Economy
Ontario health-care workers struggle with burnout as economy poised to reopen – Globalnews.ca
Bracing for impact, front-line workers in Ontario continue providing care as the threat of a third wave of COVID-19 infections looms against the backdrop of an economy poised to reopen.
Restrictions in Ontario are easing up, and in-person schooling in COVID-19 hot spots, including Toronto, York and Peel regions, is slated to resume next week.
While many people are happy about these measures, some health-care workers say it’s too much too soon, with some raising concerns about another spike in COVID-19 cases, and effects of the burnout happening on the front lines.
“I feel like we kind of got tumbled out of a waterfall, and just popped our heads up for a breath,” emergency room physician Dr. Steve Flindall, told Global News, “and now we are being sent towards another set of rapids.”
Flindall worries a third wave of COVID-19 could materialize in Ontario within a matter of weeks.
“I’m afraid it’s going to be less than a month, I’m worried with schools going back, and the simultaneous reopening of businesses, the doubling rate of the U.K. variant… it could be quite explosive if people drop their guard,” said Flindall.
Some family physicians have said they are stretched to the limit. “If I burn out, if I say ‘that’s it I can’t do it anymore,’ or if I get sick and I get COVID, I will have 1,500 patients that that don’t have a doctor,” said Ottawa family physician Dr. Nili Kaplan-Myrth.
She recalls how one of her colleagues from Alberta told her, to avoid burnout, it’s important to ‘pass the baton’ in order to keep going. “The problem is there isn’t anyone to pass it to, because we are all tired,” Kaplan-Myrth said.
DJ Sanderson is a nurse, and also serves on the board of directors for the Ontario Nurses’ Association. Sanderson said he is worried the decisions being made by the provincial government will only contribute to the stress on the front lines.
“The stress, the workload, the short staffing, the long shifts in full PPE, [it’s] just wearing on them to the point where they just can’t take it anymore,” Sanderson said.
In some cases he said, the burnout is so significant nurses are starting to leave the profession earlier than they had planned.
“We are hearing back from a number of our members, that in all honesty had planned on working a number of years, [that even though] they enjoy their careers, they’ve now started putting in for early retirement,” said Sanderson.
“Something needs to be done quickly to make sure there is a system that can take another wave.”
© 2021 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
Economy
Canada's budget 2024 and what it means for the economy – Financial Post
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Economy
Opinion: Canada's economy has stagnated despite Trudeau government spin – Financial Post
Article content
Growth in gross domestic product (GDP), the total value of all goods and services produced in the economy annually, is one of the most frequently cited indicators of economic performance. To assess Canadian living standards and the current health of the economy, journalists, politicians and analysts often compare Canada’s GDP growth to growth in other countries or in Canada’s past. But GDP is misleading as a measure of living standards when population growth rates vary greatly across countries or over time.
Article content
Federal Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland recently boasted that Canada had experienced the “strongest economic growth in the G7” in 2022. In this she echoes then-prime minister Stephen Harper, who said in 2015 that Canada’s GDP growth was “head and shoulders above all our G7 partners over the long term.”
Article content
Unfortunately, such statements do more to obscure public understanding of Canada’s economic performance than enlighten it. Lately, our aggregate GDP growth has been driven primarily by population and labour force growth, not productivity improvements. It is not mainly the result of Canadians becoming better at producing goods and services and thus generating more real income for their families. Instead, it is a result of there simply being more people working. That increases the total amount of goods and services produced but doesn’t translate into increased living standards.
Let’s look at the numbers. From 2000 to 2023 Canada’s annual average growth in real (i.e., inflation-adjusted) GDP growth was the second highest in the G7 at 1.8 per cent, just behind the United States at 1.9 per cent. That sounds good — until you adjust for population. Then a completely different story emerges.
Article content
Over the same period, the growth rate of Canada’s real per person GDP (0.7 per cent) was meaningfully worse than the G7 average (1.0 per cent). The gap with the U.S. (1.2 per cent) was even larger. Only Italy performed worse than Canada.
Why the inversion of results from good to bad? Because Canada has had by far the fastest population growth rate in the G7, an average of 1.1 per cent per year — more than twice the 0.5 per cent experienced in the G7 as a whole. In aggregate, Canada’s population increased by 29.8 per cent during this period, compared to just 11.5 per cent in the entire G7.
Starting in 2016, sharply higher rates of immigration have led to a pronounced increase in Canada’s population growth. This increase has obscured historically weak economic growth per person over the same period. From 2015 to 2023, under the Trudeau government, real per person economic growth averaged just 0.3 per cent. That compares with 0.8 per cent annually under Brian Mulroney, 2.4 per cent under Jean Chrétien and 2.0 per cent under Paul Martin.
Recommended from Editorial
Canada is neither leading the G7 nor doing well in historical terms when it comes to economic growth measures that make simple adjustments for our rapidly growing population. In reality, we’ve become a growth laggard and our living standards have largely stagnated for the better part of a decade.
Ben Eisen, Milagros Palacios and Lawrence Schembri are analysts at the Fraser Institute.
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Economy
Federal budget is about ensuring fair economy for ‘everyone’: Trudeau – Global News
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