Ontario: 1)OPP investigating threat made to Bracebridge school; 2)Ontario shuts down one way of funding nurse practitioners as province misses deadline; 3)(Updated) Ontario eyes further ban on green development standards, bigger fare evasion fines; 4)(Updated) Feds, Ontario announce $8.8B to help cities build housing infrastructure

1)OPP investigating threat made to Bracebridge school

Courtesy Barrie360.com

By Ian MacLennan, March 31, 2026

Students and staff at an elementary school on Morrow Drive in Bracebridge are remaining indoors out of an abundance of caution, according to Ontario Provincial Police, after a threat was made to the school on Tuesday morning.

Police say they were alerted around 9 a.m. about a threatening call that was received at the school.

“This concern did not affect school operations, and there is no current threat to student or staff safety,” police said in a news release.

Police added they are investigating the validity and source of the threat.

Anyone with information is asked to call Bracebridge OPP at 1-888-310-1122 or if you wish to remain anonymous, you may call Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-8477 or online at www.crimestopperssdm.com.

2)Ontario shuts down one way of funding nurse practitioners as province misses deadline

Courtesy Barrie360.com and Canadian Press

By Allison Jones, April 1, 2026

Ontario’s health minister shut down one avenue of publicly funding all nurse practitioners Wednesday, as the province missed a federal deadline for ensuring their medically necessary services are covered.

The federal government gave provinces and territories until April 1 to ensure they are funding nurse practitioner services equivalent to what doctors provide, though penalties for noncompliance won’t kick in until April 2027.

Ontario does not yet have a plan in place, despite Health Minister Sylvia Jones pushing the federal government years ago to close what she called a “loophole” in the Canada Health Act that allowed nurse practitioners to set up subscription-fee-based clinics outside the public system.

Jones has said the province will be in compliance with the federal directive before April 2027, but she did not say when.

“I want (nurse practitioners) embedded in our multidisciplinary teams,” she said Wednesday after question period. “I want them working in our hospitals. And the truth is, the vast majority are doing that now, and that work will continue.”

In Ontario, nurse practitioners — registered nurses who receive additional university education — work in a variety of settings, including hospitals and primary care, but they are unable to widely set up nurse practitioner-led clinics beyond the approximately two dozen that are already publicly funded or establish independent practices in the public system.

Nurse practitioners have said they are looking for flexible funding models, such as those for family doctors, who can bill OHIP on a fee-for-service basis or who are paid per patient enrolled.

That is not under consideration, Jones said.

“Any changes to billing codes would have to be worked out and agreed upon in partnership with the Ontario Medical Association,” she said. “So we have no plans at this point to make changes there.”

The OMA echoed Jones’s emphasis on team-based care in a statement.

“The OMA has long supported nurse practitioners as valued members of collaborative, physician-led health care teams,” the association wrote.

“Working together in teams can help optimize resources, easing pressure on physicians and the health-care system, while responding to patient needs.”

Michelle Acorn, CEO of the Nurse Practitioners Association of Ontario, said nurse practitioners have professional autonomy when it comes to their scope of practice, but not financial autonomy like some other health professionals.

“Why is it only for nurse practitioners that these flexible options are not an option?” she said.

“Why are we not moving that forward when we are most responsible providers? We can help in their health-care journey, across the entire health-care system, but we’re handcuffed to how we get paid right now.”

Some nurse practitioners outside the public system have tried to set up publicly funded clinics but their proposals were turned down, Acorn said.

“It still doesn’t answer the question for those that are not getting paid out of the public purse, how they continue to actually deliver care,” she said.

Liberal primary care critic Adil Shamji called on the government to reimburse anyone who has to pay out of pocket for nurse practitioner primary care between now and when Ontario extends public funding.

“As we face an affordability crisis, people shouldn’t have to be asking themselves whether they’re going to put food on the table or pay for a primary care visit that should be covered,” he said.

NDP Leader Marit Stiles said she herself goes to a nurse practitioner and sees them as essential to connecting more people with primary care.

“I’m very concerned about (Jones’s) competence in this role,” she said. 

“They’ve now missed the deadline for the nurse practitioners agreement. And again, did she not have time to figure this out? 

“I have to say, I’m very disappointed and I think many Ontarians who are looking for that connection to primary care — and, frankly, paying out of pocket right now, which is unacceptable in Canada — I think they’re wondering when this minister of health is going to be replaced.”

Jones has set a goal of attaching everyone to a primary care provider by 2029 and last month announced 124 successful proposals for new or expanded primary care teams, but has not yet indicated how many of those are nurse practitioner-led clinics.

3)(Updated) Ontario eyes further ban on green development standards, bigger fare evasion fines

Courtesy Barrie360.com and Canadian Press

By Allison Jones, March 30, 2026

Ontario is proposing to dramatically increase fines for fare evasion on GO Transit, allow rideshare services in some northern communities, and ban municipalities from requiring EV charging stations and other outdoor features as part of development standards.

The measures were among those announced Monday by the housing and transportation ministers, as they table a new bill meant to make transit easier to build and access, and speed up home building.

It comes the same day Prime Minister Mark Carney and Premier Doug Ford announced their governments would each spend $4.4 billion on housing-related infrastructure in Ontario municipalities that cut development charges.

New home construction, particularly in Ontario, has drastically slowed in the face of high inflation rates, rising construction costs, labour shortages and tariff-related economic uncertainty and the province expects to see just 64,800 housing starts this year.

Ontario cabinet ministers have been downplaying the significance of their goal to build 1.5 million homes by 2031, as the target moves further out of reach.

Municipal Affairs and Housing Minister Rob Flack said Monday that he believes the new legislation will help, and as long as starts trend progressively upward, he is happy.

“Every little bit helps,” he said. “It all adds up.”

The new steps meant to spur home construction include standardizing municipalities’ official plans, reviewing the building code, advancing public water and wastewater corporations to help municipalities amortize infrastructure costs, and setting a provincewide minimum lot standard exempting non-profit retirement homes from development charges.

The Ontario Real Estate Association said the bill’s combined effects will be “transformative.”

“This is the kind of bold action we need to drive economic growth, support jobs, and keep the dream of home ownership alive,” president Kim Fairley wrote in a statement.

One part of the bill, though, is set to raise the ire of environmental groups, with the legislation proposing to build on a previous move by the province to block municipalities from imposing their own mandatory climate-friendly standards on building developers.

The new measure would also ban cities from requiring green outdoor standards, with officials giving examples of landscaping, foliage requirements, soil composition and electric vehicle chargers at street level. They say having differing standards in different municipalities slows down the building process.

Lana Goldberg, a climate campaigner with environmental group Stand.earth, said municipalities enacted those standards in the absence of strong provincial building regulations.

“These common sense rules would have simply encouraged new homes to be resilient to extreme weather and more affordable to heat and cool,” Goldberg wrote in a statement.

“Eliminating these initiatives passes down costs to residents who will be on the hook for higher monthly energy bills, expensive energy retrofits, and possibly costly repairs after extreme weather events like floods.”

On the transit side of the legislation, the government is looking to increase the fare evasion fine on GO Transit from $35 to $200 on first offence, increasing on subsequent offences to $500. Fare evasion costs provincial transit agency Metrolinx about $21 million in lost revenue each year, the government said.

It is also looking to expand its One Fare program that prevents transit riders from being charged a second fare when transferring between transit systems in the Greater Toronto Area by requiring transit agencies to adopt the same fare levels, and including Hamilton and Halton transit systems.

The bill and associated measures also include previously announced steps to open high-occupancy vehicle lanes to all drivers in off-peak hours and set a rideshare framework along the upcoming route for the Northlander train.

– With files from Jordan Omstead

4)(Updated) Feds, Ontario announce $8.8B to help cities build housing infrastructure

Source Canadian Press

By Craig Lord, March 30, 2026

Prime Minister Mark Carney speaks at a housing and affordability announcement at a new condo development in Toronto on March 30, 2026.

The federal and Ontario governments say they’ll match billions of dollars in local infrastructure spending to help cities cut costly development fees and get more homes built.

Prime Minister Mark Carney is with Premier Doug Ford in Toronto today unveiling a plan for the two levels of government to each spend $4.4 billion on housing-related infrastructure over the next ten years.

The funding deal is the first to be announced through the federal government’s Build Communities Strong Fund and is meant to help municipalities cut development fees by 50 per cent for the next three years.

Experts warn municipal development fees have ballooned and inflated the cost of homebuilding in recent years, making it harder to build much-needed supply.

Ontario also unveiled a plan with the federal government last week to waive the harmonized sales tax on eligible new builds for the next year.

The latest funding announcement comes a few days after Ottawa announced it was earmarking $1.7 billion for all provinces and territories to boost housing supply however they see fit.