What if you were finance minister?
Ideas from public being pondered for Ontario budget include northern greenhouses and seniors mentoring kids.

TheStar.com
Jan. 10, 2018
Rob Ferguson

Should willing senior citizens be tapped to mentor children having trouble reading and writing?

Is it time to build a greenhouse vegetable operation near James Bay in hopes it can supply less expensive produce to residents in remote northern communities?

Those are two of 13 ideas from the public Finance Minister Charles Sousa is considering for this year’s provincial budget — the last before Premier Kathleen Wynne’s Liberals face the June 7 election in what polls suggest will be a tight race.

Ontarians are being asked to cast online votes on the concepts, selected from more than 700 submissions, at Ontario.ca/budgettalks by 5 p.m. January 26 with Sousa earmarking up to $5 million in his fiscal blueprint to bring them to life.

It’s the fourth year the government has plumbed the public for minor budget fodder, with Sousa saying “public engagement is fundamental to the development of good public policy.”

A budget date has not been set, but the document is widely expected to outline Wynne’s platform for re-election against challenges from Progressive Conservative Leader Patrick Brown and Andrea Horwath’s New Democrats.

Ideas that didn’t make the grade for this year’s budget include a proposal that “grey water” from sinks and bathtubs be rerouted to flush toilets and a push for a ticket crackdown on smokers who throw butts on the street.

The senior citizen mentor project would provide funding for “senior buddies” to spend three days a week in local schools “to spend an hour with the identified students who have difficulty in reading or writing.”

Both struggling kids and potentially lonely seniors would benefit, and teachers would get some much-needed extra help, the proponent wrote.

“A program linking older adults with elementary students not only provides kids with academic and social support but also gives older volunteers a positive perception of how they can help the next generation.”

On the idea for a greenhouse vegetable and fruit farm in the north, the proponent says a pilot project is needed to test its viability.

“Fruit and vegetable prices in northern communities are extremely high and given the high level of unemployment, many families cannot afford to buy healthy food,” the proposal says.

Other ideas include getting elementary school children more involved in gardening, improved mental health services, exposing more kids to French in Grade 1 instead of waiting until Grade 4 and a series of 25 “community hubs” to help parents of children just diagnosed with autism to navigate the care system.

Interest in the budget from would-be finance ministers has gone up this year, with submissions almost doubling from the 404 ideas proposed in 2017, when the winners were reducing and preventing food waste, improving digital services for libraries and accessing digitized health data.

Progress on those items can be  tracked online.