TORONTO —
Ontario’s COVID-19 Vaccine Distribution Task Force is facing criticism for not prioritizing essential workers, but the group says they are and that there are still ethical considerations to take into account.
As phase two of the vaccine rollout is set to begin in the coming weeks, many Ontarians have looked at the chart outlining dates and wondered why essential workers, like teachers and grocery store workers, will have to wait until June for their turn.
“We’ve seen vulnerability in the vaccine discussion, be described around age and absolutely age is a layer of vulnerability, but there are other layers of vulnerability, we need to consider including people who live in low income areas and are essential workers,” Dr. Naheed Dosani, a palliative care physician and health justice advocate, told CTV’s National.
But a doctor on the task force says that the focus shouldn’t be on the dates, which come with an asterisk.
“Don’t focus on the June in there because there’s a big asterisk underneath there that says, this can be shifted based on vaccine supply,” Dr. Isaac Bogoch told CTVNews.ca in a phone interview on Friday.
Vaccine supply can be shifted for better or for worse. Vaccinations could happen sooner than anticipated, or if there are major supply chain hiccups, later than expected.
But experts are still concerned about an equitable rollout.
“I think overall we are focusing our vaccine rollout in a way that doesn’t recognize the dire needs of particular communities that have been hardest hit by COVID-19,” said Dosani.
Currently, public health units are beginning to expand into age groups prioritized in phase two. Toronto has expanded mass vaccinations to cover people aged 60 and over. Phase two was set to begin with people aged 75 to 79. Public health units in COVID-19 hotspots are vaccinating people 50 years old and up.
Pharmacies are vaccinating people aged 55 and up using the AstraZeneca vaccine. This is expanding to 350 more pharmacies across the province to target more hotspot areas, some opening as early as Saturday. The additional capacity will have up to 700 pharmacies able to complete vaccinations and the province expects up to 1,500 pharmacies providing the inoculations by the end of April.
“You’re stopping the deaths by really focusing on the older end of the spectrum and those who live in congregate settings, especially long-term care,” said Bogoch. “You’re also helping people who might get infected during the conduct of their work, which are essential workers, people who can’t work from home.”
He said that essential workers are being targeted in three ways throughout phase two.
“One [of the ways] is many essential workers that are 50 years and up can be vaccinated because the age bracket is lower in [hotspot] areas,” he said.
“There’s many essential workers that will be vaccinated because there are more vaccines allocated to public health units, and the public health units can truly use those vaccines in ways that they see fit, including vaccinating essential workers,” he added.
“And the third thing is, stay tuned, because part of the phase two rollout is essential workers are going to be prioritized and vaccinated as they should be in stage two.”
‘THEY NEED SOME GUARANTEE’
Some Ontario doctors are worried about what will happen to patients in the meantime. Dr. Michael Warner, head of critical care at Michael Garron Hospital in Toronto said that he’s seeing patients who had no choice but to go to work and ended up spreading the virus to their family members. Without paid sick days and vaccinations, this will continue to happen, he says.
“Yesterday 17 people, including myself, and the 18th being the patient, went through a three hour experience, where I’ve never had a patient so close to death in my entire 12-year career, and we saved her,” he told CTV News Channel on Saturday.
But, he added, he shouldn’t have had to and Ontario’s Premier Doug Ford needs to step up to protect essential workers in Ontario.
“It didn’t have to be this way. If the government would just do the right thing, and protect people. Protect the people who are actually being hurt by this, the people that the premier never talks about in his press conferences, and I’m tired of it and so are my colleagues,” he added.
Dr. Abdu Sharkawy, CTV News infectious disease specialist, is seeing similar things among his own COVID-19 patients. They need better protection, he told CTV News Channel on Saturday.
“They need some guarantee that they don’t have to make a decision between having their families survive, and putting food on the table, or ending up in an ICU on a ventilator,” he said.
Sharkawy has been particularly concerned about teachers in schools with antiquated ventilation systems and students who sit together unmasked eating their lunches.
“They need vaccines, and what we’ve done right now just deciding that somehow they’ll be OK, they’ll be able to fend for themselves that, you know they’ll come up in the queue whenever they can, unacceptable, unacceptable,” he said. “Teachers are going to die.”
SUPPLY ISSUES?
While it is important to get essential workers vaccinated, Bogoch said that it’s also important to continue vaccinating older populations and those at highest risk of dying from COVID-19.
Dropping age limits in COVID-19 hotspots aims to encompass more essential workers, as well as targeting their family members and close contacts who are at higher risk of severe illness or death. Expanding the pharmacy program means more equitable distribution of vaccines.
Right now, vaccine supply is the biggest hurdle, Bogoch said.
“We just don’t have the vaccine to do it,” he said. “Because we vaccinated long-term care and community dwelling 80-year-olds and many community dwelling 70-year-olds.”
Since the beginning of March, nine long-term care residents have died from COVID-19, compared to 770 long-term care resident deaths in January, according to data published by Ontario. The COVID-19 ward in the hospital where Bogoch works has an average patient age of 65, a lot of them are older than that, some are younger, he added.
He described some of them as essential workers, some have family members who are essential workers and others don’t know where they were infected.
He is critical of those sharing stories of young people in intensive care units who could’ve been saved by a vaccination, he said that these stories don’t help and without vaccine supply, won’t change the pace of rollout.
“We don’t need anecdotes to drive this, we need data to drive this,” he said. “We have an equitable and data driven pathway, essential workers are prioritized in stage two of this process. There’s multiple ways that equity has been baked into the stage two roll out.”
The focus for Bogoch is who he’s not seeing in the ICU. That’s the elderly people who bore the brunt of the first two waves of the COVID-19 pandemic in the province. He said that this shows the vaccines are working to prevent deaths and hospitalizations in priority groups, and that that shouldn’t be seen as a failure. Without vaccinating those priority groups a third wave would have torn through long-term care homes again, he added.
“It’s not exciting and it’s not flashy, it’s just the right way to do it. Vaccinate the people who are at greatest risk of death.”
But supply remains the biggest factor in who will get vaccinated and when.
“That doesn’t mean there isn’t a problem. That doesn’t mean that we’re in the midst of a third wave and a lot of essential workers are being infected. What it means is we don’t have a ton of vaccines. We have to use the ones we have in a strategic manner”
CALGARY – MEG Energy says it earned $167 million in its third quarter, down from $249 million during the same quarter last year.
The company says revenues for the quarter were $1.27 billion, down from $1.44 billion during the third quarter of 2023.
Diluted earnings per share were 62 cents, down from 86 cents a year earlier.
MEG Energy says it successfully completed its debt reduction strategy, reducing its net debt to US$478 million by the end of September, down from US$634 million during the prior quarter.
President and CEO Darlene Gates said moving forward all the company’s free cash flow will be returned to shareholders through expanded share buybacks and a quarterly base dividend.
The company says its capital expenditures for the quarter increased to $141 million from $83 million a year earlier, mainly due to higher planned field development activity, as well as moderate capacity growth projects.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 5, 2024.
Premier David Eby is proposing an all-party committee investigate mistakes made during the British Columbia election vote tally, including an uncounted ballot box and unreported votes in three-quarters of the province’s 93 ridings.
The proposal comes after B.C.’s chief electoral officer blamed extreme weather, long working hours and a new voting system for human errors behind the mistakes in last month’s count, though none were large enough to change the initial results.
Anton Boegman says the agency is already investigating the mistakes to “identify key lessons learned” to improve training, change processes or make recommendations for legislative change.
He says the uncounted ballot box containing about 861 votes in Prince George-Mackenzie was never lost, and was always securely in the custody of election officials.
Boegman says a failure in five districts to properly report a small number of out-of-district votes, meanwhile, rippled through to the counts in 69 ridings.
Eby says the NDP will propose that a committee examine the systems used and steps taken by Elections BC, then recommend improvements in future elections.
“I look forward to working with all MLAs to uphold our shared commitment to free and fair elections, the foundation of our democracy,” he said in a statement Tuesday, after a news conference by Boegman.
Boegman said if an independent review does occur, “Elections BC will, of course, fully participate in that process.”
He said the mistakes came to light when a “discrepancy” of 14 votes was noticed in the riding of Surrey-Guildford, spurring a review that increased the number of unreported votes there to 28.
Surrey-Guildford was the closest race in the election and the NDP victory there gave Eby a one-seat majority. The discovery reduced the NDP’s victory margin from 27 to 21, pending the outcome of a judicial review that was previously triggered because the race was so close.
The mistakes in Surrey-Guildford resulted in a provincewide audit that found the other errors, Boegman said.
“These mistakes were a result of human error. Our elections rely on the work of over 17,000 election officials from communities across the province,” he said.
“Election officials were working 14 hours or more on voting days and on final voting day in particular faced extremely challenging weather conditions in many parts of the province.
“These conditions likely contributed to these mistakes,” he said.
B.C.’s “vote anywhere” model also played a role in the errors, said Boegman, who said he had issued an order to correct the results in the affected ridings.
Boegman said the uncounted Prince George-Mackenzie ballot box was used on the first day of advance voting. Election officials later discovered a vote hadn’t been tabulated, so they retabulated the ballots but mistakenly omitted the box of first-day votes, only including ballots from the second day.
Boegman said the issues discovered in the provincewide audit will be “fully documented” in his report to the legislature on the provincial election, the first held using electronic tabulators.
He said he was confident election officials found all “anomalies.”
B.C. Conservative Party Leader John Rustad had said on Monday that the errors were “an unprecedented failure by the very institution responsible for ensuring the fairness and accuracy of our elections.”
Rustad said he was not disputing the outcomes as judicial recounts continue, but said “it’s clear that mistakes like these severely undermine public trust in our electoral process.”
Rustad called for an “independent review” to make sure the errors never happen again.
Boegman, who said the election required fewer than half the number of workers under the old paper-based system, said results for the election would be returned in 90 of the province’s 93 ridings on Tuesday.
Full judicial recounts will be held in Surrey-Guildford and Kelowna-Centre, while a partial recount of the uncounted box will take place in Prince George-Mackenzie.
Boegman said out-of-district voting had been a part of B.C.’s elections for many decades, and explained how thousands of voters utilized the province’s vote-by-phone system, calling it a “very secure model” for people with disabilities.
“I think this is a unique and very important part of our elections, providing accessibility to British Columbians,” he said. “They have unparalleled access to the ballot box that is not found in other jurisdictions in Canada.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 5, 2024.
WINNIPEG – A public memorial honouring former judge, senator and chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission into residential schools, Murray Sinclair, is set to take place in Winnipeg on Sunday.
The event, which is being organized by the federal and Manitoba governments, will be at Canada Life Centre, home of the NHL’s Winnipeg Jets.
Sinclair died Monday in a Winnipeg hospital at the age of 73.
A teepee and a sacred fire were set up outside the Manitoba legislature for people to pay their respects hours after news of his death became public. The province has said it will remain open to the public until Sinclair’s funeral.
Sinclair’s family continues to invite people to visit the sacred fire and offer tobacco.
The family thanked the public for sharing words of love and support as tributes poured in this week.
“The significance of Mazina Giizhik’s (the One Who Speaks of Pictures in the Sky) impact and reach cannot be overstated,” the family said in a statement on Tuesday, noting Sinclair’s traditional Anishinaabe name.
“He touched many lives and impacted thousands of people.”
They encourage the public to celebrate his life and journey home.
A visitation for extended family, friends and community is also scheduled to take place Wednesday morning.
Leaders from across Canada shared their memories of Sinclair.
Premier Wab Kinew called Sinclair one of the key architects of the era of reconciliation.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Sinclair was a teacher, a guide and a friend who helped the country navigate tough realities.
Sinclair was the first Indigenous judge in Manitoba — the second in Canada.
He served as co-chair of the Aboriginal Justice Inquiry of Manitoba to examine whether the justice system was failing Indigenous people after the murder of Helen Betty Osborne and the police shooting death of First Nations leader J.J. Harper.
In leading the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, he participated in hundreds of hearings across Canada and heard testimony from thousands of residential school survivors.
The commissioners released their widely influential final report in 2015, which described what took place at the institutions as cultural genocide and included 94 calls to action.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 5, 2024.
