Be it resolved that a new paragraph be added to the PC Party’s policy declaration under the category of Government Transparency, as follows:
“We believe that taxpayers have a right to know how their money is used by government in the provision of health care and other services. Basic, non-identifying information such as number of procedures, total cost, segmentation by age, and other common metrics should be available to taxpayers and other agencies to help ensure the efficiency, effectiveness and safety of programs. Therefore, we support transparency legislation to restore public access to basic, non-identifying metrics related to the provision of surgical and chemical induced abortions in Ontario.”
Rationale explaining why the above policy resolution should be adopted:
1. In January of 2012, the Liberal Government secretly passed an amendment to the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FIPPA) to exclude abortion information from Freedom of Information (FOI) requests. They did so under Bill 122 (The Broader Public Sector Accountability Act).
2. Anything and everything about abortion is now being hidden by the Ontario government, with the sweeping nature of the FIPPA exemption. This includes abortion numbers, abortion complications resulting in subsequent hospitalization or death, and total cost to the taxpayer. It bars the public from knowing the demographic statistics of women who have abortions: their age, how many abortions they have, and the gestational age of the fetus at termination. Since 2012, basic data, once readily available to the public, can no longer be released to the public under the amended FIPPA.
3. This is undemocratic. We know from the experience of history that when government hides figures and statistics, it results in scandalous waste, inefficiency, and sometimes, dangerous public policy decisions.
To download this proposed policy resolution as a MS Word document, together with the Rationale, click here.