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tiffer24 said:
A real whopper from Ford today... and he was doing so well.

Premier Doug Ford says he didn't know former premier Mike Harris was the chair of long-term care home firm, Chartwell.
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Annual General Meeting of Chartwell Retirement Residences
Thursday, May 14, 2020

From link.

It will be a webcast, and access by control numbers from their "Voting Information Form".

Former Premier Mike Harris is the current Chair of the Board.


Wonder if they'll be discussing how well their profits were this past year?
Or how well their residents were with COVID-19? (Not very well.)

From their website, at link...
Chartwell is an unincorporated, open-ended real estate trust which indirectly owns and operates a complete range of seniors housing communities, from independent supportive living through assisted living to long term care. It is the largest operator in the Canadian seniors living sector with over 200 quality retirement communities in four provinces, including properties under development. Chartwell is committed to its vision of Making People's Lives BETTER and to providing a happier, healthier and more fulfilling life experience for its residents.
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6yS.gif


Wonder if Doug Ford will attend his family business' meetings at Deco Labels & Tags?
 
Mike Harris expanded the privatization of long-term care. Doug Ford is discovering that wasn’t a magic cure

From link.

A quarter-century ago, the populist premier of the day wanted to fix nursing homes in Ontario.

Mike Harris had a lasting impact on long-term care when his Progressive Conservatives oversaw the expansion of private ownership in a sector short on regulations and standards. Harris, having spearheaded for-profit ownership back then, now profits handsomely from it himself.

Today, as chair of Chartwell Retirement Residences, the former premier presides over a sprawling operation that describes itself as “the largest retirement living company in Canada.” Didn’t know that?

Neither, says Doug Ford, did he.

Replying to my questions Monday, our current premier said he’s spoken to the former premier but once, briefly, during this pandemic. Long-term care, where the majority of COVID-19 deaths have taken place in this province, never came up.

“He asked how I was doing and to be frank, I didn’t even know he was the chair of Chartwell,” Ford told me in his televised daily briefing, where he often rattles off the names of CEOs whom he encourages do their best in the pandemic.

I’d asked Ford if he had an opinion, as premier, about the difference between public and private ownership, given the carnage in long-term care today. The premier took a quick pass at the topic before passing on it.

“Well, I think there’s a difference, but what I’ve said right from the day one, Martin, the system’s broke and we are going to fix it. But if you don’t mind, Martin, I’m going to pass it over to the minister of long-term care.”

But did Ford have a message for Harris or other operators involved in long-term care in Ontario?

“We’re gonna have that opportunity to sit down and fix these issues right across the board,” he replied. As for Harris, “the conversation lasted a couple of minutes — ‘How’s your family doing?’ ‘How’s yours?’ — and that was about it.”

One wonders, when family came up, if Ford mentioned the thousands of other families that have been affected in this crisis (he has mentioned publicly that his own mother-in-law became infected with COVID-19 in a Toronto nursing home last month).

Today, from his perch as chair, Harris is well placed to look back at what he kick-started from the premier’s chair, and see how it ended up. But Ford is in a better position to take a fresh look at what his predecessor did — and, with the benefit of hindsight, to re-examine the system he inherited.

Privatization predated Harris, just as many problems predated Ford. But the Tories back then made it easier for owners by easing staff ratios and requirements, just as the Tories last year scaled back annual comprehensive inspections.

The premier says he’ll “fix it.” Harris had a fix, too.

Ford says “there’s a difference” between for-profit ownership versus non-profit. Harris presumably thought so, too, but what’s the difference between their views?

After Ford mentioned they’d chatted, I reached out to Harris for comment, to which a Chartwell spokesperson replied: “Mr. Harris has confirmed that Mr. Ford’s statement is correct and there is nothing additional to add.”

There are few quick fixes, because our long-term care crisis has been a long time coming: Private versus non-profit or public ownership? Single rooms versus double or triple? Nursing home homes versus home care?

One solution is to stop low-wage, part-time workers flitting from one facility to another, as a way to reduce infection transmission between homes. Yet it took weeks for the Progressive Conservative government to impose the ban (a loophole allowed for temporary help as needed).

And at precisely that time, Ford invited health-care workers from acute-care hospitals and army clinics to swoop in on nursing homes. Physicians frequently go from private clinics to nursing homes, acting as involuntary vectors of infection.

Separation surely saves lives, but a living wage with decent working conditions might spare us the need for SWAT teams from hospitals and medics from army bases. Either way, we won’t know for a while how profound the differences were in infection control between profit-seeking owners and non-profits.
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As an example, the vast Chartwell network overseen by Harris lists nine of its 23 long-term care residences in Ontario affected by COVID-19 infections, and seven of its 96 “retirement residences” affected. A spokesperson noted Monday that “We continue to follow all recommendations of the Chief Medical Officer and Public Health.”

But we also know that not-for-profit operators have been hit hard as well. The Salvation Army’s Meighen Manor in midtown Toronto has reported 68 confirmed cases among residents and 34 deaths in the 168-bed facility, with 45 staff also infected as of Monday — so there is no ideological immunity conferred by COVID-19.

There is a contradiction in the criticisms of long-term care: We want to have it all for nothing — better beds but more of them; more quantity and more quality; single rooms with private bathrooms but without the wait lists; more for less.
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All this while also rescuing the economy and the rest of society — investing in child care, all-day kindergarten, post-secondary education, transit, hospital care for the rest of us, wage subsidies for the jobless.

It’s a long list. Little wonder long-term care always got short shrift in perennial election cycles.

Today, in a pandemic cycle, beware the panaceas. There’s no magic cure for what ails nursing homes.
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So the great license plate saga comes to an end.

Ford gov't has killed the Blue Plates and their slogan "A place to grow"

We're going back to the future with blue on white plates and "Yours to Discover"

www.thestar.com

Ford government to abandon hard-to-read blue licence plates and return to a white design

We “blue” it. That’s the stunning admission from Premier Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservative government about the defective double-blue licence plate...
www.thestar.com www.thestar.com

Wow, that was a useful diversion.......:rolleyes:
 
Since COVID-19 emerged, how many people have died in Ontario? They won’t tell us

From link.

Ontario is refusing to publicly release data that could reveal the number of people who died in the province since COVID-19 emerged.

The numbers are part of the mortality data that critics say is needed to truly show the human toll of the pandemic.

Colin Furness, an infection control epidemiologist at the University of Toronto, said Ontario’s refusal likely suggests a technical inability to track the information.
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“Ontario’s public health information system is very old and was never adequate,” said Furness, who has been critical of the province’s lagging data throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.

The province, meanwhile, has argued the data is incomplete and sharing potentially inaccurate data is not in the public interest.

Countries around the world are releasing detailed mortality statistics amid COVID-19, outlining deaths attributed to the virus and all other causes. The numbers can show a variety of trends, including if unexplained deaths started to spike before COVID-19 became a pandemic or if delayed surgeries or hospital visits for other medical problems might have cost lives. Canada’s most recent data is from 2018.

The Star spent more than a week asking various federal government sources involved in collecting vital statistics for updated numbers. They declined to provide them.

Individual provinces and territories, except Ontario, agreed to release some information, but the numbers provided lack the level of detail needed for useful analysis.

The research revealed a wide and varied approach across the country as to how each government shares its vital statistics in the absence of a regularly updated national death registry.
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British Columbia is the gold standard in Canada. The B.C. government regularly publishes detailed statistics with analysis — including an estimated excess death rate of 2.7 per cent in March over previous years.

Quebec, Canada’s province with the highest COVID-19 death count at 2,510 as of Wednesday, only shared January 2020 totals. Alberta reports deaths per 100,000 people, to account for population fluctuations. Nunavut’s coroner’s office is responsible for tracking reportable and unexpected deaths — those in which people died suddenly and were found to be of natural causes — but not those from palliative or expected deaths, which are not investigated by the coroner.

In its refusal to provide numbers, Ontario’s Ministry of Government and Consumer Services, which oversees vital statistics collection, stated it is working in accordance with the Vital Statistics Act. The act says information should be an accurate representation of the number of events that occurred in that calendar year, according to spokesman Harry Malhi.

“Releasing statistical information that is incomplete or inaccurate is not in the public’s best interest as it could result in misinterpretation of the information provided or of the event that is being evaluated,” Malhi said in an emailed response to questions from the Star.

Since Canada does not have a central death registry, the nation’s death reports are forwarded by provinces and territories to Statistics Canada, the federal agency tasked with collecting vital statistical data. Historically, there is a reporting lag while waiting for all regions to submit their data.

In Ontario, for instance, it can take up to a year to register a death. So a death that occurred in May 2019 can still be registered today, Malhi said.

Breaking from tradition, Statistics Canada is speeding things up this year. It plans to release some death data “for those jurisdictions for which the data is available” in mid-May, according to agency spokesperson Peter Frayne.

Malhi confirmed that Ontario has shared its 2019 death statistics with Statistics Canada, even though the 2019 report has not yet been published.

Raywat Deonandan, an epidemiologist and an associate professor at the University of Ottawa, said Ontario’s refusal to share recent death rates “resonates with me right now as I’m fielding many angry questions from a public that is in increasing denial of the true toll that COVID-19 has taken.”

“The only way to capture the full death toll of this disease, without literally examining the fluids of everyone who has died in Ontario these past few months, is to compare deaths in the same time period a year ago and to compute what we call excess deaths,” Deonandan said.

“Our inability to estimate that death toll in Ontario makes it harder to combat (or confirm) the narrative that this is a media-manufactured disease,” he said, noting some people still debate the severity of COVID-19’s impact on the population to that of the flu.

“It also denies us an important variable in making more precise models for projecting how the disease will unfold in coming weeks and months.”

Furness, the U of T epidemiologist, said since deaths happen in many contexts, such as at home, in hospital or while travelling abroad, it can be challenging to compile mortality information. Still, he said, Ontario should be transparent.
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“We should be doing post-mortem testing on all non-misadventure deaths … in Ontario. This would require a simple order from the province’s chief medical officer of health,” he added.

Canada’s lacking data is in stark contrast to many countries including the United States, Belgium, Germany, Norway and Ecuador, which are releasing mortality data in a timely manner.

In the United States, the Maryland-based National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) publishes preliminary death data weekly. States and large regions, like New York City, submit official deaths through an electronic registration system — data often filed within 10 days of a death.

The lack of current death data is “not so much a health crisis as it is a health-systems crisis,” said Deonandan.

“And one cannot make data-driven decisions without accurate data.”

Without adequate post-mortem testing, “we will remain blind” to COVID-19, said Furness.
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The New York Times recently reviewed mortality data from 14 countries and regions during an investigation of excess deaths. The Times found that over March and April of 2020, “far more” people had died than in previous years in most of the jurisdictions studied. For New York City, the death rate was six times higher.

Bob Anderson, chief of the NCHS’s mortality statistics branch — the NCHS is part of the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta — said the groundwork for the electronic registration system began about 15 years ago, with refinements made to install data coding systems common to all states to file death report information more efficiently.

“When this business happened with the pandemic, we realized very quickly we were going to need to provide … something a lot more timely and a lot more detailed than we’d been doing before,” Anderson said.

“I think we’ll be able to have a fairly good accounting of what happened and how it happened at the end of the day.”

Anderson said sharing timely mortality data, especially with those in government and public health grappling with a pandemic like COVID-19, informs experts in handling a crisis.

“The responders to the crisis need the information to know where to direct their resources and those who are doing research need that information so they can evaluate the response,” Anderson said.

“The more timely you can provide the information, the more impact you have.”

Deonandan agrees.

“No health emergency response has ever been slowed by having too much or too accessible data,” he said.
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Ontario restaurants will struggle to reopen their doors post COVID-19, survey says

Published Thursday, May 7, 2020 9:07AM EDT

Most food service businesses in Ontario will not have enough cash flow to successfully reopen their doors when COVID-19 restrictions are eased, a new survey says.

Restaurants Canada, which represents the national food service industry, is now calling on the provincial government to help these businesses make it through the pandemic and not have to shut down.

“The resiliency of our industry won’t be enough to ensure Ontario’s 38,000 restaurants remain viable in the face of insufficient cash flow and insurmountable debt,” James Rilett, a regional vice president for the organization, said in a news release Thursday.

“The province needs to come to the table with a package of solutions to help these mostly small and medium-sized businesses stay afloat as they ramp up their operations.”

toronto.ctvnews.ca

Ontario restaurants will struggle to reopen their doors post COVID-19, survey says

Most food service businesses in Ontario will not have enough cash flow to successfully reopen their doors when COVID-19 restrictions are eased, a new survey says.
toronto.ctvnews.ca
 
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