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‘More information is prudent’: Barrie council now has a map of most social service locations

Oct 5, 2021 , , , , by shlf

Barrie council can see your social-service organization pretty clearly now.

At council’s request, municipal staff recently built a city-wide map that lists the location of more than 20 types of social services — from financial assistance and shelter programs, to Indigenous centres and health-care facilities.

This map contains more than 850 data points, mostly collected from County of Simcoe and 211 Ontario resources. Barrie’s Geographic Information System (GIS) branch also developed an online, interactive element.

“The web map allows users to identify and find social services within a specified distance of an address, location or point on the map by the applying buffer distances; (it) highlights information about the organization such as the services it provides, address, phone number and website,” GIS manager Brent Harlow said.

Locations of sensitive services, like women’s shelters, are not included.

However, this map should help council members make informed planning decisions, Coun. Mike McCann said.

“We are going to be a drastically-changed city,” he said. “We’ve got a lot of different services coming to council that would like to be a part of Barrie. More information is prudent. This has got to be a strong foundation for a guiding document; any time we have social services coming into our downtown, we’re very quickly able to see where all the social services are to make sure they’re not clustered together.”

To view the map, visit .

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Bruce Arthur: Advice for Doug Ford: Sometimes the middle of the road is where you get run over

Aug 4, 2021 , , , , by shlf

was explaining how the system works. You need a system, in this economy. The question was whether two more regions, , would be returned to the public health restrictions of Stage 2. Friday, the premier said both were under consideration. Monday, neither one was moved.

So how did that work, exactly? What are the thresholds for this incredibly important public health measure, and who makes that call?

“I had a phone call with Mayor (Rob) Burton from Oakville, we have a great relationship,” said Ford Monday. “He said, ‘hey, I don’t think we’re at that point,’ and in Halton, this is unique, because we have none of the mayors agreeing, we have the regional chair not agreeing, we have our MPPs not agreeing, so I suggested to write a letter. Write a letter, let your local chief medical officer of health be aware of how you feel and how other mayors feel and how our MPPs feel. I spoke to one of my great MPPs, Jane McKenna, saying I encourage you to write a letter.”

Uh, what? So the premier encouraged a letter arguing against further restrictions in Halton from two Ontario Progressive Conservative MPPs, McKenna of Burlington and Parm Gill of Milton? That was his strategy?

As it turned out, Ford misspoke on Friday about at all, because, while the region’s numbers had been rising, their case numbers had also started to flatten. Nobody seemed to communicate to the premier that he had made a mistake. And the whole dumbshow unfolded, which gave ammunition to Ontario’s goofy herd immunity anti-lockdown crowd, who reacted to something, to be clear, that wasn’t actually being proposed at all.

A hasty caucus meeting was called Monday night to discuss it, and it’s all definitely how you want a government to be handling the epidemic response to the second wave of a pandemic. Good stuff.

It was revelatory, if repetitively so, because Durham wasn’t Halton. In the past three weeks, Durham’s cases per 100,000 people per week have gone from 16.3 to 26.8 to 37.3, and now sit at an even 40, per the Star’s invaluable Ed Tubb. Their contact tracing seems to be in great shape, and hospital capacity too, though waiting for your hospitals to fill up is one of the losing strategies of this pandemic. On cases alone, Durham is roughly where York was a week before it hit Stage 2, or Toronto two weeks before, or Ottawa and Peel three weeks before. Positivity rates had been increasing in both Durham and Halton.

“It very much looks reactive, and not proactive,” says Dr. Gerald Evans, the chair of the division of infectious diseases at Queen’s University, and a volunteer member of the province’s science table. “If you look around the world, you can very nicely see groups where, that was the time you should have started it, not the time they did do it. So some of us are saying, be proactive, do something, don’t wait!”

The province doesn’t get ahead of the virus, ever. It’s clear the bar for the province actually imposing restrictions is quite high. How high? They won’t tell us, which means the anti- and pro-lockdown factions are both left to guess. When Dr. Eileen de Villa and the Toronto Board of Health asked Ford to place Toronto into a modified Stage 2 on Oct. 2, it took a solid week — not just of waiting, but of acrimony and negotiation — before the province acceded, and put Ottawa and Peel in as well. They waited until Toronto was at 69.9 cases per 100,000 residents per week, and 3.1 per cent positivity. Two weeks later the city’s test positivity is 4.4. Which is a bad number.

“Three per cent is kind of interesting, right around 3 or 4 per cent,” says Dr. Evans. “If you look around the planet, right around 3 or 4 per cent test positivity rates in many larger cities and jurisdictions, that’s the inflection point. After that point it begins to rise exponentially.”

That number will wrestle with restrictions now, and it all should have happened sooner. Ottawa has seen a hopeful dip in reported cases; Peel, Toronto and York, unfortunately, have not. And other jurisdictions may yet meet the same problems, because listen to the premier. When he lists who he calls before making these decisions, Ford says he calls local politicians first, then local businesses.

“I always say I gotta listen to the docs, I always will, and the science, but in saying that, I have to listen to the small business owners,” said Ford.

Never mind that public health officials and infectious disease specialists and epidemiologists will tell you that you control the virus first, and that is the best way to preserve the economy. Never mind that this pandemic is a marshmallow test, and the strongest measures to slow spread are the early aggressive ones. Ford compromises, you see. There is a balance.

“Can I justify if a region is hitting super-high numbers, be it Peel or Toronto?” said Ford. “No, I can’t justify. Can I fight all day long for Halton and other regions and cheering them on and really pushing back at the health table? I do it all the time. I do it all the time. But we have to have a balance there.

“We have caucus members, cabinet members on both sides. We have some cabinet and caucus members who think, don’t worry, everything’s fine. We have other ones that may feel, OK, shut everything down. But we’re going right down the middle of the road. We have to have a happy balance.”

Ford does sometimes listen to certain scientific advice. He doesn’t say how or why, or make their advice public, but he does.

Still, it’s clearer and clearer that this province doesn’t understand or believe in truly preventative public health measures, much less powerful enough epidemic response, to preserve the economy. And the result is we have case counts and hospitalizations and long-term care outbreaks rising in a data-poor system with bad public health communication and a gaffe-prone premier, and we’ll see where that goes. Everyone wants to save the economy; the smart people say, deal with your public health first. Because sometimes the middle of the road is where you get run over.

Bruce Arthur is a Toronto-based columnist for the Star. Follow him on Twitter:

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As Pfizer finishes COVID-19 vaccine testing, Elliott reveals how many doses Ottawa and Ontario are expecting

Jul 26, 2021 , , , , by shlf

The completion of human trials on one of the leading COVID-19 vaccine candidates has ratcheted up speculation about when Canadians might be able to start rolling up their sleeves.

Pfizer and BioNTech announced Wednesday they had finished the final round of human trials on their candidate — testing they say found the vaccine to be 95 per cent effective with no serious safety concerns.

After a at results last week, the experimental vaccine is now the first to complete the clinical testing process, having been tested on more than 40,000 people at 150 sites scattered across the United States, Germany, Turkey, South Africa, Brazil and Argentina since July.

The results still must be peer-reviewed, which means independent scientists look at the data before the results are published.

“The study results mark an important step in this historic eight-month journey to bring forward a vaccine capable of helping to end this devastating pandemic,” Albert Bourla, Pfizer chairman and CEO, said in a statement.

U.S. company Moderna, which is using similar technology to Pfizer, has also announced promising early results for its vaccine candidate in recent days, though its testing is .

Pfizer said it hopes to submit to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for “emergency use” approval within days; but for Canadians, it will be Health Canada that has the final say on whether or not to approve this vaccine for use, after a review process that has already begun.

Before the vaccine is approved, federal scientists will go through all of the testing results, ask any questions they have, and make a decision based on whether they conclude the dose is both safe and effective against coronavirus.

If the vaccine passes approval, Canada has an advance-purchase agreement for 20 million doses.

Ontario Health Minister Christine Elliott said the province is gearing up for the expected vaccine.

“We are expecting that we will receive shipments from both Pfizer and Moderna,” Elliott said Wednesday at Queen’s Park.

Though there has been no confirmation on the point from the federal government, an Alberta health ministry official told the Star recently that vaccines, once available, will be .

“The doses for Canada — we expect to receive four million doses between January and March of the Pfizer vaccine, two million for Moderna — of which we anticipate that we (in Ontario) will receive 1.6 million of Pfizer and 800,000 of Moderna,” Elliott said.

In Alberta, provincial Health Minister Tyler Shandro announced on Twitter that province is expecting its per capita share of 465,000 doses from Pfizer and 221,000 from Moderna, with the first shipments to arrive early in the new year.

When asked directly to confirm the dates and numbers, federal Health Minister Patty Hajdu would only say it was “really exciting” that Canada is well-positioned to receive millions of doses from both companies.

“There are a number of steps to go through before we actually get to the point of distribution, including the regulatory review with Health Canada to ensure the safety of both vaccines.”

If true, six million doses arriving early next year would be significant amount, says Dr. Prabhat Jha, an epidemiologist and professor of global health at the University of Toronto, but significant questions remain about who would get them.

To put the number in context, he points to the World Health Organization, which estimates it would take 4.3 billion doses to vaccinate all the seniors, health-care workers and people with high-risk conditions in the world. (That number assumes two doses per person and 15 per cent wastage.)

Jha notes that, roughly adjusting for population, Canada would need about 20 million doses to do the same, so this number would get us almost a third of the way there.

Canada’s National Advisory Council on Immunization , which are roughly in line with WHO guidelines, but the final distribution decisions will be up to the provinces and territories.

“Getting excited about six million doses sounds great,” he said. “But we need to think about who it would be delivered to.”

“The sound decisions here would be made not by short-term politicians, but by dispassionate, boring epidemiologists and technocrats to really say, ‘What what would be the appropriate tradeoffs here?’”

While any vaccine will need a stamp of approval from Health Canada, the department has taken steps to expedite the approval process.

The federal government has made what’s called a “rolling submission” an option for companies working on COVID-19 vaccine. Through this process, rather than waiting until all testing is done to walk it over to federal government scientists, a company can share things such as safety data and test results as they go. Pfizer and BioNTech applied for a rolling submission last month.

Still, an exact timeline for vaccine delivery remains unclear. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has said he hopes to have a vaccine available in as early as the first quarter of next year.

According to Pfizer, its results show that its vaccine, which requires two doses, is 95 per cent effective beginning 28 days after the first shot.

The Pfizer results suggest good news for seniors: Experts had worried that vaccines tend to be less effective in older adults, but Pfizer says the efficacy in those over 65 has also been over 94 per cent.

The dose was “well tolerated” by the thousands of volunteers, according to the company’s statement. The only adverse event, noted in more than two per cent of people, was fatigue (3.8 per cent) and headache (two per cent).

The company expects to produce as many as 50 million doses in 2020 and as many as 1.3 billion doses by the end of 2021.

Although this vaccine has raised eyebrows for the cold temperatures in which it must be stored, Pfizer said it is “confident” in its “experience, expertise and existing cold-chain infrastructure.”

Pfizer said it has developed specially designed shipping containers that use dry ice to keep the temperature around -70 C. The containers can also be used as storage for 15 days, if the dry ice is refreshed.

Elliott acknowledged there will be challenges with the vaccines currently seen as front-runners.

“There are significant issues with respect to the Pfizer vaccine in particular,” she noted, referring to the temperature at which it must be stored.

“People do have to receive two doses 21 days apart. This is a major logistical challenge, but we have an entire group within the Ministry of Health right now that are planning for that as soon as we receive those shipments from the federal government.”

With files from Robert Benzie and The Canadian Press

Alex Boyd is a Calgary-based reporter for the Star. Follow her on Twitter:

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North Simcoe artists have struggled throughout pandemic

Jul 20, 2021 , , , , by shlf

The COVID-19 pandemic has been tough for everybody, and artists are no exception.

Cynthia Blair, a Tiny Township painter, was planning on attending 12 shows throughout 2020.

Instead, Blair was only able to attend one — The Bay Studio Tour. The popular event, which showcases artists and artisans throughout Midland, Penetanguishene, Tiny and Tay, managed to hold a scaled-down event in early October.

About 200 people masked up and visited Blair’s studio over the course of two days to view her work, which is her preferred way to do business.

“Online is good, but I think art needs to be experienced in person,” said Blair. “There is an endless supply of art online. It’s easy to get overwhelmed.”

However, with the majority of art shows cancelled, Blair has been working to expand her online presence. She’s recently started to promote her work.

“This year, it’s important for artists to be online. You’ve got to get your work out there,” said Blair. “I am using social media in a much more concentrated way now.”

Along with having a ton of extra time to paint, the pandemic has given Blair the ability to focus on branching out online and improving her website .

While she was able to adapt, some local artists aren’t too adept at social media.

“There are a lot of artists who count on shows every year. Without them, you don’t get the sales that you normally would,” said Blair.

One of those artists is Midland’s Sylvie Huntley.

Huntley, who works with alcohol ink on ceramic tile and resin, was gearing up for an extremely busy 2020. Then the pandemic ruined her plans.

“I had 26 events booked. I was going to be branching out of Simcoe County for the first time,” said Huntley. “I had shows booked in Parry Sound, Muskoka and down in Niagara Falls. All 26 were cancelled.”

These cancellations were a huge blow to Huntley’s business. She isn’t too proficient at using social media to market and sell her work, and mostly relies on craft shows and festivals.

“My projected sales are down about 80 per cent; that’s based off how I did last year and where I was going this year,” said Huntley. “So, my revenue has almost entirely gone toward purchasing art supplies.”

In order to continue selling her work, she took the necessary steps to safety open her home up to interested patrons. 

“I’m keeping it positive,” said Huntley, who is known online as the . “By not having shows, I was able to spend a lot of time painting and learning new techniques.”

Huntley created 13 new paintings this year. She has taken those paintings — most of them picturesque views of Georgian Bay — and transferred them to coasters, trivets, scarves, place mats, calendars and more.

All of these products are featured in a pop-up studio in her living room. She will be taking appointments through to Dec. 6.

To contact Huntley, call . 

STORY BEHIND THE STORY: The COVID-19 pandemic cancelled the majority of area craft shows and events. So, reporter Andrew Mendler decided to check in with local artists regarding the impact of those cancellations.