A few weeks ago, our compulsively kickable mayor refused two public health nurses that would be subsidized by the provincial government on account of the untruth that ‘we have enough people in public health right now’.

This thoroughly phony statement is contradicted by the fact that Ontario has the 2^nd worst staffing levels in all of Canada when it comes to the sort of care that these nurses would have provided.

But this rejection of free nurses was only a preface to the possibility that Rob Ford could sell 9 of the City of Toronto’s 10 municipally run long-term care homes, that is, that provide 24hr care for the elderly or the chronically sick that can’t live independently any longer.

This will invariably mean not just more nurses being laid off like valueless employees in some obsolete factory, but the residents of these homes will be subject to the intolerably dangerous living conditions because of their extreme dependence on staff for daily tasks like toileting, feeding, and emotional support; 41.3% of long-term care residents suffer from a form of depression and about 86% need some form of help with the bathroom.

You see, its tough to know what Ford is thinking here and have strong reservations from hazarding a guess if only because I have a difficult time discerning any cognition in Rob Ford at all.

For example, Rob Ford has proclaimed more or less inarticulately that labour makes up 80% of the City’s operating budget and thus labour is in dire need being well downsized. I can’t be sure about the numbers on planet Ford, but here on planet Earth, and more proximately, in Toronto, Ontario, labour makes up only 48% of the budget, and in a labour-intensive sector like long-term care or child care, every person on staff matters. Personal health and appearance are clearly beyond our Mayor who holds the record for circumference of a single person in their capacity of Mayor, but comprehension of the budget of which he presides over clearly is also outside the structural limits of his mind.

Long-term care homes provide Ontario with an impossibly crucial service, caring for elderly. Ontario has a vast brigade of elderly people in long-term care, some 80,000, and of which 58,000 are women.  The next closest province, British Columbia, has 20,000 long-term care residents and about 15,000 are of the feminine persuasion.

But long-term care homes are crucial pieces of real estate and the growth in land value can be used as equity against which the city could borrow to invest in new things—LIKE BIKE LANES. This is probably why real estate investment trusts, or REITs, covet them so much. And since the province of Ontario subsidizes long-term care homes, this means these facilities are a great source of equity and revenue at little cost to municipalities. It is also true that municipally-run long-term care homes provide better care than private ones because all profit gets reinvested into the home, and therefore the resident, instead of transferring the money to multinational shareholders who expect some monthly dividend.

Actual worked hours per resident are higher in public homes than in any other type. Public ownership matters. With over 1000 pages of documentation to prove it (email me if you’re interested).

Mayor Ford has completely misunderstood the law of value. As Matt Elliot has wrote “Rob Ford, apparently, believes that eliminating government revenue counts as a ‘savings’. He goes on to say that:

To put it another way: this is the equivalent of taking a $100 bill, setting it on fire, and then calling that a ‘savings’ on your monthly budget. Because now, I guess, you don’t have to worry about spending it” – Matt Elliot, Ford For Toronto

Seriously, is everything this roundly mayor says in the service of a lie?

When we all signed our souls away by electing Rob Ford, we in essence voted for a man whose sole mission in municipal government make it an austere and diminished office of its former self. Ford’s purpose is to efface irretrievably any public service that corporations could in theory provide. Regardless, of course, if privatization will make everybody worse off.

To the effervescently youthful class of Canadians who find no compulsion to care about long-term care, there is an inevitability that I hope will concentrate your mind: we will all invariably become elderly and by 2031, there will between 565,000 and 750,000 people in need of long-term care beds. If you fancy a long life for yourself, start stacking money because private care is going to cost you your whole damn pension…doubled…and then exaggerated.