Focus on local virus spread
Premier Doug Ford held a photo-op at Pearson airport on Tuesday, keen to point out that he was standing in an area of “federal jurisdiction.”
He was there to urge Ottawa to crack down on travel to curb the spread of COVID-19. Ford called for mandatory testing on arrival of “every single person that comes through this airport” and a ban on direct flights from countries with cases of the new variants of the virus.
It’s “absolutely critical,” he said, because a voluntary COVID testing program at Pearson found a positivity rate of 2.3 per cent for travellers coming from abroad.
Any new cases coming into Canada, especially given the new and more contagious variants, is not good. That’s essentially what Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said earlier in the day when he vowed, rather vaguely, to beef up Canada’s existing travel restrictions “in the coming days.”
But if Ford thinks it’s “absolutely critical” for Ottawa to take additional measures because of a 2.3 per cent positivity rate, where are all of Ontario’s new measures to deal with COVID rates more than twice, or even six, times that high?
The COVID positivity rate for Ontario is 5.9 per cent; Toronto is 8.6 per cent; Peel Region is a whopping 14.4 per cent.
International travel is responsible for the tiniest portion of Ontario’s COVID cases. That Ford has decided to place such focus on it is disappointing, though not surprising given his desire to change the channel and deflect from his government’s failings.
No matter what additional travel restrictions Ottawa announces, Ontario will still have a community transmission problem. And dealing with that is Ford’s responsibility.
His government has both the tools and the money — it’s sitting on billions of unspent federal dollars earmarked for this very purpose — to do a far better job of it than it has done so far.
Workplace outbreaks are a growing problem and the Ford government still refuses to budge on paid sick days. Long-term-care homes are as great a tragedy in the second wave as they were in the first, despite everything that was supposedly learned and changed.
Just look at the COVID horror show that is Roberta Place, a long-term-care home in Barrie where some 130 residents and 90 staff have contracted the virus and more than 40 residents have already died.
An inspector found COVID positive and negative residents sharing rooms and staff working with both rather than cohorting as they should. Sloppy infection control practices like that kill in a long-term-care home regardless of whether it’s a new variant or plain old regular COVID.
Roberta Place, and the tragic stories from Tendercare, Sunnycrest and St. George that came before it, clearly demonstrate that long-term-care homes — which fall entirely under Ford’s provincial jurisdiction — still can’t get things right.
More than 3,360 residents of Ontario’s long-term-care homes have died of COVID. In recent days, the death toll has amounted to more than one resident every hour of every day. Doctors are calling it a “humanitarian crisis.”
Ford knows those numbers.
Yet, instead of taking the necessary steps to make those homes safer before we lose even more vulnerable Ontarians, Ford is busy looking up at the skies and, as he puts it, “thinking how many cases are coming in.”
There’s nothing wrong with trying to head off future problems but it should not come at the expense of dealing with the obvious problems at hand. Especially when the Ford government has the tools and money to make things better and the consequences of it not doing so are so very tragic.
Doug Ford’s government has both the tools and the money to do a far better job of it than it has done so far