BY: MATIAS DE DOVITIIS
The hope that many shared last year that things were returning to normalcy were suddenly taken away by the Omicron variant. Yet, the effect of the new COVID wave was amplified here in Doug Ford’s Ontario due to a lack of clear planning or competence. The wait-until-public-outcries-boils-over-to-make-a-decision strategy simply has not worked and has left families hanging in the lurch time and time again.
With a collective groan heard throughout Toronto, parents found out from Ford's government that in-person schooling would be delayed once again back in very late December. To nobody's surprise, the announcement came at the last possible moment, making it impossible for working parents to make alternative arrangements for their kids. This caused chaos everywhere in the Province, which was made worse two weeks after that when the first day back to in-person classes was cancelled due to the biggest snowstorm southern Ontario has seen this century. The image of Doug Ford with a small shovel posing for cameras while half of Ontario was snowed in did not build any confidence in thinking that this government had any of the situations at hand.
It is like all of Ontario has been stuck in the Bill Murray classic movie, Groundhog Day for the last two years. There is a repeated pattern by the government to take action only after public anger forces their hand. They then only take half measures whenever possible in order to save a penny. We then wake again to find that the problems did not get resolved, but only got pushed back enough to try to change the public discourse. When the problems arise again, the government deflects and delays again. It is predictably incompetent.
Two years into the pandemic and 11,000 deaths later in Ontario, Long Term Care homes are still so severely understaffed that more than half of them are suffering outbreaks. No private LTC provider has been legally or criminally responsible for the thousands of deaths due to chronic understaffing.
In schools, it is much of the same. There are still not enough measures in schools to make them safer. There are not enough air filters for every class, there is not enough PPE for staff or students, testing is not widely available and reduced class sizes were never considered an option. Repeated press conferences to make announcements do little to change the facts on the ground
In hospitals, the situation is much the same. Despite press conferences to talk about bed expansions to deal with a surge in hospital cases, the fact is that without nurses, those bed numbers are meaningless. The hospitals that take care of our sick are under-resourced. Ontario had some of the lowest numbers of hospital spaces per person in the developed world before COVID and the Ford government has done little if any to change that. In fact, they exasperated the problem by freezing nurse wages at a time when the demand was high worldwide, widening the staffing shortage in the health system.
Ontario is doing poorly in managing the crisis by any measure: deaths, hospitalizations, testing, etc. This is true in spite of the fact that we are the wealthiest Province in Canada. But it is not a matter of wealth and never has been. It is a matter of priorities and always has been.