases of the most infectious stages of syphilis fell 10% from the year before — the first substantial decline in more than two decades. Gonorrhea cases dropped 7%, marking a second straight year of decline and bringing the number below what it was in 2019.
“I’m encouraged, and it’s been a long time since I felt that way” about the nation’s epidemic of sexually transmitted infections, said the CDC’s Dr. Jonathan Mermin. “Something is working.”
More than 2.4 million cases of syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia were diagnosed and reported last year — 1.6 million cases of chlamydia, 600,000 of gonorrhea, and more than 209,000 of syphilis.
Syphilis is a particular concern. For centuries, it was a common but feared infection that could deform the body and end in death. New cases plummeted in the U.S. starting in the 1940s when infection-fighting antibiotics became widely available, and they trended down for a half century after that. By 2002, however, cases began rising again, with men who have sex with other men being disproportionately affected.
The new report found cases of syphilis in their early, most infectious stages dropped 13% among gay and bisexual men. It was the first such drop since the agency began reporting data for that group in the mid-2000s.
However, there was a 12% increase in the rate of cases of unknown- or later-stage syphilis — a reflection of people infected years ago.
Cases of syphilis in newborns, passed on from infected mothers, also rose. There were nearly 4,000 cases, including 279 stillbirths and infant deaths.
“This means pregnant women are not being tested often enough,” said Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, a professor of medicine at the University of Southern California.
What caused some of the STD trends to improve? Several experts say one contributor is the growing use of an antibiotic as a “morning-after pill.” Studies have shown that taking doxycycline within 72 hours of unprotected sex cuts the risk of developing syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia.
In June, the CDC started recommending doxycycline as a morning-after pill, specifically for gay and bisexual men and transgender women who recently had an STD diagnosis. But health departments and organizations in some cities had been giving the pills to people for a couple years.
Some experts believe that the 2022 mpox outbreak — which mainly hit gay and bisexual men — may have had a lingering effect on sexual behavior in 2023, or at least on people’s willingness to get tested when strange sores appeared.
Another factor may have been an increase in the number of health workers testing people for infections, doing contact tracing and connecting people to treatment. Congress gave $1.2 billion to expand the workforce over five years, including $600 million to states, cities and territories that get STD prevention funding from CDC.
Last year had the “most activity with that funding throughout the U.S.,” said David Harvey, executive director of the National Coalition of STD Directors.
However, Congress ended the funds early as a part of last year’s debt ceiling deal, cutting off $400 million. Some people already have lost their jobs, said a spokeswoman for Harvey’s organization.
Still, Harvey said he had reasons for optimism, including the growing use of doxycycline and a push for at-home STD test kits.
Also, there are reasons to think the next presidential administration could get behind STD prevention. In 2019, then-President Donald Trump announced a campaign to “eliminate” the U.S. HIV epidemic by 2030. (Federal health officials later clarified that the actual goal was a huge reduction in new infections — fewer than 3,000 a year.)
There were nearly 32,000 new HIV infections in 2022, the CDC estimates. But a boost in public health funding for HIV could also also help bring down other sexually transmitted infections, experts said.
“When the government puts in resources, puts in money, we see declines in STDs,” Klausner said.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Scientists can’t know precisely when a volcano is about to erupt, but they can sometimes pick up telltale signs.
That happened two years ago with the world’s largest active volcano. About two months before Mauna Loa spewed rivers of glowing orange molten lava, geologists detected small earthquakes nearby and other signs, and they warned residents on Hawaii‘s Big Island.
Now a study of the volcano’s lava confirms their timeline for when the molten rock below was on the move.
“Volcanoes are tricky because we don’t get to watch directly what’s happening inside – we have to look for other signs,” said Erik Klemetti Gonzalez, a volcano expert at Denison University, who was not involved in the study.
Upswelling ground and increased earthquake activity near the volcano resulted from magma rising from lower levels of Earth’s crust to fill chambers beneath the volcano, said Kendra Lynn, a research geologist at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory and co-author of a new study in Nature Communications.
When pressure was high enough, the magma broke through brittle surface rock and became lava – and the eruption began in late November 2022. Later, researchers collected samples of volcanic rock for analysis.
The chemical makeup of certain crystals within the lava indicated that around 70 days before the eruption, large quantities of molten rock had moved from around 1.9 miles (3 kilometers) to 3 miles (5 kilometers) under the summit to a mile (2 kilometers) or less beneath, the study found. This matched the timeline the geologists had observed with other signs.
The last time Mauna Loa erupted was in 1984. Most of the U.S. volcanoes that scientists consider to be active are found in Hawaii, Alaska and the West Coast.
Worldwide, around 585 volcanoes are considered active.
Scientists can’t predict eruptions, but they can make a “forecast,” said Ben Andrews, who heads the global volcano program at the Smithsonian Institution and who was not involved in the study.
Andrews compared volcano forecasts to weather forecasts – informed “probabilities” that an event will occur. And better data about the past behavior of specific volcanos can help researchers finetune forecasts of future activity, experts say.
(asterisk)We can look for similar patterns in the future and expect that there’s a higher probability of conditions for an eruption happening,” said Klemetti Gonzalez.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Waymo on Tuesday opened its robotaxi service to anyone who wants a ride around Los Angeles, marking another milestone in the evolution of self-driving car technology since the company began as a secret project at Google 15 years ago.
The expansion comes eight months after Waymo began offering rides in Los Angeles to a limited group of passengers chosen from a waiting list that had ballooned to more than 300,000 people. Now, anyone with the Waymo One smartphone app will be able to request a ride around an 80-square-mile (129-square-kilometer) territory spanning the second largest U.S. city.
After Waymo received approval from California regulators to charge for rides 15 months ago, the company initially chose to launch its operations in San Francisco before offering a limited service in Los Angeles.
Before deciding to compete against conventional ride-hailing pioneers Uber and Lyft in California, Waymo unleashed its robotaxis in Phoenix in 2020 and has been steadily extending the reach of its service in that Arizona city ever since.
Driverless rides are proving to be more than just a novelty. Waymo says it now transports more than 50,000 weekly passengers in its robotaxis, a volume of business numbers that helped the company recently raise $5.6 billion from its corporate parent Alphabet and a list of other investors that included venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz and financial management firm T. Rowe Price.
“Our service has matured quickly and our riders are embracing the many benefits of fully autonomous driving,” Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana said in a blog post.
Despite its inroads, Waymo is still believed to be losing money. Although Alphabet doesn’t disclose Waymo’s financial results, the robotaxi is a major part of an “Other Bets” division that had suffered an operating loss of $3.3 billion through the first nine months of this year, down from a setback of $4.2 billion at the same time last year.
But Waymo has come a long way since Google began working on self-driving cars in 2009 as part of project “Chauffeur.” Since its 2016 spinoff from Google, Waymo has established itself as the clear leader in a robotaxi industry that’s getting more congested.
Electric auto pioneer Tesla is aiming to launch a rival “Cybercab” service by 2026, although its CEO Elon Musk said he hopes the company can get the required regulatory clearances to operate in Texas and California by next year.
Tesla’s projected timeline for competing against Waymo has been met with skepticism because Musk has made unfulfilled promises about the company’s self-driving car technology for nearly a decade.
Meanwhile, Waymo’s robotaxis have driven more than 20 million fully autonomous miles and provided more than 2 million rides to passengers without encountering a serious accident that resulted in its operations being sidelined.
That safety record is a stark contrast to one of its early rivals, Cruise, a robotaxi service owned by General Motors. Cruise’s California license was suspended last year after one of its driverless cars in San Francisco dragged a jaywalking pedestrian who had been struck by a different car driven by a human.
Cruise is now trying to rebound by joining forces with Uber to make some of its services available next year in U.S. cities that still haven’t been announced. But Waymo also has forged a similar alliance with Uber to dispatch its robotaxi in Atlanta and Austin, Texas next year.
Another robotaxi service, Amazon’s Zoox, is hoping to begin offering driverless rides to the general public in Las Vegas at some point next year before also launching in San Francisco.
