Construction unions complicit in Ontario's devastating COVID-19 third wave
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/05/29/onco-m29.html
"Workers in Ontario's construction industry and related trades are being sacrificed to COVID-19 in order to keep profits flowing in Canada's speculative real estate frenzy. Home prices have surged 35 percent in Canada's most populous province just in the past year..."
Perhaps this comment doesn't belong here but I caught the end of a news item about the Indian variant making its way into Ontario due to workers at a mining camp being exposed to it. Hear anything about that?
Once again we see the largest component of the underclass, one could even call it the under-under-class, indigenous people, suffering to a far greater extent than most Canadians and being ignored until the situation becomes a major crisis. Despite the pleas of the chief of the James Bay community of Kashechewan asking for help because of a Covid outbreak, they were ignored for a week until 232 people, a number higher than many provinces now have as vaccination rates increase dramatically, in the community had Covid. The Trudeau Liberals had cut off funding in March for a screening and an isolation station for those who had travel in and out of the community for medical appointments etc. that had helped keep Covid in check.
Indigenous Services Minister Marc Miller response: "COVID moves faster than the government." Obviously. However, the rapid spread of Covid is directly related to the centuries-long lack of adequate housing the federal government, including the six years of Trudeau government, has imposed on indigenous people.
The spread of Covid in indigenous communities is facilitated by the poor or even lack of housing, resulting in 12 to 20 people living in a houseand homeless people who wander around the community in some cases, according to Chief Leo Friday. The housing crisis is of course not new and its health effects are seen in tuberculosis rates that are 20 times the Canadian average in many indigenous communities. Kashechewan still has not received a tent city at one end of the town for the homeless and others who have been infected that it requested and that residents are extremely hesitant to take in because with so many people in their household, Covid would spread rapidly throughout the people living there.
Help for the struggling James Bay community of Kashechewan has been slow in coming, as COVID-19 infections surge through overcrowded homes and isolation facilities remain non-existent, Chief Leo Friday said on Wednesday.
The virus has attacked children particularly hard, with those aged 12 and under accounting for more than half the 232 active cases, the chief said. One child was in intensive care but said to be improving.
"Nobody seems to do anything about it," Friday told The Canadian Press. "The process of their help is really slow even though we called a state of emergency."
The cases in the community account for more than one quarter of the 889 active infections roiling Canada's Indigenous reserves, federal data show. ...
"COVID moves faster than the government," Indigenous Services Minister Marc Miller said. "We keep assessing and reassessing how we can go faster." Miller said 15 Canadian Rangers as well as 15 nurses and three paramedics -- double the normal numbers -- along with 16 Red Cross members were now on site. ...
Chief Friday said his community, which battles devastating flooding from the Albany River almost every spring, had an effective program early in the pandemic that involved screening and an isolation station. A travel co-ordinator tracked arrivals, two screeners were stationed at the airport and security was in place to ensure no one was sneaking in, he said.
However, federal funding dried up in March and the programs were cut, Friday said. "It worked until the programs were depleted."
The community has asked for a tent city at one end of the town as well as a COVID-19 isolation station to look after people returning from health appointments.
Friday said six people medevaced from Kashechewan to Sudbury, Timmins and Moosonee in northern Ontario, were in ICU. Three were in their late 30s and 40s. ...
The virus, Friday said, likely originated with people flying into the remote area from health appointments elsewhere in the province. Crowded homes, blamed on a chronic housing shortage, along with a lack of places to isolate, allowed for the rampant spread to more than 10 per cent of the 2,245 residents.
https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/alarming-situation-but-help-sl...
AMC Grand Chief Arlen Dumas talks about ICU capacity in Manitoba and COVID-19’s devastating impact on Indigenous people in the video below: "“It shows you the systemic issues that are sort of failing First Nations citizens, but also everyone else.”
https://globalnews.ca/video/7901872/covid-19s-impact-on-indigenous-people/
People do not ordinarily think of nurses as being part of the underclass, but they are leaving the profession in droves because of Covid and "hellish working conditions". Today there is a nurses protest in Toronto because they are short five or six nurses per floor in many hospitals as more and more nurses quit the profession. Their wages have also been frozen since 2019 by the Ford government.
Stretched to the breaking point by the pandemic, nurses are leaving the nursing profession in droves. Many more are scaling back their hours. This has led to desperate shortages of nurses in many hospitals. Nurses and doctors are sounding the alarm about this “huge exodus.”
Hospitals have had to close beds, delay fully reopening their operating rooms, and even temporarily shut down their emergency departments entirely. Unfilled nursing job vacancies rose 40 per cent since the pandemic began. Québec lost4,000 nurses in 2020, with 50 per cent cuts to nursing teams. The Registered Nurses’ Association of Ontario predicted 15.6 per cent of nurses will leave the profession within a year, up from the usual loss rate of 4.8 per cent. A Winnipeg doctor describedhow dire the situation is, “Morale and staffing are at all-time lows. We view the situation as critical, unsustainable and in need of immediate action.”
With the high workload and stress nurses are facing, it’s easy to see why nurses are leaving. Nurses were alreadyoverstretched before the pandemic, with an average of more than six hours of overtime a week. This ballooned to over 10 hours per week in May 2020 Canada-wide. In Québec, nurse overtime was a staggering 16.9 hours on average. This reflects the stress the healthcare system is under—especially with capitalist politicians allowing COVID-19 to run rampant. Because of these pressures, a majority of nurses say they’re under high levels of stress.
Being overworked in a pandemic comes with other dangers to nurses’ health. The physical dangers range from back injury,face bruising, to infection and death. The mental toll has been enhanced by the fact that—during the disastrous first, second, and third waves of the pandemic—nurses couldn’t even see their loved ones to recharge for the next shift. It’s no surprise that one nurse said many nurses are “in a constant state of burnout.”
The stress and trauma is particularly acute among critical-care nurses and long-term care nurses. The Canadian Nurses Association described scenes of critical-care nurses, “[w]eeping in hallways and break rooms throughout their shifts after witnessing indescribable human suffering.” On ICUs, critical-care nurses care for the most critically ill COVID-19 patients, watching them struggle to breath and tragically die—often alone. ...
Long-term care nurses have seen similar horrors. In long-term care, not only have thousands died, conditions in private care homes are so bad that residents are even dying from dehydration.
The nightmare in ICUs, drowning in COVID-19 patients, was compounded by the astonishing recklessness of capitalist governments, rushing to reopen in their haste to keep the profits flowing. This pushed intensive care units to a breaking point. Many COVID-19 patients in the ICU require more than one nurse. Yet in many places with understaffed ICUs, one nurse has to care for multiple patients in the ICU.
In Ontario, the Doug Ford government one-upped Legault, capping public-sector wage increases at 1 per cent—below inflation.
Privatization is another looming threat. Nurses who leave the public sector in Québec are often hired by private companies who offer better wages and more flexible hours. The government often then contracts them out to fill the gaps left by the shortage—paying the private sector for the same nurses. In Alberta, the government is also preparing to privatize certain services, and looking tooutsource some surgeries, like hip replacements. ...
Worse, no end is in sight for the nurse shortage. Despite vaccines, the pandemic is not over. Canada’s unvaccinated will still get sick and require healthcare.
In other words, governments are totally unwilling to do what is necessary to stop the nurse exodus. Instead, they’ve worsened it with their insulting offers to nurses, and refusal to do what’s necessary to fix working conditions. They complain that their hands are tied—that there’s no money for proper pay raises and better conditions. They say nurses must be reasonable and accept conditions in line with their provinces’ fiscal situation. This is a lie. The money exists, but it’s earmarked for the capitalists. Premiers like Ford and Legault love to remind us that someone has to pay for the economic crisis—and it sure as hell isn’t going to be the capitalists. This is why capitalist governments refuse to act to save the healthcare system.
https://www.marxist.ca/article/hellish-working-conditions-spark-mass-exo...
It looks like Alberta and Saskatchewan have become the home of a new underclass - their citizens whose lives are threatened by Covid as their conservative governments act out the mantra of business first while their healthcare systems are on the verge of collapse.
Both provinces have experienced surges in COVID-19 cases since lifting protective measures in the summer. On Tuesday, Alberta reported 1,434 new cases and nine deaths. In Saskatchewan, 508 new cases were logged and two deaths were reported.
On Monday, Alberta’s top doctor admitted the summer relaxation was a mistake — one she “deeply regrets. I think that trajectory was set when we removed all the public health restrictions at the beginning of July,” Dr. Deena Hinshaw said in a call with the Calgary Primary Health Care Network. “Because whether or not it was my intention, what was heard at the end of July was: ‘COVID’s over, we can walk away and ignore it.’ And that has had repercussions.”
As Alberta made the move to loosen up in the summer, the province’s weekly average in new daily cases was declining. On July 1, Alberta unveiled its “Open for Summer” plan, which decided to ease measures, like ending asymptomatic testing and no longer notifying close contacts of exposure. At that time, the weekly average was 57 new cases a day. That number continued to decline until July 22, when the average shifted to 61 new cases over seven days. On Aug. 1, the weekly average moved to 178 new cases per day; by Sept. 1, that weekly average was at 1,082 new cases a day.
Dr. Paul Parks, president of emergency medicine at the Alberta Medical Association and an emergency medicine physician in Medicine Hat, told Global News he’s seeing “the regular onslaught” of COVID-19 patients coming in, the majority of them unvaccinated. “Thankfully, lots of them are well enough that they can be sent home,” he said. “But more and more now are needing to be hospitalized, so our COVID wards are filling up.”
To deal with the influx, Parks said his hospital is cancelling or postponing surgeries – a move other hospitals across the country have done multiple times during the pandemic. While the mask mandate has returned to Alberta, albeit with exemptions, Parks said it’s far from enough. “We haven’t really implemented any really strategic targeted public health measures that will stop the onslaught and slow the number of cases we have right now,” he said. “Other than a mask mandate and asking people nicely to not congregate or drink after 10 p.m., Alberta hasn’t done anything to slow this curve.” ...
Things have taken a turn for the worst in neighbouring Saskatchewan, as well. On July 11, the province decided to ease public health measures, including indoor mask wearing, but the government said unvaccinated or partially vaccinated people should still consider face coverings.
At that time, the weekly average for daily case counts sat at a meager 43. The rolling average continued to dip in the days after, but began to climb back up by the end of the month. On Aug. 1, 55 new cases were reported daily over a week; on Sept. 1, the weekly average was at 263 new cases a day (the highest per capita in the country).
University of Saskatchewan epidemiologist Nazeem Muhajarine told Global News recently that he believed the spike was a direct result of the July 11 reopening. Since then, he said, vaccination rates have slowed and many Saskatchewan residents attended group events during the summer – allowing Delta to spread. ...
Both Neudorf and Parks want their provincial governments to act quickly. For Parks, his hospital is beginning to transfer patients around Alberta to free up space, but he fears if COVID-19 cases continue to rise, the health-care system will be pushed past the brink. “That’s why we’re begging our leadership to do something to implement targeted public health measures,” he said. “And we’re asking the public to do their part, to wear masks, avoid big groups and get vaccinated. We need help.”
https://globalnews.ca/news/8192647/alberta-saskatchewan-covid-19-spike-c...
Kenney apologized for his Covid policies that have put the overloaded healthcare system at risk of collapse but didn't apologize for keeping things open in the summer. The question is how much impact this will have on O'Toole for wishy-washy vaccination policies and on Trudeau calling an election in the middle of the fourth Covid wave. Heh, business and elections before lives.
Premier Jason Kenney apologized for his government's recent COVID-19 response as he introduced a proof of vaccination program and implemented new restrictions for the fourth wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Kenney started off the press conference by apologizing for moving Alberta too quickly from a pandemic to endemic based on provincial modelling.
"I know that we had all hoped this summer that we could put COVID behind us once and for all, that was certainly my hope and I said that very clearly," said Kenney. "It is now clear that we were wrong, and for that I apologize."
A reporter asked the premier to what degree the events that happened between July 1 and now were a reflection of his leadership, and if he would give Albertans more than "we were wrong, and I apologize."
"We were wrong in talking about moving this from pandemic management to endemic management in July and August. I frankly don't think we were wrong to lift public health restrictions in July we actually saw that case counts and the Delta variant to continue to stabilize and come down through most of July even after large public events."
However, Kenney stuck by his Open for Summer plan that eventually saw mounting cases and hospitalizations, and a slow vaccination uptick.
"I also think it's critically important to understand that at least in this society that you can't sustain serious intrusions into people's lives permanently. And so no, I don't apologize for this decision to relax public health restrictions in the summer supported by the data."
Kenney says that there would've been "massive" non-compliance and anger from people if they had maintained "lockdown-style policies" throughout the summer.
"Yes, I said a lot of optimistic things in the summer, because I think it is the job of a leader to convey a sense of hope and optimism, not a sense of despair and pessimism, and from the perspective of where we were in July there were good reasons to be hopeful and optimistic."
The reporter doubled down on his question, asking Kenney again if he thought his leadership failed between July 1 and now, if at all.
"I don't think this is about me, I think this is about protecting our hospitals, and we have to do what is necessary to do so."
Wednesday marked the most Albertans ever occupying ICU beds in the history of the province, with the CEO of AHS announcing it was asking neighbouring provinces for help managing the situation.
"I don't apologize for not maintaining lockdown-style policies permanently but I do apologize for having predicted we could be open for good."
University of Calgary associate professor Lorian Hardcastle says an apology from the premier would have shown Albertans that he’s capable of changing and approaching the pandemic differently than he has in the past.
"I think that people are really concerned about the lack of leadership; there's a perceived absence of the leaders in the past few weeks and I think that people wanted him to stand up and admit what they got wrong," said Hardcastle. "Perhaps not be so defensive about the Open for Summer plan."
Independent MLAs Drew Barnes and Todd Loewen are now calling on Jason Kenney to resign from leadership.
A statement reads: "Inconsistent and negligent management of the pandemic has destroyed public trust. For the good of the province, the Premier must immediately resign so that public trust can be restored."
Barnes and Loewen were kicked out of Kenney's caucus in May for openly challenging Kenney's health rules and leadership.
https://edmonton.ctvnews.ca/i-apologize-kenney-says-alta-wrong-for-covid...
A farewell to CERB and the future of EI
The Canada Recovery Benefit (CRB) ended, October 23, 2021. The CRB is the continuation of the Canada Emergency Recovery Benefit which was first implemented in April 2020, only weeks after the COVID-19 Pandemic was declared.
CERB proved a lifesaver for millions. Within four months, an estimated 8.5 million Canadians had accessed the $2000/month benefit.
CERB formally ended in September 2020, and was replaced by the CRB. Between September 2020 and July 2021, CRB paid out $1000 (minus taxes) every two weeks. The annual CRB cap was $6,000. This CRB payment was lowered in July 2021 to $600 over two weeks.
CRB was still popular and much needed. About 880,000 people drew on CRB during its last two-week pay bloc ending October 23 2021.
CERB and CRB were not universal programs. You had to earn at least $5,000 in the year before the pandemic to collect. You also couldn’t quit your job and collect – leaving millions of workers in low-wage, unsafe jobs during the worst Covid waves. Many workers still chose to leave their jobs so they could protect themselves and their families. Despite this common sense decision, they were banned form collecting CERB, CRB or Employment Insurance.
Despite these limits, CERB and CRB proved superior to traditional Employment Insurance. It allowed many thousands of falsely-classified “independent contractors” and gig workers to collect CERB/CRB, as well as many self-employed people struggling to make ends meet in the “job churn”.
The experience has rekindled people’s imaginations about what a real safety net would look like. A lot of this talk is framed around a Basic Income. If a Basic Income is one way to talk about a universal safety net, it’s worth looking at why the old safety net of Unemployment Insurance failed.
Employment Insurance and the Pandemic
At the outset of the pandemic, EI was quickly declared obsolete by many politicians, media punidts and even union leaders. EI, they said, was incapable of meeting the demands of the largest loss of jobs in Canadian history.
Three million jobs were lost in March and April 2020, and another 2.5 million workers saw hours cut. Why couldn’t EI work exactly when it was needed?
quote:
Tearing up the post-war compromise
Originally called Unemployment Insurance, UI has always been an imperfect system. It reflects the compromise struck between the federal government, provincial governments, business interests, and organized labour. The unemployed workers’ movement of the Great Depression, backed up by early industrial unions, fought for a UI system funded entirely by employers. When UI came into effect in 1940, it was funded by worker contributions, employer contributions and federal government contributions.
In the early 1970s, UI reached its high point in coverage of the unemployed. This was also a time when Canadian labour militancy was the highest of any country in the world, save Italy. About 95 percent of unemployed workers were eligible for UI, and the wage replacement rate was 75 percent. This provided workers a lot of leverage in bargaining, and did a lot to halt a race to the bottom in wages. Low unemployment and almost universal UI meant the job market favoured workers, not employers.
Within a few years, these conditions ended around the world. A new era of turmoil global capitalist turmoil and competition erupted. Big business responded with a new counter-offensive.....
A new study by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) "has now provided hard data to back up what we already suspected": the poor, racialized and indigenous have suffered from Covid at much higher rates.
The researchers use Labour Force Survey data from Statistics Canada. Those data, says the CCPA, remind us of “the important role Indigenous and racialized workers have played as essential, frontline workers during the pandemic.”
But while they fulfilled that important role – a role which allowed many others to stay safe – Indigenous and racialized workers paid a heavy price.
In an earlier report in 2016, the CCPA described “the outsized role of racialized workers in frontline services: working in grocery stores, in delivery services, warehousing and storage, and food manufacturing,” as well as the “role of racialized women as personal support workers in long-term care in Ontario.”
These jobs are not just dangerous and low-paid. They are also essential. These workers stayed on the job at the height of the pandemic, allowing the rest of the population to obey public health orders to shelter at home. ...
The CCPA study covers the 12-month period from July 2020 to June 2021. The authors remind us that during much of that time essential workers had to operate without the benefit of vaccination or adequate personal protective equipment. ...
From July 2020 to June 2021, 28 per cent of Indigenous and 31 per cent of racialized households lived with economic insecurity. They lacked adequate funds to pay for basic needs such as food, housing and medicines. For white households, the proportion was much smaller: 16 per cent.
The new report does an analysis of jobs that require close physical contact with others and where risk of infection is highest. This includes jobs in health and long-term care, retail and warehousing and food processing. Here, the researchers’ findings are striking. They identify not only a race and ethnicity gap, but also a gender gap.
Indigenous women had the highest share of employment — over 30 percent — in the occupations that ranked as most dangerous and risky due to the physical proximity to others these roles demand. Next were non-Indigenous women at 28 per cent, followed by Indigenous men at 14.6 per cent.
Non-Indigenous men had only a 12.5 per cent share of these dangerous and risky jobs.
Racialized workers held well more than half — 57 per cent — of the jobs that included, to some degree, what the CCPA describes as “close proximity” to others. It is interesting to note that white women worked these jobs at almost as high a rate. On the other hand, a third of racialized men and only 28 per cent of white men worked in such high-risk situations. ...
The accumulated wealth of our billionaires has, indeed, increased during, and partly as a result of profiteering from, the pandemic. But so have the savings of those with high-wage professions, a good many of whom could safely work from home. They have managed to save more than they usually do because they have had fewer things to spend their money on.
The story for low-wage workers is entirely different.
They lost their jobs in higher numbers than high-wage workers, “while other low-wage workers had no choice but to continue to work, even when they might have been ill
or exposed to COVID-19.”The CCPA blames the phenomenon of people reporting to work while sick on the “unwillingness of governments to legislate paid sick days.”
https://rabble.ca/labour/new-data-shows-just-how-much-higher-the-risk-of...
Liberals have one set of rules for low-income seniors and other for wealthy corporations
On Friday, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that Loblaws is following Canadian law by avoiding paying taxes in Canada thanks to offshore tax havens that the Liberal government allows. Decades of Conservative and Liberal governments have refused to change our laws to stop tax avoidance, allowing huge corporations like Loblaws to avoid paying their fair share of taxes. Last week’s ruling made it clear that the government needs to rewrite the law in order to address the problem, so far, they have refused to do so. While the government protects corporate profits by refusing to change the law, they have cut the benefits of low-income seniors and families because they got support during the worst of the pandemic. Thousands of seniors lost their Guaranteed Income Supplement (GIS) and families across the country are now trying to make ends meet without their Canada Child Benefit (CCB) thanks to clawbacks by the Liberal government.
"The Liberals are punishing people who have very little and letting the wealthiest corporations off the hook," said Niki Ashton, NDP Critic for Tax Fairness. "Everyone in Canada knows that hiding money offshore is wrong, but the Liberals seem content that it is legal. They have been in power for six years and have protected the profits of billionaires by refusing to close the huge tax loopholes used by the wealthiest corporations."
About 90,000 low-income seniors lost some or all of their GIS benefits because their incomes increased slightly last year by receiving the CERB or CRB. For this year, the PBO estimates that the GIS clawback will take $380 million out of the pockets of low-income seniors. This is about the same amount that Loblaw avoided paying in their share of taxes, about $400 million....
Putting food on the table will be more of a challenge for many Canadian families in 2022
Putting food on the table will be more of a challenge for many Canadian families in 2022, according to a new report, as prices continue to skyrocket at restaurants and grocery stores alike.
The 12th edition of Canada's Food Price Report, released today, predicts that an "average Canadian family" consisting of two adults and two children will pay roughly $14,767 for groceries alone next year — nearly $1,000 over what they spent in 2021.
This represents a year-over-year increase of roughly seven per cent, and the largest jump in grocery prices ever predicted by the widely-respected annual Food Price Report.
"Our 2022 forecast predicts the highest increase in both percentage and dollars in 12 years," reads the report, as authored by dozens of researchers from Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, Ontario's University of Guelph, the University of Saskatchewan and the University of British Columbia.
Researchers attribute rising food prices, both in 2021 and forward-looking, to such factors as labour force challenges, high transportation costs, reduced transport capacity, wildfires, drought and other environmental issues.....
An August 2021 US study study found "Six jurisdictions reported SARS-CoV-2 prevalence of 0%–86.8% (median = 29.3%) from mass testing events in 16 adult facilities." This raises questions about the variation of health protection in the institutions and, more likely, about the hiding of Covid cases since the prison reporting zero cases had more than 3,300 prisoners during the study period, defying all expectations of the number of cases in a high density environment.
The following article notes that people in provincial prisons, unlike those in long-term care homes, are often released in a matter of weeks, raising the question of whether ignoring the risk of Covid in prison environments is foolish even from a self-interest point of view since so many of these people are relatively quickly back in the community and bringing Covid with them if they have been infected. Racialized people are over-represented in our prison systems and therefore both suffer higher rates of infection and therefore higher rates of transmission into racialized communities when they are releUnlike most long-term care facilities, however, Indigenous people and people of colour are overrepresented in both federal and provincial prisons. As has now become clear, racialized people, especially black and Indigenous people of colour, have borne the brunt of the COVID-19 pandemic. These factors, combined with limited access to health services, overcrowding, and difficulties physical distancing, put people who are incarcerated in particular danger from COVID-19.ased.
As we now know, the COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare many of the inequities in Canadian society. We have learned that people living in congregate settings with chronic health conditions tend to be the most vulnerable, along with communities of colour and others contending with marginalization.
There is one group that meets all of these criteria, yet continues to be largely ignored — people who are incarcerated.
“The majority of people in provincial prisons are released within weeks of their entry. They’re your hairdresser, your neighbour, or the person who packs your groceries. They’re part of our community,” says Dr. Nadine Kronfli, a CTN scientist and principal investigator for two ongoing studies examining the impacts of COVID-19 on Canadian prison populations. “Why, then, have we not given prisons the attention they deserve when it comes to halting the spread of COVID-19?”
When it comes to COVID-19, Dr. Kronfli likens prisons to long-term care facilities. For one, both have a high density of people living and working in close quarters. Second, both have high proportions of individuals living with comorbidities — hypertension and diabetes the most common among people in prison. Third, like long-term care facilities, the borders between prisons and surrounding communities are porous, as staff, community members, and inmates come and go regularly.
While long-term care facilities have received significant attention since the emergence of COVID-19 due to outbreaks in facilities from coast to coast, prisons have received relatively little attention despite outbreaks of their own. Some studies have shown a COVID-19 prevalence rate of up to 87 per cent among prison populations, rivaling even some of the hardest hit long-term care facilities.
Unlike most long-term care facilities, however, Indigenous people and people of colour are overrepresented in both federal and provincial prisons. As has now become clear, racialized people, especially black and Indigenous people of colour, have borne the brunt of the COVID-19 pandemic. These factors, combined with limited access to health services, overcrowding, and difficulties physical distancing, put people who are incarcerated in particular danger from COVID-19. ...
So why has Canada not supported other policies to protect people in prison, as they have in long-term care facilities? “Ultimately, individuals in prison are treated as second-class citizens,” says Dr. Kronfli. “The state doesn’t feel an equivalent responsibility to protect those in custody. But these people should not be punished by jeopardizing their health. That’s just not right.”
https://www.hivnet.ubc.ca/news/2021/02/determining-the-impact-of-covid-1...
While the following short documentary video at the url below, called The Facility, documents the abuse and high level of esposure to Covid in an American prison, many of the conditions there can also be found in Canada. Here is the commentary accompanying the video:
In this harrowing documentary—told mostly through video chat and news footage—reporter Seth Freed Wessler investigates conditions at the Irwin County Detention Center, a private Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in Ocilla, Georgia, for people facing deportation during the COVID-19 pandemic. Many immigrants are held indefinitely until a U.S. district court agrees to hear their case, a predicament further complicated by pandemic lockdowns. Through Wessler’s impressive access, we see firsthand the center’s negligence in protecting detainees against infection. The situation becomes so dire that they protest by mounting several hunger strikes. The detainee’s plight only becomes news, however, when one of the center’s nurses blows the whistle.
https://fieldofvision.org/the-facility
Despite the lost jobs, income and trajic death toll suffered by society's outcasts, the lower class and even part of the middle class, Canada's top 100 paid CEOs, to say nothing of its billionaire class, continued to gain enormous wealth during Covid, thanks in part to Trudeau's government subsidies. More than a third of the companies run by these CEOs "received the COVID-19 Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy (CEWS)". Corporate welfare bums indeed!
Meanwhile, the rich get richer while the poor and racialized people die in numbers far above the national average.
Canada's 100 top-paid CEOs had a stellar year in 2020, despite the onset of a pandemic which led to layoffs and financial woes for many workers, according to a new report.
The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) report examined the 100 highest-paid CEOs at publicly traded Canadian-based companies for 2020. It found that their average annual compensation totalled $10.9 million — $95,000 more than their average pay in prepandemic 2019.
"While [2020] was really a pretty bad year for most Canadians, particularly lower paid working Canadians, many of whom lost their jobs … it wasn't at all a bad year for CEOs," said David Macdonald, report author and senior economist with the CCPA, a think-tank that studies economic inequity.
MacDonald combined each CEO's base salary plus compensation, such as cash bonuses and stock options, to tally up their income totals.
According to his report, more than one-third of the companies headed by those CEOs received the COVID-19 Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy (CEWS) either directly or indirectly through their subsidiaries or franchisees. ...
MacDonald suggests that added subsidy helped some CEOs achieve revenue targets for lucrative bonuses, even though their companies may have suffered financially due to the pandemic.
"Many of these companies probably didn't need the [CEWS], but if there's federal money available, they were going to apply and they were going to take it," he said. "That was not what this program was meant for."
The federal government introduced CEWS in March 2020 to help companies minimize job losses as COVID-19 restrictions and lockdowns were imposed. To qualify, companies simply had to show a drop in revenue during the pandemic. According to the federal CEWS website, as of Dec. 19, Ottawa has paid out $99.13 billion under the program. ...
According to the report, David Klein, CEO of the cannabis company Canopy Growth, scored the top spot, earning just over $45 million in total compensation. MJBizDaily, a cannabis industry news publication, estimates Canopy Growth may have received $50 million total in CEWS funding.
It's very depressing, Jerry. I am sick of hearing about how well the wealthy have done throughout this pandemic. Of course they are the first to break the rules and find loopholes to continue to enjoy travel and other freaking perks.
"COVID is ripping through Toronto's shelter system: 34 shelters in outbreak. The city's General Manager: 'No, we don't need help currently.."
https://twitter.com/cathycrowe/status/1480215948590211078
City Manager, Chris Murray: www.toronto.ca
[email protected]
The following article shows that "recent disease history in Toronto’s shelters shows the decades of neglect that has led to the current collapse of the shelter system under COVID-19". In discussing the problems that the homeless in Toronto shelters, which is typical of other communities, have previously faced in dealing with tuberculosis, SARS, strep, the article illustrates how failure to deal with these made the current Covid crisis much worse. I have copied the current Covid crisis part of the article but the history of the other diseases described in the article and how they led to the current crisis can be read at the url below.
In the first year of this pandemic the World Health Organization, Canada’s Chief Public Health Officer Dr. Theresa Tam, provincial medical officers of health and Toronto’s medical officer of health were rarely heard to say the words homeless, underhoused, shelter, or encampments. Not much has changed. Public health measures ranging from priority for masks, testing, physical distancing, and vaccination for this population lagged and continue to be inadequate.
Media, especially health and social policy journalists seem oblivious to the high-risk situation homeless people are left in during a pandemic. Only a few media outlets have routinely tackled the issue and usually only in response to something sensational — a homeless man dies of COVID, middle-class people protest outside a new shelter, a fire in an encampment or police brutality at encampment evictions. Then there is the tired media coverage of extreme cold weather and where do “the homeless” go that touches on COVID. I can predict media calls by the temperature.
Infectious disease doctors, public health doctors, epidemiologists? I’m pretty much their number one fan but remain puzzled at their inattention. It’s not rocket science that the COVID hotspot sites include congregate settings: long-term care, prisons, group-homes, schools, and shelters. Conditions in many Canadian shelters are comparable to refugee camps and the poor health status of the homeless population has been researched to death. One would think these medical experts would see the “canary in the mine shaft” or as Andrew Nikiforuk so vividly elucidates – the Fourth Horseman.
Well, the front-line workers and unhoused people do see the danger. This week, the Shelter and Housing Justice Network took the extraordinary step of issuing a media release stating that Toronto’s shelter system had collapsed and the city’s approach to isolate people in situ, and deny N95 masks is tantamount to neglect.
At the time of writing, 48 Toronto shelters were in outbreak, 317 people were infected in those outbreaks and the 60-bed Recovery Hotel program normally used to isolate people was essentially full (57 of 60 beds full).
Long-term care homes, schools, prisons, and shelters are not receiving adequate attention or protection. Homeless people, who are not unhoused and in shelters by choice, are trapped with a dangerous virus lurking.
Dr. Andrew Boozary, the head of social medicine and population health at the University Health Network sums it up in a tweet:
“…the thing that bothers me most about ‘let the virus rip now’ is it basically means everyone that is under housed, people in poorer neighbourhoods with more essential work and kids in less safe schools, elders and health workers will have to continue living this nightmare.”
https://rabble.ca/columnists/how-the-collapse-of-torontos-shelters-under...
In yet another example of how the underclass was ignored and abused, even to death, a recently released email shows that ministers in the Legault government knew about the Covid crisis at the Herron long term care home where 47 seniors died ten days earlier than previously admitted.
An email tabled at an inquest into pandemic deaths reveals Quebec cabinet ministers knew about the dire situation at the Herron long-term care home at least 10 days earlier than they had previously acknowledged.
COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, leading to several investigations, including one by the coroner’s office.
The March 29, 2020, email — first reported this week by Radio-Canada — is labelled “URGENT” and warns the chief of staff to Seniors Minister Marguerite Blais that there were “almost no more staff” to care for Herron’s 154 residents.
The email was reportedly forwarded to Blais that night, while the health minister at the time, Danielle McCann, received a briefing on the situation the next day.
However, both Blais and McCann have stated publicly that they only learned about conditions at the Herron care home from reading a news article in the Montreal Gazette on April 10, 2020.
Premier François Legault told reporters Tuesday his government was “reassured” by the March 29, 2020, email, because it stated that the local health authority was taking charge of the troubled long-term care home.
Liberal Opposition Leader Dominique Anglade on Tuesday demanded the resignations of McCann, who is now minister of higher education, and Blais, accusing them of lying to the public.
https://globalnews.ca/news/8737827/covid-19-quebec-ministers-knew-earlie...
New York Mayor Eric Adams Orders Cops to Clear Unhoused Residents’ Encampments
Here in New York, Mayor Eric Adams is continuing his controversial plan to clear encampments in the city where unhoused people have taken shelter. On Wednesday, New York police arrested six activists and an unhoused man after a seven-hour standoff at one encampment in the East Village of Manhattan. Residents of the small encampment demanded the city provide actual housing to those in need.
Johnny Grima: “We need apartments. We don’t need temporary housing. We need apartments now, apartment studios now. … There’s more than 100,000 children homeless in New York City for the sixth year in a row, man. It’s disgusting, bro. All right? I was in a family shelter when I was 17 years old, man. You guys destroy people’s lives, man.”
New York Civil Liberties Union Executive Director Donna Lieberman said, “The Mayor’s attempt to police away homelessness and sweep individuals out of sight is a page from the failed Giuliani playbook. With no real plan for housing, services, or supports, the administration is choosing handcuffs.”
Government data suggests First Nations hit more often with CERB repayment letters
quote:
"I thought the federal government was being gracious in giving out the CERB," she said in a recent interview from her Winnipeg apartment. "But they are unforgiving and relentless in wanting that money back."
Ketchum was one of 441,599 aid recipients who in late 2020 received a letter from the Canada Revenue Agency questioning their eligibility and warning they may owe back some of the payments.
Number-crunching by The Canadian Press about where the letters went suggest a disproportionate number landed in postal codes home to First Nations, including in Manitoba and Saskatchewan.
Two areas of northern Manitoba stand out from the data, with more than half the average number of CERB recipients during each of the benefits' pay periods receiving what the CRA called "educational letters."
quote:
Areas with large numbers of CERB recipients, including in and around the Greater Toronto Area, showed smaller shares of letters in the data obtained by The Canadian Press under the Access to Information Act.
The CRA said no one has been forced to repay any of the aid, no repayment deadlines have been set and "no recovery or collection efforts have been made with respect to any group, including Indigenous applicants."
The Canadian Medical Association Journal's review of Canada's response to Covid ranks it second to only Japan among ten developed countries studied in terms of fewest deaths per capita and infection rate and highest in vaccination rate. While true the article fails to deal with the extremely high death toll in long term care homes, homeless shelters and prisons because of low quality care in the long term care homes, homeless shelters and poor conditions in prisons, along with the unnecessary confinement of non-violent prisoners, often racialized, meat packing plants and other 'essential' workers, also often racialized, First Nations communities that placed them at greater risk and
that have been described in numerous posts above.
https://www.cmaj.ca/content/194/25/E870
Compared with the other Group of 10 (G10) countries, Canada performed better than most in terms of percentage of the population receiving 2 doses of a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine, and on measures assessing the direct effect of the pandemic: number of people infected, number who died from COVID-19 and total excess deaths. It also did not deal with the much poorer treatment of the poor and working class compared to the wealthy and corporations in terms of CERB and other repayments.
