Ontario introduced new legislation Tuesday to enable the extension of some pandemic emergency orders over the next year, as the province reports 112 new cases.
The legislation, to be tabled Wednesday, would allow the government to extend or amend some emergency orders a month at a time, with the law expiring a year after it’s passed.
Solicitor General Sylvia Jones said the proposed legislation would “bridge the gap between the public health measures that were necessary to respond to the initial and immediate threat of COVID-19, and those now needed to support Ontario’s safe recovery.”
Under current legislation, the province can only issue emergency orders while the state of emergency is in place.
“This [new] legislation will not allow us to create any new emergency orders, they can only be amended or removed,” said Premier Doug Ford at a daily COVID-19 briefing on Tuesday.
Ontario’s state of emergency is set to expire July 15, and the Premier’s office said it would introduce a motion Wednesday to extend it until July 24 to ensure there is no gap between the provincial declaration and when the new bill takes effect.
If the bill passes, the government could move parts of the province back to earlier stages of the pandemic lockdown if required.
It could also continue the redeployment of health-care staff and change public health orders limiting social gatherings.
Emergency orders that permit the pick-up and delivery of cannabis and prohibit price gouging on essential goods will not be included in the bill, and will expire next week.
Jones said the bill will also introduce additional reporting requirements to bolster oversight. The government will have to report any emergency order extensions to a legislative committee once every month and table a report on the use of the law six months after it expires.
“We want to make sure that we’re not over-using the declaration of emergency,” she said.
Ontario first declared a state of emergency March 17 when the province’s COVID-19 cases began to increase.
Ontario reports 112 new cases Tuesday
Meanwhile, Ontario reported 112 new cases of COVID-19 on Tuesday.
The additional cases bring the total in Ontario since the outbreak began to 36,060. Of those, 87.6 per cent are resolved.
Another 177 instances were marked resolved yesterday, according to the Ministry of Health, meaning there are currently about 1,723 active cases of COVID-19 provincewide.
Twenty-eight of Ontario’s 34 public health units reported five or fewer new cases, while 23 of those 28 confirmed no additional cases at all, Minister of Health Christine Elliott noted in a series of tweets.
Only Toronto, Peel and York reported 10 or more new cases, with 30, 39 and 10, respectively.
Testing levels, however, dropped considerably. The province’s network of about 30 labs processed just 15,122 test samples, the fewest since June 1.
Ontario officially reported zero additional COVID-19-linked deaths in yesterday’s update, and only two more were confirmed today. That puts the province’s official death toll at 2,691, though a CBC News count based on data directly from public health units puts the actual toll at 2,734.
After steadily declining over the last week, the number of patients in Ontario hospitals with confirmed cases of COVID-19 jumped up slightly, to 131 from 118. Thirty-four are being treated in intensive care units, while 24 require ventilators.
Kingsville, Leamington move into Phase 2
The towns of Kingsville and Leamington are joining the rest of the province in Phase 2 of the government’s reopening plan.
Ford announced Monday that the communities, which were the final two towns in Stage 1 of the process, would move up as of 12:01 a.m.
WATCH | Ontario premier clears Kingsville, Leamington for Stage 2:
Doug Ford says COVID-19 outbreaks in Leamington and Kingsville have been contained, and the regions may enter the next phase of reopening. 1:16
Ford said COVID-19 outbreaks on local farms are under control and community spread of the virus is low.
Most of the Windsor-Essex region, except for those two towns, moved to the second stage of reopening on June 25.
The government dispatched a team from Emergency Management Ontario to the region last week to help co-ordinate health care and housing for hundreds of agri-food workers who have tested positive for the virus.
Ford said Monday he will be visiting the region soon, and thanked people in Kingsville and Leamington for their patience in recent weeks.
MONCTON, N.B. – New Brunswick RCMP say two youths have been arrested after an emergency alert was issued Monday evening about someone carrying a gun in the province’s southeast.
Caledonia Region Mounties say they were first called out to Main Street in the community of Salisbury around 7 p.m. on reports of a shooting.
A 48-year-old man was found at the scene suffering from gunshot wounds and he was rushed to hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.
Police say in the interest of public safety, they issued an Alert Ready message at 8:15 p.m. for someone driving a silver Ford F-150 pickup truck and reportedly carrying a firearm with dangerous intent in the Salisbury and Moncton area.
Two youths were arrested without incident later in the evening in Salisbury, and the alert was cancelled just after midnight Tuesday.
Police are still looking for the silver pickup truck, covered in mud, with possible Nova Scotia licence plate HDC 958. They now confirm the truck was stolen from Central Blissville.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 16, 2024.
MISSISSAUGA, Ont. – Golf Canada has set an impressive stretch goal of having 30 professional golfers at the highest levels of the sport by 2032.
The World Junior Girls Golf Championship is a huge part of that target.
Credit Valley Golf and Country Club will host the international tournament from Sept. 30 to Oct. 5, with 24 teams representing 23 nations — Canada gets two squads — competing. Lindsay McGrath, a 17-year-old golfer from Oakville, Ont., said she’s excited to be representing Canada and continue to develop her game.
“I’m really grateful to be here,” said McGrath on Monday after a news conference in Credit Valley’s clubhouse in Mississauga, Ont. “It’s just such an awesome feeling being here and representing our country, wearing all the logos and being on Team Canada.
“I’ve always wanted to play in this tournament, so it’s really special to me.”
McGrath will be joined by Nobelle Park of Oakville, Ont., and Eileen Park of Red Deer, Alta., on Team Canada 2. All three earned their places through a qualifying tournament last month.
“I love my teammates so much,” said McGrath. “I know Nobelle and Eileen very well. I’m just so excited to be with them. We have such a great relationship.”
Shauna Liu of Maple, Ont., Calgary’s Aphrodite Deng and Clairey Lin make up Team Canada 2. Liu earned her exemption following her win at the 2024 Canadian Junior Girls Championship while Deng earned her exemption as being the low eligible Canadian on the world amateur golf ranking as of Aug. 7.
Deng was No. 175 at the time, she has since improved to No. 171 and is Canada’s lowest-ranked player.
“I think it’s a really great opportunity,” said Liu. “We don’t really get that many opportunities to play with people from across the world, so it’s really great to meet new people and play with them.
“It’s great to see maybe how they play and take parts from their game that we might also implement our own games.”
Golf Canada founded the World Junior Girls Golf Championship in 2014 to fill a void in women’s international competition and help grow its own homegrown talent. The hosts won for the first time last year when Vancouver’s Anna Huang, Toronto’s Vanessa Borovilos and Vancouver’s Vanessa Zhang won team gold and Huang earned individual silver.
Medallists who have gone on to win on the LPGA Tour include Brooke Henderson of Smiths Falls, Ont., who was fourth in the individual competition at the inaugural tournament. She was on Canada’s bronze-medal team in 2014 with Selena Costabile of Thornhill, Ont., and Calgary’s Jaclyn Lee.
Other notable competitors who went on to become LPGA Tour winners include Angel Yin and Megan Khang of the United States, as well as Yuka Saso of the Philippines, Sweden’s Linn Grant and Atthaya Thitikul of Thailand.
“It’s not if, it’s when they’re going to be on the LPGA Tour,” said Garrett Ball, Golf Canada’s chief operating officer, of how Canada’s golfers in the World Junior Girls Championship can be part of the organization’s goal to have 30 pros in the LPGA and PGA Tours by 2032.
“Events like this, like the She Plays Golf festival that we launched two years ago, and then the CPKC Women’s Open exemptions that we utilize to bring in our national team athletes and get the experience has been important in that pathway.”
The individual winner of the World Junior Girls Golf Championship will earn a berth in next year’s CPKC Women’s Open at nearby Mississaugua Golf and Country Club.
Both clubs, as well as former RBC Canadian Open host site Glen Abbey Golf Club, were devastated by heavy rains through June and July as the Greater Toronto Area had its wettest summer in recorded history.
Jason Hanna, the chief operating officer of Credit Valley Golf and Country Club, said that he has seen the Credit River flood so badly that it affected the course’s playability a handful of times over his nearly two decades with the club.
Staff and members alike came together to clean up the course after the flooding was over, with hundreds of people coming together to make the club playable again.
“You had to show up, bring your own rake, bring your own shovel, bring your own gloves, and then we’d take them down to the golf course, assign them to areas where they would work, and then we would do a big barbecue down at the halfway house,” said Hanna. “We got guys, like, 80 years old, putting in eight-hour days down there, working away.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 16, 2024.
NEW YORK (AP) — Fenway Park has the Ted Williams seat. And now Citi Field has the Grimace seat.
The kid-friendly McDonald’s character made another appearance at the ballpark Monday, when the New York Mets unveiled a commemorative purple seat in section 302 to honor “his special connection to Mets fans.”
Wearing his pear-shaped purple costume and a baseball glove on backwards, Grimace threw out a funny-looking first pitch — as best he could with those furry fingers and short arms — before New York beat the Miami Marlins at Citi Field on June 12.
That victory began a seven-game winning streak, and Grimace the Mets’ good-luck charm soon went viral, taking on a life of its own online.
New York is 53-31 since June 12, the best record in the majors during that span. The Mets were tied with rival Atlanta for the last National League playoff spot as they opened their final homestand of the season Monday night against Washington.
The new Grimace seat in the second deck in right field — located in row 6, seat 12 to signify 6/12 on the calendar — was brought into the Shannon Forde press conference room Monday afternoon. The character posed next to the chair and with fans who strolled into the room.
The seat is available for purchase for each of the Mets’ remaining home games.
“It’s been great to see how our fanbase created the Grimace phenomenon following his first pitch in June and in the months since,” Mets senior vice president of partnerships Brenden Mallette said in a news release. “As we explored how to further capture the magic of this moment and celebrate our new celebrity fan, installing a commemorative seat ahead of fan appreciation weekend felt like the perfect way to give something back to the fans in a fun and unique way.”
Up in Boston, the famous Ted Williams seat is painted bright red among rows of green chairs deep in the right-field stands at Fenway Park to mark where a reported 502-foot homer hit by the Hall of Fame slugger landed in June 1946.
So, does this catapult Grimace into Splendid Splinter territory?
“I don’t know if we put him on the same level,” Mets executive vice president and chief marketing officer Andy Goldberg said with a grin.
“It’s just been a fun year, and at the same time, we’ve been playing great ball. Ever since the end of May, we have been crushing it,” he explained. “So I think that added to the mystique.”
