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Extra, Extra: Medical Residencies Reduced, New Pension Plan Schedule Announced, and a Soccer Coach Returns to the Field
Every weekday’s end, we collect just about everything you ought to care about or ought not to miss.
The Ontario, Canadian, and Toronto city flags. Photo by Don Long from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.
- Critics are slamming the Liberal government’s decision to eliminate 50 medical residencies for doctors-in-training when hundreds of thousands of Ontarians don’t have a family physician. Health Minister Eric Hoskins is defending the move, saying, “I am confident that this change will help us achieve our goal of making sure that we’ve got the right specialists in the right areas and we’ve got the right number of family doctors and they’re practicing where we need them.” First-year residencies have nearly doubled since 2004 to 1,200 positions a year; the government says the cuts are being integrated to make better use of scarce health-care dollars. According to the opposition Progressive Conservatives, the Liberals have cut $54 million worth of funding from the 2015 health-care budget. More than 800,000 Ontarians do not have a family doctor.
- Premier Kathleen Wynne has announced plans to phase in the provincial government’s new Ontario Retirement Pension Plan in four waves by 2020. Announced this morning, the plan will allow for large businesses with more than 500 employees to begin contributing immediately when the ORPP begins in 2017. Medium-sized businesses—with 50 to 499 employees—will begin contributing in 2018, and small businesses will contribute to the increase in 2019, while those who have opted out of a pension plan will be forced to contribute starting in 2020. The new ORPP will require workers to contribute 1.9 per cent of their annual earnings, up to $90,000 yearly, matching their employers’ contributions, bringing the total contribution to 3.8 per cent. Those who are self-employed are excluded from the plan.
- A Somalian-Canadian soccer coach is back on the field after surviving an attack by a militant group months ago. Mohamud Hagi Ibrahim—known as Coach Khalif to local Toronto players—returned to Somalia to coach a team despite political unrest in the country when an attack on his hotel reportedly killed 15 people. Ibrahim jumped from his fourth-floor hotel window and broke his femur, hip, and foot in the fall.