Privatization lies at the heart of the calamity that turned Ontario’s nursing homes into COVID death traps. Ford’s zeal for privatization runs deep.

If there’s a justification for the needlessly high pile of corpses that accumulated inside profitable nursing homes during the pandemic, it goes something like this: those people were old and were going to die anyway.

That’s probably the best excuse possible if you’re trying to convince yourself it’s OK to vote for Doug Ford — despite his keen support for the privatization of nursing homes, with all its deadly consequences.

Privatization lies at the heart of the calamity that struck Ontario’s nursing homes, turning them into gruesome COVID death traps.

Ford’s zeal for privatization runs deep. Handing over our public services to money-making private operators isn’t just part of his agenda — it permeates his policies. It’s in his DNA.

Under Ford, privatization has ripped through our public programs more rapidly than the Omicron variant would spread through an unvaccinated crowd jammed together in a tiny elevator stuck between floors.

The move toward nursing home privatization really got going under former Conservative premier Mike Harris. Today, 57 per cent of Ontario nursing homes are profit-making operations, mostly as part of corporate chains.

But profit transforms a nursing home. Among profit-making homes In Ontario, the COVID death rate was 7.3 per cent — nearly five times the 1.5 per cent death rate in publicly owned nursing homes, according to a Star investigation last year.

That difference translates into hundreds of extra deaths in profit-making homes.

So, yes, everyone is going to die sometime. But it matters that hundreds of people (also known as Gramma and Grampa) died sooner than their natural expiry date simply because they lived in profit-making homes.

Having learned nothing from this death parade, Ford is charging ahead with yet more privatization as the province sells off a new round of 30,000 nursing-home bed licences, with 16,000 of those allocated to private operators.

Nursing homes have become prized financial assets. Their profitability is ensured because they’re government-subsidized, making them safe investments with reliable income streams — exactly what’s being sought by private equity firms, which are notorious for slashing costs to maximize profits.

Now, any bright 5-year-old might have spotted the problem here with placing fragile seniors in the care of firms known for bare-knuckle capitalism. As a paper published last year by the U.S. National Bureau of Economic Research pointed out, when private equity firms acquire nursing homes, patients start to die more often.

Ford is also increasing privatization elsewhere in the health-care system. There are currently hundreds of private medical clinics in Ontario, mostly performing diagnostic tests, but Ford plans to allow them to perform surgeries as well — even though “private hospitals” have been banned in the province since 1973.

And then there’s the damage done to public education.

This year, provincial funding of public schools is $800 less per student than it was when Ford took office four years ago, according to Ricardo Tranjan, a political economist with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

Public schools increasingly depend on fundraising to pay for extracurricular activities, creating a huge difference between activity programs in schools in well-to-do neighbourhoods and those in poorer areas.

What makes all this so infuriating is that we’re a fabulously rich province, and this cost-cutting is completely unnecessary. As Ontario’s Financial Accountability Office notes, Ontario spends less per capita on public programs than any other province.

If we simply spent the same as the national average, our public programs would have an extra $28 billion a year! Considering that Ontario currently spends $30 billion on education and $71 billion on health, an extra $28 billion would be a stunning game-changer.

Instead, our public systems are impoverished, with poor kids deprived of after-school sports and field trips, while corpses pile up in nursing homes handed over to corporate sharks.

But Ford wants you to focus on that licence plate rebate, and to rest assured that poor kids and incapacitated old people are perfectly able to fend for themselves.

Originally published in the Toronto Star, May 4, 2022.