Every single Ontario municipal police force told the provincial government they would not be conducting random stops of citizens to enforce the province’s stay-at-home order, forcing the province to walk back its directive to police. Yet even so, the government didn’t apologize for throwing civil liberties out the window, True North’s Andrew Lawton says.
Between April 1-17, 40 COVID-positive flights from Delhi landed in Canada — mostly in Toronto, but also many in Vancouver. This is on top of 26 flights from the U.S., 14 from the UAE, 11 from France, nine fromTurkey, and seven each from Germany, Qatar, and the Netherlands.
Ottawa’s mayor says he doesn’t think police border checkpoints on the interprovincial crossings between Gatineau and Ottawa will last the week, slamming them as “impractical and unnecessary.”
The US State Department has announced plans to expand its “Level 4: Do Not Travel” guidance to about 80% of countries worldwide, citing the “unprecedented risk to travelers” from the coronavirus.
The US already had 34 countries, including Chad, Kosovo, Kenya, Argentina, Russia and Tanzania on the Level 4 warning. About 130 more will be added now.
OTTAWA — Whenever Doug Ford puts on that feel-your-pain “folks, I’m being honest with you” face, his pandemic-fighting plan from yesterday is about to be slammed into reverse – and replaced by something even worse.
I’ve been watching politicians since covering Calgary city council alongside a television reporter and future premier named Ralph Klein – yes, I’m that old – and I’ve never seen such raging ineptitude as Ford is now showing as Ontario premier.
And never have life-or-death actions and reactions fallen so short of the minimum threshold for competent leadership.
Everyone is piling on Ford. I’m not a fan but the real culprit in this mess is Justin Trudeau and his cronies.
Ford has been brutal in his use of lockdowns, they could have been much more selective had the lessons of the first lockdown been learned. The focus should have switched to isolating and protecting the most vulnerable, our elderly. Allowing large scale infection prone employers to operate while small businesses were shuttered was clueless.
My Mother died of Covid she contracted in a hospital in March never having been offered a vaccine. Unconscionable.
Justin on the other hand screwed the entire nation over by taking direction from Beijing and completely bungling the vaccine file.
Entry of the deadly Indian ‘double mutant’ COVID-19 variant into this country could prove catastrophic.
OTTAWA — Public Safety Minister Bill Blair says Canada’s international and U.S. border restrictions will be in place for another month, at least.
In a pair of announcements made Tuesday, Blair said that Canadian and U.S. officials have agreed to keep the border between the two countries closed to non-essential travel, as well as the existing restrictions on non-U.S. international travel into Canada will be extended until May 21.
You know the wheels are coming off lockdown enforcement when the police are targeting a “12-year-old” potential violator in a skateboard park.
And a free society is skating on thin ice when videos show up appearing to show a kid being pushed to the ground by a police officer.
Toronto says it will temporarily close any non-essential businesses that have had five or more COVID-19 cases in the previous two weeks.
Public health officials say the closures will be in effect for a minimum of 10 days, and workers are required to self-isolate during that time.
They say workplaces considered essential, such as health-care facilities and schools, may be exempt.
Ontario reports 3,469 new COVID-19 cases, 22 more deaths
Ontario reported more than 3,400 new COVID-19 cases and 22 deaths on Tuesday, as hospitalizations continue to rise steadily.
Provincial health officials logged 3,469 new coronavirus infections, a notable drop from 4,447 cases on Monday.
Ontario reported 4,250 infections on Sunday, 4,362 on Saturday and a record 4,812 cases on Friday
Peel Region to order sweeping business closings in rebuke of Ontario’s COVID-19 measures
Peel Region’s top doctor is ordering sweeping new business closings to combat the third wave of COVID-19, as Premier Doug Ford faces growing pushback over his government’s pandemic plan.
Lawrence Loh, Medical Officer of Health for Peel, will issue a new order on Tuesday to direct all businesses with five or more cases of COVID-19 within the past two weeks to shutter for 10 days.
The closings will be ordered when at least five cases are deemed to have been “reasonably acquired” in the workplace, and will take effect as early as Friday. The names of the businesses will be published on Peel’s website once they’ve been notified. The region includes the cities of Brampton and Mississauga.
Surely there must have been people in cabinet, in caucus, who could have told Ford he was yet again courting disaster. Instead he blundered straight into it.
A Lancet report published Thursday from epidemiologists and experts across both Canada, U.S. and the U.K. found an overwhelming amount of evidence that the disease was spread through aerosols — tiny airborne particles that come from people’s mouths when they breathe, talk or cough.
Hospitals are shifting critically ill patients around, looking for any empty bed. Nurses and doctors are putting in exhaustion-defying amounts of overtime. Some provinces are opening new intensive care unit capacity.
But it may not be enough to stave off a point no one wants to reach in the pandemic — when only a handful of ICU beds remain but a greater number of patients need those spots.
Amid a public health crisis the likes of which Ontario has never seen, and a firestorm of criticism regarding the Ford government’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic there are growing calls for the premier to step down.
On Sunday, a Washington Post op-ed by columnist David Moscrop titled “Doug Ford must resign” quickly became the most read story on the paper’s website. In the article, Moscrop wrote, “Over a year into the pandemic, things are worse in Ontario than they have been since it began.”
Doug is no great shakes but the Trudeau government has been downright criminal.
Flights from Delhi continue to land in Canada despite India’s daily tally of COVID-19 infections surging to a record over the weekend — and amid the emergence of a new “double mutant” variant in the country.
A federal government website that lists flights where someone has been confirmed to have been infected with COVID-19shows that from April 4 to April 16, there were 120 flights with a COVID-positive passenger or passengers.
