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Weekend Newsstand: November 7, 2015
Today's news: the Toronto Police Services Board kept quiet a report on radically reducing policing costs, gender-affirming surgeries for trans people may now be easier to access in Ontario, and a $100-million power line that may not have been needed at all.
The Toronto Police Services Board has been hiding a report it commissioned, presented a year ago this month, on radically reducing the police service’s costs. The report offered several dramatic solutions for reining in the service’s costs, such as replacing all 17 divisions with storefront operations, cutting the size of middle management, and moving work that doesn’t require police training to civilian employees who would be paid less. Former board chair Alok Mukherjee’s only comment on the report was that he did intend to make it public, while current board chair Andy Pringle said the document was intended as an “internal think” piece rather than for the public to see. Mukherjee had pointed to the report as “unfinished business” for the board before he stepped down earlier this year.
Beginning in 2016, Ontario will move to allow all qualified health care providers to refer transgender patients for gender-affirming surgeries. Currently, trans people throughout the province must go through the Gender Identity Clinic at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, and the wait list even to receive a referral from the clinic can be up to two years. Allowing more health professionals to refer patients for surgery has the potential to dramatically lower wait times for people who are prepared to undergo gender-affirming surgeries, and provincial Health Minister Eric Hoskins said at yesterday’s announcement that “one of the most vulnerable times for trans people is when they are ready for surgery, but face a prolonged wait.” Even with this change, some surgeries are not offered in Ontario and many patients travel to Quebec; Montreal has the country’s only clinic that provides all gender-affirming surgeries in one place.
A $100-million power line that has yet to be completed due to land disputes in Caledonia may have been unnecessary all along, according to new reporting by CTV News. Hydro One applied to the Ontario Energy Board to charge Ontarians for the entire cost of the line, but that application was rejected because the board found that there was not a sound economic case for the line.