QUEEN’S PARK – Following Premier Kathleen Wynne’s announcement that The Hospital for Sick Children will receive 2.4 billion dollars in additional funding this year, Ontario PC leader Doug Ford has expressed disgust with the increase, calling it “unfair to the province’s millions of hard-working healthy children”.
In a press conference earlier this week, Ford told reporters that he’s not against children with diseases, he just doesn’t see why they should get special treatment: “These elitist toddlers think everyone else should have to pay for their bone marrow transplants and open heart surgeries. If they were planning to go into multiple organ failure, they should have been born to wealthier parents.”
Ford argued that the money should be returned to the taxpayers to fund the allowances of more deserving kids: “robust, able-bodied children who will be our future investment bankers and car salesmen. There’s no point throwing money at a bunch of sickly losers who, let’s face it, aren’t going to be around for much longer anyway.”
Ford’s PR team stressed that his opposition to the funding is purely for the good of the province: “Doug loves pallid, diseased youths as much as the next guy”, said Jeff Silverstein, Ford’s director of communications. “But if we reward this kind of behaviour, kids across the province will start going out and contracting Ebola on the taxpayer’s dime”.
This is just the latest in a series of denouncements from Ford, who has also taken a strong stance against Ontario’s sex-ed curriculum, abortion, and people who can read better than he can.
However, Ford made it clear that he doesn’t blame the sick children entirely: “It’s the parents’ fault, too. If you can’t afford intensive medical care for eighteen years, maybe you shouldn’t have children”.
Ford’s campaign is set to release his plan for the hospital later this week, which involves bulldozing it and putting up a ten-story parking garage.
