Legislative Assembly Of Ontario Research Articles

Harvey and Gurvir's Law: Ontario Bill for Quality Prenatal Information about Down Syndrome: Terminology, Feasibility, and Ethical Issues.

Harvey and Gurvir's Law is a bill proposed to the Legislative Assembly of Ontario (Canada) to reduce stigma and bias associated with Down syndrome, by developing and disseminating quality information about Down syndrome in the context of prenatal testing.

Knowledge Mobilization by Provincial Politicians: The United Front against Trafficking in Ontario, Canada

ABSTRACT In recent years, some Canadian provinces have followed the federal government’s intensification of anti-trafficking measures. Ontario is perhaps the most significant in this respect, especially with its introduction of the 2017 Anti-Human Trafficking Act. We set out to investigate debates in the Legislative Assembly of Ontario regarding the then proposed law. Our aim was to understand how politicians and others who presented at the debates mobilized knowledge, and to offer opportunities of resistance to discursive injustice for future policymaking. We engaged in a critical discourse analysis approach to examine how different types of knowledge were applied and reproduced, with a particular focus on explicit and implicit knowledge statements. Through analysis of the debate transcripts, we found a near unified front against a perceived humanitarian crisis that required an urgent punitive and securitized response, based largely in individualistic, moralistic, and colonial notions of “risk” and vulnerability. Our findings uncovered a reliance on strong beliefs and willful silences to narrate a trafficking story that displaced social conditions onto a purportedly immoral sex trade. This conceptualization was advanced through repeated invalidation of sexual labor, with invocations of childhood innocence, thereby hindering the promotion of just and inclusive societies.

Fiduciary Responsibility and the Green Energy Act, 2009 (Ontario, Canada).

Analyses of the Green Energy Act (2009) have stated that the act had numerous shortcomings concerning the environmental impacts of the energy projects initiated within its purview. This account addresses the core points of divergence in the policy's creation that are responsible for the problematic effects. The crux of these problems comes from the ambiguity of the concept of green energy within the act due to its lack of a formal definition. The reasons for this anomaly originate from the Legislative Assembly of Ontario's address on the topic and their decision to let it remain ambiguous. This stance raises questions of whether they are fulfilling their fiduciary duties to an acceptable level. Although these questions of duty and obligation are both delicate and necessary when talking about projects that involve Canada's indigenous peoples, it is not limited to them due to the scope of the effects. Ultimately, although the policy was repealed in January 2019, there are many lessons that can be learned from the missteps of the Act.

Integrating Health Services in Ontario Through Mergers and Centralization

On 18 April 2019, the Legislative Assembly of Ontario passed Bill 74, The People’s Health Care Act, which provided new authorities to the Ministry of Health and a newly createdOntario Health super agency to facilitate the integration of health care services across Ontario. This reform represents a shift away from the previous regionalized system of Local Health Integration Networks (LHINs). While centralization is intended to improve efficiency within the system and create a patient-centred model of care, it also equips the Ministry and Ontario Health with greater authority over health agencies. Ontario’s reform represents another move towards centralization in a wave of regionalization reversal that has swept across the country. Implementation of this reform will take several years to roll out. An analysis of centralization reforms in other jurisdictions can provide insight into Ontario’s decision to reform. Though this bill was presented as a modernization of Ontario’s health system to meet people’s needs, a common theme in stakeholders’ opinions is the lack of consultation with the public.

Politics and the Art of Indexing: Teamwork in a Legislative Environment

AbstractIn this article Cheryl Caballero, Erica Smith and Rosalind Guldner, members of the Ontario Legislative Assembly indexing team, describe the challenges of indexing legislative text and how they set about meeting them. A version of their article was originally published in The Indexer in June 2015*.

OxyContin in Ontario: The multiple materialities of prescription painkillers

BackgroundIn the past decade, OxyContin diversion and misusehave been firmly established in Ontarian public discourse as serious problems requiring major intervention.This article contextualizes and theorizesthe processes through which the marketing of the prescription opioid and its subsequent problematization occurred. Theanalysis refuses the impossible choice between the ‘deserving pain patient’ and the ‘undeserving addict,’ between the war on pain and the war on drugs, and between a notion of OxyContin as either miracle panacea or destructive poison. Rather than falling in step with these binaries, OxyContinis theorized across them, or multiply, with the aim of moving beyond established moral and theoretical registers for exploring embodied consumption. MethodsThis discursive study is based on a broad range of texts collected between 2009-2013: Hansard reports from the Legislative Assembly of Ontario; newspaper, magazine, and internet coverage of OxyContin; and policy documents, research reports, and position papers and news releases produced by government agencies, advocacy organizations, professional bodies, think tanks, tribal councils, and law enforcement agencies. ResultsPharmaceutical industry and state actors have attempted to dualistically parse disparate materializations of OxyContin, a tactic that intensified as media pressure helped produce the notion of a public health crisis and, implicitly, a crisis of welfare dependence. By focusing on the (impossible) task of stratifying proper from improper use, the drug's advocatessought to secure the integrity of opioid painkillers and to protect their materialization as vehicles for maintaining a body that is normal, stable, and in control, as opposed to a body of excess that threatens to expose the consumerist logic of contemporary medicine. ConclusionAttempts to contain the multiplicity of OxyContin result in the further entrenchment of privatized and individualized approaches to pain and painkilling and serve to undermine rather than secure public health and safety.

オンタリオ州議会における新しい情報パラダイムに向けての革新的，協働的アプローチ

オンタリオ州議会における新しい情報パラダイムに向けての革新的，協働的アプローチ

The Woman Candidate for the Ontario Legislative Assembly, 1919-1929

History paints a bleak picture of Ontario women's lack of electoral success after 1919, the year women secured the right to provincial and municipal elective office. This article examines thirteen of twenty-one women who ran unsuccessfully as candidates for the Ontario Legislative Assembly before 1943, especially the twelve who were candidates between 1919-1929, the political success of some of their predecessors elected as school trustees as early as 1892, and the experience of these women with political parties. It tests to what extent the historical record confirms political scientist Sylvia Bashevkin's analysis of women and party politics in English Canada and sociologist Thelma McCormack's theory of male and female dual political cultures.

A Wavering Commitment? Administrative Independence and Collaborative Governance in Ontario’s Adjudicative Tribunals Accountability Legislation

In December 2009, the Ontario Legislative Assembly enacted the Adjudicative Tribunals Accountability, Governance and Appointments Act, 2009 [ATAGAA]. This new legislation offers a unique approach to ensuring that adjudicative tribunals in the province are transparent, accountable and efficient in their operations while preserving their decision-making independence. This approach aims to bring the executive branch of government and tribunals together in achieving effective and accountable internal tribunal governance. Through the use of illustrative cases, the author argues, however, that the statute does not address many of the contemporary concerns about administrative independence and accountability that tribunals experience on the ground. She argues further that the legislation is inconsistent in its underlying commitment to the concept of accountability itself as it fails to contemplate the importance of government accountability to tribunals and overlooks opportunities to foster sustained internal cultures of accountability. Finally, the approach taken by the legislation must be channeled properly to avoid disintegrating from one of collaborative governance to one of command and control.En décembre 2009, l’Assemblée législative de l’Ontario a adopté la Loi de 2009 sur la responsabilisation et la gouvernance des tribunaux décisionnels et les nominations à ces tribunaux. Cette nouvelle loi présente une approche tout à fait particulière pour assurer que les tribunaux décisionnels de la province sont transparents, tenus de rendre compte et efficaces dans leur fonctionnement tout en préservant leur indépendance décisionnelle. Cette approche vise à rapprocher l’autorité exécutive du gouvernement et les tribunaux pour en arriver à une gouvernance interne efficace et responsable des tribunaux. En utilisant des cas pour l’illustrer, l’auteure soutient, toutefois, que la loi n’aborde pas plusieurs des préoccupations contemporaines au sujet de l’indépendance administrative et l’obligation de rendre compte dont les tribunaux font l’expérience sur le terrain. Elle soutient de plus que la loi est inconsistante dans son engagement sous-jacent envers le concept lui-même de l’obligation de rendre compte puisqu’elle ne contemple pas l’importance de tenir le gouvernement responsable envers les tribunaux et néglige les occasions de favoriser des cultures internes soutenues de rendre compte. Finalement, l’approche que prend la loi doit être dirigée convenablement pour éviter de se désintégrer d’une approche de gouvernance collaborative en une de commandement et de contrôle.

Free voting in a provincial parliament: The case of ‘same‐sex’ legislation in Ontario, 1994

Previous research on parliamentary free voting, which has been confined exclusively to national parliaments and almost exclusively to the British House of Commons, has found relatively little constituency impact on members’ voting decisions, even on the most contentious issues of social policy. Since sub‐national parliaments tend to be smaller, less professionalised, and (arguably) ‘closer to the people’, it is possible that a more significant ‘constituency connection’ might be observed in these legislative arenas. This study extends the literature on this topic by empirically examining the fate of a recent homosexual rights bill in the Ontario Legislative Assembly. Contrary to expectations, none of the constituency characteristics used in logistical regression models generates a significant MLE coefficient, suggesting that Canadian provincial legislators may be even less sensitive to constituency preferences than their national counterparts.

Petitions to the Legislative Assembly of Ontario from Local Governments, 1867–1877: A Case Study in Legislative Participation

In late twentieth-century English-speaking western democracies, the petition is almost exclusively a sporadic, exceptional, and marginal mode of political expression, its legitimacy as an instrument and indicator of public opinion superceded by elected professionals and ubiquitous polls; a tenuous survival from its origin as the universal form of civic supplication. Part and parcel of the democratic revolution that reached its apogee in the nineteenth century, this transition may not have been neatly contemporaneous with the constitutional changes to which it seems collateral. In a recent article in this review, David C. Frederick posited that petitioning effectively disappeared in the United States after the imposition of a “gag-rule” by Congress, imposed in the 1830s as a response to anti-slavery agitation by petition.

Gay Rights and Family Values: The Passage of Bill 7 in Ontario

On 16 December 1986, the Ontario Legislative Assembly passed into law an amendment to the Human Rights Code prohibiting discrimination against homosexuals. Originating in June of 1985 as an innocuous piece of housekeeping intended to bring Ontario statutes into line with the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Bill 7 (Equality Rights Statute Law Amendment Act) had been altered in such a way as to confront the Liberal government with one of its most controversial choices since forming the government.

Canadian Legislatures: The 1984 Comparative StudyRobert J. Fleming and J. Thomas Mitchinson, eds. Toronto: Legislative Assembly of Ontario, 1984, pp. 76

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Michigan and Ontario Legislators: Perspectives on the Federal System

In analysing the American and Canadian federal systems it possible to stress the trends common to both systems or, alternately, to emphasize the differences that distinguish the Canadian from the American experience with federal institutions. Both political systems have persisted with recognizable federal features even while substantial nationalizing developments have occurred in the economies and cultures of the two nations. One leading authority characterizes the kind of federalism that results as co-operative in contrast to the older classical variety.' Others, while noting common trends, stress the greater degree of resistance to centralization found in Canada by use of such labels as pluralistic federalism,2 double-image federalism,3 and perpheralized federalism.4 While briefs can be made for affixing one or another label to a system, it seems more useful at this stage to study some of the array of differences between the Canadian and American federal systems. One way to get a rough measure of differences and similarities to pose a set of questions on federalism to comparable groups of Canadians and Americans. These questions can be designed to determine the respective orientations to their federal systems and their opinions on various provincial (state)-federal problems. In this study the questions were put to members of the Ontario Legislative Assembly and the Michigan Senate. The decision to interview legislators in both countries was heavily influenced by the theory that members of leadership groups might be the key to an understanding of the changing loyalties more generally.experienced as federal systems undergo nationalizing and centralizing trends. William H. Riker argues that the most fundamental feature of the maintenance of the federal system is the popular sentiment of loyalty to (different levels of) government, which sentiment serves as a channel for development for centralizing or peripheralizing institutions.5 T. A. Corry, althoui;h arv;uing in a different context, asks for

Michigan and Ontario Legislators: Perspectives on the Federal System

In analysing the American and Canadian federal systems it is possible to stress the trends common to both systems or, alternately, to emphasize the differences that distinguish the Canadian from the American experience with federal institutions. Both political systems have persisted with recognizable federal features even while substantial nationalizing developments have occurred in the economies and cultures of the two nations. One leading authority characterizes the kind of federalism that results as “co-operative” in contrast to the older “classical” variety. Others, while noting common trends, stress the greater degree of resistance to centralization found in Canada by use of such labels as “pluralistic federalism,” “double-image federalism,” and “peri-pheralized federalism.” While briefs can be made for affixing one or another label to a system, it seems more useful at this stage to study some of the array of differences between the Canadian and American federal systems. One way to get a rough measure of differences and similarities is to pose a set of questions on federalism to comparable groups of Canadians and Americans. These questions can be designed to determine the respective orientations to their federal systems and their opinions on various provincial (state)-federal problems. In this study the questions were put to members of the Ontario Legislative Assembly and the Michigan Senate.