As provinces across Canada start to lift COVID-19 restrictions, some experts are questioning whether public health decisions are being made based on medical data or politics.
Ontario’s three-phase reopening plan that stretches into mid-March is underway, with proof of vaccination and masking to remain in place as capacity limits widen and more businesses reopen.
Epidemiologist Timothy Sly says even though the COVID-19 pandemic has taken its toll on the mental health and lives of Canadians, it’s still not reasonable enough to ignore scientific evidence.
“Hospital rates, ICU rates, wastewater rates, if they’re going down and they have been for the last three weeks, then we can look forward to taking a few more steps (in lifting restrictions),” said Sly.
But in the Prairies, the hospitalizations have only just started to decline.
“If politics chooses not to listen to that, then I think we’re a little nervous,” said Sly.
As of Tuesday, there were 1,623 people in hospital with COVID-19, according to Alberta Health, with 129 in intensive care.
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Dr. Noel Gibney, professor emeritus in the department of critical care medicine at the University of Alberta, said the removal of COVID-19 restrictions is premature.
“If we look back at some of the previous waves, the government used hospitalization numbers of 400 or 500 to make decisions about what public health measures would be added or removed,” Gibney explained on Wednesday in an interview with Global News.
“We’re actually significantly above those numbers now, and our system remains under profound pressure.”
On Tuesday, Saskatchewan was the first province to announce it would be ending the use of COVID-19 vaccine passports beginning on Feb. 14, with facemasks in indoor public settings to lift by end of February.
“Proof of vaccination has been an effective policy, but its effectiveness has run its course,” said Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe on Tuesday.
“The benefits no longer outweigh the costs. It’s time to heal the divisions over vaccination in our families, in our communities and in our province. It’s time for proof of vaccination requirements to end,” he added.
Alberta then followed by announcing its COVID-19 vaccine passport program would end first thing Wednesday. Almost all public health restrictions would be lifted by March 1 — including masking — if hospitalizations continue to improve.
At a news conference, Alberta Premier Jason Kenney said Tuesday that while the restrictions exemption program (REP) served its purpose of increasing vaccination rates, it is no longer an effective tool for doing so and no longer needed, especially with so many vaccinated people still contracting the highly-transmissible Omicron variant of COVID-19.
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Ontario’s health minister Christine Elliot said on Wednesday that the province is “not in the clear” to remove COVID-19 vaccine passports that are required to enter some indoor public settings such as gyms and restaurants or to drop the mask mandate.
“We have no plans, currently, to drop the passport vaccination situation or masking,” Elliot said. “We always said that we were going to take a very cautious, phased, prudent approach to opening up and that’s the path that we’re going to follow.”
On Wednesday, Ontario reported another drop in hospitalizations, with 2,059 people with COVID in hospitals and 449 in intensive care units. This is down from a week ago at 2,939 hospitalizations with 555 in ICU. Case counts, test positivity and wastewater signal have also been on the downward trend, Elliott said.
A clinical professor in the School of Population & Public Health at the University of British Columbia, Dr. Hoption Cann, said ending COVID-19 restrictions is a “political decision.”
He also said there are both scientific and economic issues for politicians to look at and try to balance.
“Economically, there’s been a lot of harm due to lockdowns during the pandemic. So as a politician, they kind of have to balance the two things. And it’s not an easy balance to make,” Cann said.
As provinces ease restrictions, he believes that potentially the number of infections could go up again, but it’s hard to predict at this time.
“What we do know is having two doses and particularly three doses offers very good protection against being hospitalized or dying from this infection. So an easing up of restrictions is one thing, but you still have to try and promote those people to get a triple dose or get vaccinated if they haven’t been,” said Cann.
With some provinces moving faster than others, Sly says provinces need to respond thoughtfully based on the data they have, like the number of hospitalizations and new cases, and not rush to remove all of the COVID-19 mandates on a single date.
“We need to look at the local situation and say, how are we responding sensibly and responsibly or are we just having a knee-jerk reaction due to some ideology,” said Sly.
Sly also acknowledged that there are many sides to the discussions that aren’t just based on epidemiology, stating that “we cannot have a future dictated by a scientist without any regard at all to the fallout.”
“We need a roundtable discussion. But when we have policies that seem to be made (because a political party) is looking for the popular vote or not really listening to what’s being said, then it is a little too soon to ease restrictions,” said Sly. “Evidence-based decision-making is the key here.”
When Alberta Premier Jason Kenney announced plans to lift COVID-19 restrictions in phases on Tuesday, he said, “It’s time for us to learn to live with COVID-19,” listing the challenges of the pandemic: disrupting livelihoods, dividing people and hurting mental health.
In late January, Ontario Premier Doug Ford also said the province needs to “learn to live with” COVID-19.
Beginning on Jan. 31, social gatherings were increased to a maximum of 10 people indoors, and 25 outdoors.
Restaurants, bars, retail stores, malls, gyms, cinemas and other indoor public settings were also allowed to open to a 50 per cent capacity.
One of the first countries to choose to “live with COVID” is Denmark, which is now seeing a record number of hospitalizations.
Although ICU numbers remain low, the country is registering a similar number of COVID-19 deaths as in previous waves of the pandemic.
“If we make a wrong move and because it’s politically expedient to do so, we could be rewarded by a sudden surge of cases again, mainly among the unvaccinated,” said Sly.
— with files from Jamie Mauracher, Kaylen Small, and Gabby Rodrigues
© 2022 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
The 2024 federal budget failed to spark a much-needed rebound in the polls for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s trailing Liberal party, according to new Ipsos polling released Tuesday.
Canadian reaction to the Liberal government’s latest spending plans shows an historic challenge ahead of the governing party as it tries to keep the reins of government out of the Conservative party’s hands in the next election, according to one pollster.
“If the purpose of the budget was to get a political reboot going, it didn’t seem to happen,” says Darrell Bricker, CEO of Ipsos Global Public Affairs.
The 2024 federal budget tabled last week included billions of dollars in new spending aimed at improving “generational fairness” and rapidly filling in Canada’s housing supply gap.
Ipsos polling conducted exclusively for Global News shows voters’ reactions to the 2024 federal budget mostly ranged from lacklustre to largely negative.
After stripping out those who said they “don’t know” how they feel about the federal budget (28 per cent), only 17 per cent of Canadians surveyed about the spending plan in the two days after its release said they’d give it “two thumbs up.” Some 40 per cent, meanwhile, said they’d give it “two thumbs down” and the remainder (43 per cent) gave a symbolic “shrug” to Budget 2024.
“Thumbs down” reactions rose to 63 per cent among Alberta respondents and 55 per cent among those in Saskatchewan and Manitoba.
Some 10 per cent of respondents said the budget would personally help them, while 37 per cent said it would hurt, after again stripping out those who said they didn’t know what the impact would be.
Asked about how they’d vote if a federal election were held today, 43 per cent of respondents said they’d pick the Conservatives, while 24 per cent said they’d vote Liberal, followed by 19 per cent who’d lean NDP.
The Conservative lead is up one point from a month earlier, Bricker notes, suggesting that Budget 2024 failed to stem the bleeding for the incumbent Liberals.
Only eight per cent of respondents to the Ipsos poll said the budget made them more likely to vote Liberal in the upcoming election, while roughly a third (34 per cent) said it made them less likely.
“The initial impressions of Canadians are that it hasn’t made much of a difference,” Bricker says.
Sentiment towards the Liberals remains slightly higher among generation Z and millennial voters — the demographics who appeared to be the focus of Budget 2024 — but Bricker says opinions remain “overwhelmingly negative” across generational lines.
Heading into the 2024 budget, the Liberals were under pressure to improve affordability in Canada amid a rising cost of living and an inaccessible housing market, Ipsos polling conducted last month showed.
The spending plan included items to remove junk fees from banking services and concert tickets, as well as some items aimed at making it easier for first-time homebuyers to break into the housing market. It also included a proposed change to how some capital gains are taxed, which the Liberals have claimed would target the wealthiest Canadians.
Paul Kershaw, founder of Generation Squeeze, told Global News after the federal budget’s release that while he was encouraged by acknowledgements about the economic unfairness facing younger demographics, there is no quick fix for the affordability crisis in the housing market.
Trudeau, his cabinet ministers and Liberal MPs have hit the road both before and after the budget’s release to promote line items in the spending plan.
Bricker says this is the typical post-budget playbook, but so far it looks like there’s nothing that “really caught on with Canadians” in the early days after the release of the spending plans. The Liberals have a chance to make something happen on the road, he says, but it’s “not looking great.”
“Maybe over the course of the next year, they’ll be able to demonstrate that they’ve actually changed something,” he says.
Bricker notes, however, that public opinion has changed little in federal politics over the past year.
The next federal election is set for October 2025 at the latest, but could be called earlier if the Liberals fail a confidence vote or bring down the government themselves.
But a vote today would see the Liberals likely lose to a “very, very large majority from the Conservative party,” Bricker says.
“What we’re seeing is, if things continue on as they’ve been continuing for the space of the last year, that they will end up in a situation where, almost an historic low in terms of the number of seats,” he says.
The Conservatives are leading in every region in the country, except for Quebec, where the Bloc Quebecois holds the pole position, according to the Ipsos polling.
The Liberals are meanwhile facing “a solid wall of public disapproval,” Bricker says. Some 32 per cent of voters said they would never consider voting Liberal in the next election, higher than the 27 per cent who said the same about the Conservatives, according to Ipsos.
Typically, Bricker says an incumbent party can hold onto a lead in some demographic, age group or region and build out a strategy for re-election from there.
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But this Liberal party lacks any foothold in the electorate, making prospects look grim in the next federal election; it’s so bleak that he even invokes the Progressive Conservative party’s historic rout in the 1993 vote.
“The hill they have to climb is incredibly hard,” Bricker says.
“I haven’t seen a hill this high to climb in federal politics since Brian Mulroney was faced with a very similar situation back in 1991 and ’92. And we all know what happened with that.”
These are some of the findings of an Ipsos poll conducted between 17 and 18, April 2024, on behalf of Global News. For this survey, a sample of 1,000 Canadians aged 18-plus was interviewed online. Quotas and weighting were employed to ensure that the sample’s composition reflects that of the Canadian population according to census parameters. The precision of Ipsos online polls is measured using a credibility interval. In this case, the poll is accurate to within ± 3.8 percentage points, 19 times out of 20, had all Canadians aged 18-plus been polled. The credibility interval will be wider among subsets of the population. All sample surveys and polls may be subject to other sources of error, including, but not limited to coverage error, and measurement error.
Opinion: Brad West been one of the sharpest critics of decriminalization
Published Apr 22, 2024 • Last updated 2 hours ago • 4 minute read
VICTORIA — Port Coquitlam Mayor Brad West fired off a letter to Premier David Eby last week about Allan Schoenborn, the child killer who changed his name in a bid for anonymity.
“It is completely beyond the pale that individuals like Schoenborn have the ability to legally change their name in an attempt to disassociate themselves from their horrific crimes and to evade the public,” wrote West.
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The Alberta government has legislated against dangerous, long-term and high risk offenders who seek to change their names to escape public scrutiny.
“I urge your government to pass similar legislation as a high priority to ensure the safety of British Columbians,” West wrote the premier.
The B.C. Review Board has granted Schoenborn overnight, unescorted leave for up to 28 days, and he spent some of that time in Port Coquitlam, according to West.
This despite the board being notified that “in the last two years there have been 15 reported incidents where Schoenborn demonstrated aggressive behaviour.”
“It is absolutely unacceptable that an individual who has committed such heinous crimes, and continues to demonstrate this type of behaviour, is able to roam the community unescorted.”
Understandably, those details alarmed PoCo residents.
But the letter is also an example of the outspoken mayor’s penchant for to-the-point pronouncements on provincewide concerns.
He’s been one of the sharpest critics of decriminalization.
His most recent blast followed the news that the New Democrats were appointing a task force to advise on ways to curb the use of illicit drugs and the spread of weapons in provincial hospitals.
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“Where the hell is the common sense here?” West told Mike Smyth on CKNW recently. “This has just gone way too far. And to have a task force to figure out what to do — it’s obvious what we need to do.
“In a hospital, there’s no weapons and you can’t smoke crack or fentanyl or any other drugs. There you go. Just saved God knows how much money and probably at least six months of dithering.”
He had a pithy comment on the government’s excessive reliance on outside consultants like MNP to process grants for clean energy and other programs.
“If ever there was a place to find savings that could be redirected to actually delivering core public services, it is government contracts to consultants like MNP,” wrote West.
He’s also broken with the Eby government on the carbon tax.
“The NDP once opposed the carbon tax because, by its very design, it is punishing to working people,” wrote West in a social media posting.
“The whole point of the tax is to make gas MORE expensive so people don’t use it. But instead of being honest about that, advocates rely on flimsy rebate BS. It is hard to find someone who thinks they are getting more dollars back in rebates than they are paying in carbon tax on gas, home heat, etc.”
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West has a history with the NDP. He was a political staffer and campaign worker with Mike Farnworth, the longtime NDP MLA for Port Coquitlam and now minister of public safety.
When West showed up at the legislature recently, Farnworth introduced him to the house as “the best mayor in Canada” and endorsed him as his successor: “I hope at some time he follows in my footsteps and takes over when I decide to retire — which is not just yet,” added Farnworth who is running this year for what would be his eighth term.
Other political players have their eye on West as a future prospect as well.
Several parties have invited him to run in the next federal election. He turned them all down.
Lately there has also been an effort to recruit him to lead a unified Opposition party against Premier David Eby in this year’s provincial election.
I gather the advocates have some opinion polling to back them up and a scenario that would see B.C. United and the Conservatives make way (!) for a party to be named later.
Such flights of fancy are commonplace in B.C. when the NDP is poised to win against a divided Opposition.
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By going after West, the advocates pay a compliment to his record as mayor (low property taxes and a fix-every-pothole work ethic) and his populist stands on public safety, carbon taxation and other provincial issues.
The outreach to a small city mayor who has never run provincially also says something about the perceived weaknesses of the alternatives to Eby.
“It is humbling,” West said Monday when I asked his reaction to the overtures.
But he is a young father with two boys, aged three and seven. The mayor was 10 when he lost his own dad and he believes that if he sought provincial political leadership now, “I would not be the type of dad I want to be.”
When West ran for re-election — unopposed — in 2022, he promised to serve out the full four years as mayor.
He is poised to keep his word, confident that if the overtures to run provincially are serious, they will still be there when his term is up.
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LIVE Q&A WITH B.C. PREMIER DAVID EBY: Join us April 23 at 3:30 p.m. when we will sit down with B.C. Premier David Eby for a special edition of Conversations Live. The premier will answer our questions — and yours — about a range of topics, including housing, drug decriminalization, transportation, the economy, crime and carbon taxes. Click HERE to get a link to the livestream emailed to your inbox.
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