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DSC said:
Ford always blames the Feds if things look difficult, either they should NOT interfere with "Provincial Responsibilities" or they should!! Whichever puts any blame on others, typical.
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I'd say Ford just likes to pass the buck. Be it upwards to the Feds, or downards to the municipalities (while crippling them one way or another).
 
PinkLucy said:
Ford always says we shouldn’t pander to special interest groups. Yet here he is not wanting to annoy the relatively small group of anti vaxxers. Part of his voting base perhaps? This way, he can blame the feds since his supporters hate Trudeau anyway
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To be fair, it is hard not to when his daughter is one of them. /s

AoD
 
Ontario is reporting 340 cases of #COVID19 and over 23,400 tests completed.

Here is the weekly chart:

1628261074708.png
 
Herd immunity treshold is supposedly in about a week (80% single, 75% double vaccinated). I understand that going with a vaccine passport would be a pain in the ass to administer for businesses. Many provinces are fully open already.
 
p_xavier said:
Herd immunity treshold is supposedly in about a week (80% single, 75% double vaccinated). I understand that going with a vaccine passport would be a pain in the ass to administer for businesses. Many provinces are fully open already.
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Businesses, more than just about any other group, are pushing for vaccine passports. They foresee a tsunami of liability damages lawsuits without company-wide mandatory employee vaccination and vaccine passports for clients.
 
p_xavier said:
Herd immunity treshold is supposedly in about a week (80% single, 75% double vaccinated). I understand that going with a vaccine passport would be a pain in the ass to administer for businesses. Many provinces are fully open already.
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I think 80% was quoted in the early days as the threshold for vanilla COVID; the more infectious variant is said to have pushed it higher.

AoD
 
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zang said:
Businesses, more than just about any other group, are pushing for vaccine passports. They foresee a tsunami of liability damages lawsuits without company-wide mandatory employee vaccination and vaccine passports for clients.
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Not in Québec, per the articles I read. But again every business owner see it differentely. Some prefer that than to face another lockdown, some want all restrictions removed.
 
p_xavier said:
Not in Québec, per the articles I read. But again every business owner see it differentely. Some prefer that than to face another lockdown, some want all restrictions removed.
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I personally want vaccine passports so that if we do have a 4th wave everything does not need to close up.

My logic is this: If you have a 4th wave with vaccine passports you can deny entry to the unvaccinated to prevent further spread. Simple health and safety.

Folks, if you choose not to get vaccinated it is your right. It is also the right of every business owner to deny you service if it endangers staff. You have a right to choose not to be vaccinated but you also do not have a right to enter anywhere you please if you don't.
 
Richard White said:
I personally want vaccine passports so that if we do have a 4th wave everything does not need to close up.

My logic is this: If you have a 4th wave with vaccine passports you can deny entry to the unvaccinated to prevent further spread. Simple health and safety.

Folks, if you choose not to get vaccinated it is your right. It is also the right of every business owner to deny you service if it endangers staff. You have a right to choose not to be vaccinated but you also do not have a right to enter anywhere you please if you don't.
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Why you need to close up and 80% of the elligible population will soon be fully vaccinated? We need to stop looking at cases and look at hospitalizations. All of the experts saying the UK reopening would be a catastrophe, it wasn't. A vaccine passport would have helped on April/May and not having another complete lockdown when you could have opened to a select few. At 80%? I don't see the point really.
 
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Did spending less on COVID cost us?​

From link.

Holding back COVID-fighting money might have cost us much more.

Recently, Ontario’s Auditor General released a scathing report that reveals that Premier Doug Ford and his government tied themselves in knots to avoid spending COVID-19 funding to fight COVID-19.

Auditor General Bonnie Lysyk revealed that the government manipulated their reporting to show a combined total for the amounts spent and the amounts committed for future spending and failed to track a whopping $4.4 billion.

“Failure to distinguish between these two amounts can adversely affect decision-making, as a combined total does not give an accurate picture of the actual progress of the initiative,” reported Lysyk.

Essentially, Ford was holding back money we needed to stop COVID-19. On July 21, the Financial Accountability Office of Ontario confirmed it — $10.3 billion in pandemic-fighting funding was withheld by Ford.

What did this mean on the front lines of the pandemic?

Long-term care didn’t receive enough staff for infection prevention and control. Schools didn’t get the extra staff they needed to create smaller class sizes, nor did they all get HVAC upgrades to keep students and staff safe. Hospitals and nursing homes were shorted on critical personal protective equipment, such as masks. Local businesses didn’t get the help they deserved to keep the rent, staff wages and b

Again and again, Ford looked for the lowest-cost ways to fight COVID-19, which explains why — when the third wave was rising out of control — his solution was an attempted shutdown of our children’s playgrounds, rather than pricier public health measures such as testing, tracing and isolating cases of the virus.

Investing in doing those things right certainly could have made the shutdowns shorter, less painful and less costly to our economy.

The Ministry of Long-Term Care missed the Aug. 20, 2020 deadline to report to the treasury board on infection control in long-term care homes. The fact that the government did not work with urgency to complete this report given the painful and tragic number of COVID-19-related deaths in long-term care is a significant failure that adds to the grief of so many families.

By that point, the COVID-19 Long-Term Care Commission had already laid out a multitude of problems with the state of long-term care in the province and the Canadian Armed Forces had painted a disturbing picture of the lack of infection prevention and control in long-term care.

This only reaffirms how little care and funding the government put into improving safety. In Kitchener, we saw 50 deaths at the Revera Long Term Care Home, Forest Heights.

Ford also put support for working folks battling the pandemic at the bottom of the priority list. According to the auditor, pandemic pay didn’t move out until weeks or months after it was due, and on top of the delay, the ministry did not have a plan in place to track which front-line workers had received payments, leaving some in the lurch.

Pandemic pay was not enough money, and not offered to enough workers. It was supposed to arrive in April 2020, but was not distributed to front-line workers until June and July. At that time, workers were coping with incredible stress — some of them from inside long-term care homes that were humanitarian disasters — while then Finance Minister Rod Phillips (now long-term care minister) was on vacation.

It was expected that this report would uncover Ford being slow to spend pandemic funds — but the extent to which he sat on the money while COVID-19 grew out of control is astounding. Beyond a lack of accountability, the government’s failures to track and report $4.4 billion in spending and to distinguish between planned and actual spending affects Ontario’s ability to prepare for and respond to future crises. We need to learn from this experience.

Withholding COVID-19 money cost us so much more in the long run. It cost us financially. And it cost us in terms of more illness, more loss of life, and longer, more painful lockdowns.

When you’re drowning, withholding the life preserver for a rainy day is a bad choice. I hope we can all agree, bad choices must have consequences.
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