The Ontario NDP's election platform at a glance

The Ontario NDP released its platform Monday, days ahead of the expected official start to the provincial election campaign.

You can read more about party's plans for what leader Andrea Horwath calls a "high stakes election" here, or scan through its key promises in the list below, broken down by subject area.

You can also read the full party platform for yourself at the bottom of this story.

Housing

• End exclusionary zoning; bring back rent control; create a portable housing benefit.
• Build 100,000 units of social housing over the next decade; update 260,000 social housing units to extend their lifespan.

Health care

• Begin working immediately on universal pharmacare for Ontario, instead of waiting for the federal plan, and strengthen and accelerate the expansion of dental care.
• Hire 10,000 personal support workers, give them a raise; hire 30,000 nurses, expedite recognition of nursing credentials of 15,000 internationally trained nurses; scrap Bill 124, which limits public sector compensation increases.
• Hire 300 doctors in northern Ontario, including 100 specialists and 40 mental health practitioners; fund travel accommodations for medical residents to take elective rotations in rural and northern communities; create more residency rotation positions to help retain doctors in the north.
• End health-care user fees, such as doctors' notes.
• Establish universal, publicly funded mental-health care; invest $130M over three years for children's mental health.

Electoral reform

• Create a mixed member proportional voting system designed by an independent group of citizens.

Taxation

•  Freeze taxes for low and middle income families.

The COVID-19 pandemic  

• Hold a public inquiry into the province's COVID-19 response.
• Establish provincial standards for home and community care services; establish a caregiver benefit program to provide $400 a month to informal caregivers who don't qualify for existing federal tax credits or respite care.

Long-term care

•  Build a new public and non-profit home and community care and long-term care system; build 50,000 new and modern beds.

Labour

• Raise the minimum wage to $20 in 2026, with $1-an-hour increases annually; legislate 10 permanent personal emergency leave days.
• Implement a four-day work week pilot project.

Child care

• Set a minimum wage for registered early childhood educators at $25 per hour, and $20 for all other program staff.

Transportation

• Create a zero-emissions vehicles strategy, with a goal of 100 per cent of all new auto sales being ZEVs by 2035; offer up to $10,000 incentives for ZEVs, excluding luxury vehicles.
• Reduce Ontario's greenhouse gas emissions by at least 50 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030 and achieve net zero emissions by 2050; establish a new cap-and-trade system.
• Regulate gas prices.

The environment

• Expand the Greenbelt; plant one billion trees by 2030; ban non-medical single-use plastics by 2024.
• Introduce an energy efficient building retrofit program to help families and businesses with the cost of retrofitting their homes and lowering electricity bills.

Education

• Hire 20,000 teachers and education workers; cap class sizes for Grades 4 through 8 at 24 students; cap full-day kindergarten classes at 26 students; cancel EQAO standardized testing; scrap the requirement for two online courses for high school graduation.

• Restore the previous government's free tuition program; convert post-secondary student loans to grants; retroactively erase student loan interest.

Gender equity

• Update and enforce the Pay Transparency Act; make prescription contraception free; fund 10 days of paid leave for women escaping violence.

Autism supports

• Make the Ontario Autism Program fully needs-based, with no caps.

Disability supports

• Increase Ontario Works and Ontario Disability Support Program rates by 20 per cent and index raises to inflation; restart a basic income pilot.

Indigenous rights and anti-racism work

• Remove the cap on supervised consumption sites and expedite approvals for supervised consumption sites in the north.

• Implement the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

• Implement a provincial anti-racism strategy; appoint a minister responsible for anti-racism; erect a Holocaust memorial on the grounds of the legislature; immediately pass the Our London Family Act to combat Islamophobia.

Here is the NDP's full party platform that was released Monday: