Canadian Politics: The Surreality of Life under King Corona

[Paxter]

We have a Royal Commission underway in Australia on the same topic. It’s disgusting and we all probably should take some responsibility. Treatment of vulnerable people needs to be top of mind at the ballot box - but the majority of us just don’t care.

[Fragile Bird]

1 hour ago, Raja said:

Have you guys read this report? It's tragic stuff. Full report can be found here, I'm halfway through at the moment. As Maarsen said, it's a military report on Long Term Care Homes by the Armed forced. Reading the report, it's not surprise what's going on in the care homes.

This is just 1 care home but it's like this in all 3-4 of them that they reviewed. This stuff honestly astounds me.

The report is horrific. Who the bloody hell let these people run nursing homes?

 

[maarsen]

1 hour ago, Fragile Bird said:

The report is horrific. Who the bloody hell let these people run nursing homes?

 

People who want to pay less in taxes. Unfortunately this is not a surprise to anyone who works in or knows people who work in nursing homes.  Check out the website of the Ontario Health Coalition or the OCHU website. Candace Rennick, Secretary Treasurer of CUPE Ontario started out working in LTC homes before becoming a union activist and has been raising these issues for years. People and governments have not wanted to listen. Michael Hurley of OCHU has also spoke many times on these issues. We had 10000 people at Queens Park last year trying to bring this to the attention of the public and it barely makes a minute or two on the any TV station in Ontario.

[Fragile Bird]

It not only unions who have spoken up, it’s the families as well. These are issues that have been around for decades. My question is rhetorical. The answer is us. When we were young we didn’t care. When we sent our parents to homes, many of us never even visited. And those of us who visited didn’t raise enough stink.

That’s a rhetorical us, btw.

[Guest]

1 hour ago, Fragile Bird said:

It not only unions who have spoken up, it’s the families as well. These are issues that have been around for decades. My question is rhetorical. The answer is us. When we were young we didn’t care. When we sent our parents to homes, many of us never even visited. And those of us who visited didn’t raise enough stink.

That’s a rhetorical us, btw.

I have a feeling this will end up wrecking the long-term care facility industry, at least in the U.S. Investigations will be done, and those places are rife with cut corners and cut costs.

[Raja]

There's a review of LTCs planned for Ontario ( or already under way), but I don't think there's a Canada wide one yet.

[Fragile Bird]

3 hours ago, Raja said:

There's a review of LTCs planned for Ontario ( or already under way), but I don't think there's a Canada wide one yet.

The federal government has said that there has to be a national conversation about how we treat the elderly. I am hopeful that this will happen. I actually expect it to.

There has always been resistance on the federal level to get involved in LTC. Successive governments, ever since the beginnings of universal health care in the 60s and 70s, stated the health care funding they were giving was for hospitals and doctors, for curative matters. At one point some money was given to the CMHC, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, for support in building homes, but it wasn’t much and it was for a brief period in the 70s under Pierre Trudeau. The next conservative government didn’t continue the program and by the end of their reign, with the largest budget deficits in history, they started cutting health care funding. They also negotiated NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, including a requirement that saw the opening up of sectors to private companies, especially the delivery of services in the health sector. There’s a French company, owned by one of France’s billionaire families, that has taken over swathes of the services provided to hospitals and nursing homes in Canada, that had been heavily criticized for their cut-rate practices, replacing union jobs that paid $20/hr with minimum wage, non-unionized jobs, for example. Iirc, BC gave free reign to them under various right-wing governments.

And then we hit the debt laden 90s and the Wall Street Journal called Canada ‘the Argentina of the north’ and predicted we would default on our debt. The new Liberal government was pretty brutal, getting our debt under control until we were in the best financial condition in the G7, together with Germany. They slashed payments to healthcare. My father was dying of cancer in hospital and I remember there were 2 nurses on the floor at night to look after, I don’t know, 70 or 80 or more patients. A decade later when my mom was in hospital there were 7 or 8 on the floor at night. And then the next Conservative government ran into the financial crisis, and after having run their campaigns on ‘those bastard Liberals’, also started cutting funding, by setting annual percentage increases far below the rate of growth of services. Aging baby boomers will stress the system for the next 20 to 30 years.

We do have a serious problem up here in that the Americans have such low tax rates that businesses just pick up and move south, where their target markets are anyway. 

The US is in fact a problem, because they are relentless in their demands that more and more government services be privatized so that American companies can bid on business. And of course, right wingers up here are of like mind. People don’t even realize what is being sold out. I predict the same will happen in the UK.

Add to this the issue of all the unpaid work women do. I suspect that many of the nursing homes ran into trouble because they relied on family coming in and doing so much care work, looking after their aged parents. With nursing homes locked down and workers getting sick, they couldn’t cope. And on top of that their practices were just plain bad.

With massive debt being racked up because governments are spending so much to prop up the economy, one wonders how this going to play out down the road.

 

[Fragile Bird]

Update

May          22         23        24        25        26         27         28       29

             cases     cases    cases    cases    cases    cases    cases   cases              

BC             18        10         -           12        11          9          9          4

Albt           32        18       42          19         22        25        29        24

Sask            5          3         2            2           0          3          2          2

Man            2          0         0            0           0          0          2          0

ON           441      412     460        404       287      292      383      344

Que          646      697     573        573       614      541      563      530

NS                2         0          1            1           2          1          2         0

NB                0         1          0            0           1          1          1         2

Totals      1146    1141   1078       1011      937      872       993     906

Nfld                                                                                         1

Four days in a row of less than a thousand cases. Let's hope it keeps up. We might have a terrible pop-up in New Brunswick where, if you haven't yet heard, a doctor travelled to Quebec on some private business and then returned to Campbellton without self-quarantining for 14 days like he was supposed to have done. He met with more than 150 patients and has spread the Covid-19 he picked up while in Quebec. People are pretty upset, everything was ready to open and areas have been locked down again. The doctor has been suspended. What a damn idiot. I had to add in Nfld which had it's first new case in over two weeks. Quebec, which re-opened some schools, has had 44 new school related cases. "This was expected" said the minister. Ontario has got it's testing numbers up again and cases have not really increased.

Btw, since the testing has really opened up, I went to a testing centre at St. Joe's last night. That's 10 seconds of my life I'll never get back. That is one long, thin swab, and boy oh boy, they shove that bugger way up your nose. "You'll feel some discomfort" said the nurse. It was a very weird sensation, and I can still feel it now. I don't know how they do it elsewhere, but she stuck it up there and then slowly counted to ten. They said they'll call if I test positive, but in the meantime stay at home for four days, since I have a couple of symptoms. I explained I had symptoms back in April, no one had referred me, and I just wanted to make sure I don't have the virus. I still have a bit of a cough and sore throat, and my voice is weak, hence the istruction to isolate.

 

[Fragile Bird]

Update

May          25        26         27         28       29        30          31

             cases     cases    cases    cases    cases    cases    cases                 

BC             12        11          9          9          4         11           -

Albt           19         22        25        29        24        13          18

Sask            2           0          3          2          2          4            1

Man            0           0          0          2          0           0           1

ON           404       287      292      383      344       323       326

Que          573       614      541      563      530      419        408

NS                1           2          1          2         0           1            0

NB                0           1          1          1         2           3            0

Nfld              0           0          0          1         0           0            0

Totals      1011       937       872      993     906       772        757

We're dropping some more (imagine the US only reporting 7,570 new cases instead of 20,350), although Ontario has had this uptick the last couple of days. The medical officer attributed it to the fact we had a long weekend last weekend, we had an uptick days after Mother's Day as well. A native band near Thunder Bay called out two band members by name and banned them from the reserve for visiting Toronto, the hotspot of Ontario. So far NB hasn't had too many cases reported yet, which is good because the Campbellton hospital has 4 ICU beds and 2 are occupied by sick people. The big news of the day is 202 deaths in Quebec - they actually only had 37 deaths in the last 24 hours, but 165 deaths were not reported due to a 'data transmission problem'. 

 

[Paxter]

That's three days in a row that Canada has reported less than 1,000 cases nationwide. Perhaps Quebec has finally turned the corner, reporting 400 new cases yesterday from a peak of 1,000 cases a month ago. 

It is interesting that the drop-off in cases has coincided with the warmer weather in Ontario and Quebec. Coincidence?

[Fragile Bird]

1 hour ago, Paxter said:

That's three days in a row that Canada has reported less than 1,000 cases nationwide. Perhaps Quebec has finally turned the corner, reporting 400 new cases yesterday from a peak of 1,000 cases a month ago. 

It is interesting that the drop-off in cases has coincided with the warmer weather in Ontario and Quebec. Coincidence?

Lol, 4 days! And today will be 5. Ford must be screaming in rage, Quebec has reported 295 and Ontario is back over 400, 404. That must be the holiday weekend. Of course, Quebec could be way back up tomorrow.

On another sad note, it looks like the Snowbird crash in BC may have been caused by a bird strike.

[Fragile Bird]

Now we know the real reason for Ontario’s spike up in cases: a hospital network in Etobicoke failed to pass on information about 700 positive cases to public health for contact tracing. They have a reputation for incompetence so why am I not surprised, but Mt. Sinai also failed to pass on cases, and that did take me by surprise. I expect better from the downtown hospitals.

[Paxter]

2 hours ago, Fragile Bird said:

Now we know the real reason for Ontario’s spike up in cases: a hospital network in Etobicoke failed to pass on information about 700 positive cases to public health for contact tracing. They have a reputation for incompetence so why am I not surprised, but Mt. Sinai also failed to pass on cases, and that did take me by surprise. I expect better from the downtown hospitals.

Crazy.

Contrasting trajectories between ON and AB recently. On May 1, AB had 3,100 active cases, not far off ON on 4,662. Fast forward a month and AB has just 400 active cases, while ON is stuck on 3,834 after hitting a plateau. 

It will be interesting to see if the re-opening in AB changes the story at all. I presume Ontario is going to stay shut for most of June. 

[Fragile Bird]

It seems there was a miscommunication between the hospitals about who was sending on the information. Still, there has to be some incompetence involved because they must have been doing it for months by April.

[Aemon Stark]

4 hours ago, Fragile Bird said:

Now we know the real reason for Ontario’s spike up in cases: a hospital network in Etobicoke failed to pass on information about 700 positive cases to public health for contact tracing. They have a reputation for incompetence so why am I not surprised, but Mt. Sinai also failed to pass on cases, and that did take me by surprise. I expect better from the downtown hospitals.

The same stuff happens at every hospital. Unfortunately. But the big problem in Ontario is that the system as a whole is disorganized - each hospital/network doing its own thing, uncoordinated from public health units which are organized along municipal or regional/county lines. Pretty much every other province has regional health authorities or zones which put acute care, public health, and community health under the same umbrella. 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

How does your PM seem to even get more handsome despite having a grey beard? It reminds me of this:

 

[Paxter]

Quebec's daily new cases have halved in a week!

@Tywin et al.: It's easy for JT to look good when the US and UK are setting such a low bar on Pres/PM appearance...

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

15 minutes ago, Paxter said:

Quebec's daily new cases have halved in a week!

@Tywin et al.: It's easy for JT to look good when the US and UK are setting such a low bar on Pres/PM appearance...

Our city's Mayor here in Minneapolis oddly looks like him.

[TrueMetis]

Justin Trudeau points out that racism is in fact still a problem in Canada, conservatives of course flip their shit over this easily verifiable fact and idiots like Stockwell Day goes on TV to compare what minorities face to him being bullied in school for wearing glasses.

[kairparavel]

Stockwell Day is still around? Huh.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/doris-day-petition-hits-the-mark-1.209426