Once again, neoliberalism has handed Doug Ford another majority government in Ontario.

Healthcare privatization. U.S. trade agreements. Toll roads and taxes. These were all hot topics of the 2025 Ontario election, but you’d be forgiven for not recognizing that they were all being discussed and debated 30 years ago.

A simple definition of neoliberalism is ‘a political approach that favors capitalism, deregulation, and reduction in government spending.’ The elections of Ronald Reagan in the U.S. in 1981 and Brian Mulroney in Canada in 1984 ushered in this new era of politics which was really just a repacked offering of politics from an even earlier era: cut government regulation and spending, and let private billionaires and corporations run everything.

Today we’re living with the consequences of 30 to 40 years of neoliberal policy. The impacts of which have exacerbated since COVID, with high inflation periods setting off a chain of events that finally broke various critical systems. 

Back in the 1980s and 90s, many of us witnessed fringe policies becoming reality. When Mike Harris was elected in 1995 in Ontario, he introduced a draconian period of economic austerity, slashing taxes and eroding the social safety net across the board. Today, we’re living with the predicted fallout. 

The roots of the problem are never mentioned or discussed; instead, the drumbeat of neoliberalism ensures the status quo, with even more extreme versions now being peddled by the far right.

ER’s shutting down  

Cuts to Canadian healthcare were enshrined in the 1993 Liberal budget that made major changes to health transfers — more power for provincial governments but less money — reducing health transfers to provinces by 50 per cent.  

Today the fallout has hit emergency rooms hard, with about 20 per cent of publicly funded facilities experiencing closures. “Unplanned closures of emergency departments were very rare before 2019/20,“ according to a 2023 Ontario Auditor General report, blaming poor staffing. 

And it’s not just Ontario. Alberta, Quebec, P.E.I. and BC are also reporting ER closures while the system faces increasing privatization in response to cuts.

Winning the lottery for a family doctor

Nothing illustrated how dire the situation has become more than the extremely long line up in January 2025 in Bruce County, a town of about 5,000 people. More than 1,000 stood outside in –10C freezing cold to get on a patient list for a family doctor. Only 500 spots were available, while another 500 ended up on a waitlist. 

“This is not the way it should be,” Dr. Paul McArthur, a local doctor on the search team to attract a new physician, told CBC. But for the 2.5 million Ontarians without a family doctor, it’s the new normal. 

Long-term care is crumbling

Sometimes cuts just lead to poor service. Other times, cuts lead to people dying. 

Cuts by Ford to both to general care for LTC support as well as the unit responsible for inspections couldn’t have been worse timed.

A 2023 report from the Ontario Ombudsman was scathing: “During the critical initial weeks of the first wave, the Ministry’s Inspections Branch… simply stopped conducting on-site inspections. For a seven-week period from mid-March to early May 2020, there was no independent on-site verification of the conditions in long-term care homes.“ Residents were “not being fed, cleaned or given their medications.” Many people died as a result. 

Rental housing construction and costs 

The cost of rent in Toronto has soared since the 1990s. Part of the reason is that Toronto (and Canada as a whole) has largely stopped building rental housing. 

In May, 2024, “a multi-decade high of 5,779 units of, purpose-built rental completions… in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area,” according to Urbanation.

The shortage of affordable rental housing, public housing and co-op housing, is directly contributing to the skyrocketing rents, and ultimately people being pushed onto the street.

However there’s a reason these analyses only go back to the 90s. That’s when the government killed off very successful federal housing supply programs and turned construction over to private capital. If you go back earlier, the numbers pale in comparison.

In 1993, Canada’s National Affordable Housing Program was axed as part of the neoliberal push. The last year of the program saw more than 8,000 rental units built in Toronto, according to CMA. Today the numbers are nothing compared to the 60s and 70s where we were regularly seeing 10,000 to 20,000 units being built annually.

Food bank usage and food security emergencies

A third Ontario community just declared a food insecurity emergency in January 2025.

These are directly tied to 1980’s neoliberalism; that’s when food banks were created, as a temporary poverty measure. Like many neoliberal “temp measures,” they are now built into the system with food bank use soaring to over two million visits in March 2024 – nearly double the monthly visits five years ago in March 2019.

Engineering more profit for Canada’s largest corporations

Corporations fixing prices has a long history in both Canada and the U.S., from a strong antitrust enforcement tradition to the game Monopoly. 

But increased technological software combined with a steady decrease in government regulation has led to a recent increase in price fixing issues.

The bread price-fixing scandal, which became public in 2017, involved a class-action lawsuit against a group of bread producers and big supermarkets conspiring to artificially inflate the price of bread over a 14-year period. 

Consumer anger at the rising costs of groceries has only continued to grow. The escalating cost of food, and soaring profits, sparked a nationwide boycott of Loblaw-owned stores in 2023, however with limited effect. 

Then this year, the price fixing happened again. In January it was revealed that “Loblaw, Sobeys and Walmart grocery stores [were] overcharging customers by selling underweighted meat” by about six per cent with a class-action in the works.

Continuous mergers and acquisitions have created a highly concentrated, corporatized food system in Canada. Four corporations control 68 per cent of Canada’s grocery sales. Under neoliberal policy, corporations can extract even more money from all parts of the food system, writes the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. “This means higher input prices for farmers, lower prices received by farmers for their products, low wages for food sector labour, and high prices for consumers.”

Public transit is crumbling exactly when we need to expand it 

If it feels like the TTC has declined, that’s because it has.

The Scarborough Line 3 was literally ran into the ground in 2023 due to delays in maintenance and service. The ill-fated Transit City plan would have eventually replaced this RT line, however Rob Ford killed it.

A recent analysis shows what Torontonians are experiencing isn’t just in their heads: yes transit is actually worse across the board due to cuts, inevitably impacting the rider experience. “Slower buses and streetcars arrive less frequently and provide less capacity,” writes transit advocate Steve Munro.

Student debt crisis

The 1993 federal budget didn’t just cut health funding. It also gutted education.

In a series of articles describing student debt the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives describes Canadian student debt as “out of control.”

The neoliberal trend from the 80s is stark and obvious: “the share of university revenues from provincial governments dropped…while student fees rose. Tuition fees grew every year since data collection began, greatly outpacing inflation.”

Total student debt was almost $22 billion in 1999. Nearly 20 years later it has ballooned to $39 billion.

Emergency response

As has been increasingly and painfully obvious in recent years, the climate crisis is leading to more and more extreme weather — both fire and ice. 

In 2018, Ford cut emergency firefighting by two thirds in 2019 and never restored the funding. Alberta also followed suit.

The 1998 Ice storm, killed 25 people, caused transmission tower collapse and left four million without power, some of them for an entire month. The government response included sending in the military and  a major public inquiry to discuss future strategies. 

In 2022, the derecho storm in Ottawa killed 11 people, and left 1.1 million without power. The mayor of Ottawa said the damage to the electrical system was worse than the 1998 ice storm. But this time there was no inquiry or military involvement — the damage was normalized.

Those resisting our neoliberalism systems — much like climate change — aren’t just fighting cuts, they are fighting time.

The long game of neoliberalism didn’t destroy systems overnight — it caused massive strain, reduced standards, and drove under investment, over many years and successive Liberal and Conservative governments. Sadly, it’s happened so gradually, that most don’t remember the better times.

Education costs more; not having a GP requires going to emergency rooms, now shutting down with more regularity. Housing and food costs more for less, while people wait longer for transit in ever increasing traffic.

It hasn’t always been this way. Neoliberal effects have been slowly killing our social systems over decades. It doesn’t have to stay this way either. The counter fight against it isn’t a short term project; it will take decades as well. We can still fight for a return to the better times, as long as we can remember them.