Mask mandates are lifting in hospitals, long-term care homes and other health-care facilities across the country, marking an end to some of the last remaining public health restrictions against COVID-19 in Canada.
But what changes for patients and health-care workers may not be clear-cut, as the lifting of mandates doesn’t mean an end to masking altogether — and health officials stress that mandates could return to health care in the future, if COVID levels take a turn for the worse.
“Clearly masks are important in health-care settings, we’ve used them always, and I’ve been a big supporter of mask wearing when it’s appropriate,” Dr. Bonnie Henry, B.C. provincial health officer and chair of the council of chief medical officers of health, told CBC News.
“Nobody is telling you not to wear a mask, what we’re saying is it’s no longer mandatory by a provincial health officer order that everybody do it all the time.”
Canadians can expect many areas of hospitals to still encourage masking in emergency rooms and departments with particularly vulnerable patients, like burn units and cancer wards — and health-care workers will still likely wear them in many patient-facing settings.
“If you want to or your provider wants to, masks will certainly be available. So I think it’s going to be a gradual transition,” Dr. Saqib Shahab, Saskatchewan’s chief medical health officer, told CBC Saskatchewan last week.
“We really hope outbreaks won’t rise as a result of this policy … but it’s something that I think all of us have a role to play in minimizing that risk.”
But reaction to the policy change has been mixed, with some health-care worker unions and advocates arguing the move will shift public health responsibilities onto individuals and could even equate to a violation of human rights for high-risk patients.
Registered nurse Janelle Van Haltren prepares to attend to a patient in the Humber River Hospital emergency departing on Jan. 13, 2022. Canadians can expect many areas of hospitals to still encourage masking — and health-care workers will still likely wear them in many patient-facing settings. (Evan Mitsui/CBC)
Lifting mandates could reduce health-care burnout
Part of the reasoning behind the shift in policy is to remove the need for health-care workers, who have faced severe burnout throughout the pandemic, to constantly mask in every area of the hospital — while also still allowing them the freedom to continue to do so.
“We know that most of our staff, when they got infected, weren’t getting infected at work, they were getting infected in the community,” said Dr. Michael Gardam, an infectious disease specialist and CEO of Health P.E.I.
“And so really the time has kind of come and gone for this and we need to get to a new state where we are masking when we need to — but not routinely, everyday, everywhere.”
Dr. Alon Vaisman, an infection control physician at Toronto’s University Health Network (UHN) and assistant medical professor at the University of Toronto, said removing universal mask mandates in all health-care settings would likely help to ease health-care worker burnout.
“I absolutely see the reasoning there, because it seems like a very low-risk manoeuvre. I think it’s important to recognize that if you take health-care workers, for example, they’ve been working extremely hard the last three years,” he said.
“And if there’s anything we can do to try to alleviate the stress, if you could remove masking where it’s no longer necessary and where the risk is extremely low, I think if you could do that it’s very helpful to reduce burnout.”
Mask mandates lifted at Sask. Health Authority facilities
Mask mandates at Saskatchewan Health Authority facilities have been lifted.
Dr. Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease physician and senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in Baltimore, said hospitals should be able to independently set policies on masking depending on local COVID levels and expert advice.
“When you’re talking about non-patient facing activities, I don’t think that there’s much benefit in having masks in place,” he said.
“There is benefit in patient-facing activities to having people wear masks, but I think it’s something that each hospital needs to make a determination on based on the local metrics and not really something for the government to necessarily be involved in.”
Alberta is still requiring masks in patient-facing settings, Quebec and Ontario are leaving masking rules up to individual hospitals, while Manitoba has opted to still require masks in health-care settings for the time being.
“If you’re in an immunocompromised-facing service, these policies make sense,” said Dr. Abraar Karan, an infectious diseases fellow at Stanford University and physician and researcher in Stanford, Calif.
“Now whether we should keep mask mandates in place at all hospitals, for all patients, in all services, that’s more debatable.”
Surgical oncologists Dr. Usmaan Hameed, right, and Dr. Peter Stotland, left, walk to the operating room at North York General Hospital in May 2020. (Evan Mitsui/CBC)
Ethical debate over removing mask mandates in hospitals
B.C.’s Human Rights Commissioner Kasari Govender raised concerns about the decision to lift mandatory masking in health-care settings, saying they are the one space vulnerable people should be able to rely on to prioritize their safety — particularly in long-term care facilities.
“The removal of mask mandates has a disproportionate impact on marginalized people, seniors, and those who are clinically extremely vulnerable,” Govender said in a statement this week.
“This represents a violation of their rights to equal participation in our communities.”
B.C. lifts mandatory masking in health care and proof of vaccination for long-term care visitors
B.C. is ending its universal mask mandate in health care settings, Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry announced Thursday. Visitors to long-term care and assisted living facilities will also no longer need to show proof of a COVID-19 vaccination.
The Canadian Union of Public Employees, which represents over 200,000 health-care workers across the country, said in a statement to CBC News it’s not acceptable for governments to allow employers to “download workplace safety onto front-line workers.”
“That ignores the fundamental responsibility of employers to provide a safe work environment,” CUPE’s National President Mark Hancock said.
“Leaving the decision over infection controls in the work environment to individual employees is never okay. It’s especially concerning in a health-care setting where people are already ill and at risk.”
Vaisman said the overall benefit derived from universal mask mandates in all health-care settings at this point in the pandemic isn’t as strong as it once was.
“What we’ve seen throughout the pandemic is that the morbidity and mortality associated with COVID, the likelihood that you’ll be admitted to hospital if you get COVID, has substantially fallen over the last few years,” he said.
“Our primary objective is always to keep patients safe … but it’s important to recognize that the risk to patients has dramatically changed over the last few years because of vaccination, because of previous infection, because of therapeutics.”
Surgical oncologists Dr. Usmaan Hameed operates on a patient in North York General Hospital on May 26, 2020. (Evan Mitsui/CBC)
Vaisman said masking will remain in all traditionally high-risk areas in UHN hospitals, and patients entering emergency departments will still need to mask up — but fewer people will likely be wearing them in common spaces such as lobbies, hallways and elevators.
“So in certain settings where we think the risk is lower, you won’t see health-care workers masked as often as you did in the past,” he said. “I think the Canadian public will start to notice that masking is becoming less and less common in health-care settings.”
“We no longer need that additional level of protection all the time, because of what we’re seeing with the epidemiology in the community and our health-care settings — we don’t have any outbreaks in long term care right now of influenza or COVID [in B.C.],” she said.
“So the setting is different and we need to adapt to that, we need to get back to a more normal way of interacting.”
A nurse gowns up before attending to a patient in the intensive care unit of Humber River Hospital in Toronto, on Jan. 25, 2022. (Evan Mitsui/CBC)
Mask mandates could return if COVID levels worsen
Canada avoided a severe winter COVID-19 wave despite a lack of most of public health restrictions, a busy indoor holiday season and a rapidly mutating virus — largely thanks to high levels of hybrid immunity from vaccination and prior infection.
A Canadian study of health-care workers in Quebec published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases in January found that two doses of an mRNA vaccine and a previous Omicron infection offered substantial protection against future infection from Omicron subvariants.
Bivalent vaccines, which were designed to target the BA.4 and BA.5 Omicron subvariants, were also associated with a lower risk of severe infection with several later members of the Omicron family, researchers wrote in new correspondence in the New England Journal of Medicine.
But COVID hospitalization levels still remain stubbornly high in Canada, with 3,268 hospital beds occupied by COVID patients across the country according to the latest federal data, despite continuing to gradually decline since mid-January.
“We’re not done with this yet. COVID is going to be around and it’s an additional infection that is causing illness — particularly in older people, particularly in people who have immune-compromising conditions,” Henry said.
“It’s going to be really important when we get to next respiratory season, that we’ll be looking again at whether universal masking through that period of time when the risk is high, not just for COVID, but for influenza, for RSV, for other respiratory viruses as well.”
Gardam said that while it makes sense to lift mask mandates in hospitals for now, a worsening situation with COVID or other respiratory illnesses later could change that.
“If we have a large outbreak of influenza or RSV or COVID in the future as we get into the winter seasons, I think it’ll be quite reasonable to bring back masking in hospitals in certain areas, then taking it away again when the epidemiology suggests that it’s safe,” he said.
“There’s no doubt masks had benefit during the pandemic, along with the other pandemic control measures that we had … we need to figure out what that middle ground is.”
WINNIPEG – Some 250 coloured tacks pepper a large-scale world map among bookshelves at Whodunit Mystery Bookstore.
Estonia, Finland, Japan and even Fenwick, Ont., have pins representing places outside Winnipeg where someone has ordered a page-turner from the independent bookstore that specializes in mystery and crime fiction novels.
For 30 years, the store has been offering fans of Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot or Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes a place to get lost in whodunits both old and new.
Jack and Wendy Bumsted bought the shop in the Crescentwood neighbourhood in 2007 from another pair of mystery lovers.
The married couple had been longtime customers of the store. Wendy Bumsted grew up reading Perry Mason novels while her husband was a historian with vast knowledge of the crime fiction genre.
At the time, Jack Bumsted was retiring from teaching at the University of Manitoba when he was looking for his next venture.
“The bookstore came up and we bought it, I think, within a week,” Wendy Bumsted said in an interview.
“It never didn’t seem like a good idea.”
In the years since the Bumsteds took ownership, the family has witnessed the decline in mail-order books, the introduction of online retailers, a relocation to a new space next to the original, a pandemic and the death of beloved co-owner Jack Bumsted in 2020.
But with all the changes that come with owning a small business, customers continue to trust their next mystery fix will come from one of the shelves at Whodunit.
Many still request to be called about books from specific authors, or want to be notified if a new book follows their favourite format. Some arrive at the shop like clockwork each week hoping to get suggestions from Wendy Bumsted or her son on the next big hit.
“She has really excellent instincts on what we should be getting and what we should be promoting,” Micheal Bumsted said of his mother.
Wendy Bumsted suggested the store stock “Thursday Murder Club,” the debut novel from British television host Richard Osman, before it became a bestseller. They ordered more copies than other bookstores in Canada knowing it had the potential to be a hit, said Michael Bumsted.
The store houses more than 18,000 new and used novels. That’s not including the boxes of books that sit in Wendy Bumsted’s tiny office, or the packages that take up space on some of the only available seating there, waiting to be added to the inventory.
Just as the genre has evolved, so has the Bumsteds’ willingness to welcome other subjects on their shelves — despite some pushback from loyal customers and initially the Bumsted patriarch.
For years, Jack Bumsted refused to sell anything outside the crime fiction genre, including his own published books. Instead, he would send potential buyers to another store, but would offer to sign the books if they came back with them.
Wendy Bumsted said that eventually changed in his later years.
Now, about 15 per cent of the store’s stock is of other genres, such as romance or children’s books.
The COVID-19 pandemic forced them to look at expanding their selection, as some customers turned to buying books through the store’s website, which is set up to allow purchasers to get anything from the publishers the Bumsteds have contracts with.
In 2019, the store sold fewer than 100 books online. That number jumped to more than 3,000 in 2020, as retailers had to deal with pandemic lockdowns.
After years of running a successful mail-order business, the store was able to quickly adapt when it had to temporarily shut its doors, said Michael Bumsted.
“We were not a store…that had to figure out how to get books to people when they weren’t here.”
He added being a community bookstore with a niche has helped the family stay in business when other retailers have struggled. Part of that has included building lasting relationships.
“Some people have put it in their wills that their books will come to us,” said Wendy Bumsted.
Some of those collections have included tips on traveling through Asia in the early 2000s or the history of Australian cricket.
Micheal Bumsted said they’ve had to learn to be patient with selling some of these more obscure titles, but eventually the time comes for them to find a new home.
“One of the great things about physical books is that they can be there for you when you are ready for them.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published on Sept. 15, 2024.
MONTREAL – Canada’s labour minister is praising both Air Canada and the union representing about 5,200 of its pilots for averting a work stoppage that would have disrupted travel for hundreds of thousands of passengers.
Steven MacKinnon’s comments came in a statement shared to social media shortly after Canada’s largest air carrier announced it had reached a tentative labour deal with the Air Line Pilots Association.
MacKinnon thanked both sides and federal mediators, saying the airline and its pilots approached negotiations with “seriousness and a resolve to get a deal.”
The tentative agreement averts a strike or lockout that could have begun as early as Wednesday for Air Canada and Air Canada Rouge, with flight cancellations expected before then.
The airline now says flights will continue as normal while union members vote on the tentative four-year contract.
Air Canada had called on the federal government to intervene in the dispute, but Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Friday that would only happen if it became clear no negotiated agreement was possible.
This report from The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 15, 2024.
When it comes to plant-based alternatives, Canadians have never had so many options — and nowhere is that choice more abundantly clear than in the milk section of the dairy aisle.
To meet growing demand, companies are investing in new products and technology to keep up with consumer tastes and differentiate themselves from all the other players on the shelf.
“The product mix has just expanded so fast,” said Liza Amlani, co-founder of the Retail Strategy Group.
She said younger generations in particular are driving growth in the plant-based market as they are consuming less dairy and meat.
Commercial sales of dairy milk have been weakening for years, according to research firm Mintel, likely in part because of the rise of plant-based alternatives — even though many Canadians still drink dairy.
The No. 1 reason people opt for plant-based milk is because they see it as healthier than dairy, said Joel Gregoire, Mintel’s associate director for food and drink.
“Plant-based milk, the one thing about it — it’s not new. It’s been around for quite some time. It’s pretty established,” said Gregoire.
Because of that, it serves as an “entry point” for many consumers interested in plant-based alternatives to animal products, he said.
Plant-based milk consumption is expected to continue growing in the coming years, according to Mintel research, with more options available than ever and more consumers opting for a diet that includes both dairy and non-dairy milk.
A 2023 report by Ernst & Young for Protein Industries Canada projected that the plant-based dairy market will reach US$51.3 billion in 2035, at a compound annual growth rate of 9.5 per cent.
Because of this growth opportunity, even well-established dairy or plant-based companies are stepping up their game.
It’s been more than three decades since Saint-Hyacinthe, Que.-based Natura first launched a line of soy beverages. Over the years, the company has rolled out new products to meet rising demand, and earlier this year launched a line of oat beverages that it says are the only ones with a stamp of approval from Celiac Canada.
Competition is tough, said owner and founder Nick Feldman — especially from large American brands, which have the money to ensure their products hit shelves across the country.
Natura has kept growing, though, with a focus on using organic ingredients and localized production from raw materials.
“We’re maybe not appealing to the mass market, but we’re appealing to the natural consumer, to the organic consumer,” Feldman said.
Amlani said brands are increasingly advertising the simplicity of their ingredient lists. She’s also noticing more companies offering different kinds of products, such as coffee creamers.
Companies are also looking to stand out through eye-catching packaging and marketing, added Amlani, and by competing on price.
Besides all the companies competing for shelf space, there are many different kinds of plant-based milk consumers can choose from, such as almond, soy, oat, rice, hazelnut, macadamia, pea, coconut and hemp.
However, one alternative in particular has enjoyed a recent, rapid ascendance in popularity.
“I would say oat is the big up-and-coming product,” said Feldman.
Mintel’s report found the share of Canadians who say they buy oat milk has quadrupled between 2019 and 2023 (though almond is still the most popular).
“There seems to be a very nice marriage of coffee and oat milk,” said Feldman. “The flavour combination is excellent, better than any other non-dairy alternative.”
The beverage’s surge in popularity in cafés is a big part of why it’s ascending so quickly, said Gregoire — its texture and ability to froth makes it a good alternative for lattes and cappuccinos.
It’s also a good example of companies making a strong “use case” for yet another new entrant in a competitive market, he said.
Amid the long-standing brands and new entrants, there’s another — perhaps unexpected — group of players that has been increasingly investing in plant-based milk alternatives: dairy companies.
For example, Danone has owned the Silk and So Delicious brands since an acquisition in 2014, and long-standing U.S. dairy company HP Hood LLC launched Planet Oat in 2018.
Lactalis Canada also recently converted its facility in Sudbury, Ont., to manufacture its new plant-based Enjoy! brand, with beverages made from oats, almonds and hazelnuts.
“As an organization, we obviously follow consumer trends, and have seen the amount of interest in plant-based products, particularly fluid beverages,” said Mark Taylor, president and CEO of Lactalis Canada, whose parent company Lactalis is the largest dairy products company in the world.
The facility was a milk processing plant for six decades, until Lactalis Canada began renovating it in 2022. It now manufactures not only the new brand, but also the company’s existing Sensational Soy brand, and is the company’s first dedicated plant-based facility.
“We’re predominantly a dairy company, and we’ll always predominantly be a dairy company, but we see these products as complementary,” said Taylor.
It makes sense that major dairy companies want to get in on plant-based milk, said Gregoire. The dairy business is large — a “cash cow,” if you will — but not really growing, while plant-based products are seeing a boom.
“If I’m looking for avenues of growth, I don’t want to be left behind,” he said.
Gregoire said there’s a potential for consumers to get confused with so many options, which is why it’s so important for brands to find a way to differentiate themselves, whether it’s with taste, health, or how well the drink froths for a latte.
Competition in a more crowded market is challenging, but Taylor believes it results in better products for consumers.
“It keeps you sharp, and it forces you to be really good at what you’re doing. It drives innovation,” he said.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 15, 2024.
