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Month: August 2021

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Ontario is proposing ‘sneaky’ changes to child care

Aug 31, 2021 , , , , by shlf

Ontario’s Ministry of Education is proposing changes to child-care regulations that would allow operators to group infants and toddlers together, reduce staff-to-child ratios for some age groups and lower qualification requirements for staff.

Child-care advocates said the proposed changes would make child care worse, not better, and they criticized the government for releasing the proposal in the middle of a pandemic, when parents are stressed and many operators are just trying to stay afloat.

“People are pushed to the limit and very distracted,” said Carolyn Ferns, a spokesperson for the Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care. “To have something like this come along at a time when the sector is very vulnerable, very distracted and not able to mobilize … I think it’s opportunistic and sneaky.”

The proposed amendments to the Child Care and Early Years Act, , arose as a result of a scheduled five-year review of the Act. The ministry is soliciting feedback from “all interested parties” by Nov. 20.

Among the is combining infants and toddlers into one group. Infants and toddlers are currently grouped by 0-to-18-months and 18-to-30-months, respectively; the new combined group would be 0-to-24-months.

The biggest impact would be for children between 24 and 30 months old. Under the current system, they’re considered toddlers, and required to have a 1-to-5 staff-to-child ratio and a maximum group size of 15.

Under the proposed changes these children would be bumped up into the preschool category with children up to five years old, and they would have a 1-to-8 staff ratio and a maximum group size of 24. “That’s a pretty big change for those two-year-olds,” Ferns said.

Don Giesbrecht, CEO of the Canadian Child Care Federation, said any reduction in staff ratios is concerning.

“Best practice is always going to say that we want more staff for fewer children, not more children for fewer staff,” he said, adding that grouping two-year-olds with children up to five is “not the norm” in Canada. “Typically a two-year-old is very much considered a toddler.”

In a written response to questions for this story, Ingrid Anderson, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Education, said the changes to age categories were proposed because “greater continuity of care during (a child’s) first years is associated with reduced stress and stronger relationships between educators, children and parents.”

A child’s “developmental progression” varies widely, Anderson said. “Allowing educators and parents to make decisions on when children are ready to progress to the next age group is beneficial for children’s learning and development.”

The proposed changes do not seem to allow children to progress to the next age group based on their development, rather than their age, so it’s not clear what Anderson meant by this. She did not respond to a request for clarification. The ministry is soliciting feedback on possibly allowing overlapping age categories in the future, but that is not one of the proposed amendments.

Anderson said findings from an industry survey and conversations with “sector partners” indicated the need for “more flexibility in (staffing) ratios so that licensees could move children between programs based on their developmental needs.”

The Association of Day Care Operators of Ontario, which represents both for-profit and non-profit child-care centres, declined to comment.

This marks the fourth time in the last decade that the province has proposed changes to age categories and staff ratios. The previous Liberal government under Kathleen Wynne , but when it was met with widespread backlash from parents, advocates and academics.

One difference with the current proposal is that it would be optional for operators to adopt the new age categories, and they would have to apply to the ministry to do so.

Ferns said that since it would be cheaper for child-care operators to use the new age categories and staffing ratios, many would.

“Because we’re in this situation where we have this market model and centres have this financial pressure on them, decisions are made for the wrong reasons,” she said. “We’re not doing it because that’s what’s in the best interests of the child. Is it good for a toddler to be put into a larger group with fewer staff? No, of course not, and we wouldn’t be making that decision if it wasn’t for financial reasons.”

The ministry’s proposed changes also include removing the requirement that staff working with kindergarten-age children be members of the College of Early Educators; allowing non-qualified staff to temporarily fill in for qualified staff for up to two weeks; and requiring that a supervisor have two years’ experience in “general children’s programming,” rather than licensed child care specifically.

Alana Powell, who represents the Association of Early Childhood Educators Ontario, said the proposed changes collectively “undermine” the value of early childhood educators and don’t address the long-standing problems of staff recruitment and retention.

“We understand that operators are in a very tough position, but this isn’t the way to solve those problems,” she said. “We really have to get at the root of the issues, which is the wages and working conditions in the sector.”

Coming little more than a week after a throne speech in which the federal government signalled its intention to build a national child-care system, the province’s proposal is deflating, Ferns said.

“They’re not speaking to the moment that we’re in,” she said. “We’re actually at a place in Canada now where we’re talking about making substantial changes to child care. We could be moving forward in a really positive way to expanding licensed child care, to building a system that would be more affordable for families, that would provide some stability for centres, not through tweaking how many kids they can shoehorn into a room, but by actually building a quality, publicly funded child-care system.”

Brendan Kennedy is a Toronto-based social justice reporter for the Star. Follow him on Twitter:

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Here’s what you need to know from this week’s COVID-19 vaccine news: Testing milestones, presidential boasts and a Canadian hope

Aug 31, 2021 , , , , by shlf

Considered one of the few ways to finally bring the pandemic under control, the search for a vaccine is moving fast.

Teams around the world are at work on dozens of potential vaccines in the hopes that one of them — and possibly more — will crack the code in the coming months; passing clinical testing and gaining regulatory approval.

Thousands of people are already rolling up their sleeves for clinical testing, while debates are underway about issues such as who will get a vaccine first? How will it be distributed? How do we make sure parts of the world aren’t left out?

From the cost for everyday Canadians, to the death of a trial participant, to U.S. President Donald Trump’s claims that a vaccine is “ready,” here’s what you need to know this week.

Vaccines won’t come with a fee for Canadians

When Health Canada approves COVID-19 vaccines for use in this country, they’ll be provided to Canadians at no cost, a spokesperson for Health Canada confirmed this week.

Which is not to say they’re free, exactly, as the federal government has spent somewhere in the neighbourhood of a billion dollars so far locking down advance purchase agreements for leading vaccine candidates. The exact details have been kept under wraps, with the federal procurement minister citing the competitiveness of the market. Pharmaceutical companies have been similarly mum, but the few public estimates on cost available range from about $5 a dose, to upwards of $50.

The need to get a critical mass of people vaccinated — and, hopefully, stop the pandemic — has even persuaded some countries without public health care to provide shots free of charge.

Among them, the U.S., which announced a goal last month that no American will have to “pay a single dime” for a vaccine, the New York Times reported.

Ottawa invests in a Canadian vaccine bid

Federal officials have spent months securing access for Canadians to potential vaccines from around the world, but this week, they offered a show of confidence in a Canadian-made candidate.

for 76 million doses of a plant-based vaccine in development in Quebec City.

A biotechnology company called Medicago is getting a total of $173 million for doses of its vaccine, which is wrapping up Phase 1 tests, and to help pay for a vaccine- and antibody-production facility.

Brazilian vaccine trial continues despite death, paused trials resume

A volunteer who was enrolled in a clinical study of the vaccine candidate being developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University has died, Brazil’s health authority said Wednesday.

But the trial will continue, and researchers from the British university reportedly say there are “no concerns about safety of the clinical trial.”

Reporters for said they talked to an unnamed person familiar with the situation who said the trial would have been suspended if the volunteer who died had received the vaccine, which suggests that they had not.

Anytime a volunteer suffers a serious side effect, a clinical trial must stop.

Clinical trials test the efficacy of a new vaccine by giving the experimental dose to some people, then giving a different vaccine or a placebo to a different group. In the case of this trial, the control group was giving a meningitis vaccine instead. Reuters’ report suggests that the person who died was in the latter group.

Both Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca have previously paused at least some trials while problems experienced by volunteers were investigated to see whether they had been caused by vaccines, but both said this week they were resuming.

, the FDA gave AstraZeneca the nod to resume its U.S. trials, while Johnson&Johnson said it had identified “no clear cause” of its volunteer’s illness, so it was starting back up.

Trump claim that a vaccine is ‘ready’ is dangerous: Expert

During the final debate between Trump and Democratic rival Joe Biden on Thursday, the sitting president began by saying that “We have a vaccine that’s coming; it’s ready. It’s going to be announced within weeks, and it’s going to be delivered.”

When pressed, he said that was “not a guarantee” but that there is a “good chance” of one being ready in weeks.

Trump’s statement isn’t accurate and risks undermining public confidence in an eventual vaccine, says Dr. Alan Bernstein, the president and CEO of CIFAR, a Canadian-based global research organization, and a member of Canada’s COVID-19 Vaccine Task Force.

“For President Trump to say that it’s ready implies that there’s one step when there are multiple, multiple steps even once the trial is finished before we will have a vaccine,” he said.

Meaning, while some vaccines could see clinical testing results in a matter of weeks, that information would still have to go to the regulator for final approval. In the U.S., that means the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and here it’s Health Canada.

An eventual vaccine will also have to be manufactured and distributed.

Making claims such as Trump’s raises expectations, Bernstein says, but also undermines public confidence in the safety of a vaccine.

“It politicizes the process. And I think that’s very dangerous, because then people will wonder, ‘Is this really all about politics? Or is that vaccine really safe?’”

The regulatory processes in the U.S. and Canada are totally separate, meaning any vaccine deployed in Canada will have to be first approved by scientists at Health Canada.

Human-challenge testing to go ahead in the U.K.

British scientists confirmed this week they are going ahead with the world’s first human-challenge tests for COVID-19, which means they are deliberately infecting healthy volunteers with the virus.

The hope is that this will help scientists understand the virus better, and eventually allow them to test treatments and vaccines more effectively, and ultimately bring the pandemic to heel sooner.

While human-challenge testing is used to develop other types of drugs — malaria medications, for example — it remains a controversial approach to COVID-19 because of a lack of what are known as “rescue” drugs. In other words, if a volunteer develops severe complications of COVID-19, doctors don’t have a surefire way of treating them.

According to a , a research institution that is getting funding from the British government, they’ll start by recruiting volunteers between ages 18 and 30 with no previous history of COVID-19, and no known risk factors.

Inside a quarantined lab, researchers will try to figure out just how much virus someone needs to be exposed to before they get infected.

The hope is that researchers will eventually be able to start testing vaccines. Deliberately infecting volunteers will allow them to figure out which ones work a whole lot faster.

The study is set to begin early next year.

Moderna reaches enrolment goal

Moderna, a Massachusetts-based biopharma company, the first to start testing its vaccine in the United States, hit its enrolment target this week — meaning it now has 30,000 volunteers ready to roll up their sleeves for their two-dose shot.

This is noteworthy for a couple of reasons, the major one being that the company, whose mRNA vaccine has long begun considered a front-runner, is entering the home stretch in the vaccine-testing race.

But it’s also notable since they’d faced challenges early on in recruiting a diverse pool of volunteers. Any vaccine that will eventually be rolled out around the world needs to be tested on as wide a range of people as possible, to make sure it works for everyone. That’s presented challenges for some companies.

Moderna began Phase 3 testing on July 27, and a month later had about half the number of people they needed, but reported that only about a fifth of its participants were Black or Hispanic, despite those communities being disproptionately affected by the pandemic.

The company in order to focus on recruiting a more diverse group.

On Thursday, as it announced the completion of enrolment, it touted the diversity of its final volunteers. In the end, 37 per cent of participants were from communities of colour, Moderna said, including 6,000 people who identified as Hispanic or LatinX, and 3,000 who identify as Black or African American.

“We are indebted to all of the participants in the study. We would also like to thank the investigators and our partners at clinical trial sites,” CEO Stéphane Bancel said .

is a Calgary-based reporter for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: .n.boyd

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This Toronto plumber is selling candy chutes for Halloween to raise money for the Daily Bread Food Bank. The demand has been overwhelming

Aug 31, 2021 , , , , by shlf

What do you do when the long-standing trick-or-treating Halloween tradition is possibly in jeopardy amid the pandemic?

If you are plumber Geoff Burke, you put your building skills to use by making and installing candy chutes outside people’s homes.

“Kids are definitely having a tough year with school cancellations, not being able to see their friends and all that, so I thought, why not provide a little bit of life for these kids who have missed out on so much already this year,” said Burke, a resident in Toronto’s west end and owner of Watermark Plumbing Services Inc.

“Along with what the experts are saying, this is one of the safer holidays that we can celebrate safely outside.”

Canada’s top public health official Dr. Theresa Tam, told reporters on Tuesday that Halloween need not be cancelled altogether. According to Tam, public health leaders believe it’s possible to strike ” between risk and fun if outdoors.

Tam urged community members to observe existing safety measures — such as masking up, using hand sanitizer and observing physical distancing — while out on the candy hunt.

Toronto, Ottawa and Peel region are Ontario’s hot zones, but Ontario’s medical health officer Dr. David Williams said, as of Tuesday, recommendations for Halloween in those spots haven’t yet been finalized.

Meanwhile Burke, 32, has come up with a creative solution to pandemic trick-or-treating: distributing candy through makeshift chutes installed in front of people’s homes.

The idea came to him a few weeks ago when he read a story about a man in Ohio who created a candy chute as a means to distribute candy to kids during Halloween while safely observing physical distancing guidelines. Burke’s own two-year-old daughter is at an age when she’s starting to enjoy the outside activities and it would be hard to explain to her why trick-or-treating is not happening, he said.

When he put out a call over the Thanksgiving weekend, the community response was swift and overwhelming. He had to stop the requests after getting 400 of them.

“It was quickly getting out of hand,” he said about people’s interest.

The chutes are made from drainage pipes, which have been donated by Burke’s supplier, . The pipes are then painted orange and decorated just to give them an extra festive look.

The plan is to use volunteers from Daily Bread Food Bank to help put them up, starting next week.

Burke only asks that for each chute installed, a minimum $25 donation be made to help the food bank. Earlier in April he used his plumbing services to raise over $4,500 for the same initiative, after realizing COVID-19 was leaving many people out of food options.

“To me, it’s just a way to help people get out there, stay socially distanced and have a little bit of fun. It’s been a difficult time for everybody for too long,” he said.

Burke is not the only person to think outside the box while trying to find a way to celebrate this upcoming Halloween.

On his front porch in Brooklin, north of Whitby, Scott Bennett has installed a candy slide through which he’s planning to drop candy straight into the bags of trick-or-treaters on Halloween.

He has on how to build one such slide on his YouTube channel where he usually posts various projects of his craft in woodworking. With “as few tools as possible” he hopes people will quickly learn to do it and safely take part in Halloween.

“I think our kids are going through enough change right now, and adults are potentially stressed about things,” he said, noting Halloween is a magical time of the year and at this stage of the pandemic it’s really important that people get a chance to see some change in their routine.

“I don’t want to be in my house with the lights off. I want to be out on the porch talking to my neighbours, celebrating with everyone.”

With files from Tonda MacCharles

Gilbert Ngabo is a Star breaking news reporter based in Toronto. Follow him on Twitter:

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Pandemic plus holiday prep puts the pinch on online shopping

Aug 31, 2021 , , , , by shlf

As COVID-era consumers embrace the convenience and sequestered safety of online shopping, retailers are increasingly tasked to ensure prompt and reliable parcel delivery.

Statistics Canada reported a record $3.9 billion in e-commerce sales in May, a 2.3 per cent hike over April and a 99.3 per cent increase over February. The pre-holiday numbers are on an upward trajectory said the agency, noting Canadians now do 10 per cent of their spending online.

The pandemic, causing many brick-and-mortar stores to close, has created massive demand and opportunity for delivery services, an industry valued annually at $12 billion nationally and $4.5 billion in Ontario.

This is a windfall not without challenges for delivery businesses, said LinkEdge Consultancy managing partner Brian Meagher.

“Holiday delivery issues have been around for a long time,” said Meagher who consulted Metroland Media in the planning of its new parcel delivery service launched earlier this month. “There has been a history of early cut-off times and that disappoints many consumers. This year, it could be a significantly bigger issue for everyone.”

The fact that almost 50 per cent of consumers will shop online this year to avoid large crowds, and retailers want more delivery options, was the genesis to create and launch Metroland Parcel Services, said Mike Banville, who leads the new service.

Metroland, a division of Torstar Corporation, publishes more than 70 community and daily newspapers delivered to 70 per cent of Southern Ontario households by a network of 15,000 delivery contractors. Metroland’s facility hubs, distribution networks and expertise ideally positions the organization to successfully extend its services into parcel delivery, said Banville.

“Our research and clients tell us e-commerce channel growth has exploded and is largely expected to sustain post-COVID. Parcel carriers are struggling to meet service level commitments. Some carriers have inconvenient hard stop deadlines for holiday deliveries,” he said.

“Our new solution is designed to deliver a high value premium final mile parcel delivery experience in Ontario right up to Christmas Eve and beyond.”

Metroland offers next-day express and standard two- to three-day delivery at competitive prices and includes delivery guarantees, real-time parcel tracking and photo delivery confirmation. The new service also provides seamless technology integration into client platforms.

Metroland’s strategy and parcel delivery commitment struck an important chord with Toys R Us Canada president and CEO Vic Bertrand.

“Toys R Us is focused on serving Canadians with what they want, when they want, and how they want it,” said Bertrand. “The how is where Metroland comes in.”

Delivery makes up the majority of Toys R Us e-commerce transactions, followed by pickup and curbside, explained Bertrand, adding that the capacity constraints on delivery last holiday, and through the pandemic, will persist through this holiday season.

“That’s why we’re thrilled to be on board with Metroland. Their service is both timely and targeted for our exponential growth in the Golden Horseshoe. Our e-commerce sales have risen triple-digit overall since the pandemic.

“Metroland has a unique, high volume distribution footprint in Ontario that is well-positioned to respond to our last mile delivery needs.”

For information, visit or email .

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‘My heart went out to them’: Students send messages of hope to seniors at Simcoe Manor in Beeton

Aug 30, 2021 , , , , by shlf

Catholic school board trustee Janice Hutchison’s heart broke when she heard seniors at Simcoe Manor were back in isolation after a COVID-19 outbreak this month.

“Reading all of the reports and news articles and seeing our seniors — who are near and dear to our hearts — were quarantined to their rooms, my heart went out to them,” she said. “I thought how upsetting it must be that they aren’t even allowed to sit at a table and have a meal with somebody else.”

As a former volunteer at Simcoe Manor and a trustee, Hutchison came up with a solution.

“I have a school. All I did is sent a simple email to our principal, and she jumped all over it.”

Within days, students from all grades at Monsignor JE Ronan Catholic School in Beeton created a package of hundreds of cards and letters, with special messages to staff and seniors at Simcoe Manor.

“I didn’t expect that — it was jam-packed.”

The cards were stuffed into a large envelope and delivered to the residence, to be quarantined before being handed out to staff and residents.

Hutchison didn’t even peek inside to see the artwork.

“I didn’t want to compromise them.”

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Sunken boat discovered off tip of Beckwith Island

Aug 30, 2021 , , , , by shlf

The Marine Unit attached to the Southern Georgian Bay Detachment of the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) responded to a report of a sunken vessel off the south tip of Beckwith Island at 3 p.m. on Oct. 12.

There were no persons injured in the incident, police said. A further investigation is being conducted by investigators from Transport Canada under the Navigable Waters Protection Act.

Between Oct. 12 to 15, the marine unit conducted 28 hours of marine patrol on the waters of Georgian Bay. Officers checked 14 vessels and their operators for any signs of impairment and for having all of the required equipment.

Marine officers continue to participate in the ‘I Got Caught Wearing My Life Jacket’ educational T-shirt reward program for young boaters. They also make themselves available for marine-related media interviews and to remind cottagers closing down for the winter to view tips on the OPP website for .


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‘It’s going to be a little different’: Alliston families not scared to stray from Halloween traditions during pandemic

Aug 30, 2021 , , , , by shlf

After the province asked Ontarians to avoid having extended family over for Thanksgiving dinner, many started questioning what will happen with other upcoming holidays, and the one that’s top of mind for everyone right now is Halloween.

The province’s top doctor has recommended against trick or treating in hot spots where cases of COVID-19 have been sharply rising, including Toronto, York and Peel Region and Ottawa.

Alliston resident Nehya Fawx, a mother of three young girls, always ventures out into the neighbourhood with the little ones, but with many houses likely not handing out sweets this year, she has decided to do things differently.

“My girls would be so disappointed to walk from house to house and having no one answer their door or having very few answers and being tuckered out with barely any candy,” she said.

Fawx and her neighbour have decided to do their own trick or treating adventure, and they will end the night at home with a Halloween candy hunt.

While her family won’t be going out, she has still decorated her home and plans to hand out candy to anyone who shows up at her door.

“It’s going to be a little different but it will be as close to normal as we can make it,” she said. “Halloween is our household favourite time of year.”

Resident Joanna Touma has three kids, ages 11, 14 and 15, and her youngest would have normally gone out for candy. But since her mom lives with them and has health issues, they decided the best thing to do is to skip Halloween all together.

“Luckily, my kids are very understanding and care more about grandma than candy,” she said. “I can’t chance that someone comes to my door and doesn’t follow proper protocol.”

The Gibson Centre in Alliston is giving families an alternate way to exercise their spooky spirits in the safest way possible.

Executive director Jennifer Fortin said the centre will be hosting groups of kids Oct. 31 to experience its Halloween House. The event, which will follow all public-health protocols, will allow kids to experience different themed rooms, like a graveyard and vampire lair, through a supervised, one-way path.

There will candy stations along with way, with volunteers wearing masks and gloves.

The event is appropriate for kids ages three to 12 and it takes place between 5 p.m. and 7 p.m.

Admission is $5 per child and $20 per family, but spots need to be reserved ahead of time. To book a time slot, call the centre at .

The town is asking residents to take a socially distanced approach to Halloween and one of the ways they can do this is to participate in its virtual pumpkin carving contest. For more details .

Story behind the story: With there being a lot of debate about whether people should stick with their Halloween traditions and send the kids door-to-door for candy, Simcoe.com decided to talk to some local residents to find out how they plan to celebrate this year.


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Court rejects injunction to prevent Toronto from enforcing encampment prohibition in city parks

Aug 30, 2021 , , , , by shlf

An Ontario court has denied a request for an injunction that would have prevented Toronto from enforcing its prohibition on tents in city parks for the rest of the pandemic.

In the decision released Wednesday, Judge Paul Schabas cautioned that he wasn’t directing the city to remove the homeless encampments in city parks, and urged it to recognize that the situation was evolving.

“My decision is based on evidence that dates from the summer months when the incidence of COVID-19 was low, the weather was warm, and the city had specific concerns about particular group encampments,” Schabas wrote.

He also noted that the city had taken “significant steps” to respond to the threat of COVID-19 in shelters since the pandemic struck.

The city has to consider how and when to enforce its bylaws now, he wrote, based on the availability of safe shelter spaces and the impact of encampments on parks and the public.

While Schabas accepted that some of the applicants — a group consisting of several current and former encampment residents, the Toronto Overdose Prevention Society and the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty — feared being exposed to COVID-19 in shelters, he ruled the evidence before the court didn’t satisfy that “broad relief” was justified, even temporarily.

Calling homelessness an “unfortunate reality,” he said the city needed tools to address situations where public health and safety was jeopardized, or where the public’s use of parks was limited or prevented. Encampments, he wrote, impaired the use of park spaces — particularly during the pandemic when outdoor spaces were needed for activities that couldn’t be done indoors.

Arguments over the potential encampment injunction were , the same day as a separate hearing about distancing standards in Toronto’s shelter system. That case , with the city found by a judge to have breached its obligations under a settlement about COVID precautions in its homeless shelters.

Lawyers representing the applicants in the encampment suit argued that encampments alleviated stress and uncertainty for homeless people, by providing consistency around where they got their meals, relieved themselves, charged phones and slept at night. They argued encampments offered more consistent access to pharmacies, safe consumption sites and medical care.

The city meanwhile argued that the encampments posed “serious dangers” to those living in them, as well as city staff and the public.

“The city has made a policy decision to invest its scarce resources in making safer indoor spaces available to as many people as possible, rather than building infrastructure to support living within parks,” it wrote in submitted materials.

The city told the court it hadn’t taken steps to dismantle encampments since the case started, though it continued to make efforts to move people into shelters or other indoor housing.

Zoe Dodd, co-founder of the overdose prevention society, said she was disappointed to see Schabas’ decision. She said that the separate court ruling last week had shown the city wasn’t meeting safe distancing standards in its shelters.

She said it didn’t make sense that people in Toronto were advised not to see their families on Thanksgiving, nor celebrate Halloween, while the city was downtown this winter.

The applicants’ lawyers were deciding whether an appeal was possible, she said.

Dodd specifically took issue with Schabas’ conclusion that encampments impaired the public’s use of parks, arguing that those experiencing homelessness are part of the public.

In a statement, the city said it would continue trying to create capacity for those living in encampments to move indoors. According to the city, since March more than 948 people had been moved from encampments to indoor spaces — with 62 encampments cleared this year.

“Today’s ruling does not order the city to clear encampments,” according to the city’s statement, “rather the ruling does not prevent the city from clearing an encampment when shelter and housing options become available to those living in encampments or as required by the circumstances.”

Following the ruling, Mayor John Tory told reporters he understood that people needed better housing options in the city, and pledged to provide “as broad a range of options as possible” to those currently living in encampments — especially as the winter months approach.

With a file from Francine Kopun

Victoria Gibson is a Toronto-based reporter for the Star covering affordable housing. Her reporting is funded by the Canadian government through its Local Journalism Initiative. Reach her via email:

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Conservative MP warns the Bank of Canada risks becoming too political. Not likely, experts say

Aug 30, 2021 , , , , by shlf

OTTAWA–The Bank of Canada is pushing back against Conservative questions about its independence from the federal government, saying its inflation target — not politics — is guiding its response to the .

The central bank was pulled into the pandemic political fray Thursday when Conservative finance critic Pierre Poilievre suggested the bank was enabling the Liberal government’s deficit-spending habits.

In an interview with Bloomberg News, Poilievre warned the central bank to avoid acting as an “ATM” for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s emergency pandemic programs.

At issue is the bank’s unprecedented purchase of billions of dollars worth of government bonds in an effort to stabilize the economy, which has been rocked by rolling lockdowns during the COVID-19 crisis. The bank has committed to buying $5 billion in government bonds each week during the crisis, a policy known as “quantitative easing” which is intended to inject cash into the economy.

Poilievre called the practice — which has been employed on a massive scale by central banks around the world during the crisis, including in the U.S., U.K., and Australia — “printing money,” and suggested it was a “pyramid scheme.”

“Expanding the bank’s balance sheet during a short-term, once-in-a-lifetime pandemic lockdown is different than perpetually buying and inflating the financial assets of the wealthy at everyone else’s expense,” Poilievre said in a written statement to the Star.

“Trickle-down economics does not work. We need a bottom-up, worker-led recovery.”

The bank has said it will stop its quantitative easing efforts once the economy has recovered after COVID-19.

Poilievre’s characterization was challenged by independent economic analysts who spoke to the Star on Thursday.

“Every central bank is probing the outer limits of monetary intervention to an extent we’ve never seen before, but the Bank of Canada is hardly alone in this intervention,” said David Rosenberg, the chief economist at Rosenberg Research. “I mean, look what’s happened in the world around us.”

Rosenberg pointed out that the bank’s counterpart, the U.S. Federal Reserve, is openly calling on Washington for more fiscal stimulus to weather COVID-19’s economic storm.

“Is Canada behaving irresponsibly? I don’t see that,” Rosenberg said. “Is (Bank of Canada governor) Tiff Macklem somehow political? I find that really hard to believe,”

The Bank of Canada is not typically drawn in to the cut and thrust of partisan politics. As a Crown corporation, it operates at arm’s-length from the government and has legislated independence to set the country’s monetary policy with an eye to keeping inflation low.

While the bank’s efforts to stabilize the Canadian economy during COVID-19 are unprecedented, they should not be viewed as political said Scotiabank chief economist Jean-François Perrault.

“There is no question that central banks around the world … have needed to undertake absolutely exceptional measures to try and stabilize economies and put them on a path to recovery,” said Perrault, who previously worked at the central bank and in government.

“The bank is obviously an inflation targeting organization. That’s job number one, that’s its mandate. I’m 100 per cent convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that the actions that they’ve taken were all done with the objective of stabilizing inflation.”

In a statement, the Bank of Canada said it has been “consistently clear that the policy actions taken by the bank during the COVID-19 pandemic are always guided by our mandated inflation objective.”

Alex Paterson, a spokesperson for the central bank, also pointed to a previous statement that the bank intends to continue its policy of quantitative easing until the recovery from COVID-19 is “well underway.”

The Liberal government was less guarded in its response to Poilievre’s charges.

“The Conservatives are recklessly politicizing the role of the independent, and widely respected Bank of Canada,” wrote Katherine Cuplinskas, a spokesperson for Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland.

Alex Boutilier is an Ottawa-based reporter covering national politics for the Star. Follow him on Twitter:

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LIVE VIDEO: Ontario Premier Doug Ford provides daily update on COVID-19 November 26

Aug 30, 2021 , , , , by shlf

At a news conference in Mississauga, Ontario Premier Doug Ford makes an announcement and provides an update on his government’s response to the ongoing COVID-19 (coronavirus disease) pandemic. He is joined Stephen Lecce, the provincial minister of education.

On Parliament Hill, Dr. Howard Njoo, Canada’s deputy chief public health officer, conducts a technical briefing concerning the procurement and regulation of COVID-19 vaccines. He is joined by Dr. Supriya Sharma, a senior medical advisor with Health Canada, Dr. Marc Berthiaume, the director of the Bureau of Medical Science at Health Canada, and Arianne Reza, assistant deputy minister for procurement at Public Services and Procurement Canada.