Front Burner - How Ontario was led into a COVID-19 crisis

Episode Date: April 19, 2021

Military-style field hospitals in the middle of Toronto. A children’s ICU filling up with dying adults. Medical advisers at the end of their rope. Today, host Jayme Poisson looks at the choices Premier Doug Ford made in recent months and how they led Ontario down the path to what many doctors are calling a catastrophe.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. So things have taken a terrifying turn in Ontario. Worst case scenario, the province could see up to 30,000 new cases of COVID-19 every day by June. That's what the latest modeling shows. It's bad.

But what's worse is that this was exactly what was predicted. Premier Doug Ford's own science advisors told him what he had to do to avoid this tragedy. But the Ford government either ignored, cherry-picked, or half-followed that advice. Dr. Peter Youni, head of Ontario's COVID science table, said he thought about quitting on Friday after a press conference announcing new government restrictions was followed by an explosion of outrage. Youni called it one of the darkest days of his career. Yeah, I feel terrible. I mean, yesterday I had a crying fit when I was on the call with Danny Brown. He actually tried to comfort me.

It's just wrong, you know, it's just wrong. Today, with the help of many of my colleagues, how Doug Ford led Ontario down the path to disaster. All right, so I'd like to start at a very specific moment here. A press conference on February 11th of this year. Reporters had just listened to a presentation given by Stiney Brown, the co-chair of the province's COVID-19 science table. The province was about to ease restrictions, but the projections about where the virus was heading, the modeling,

well, it showed that easing up would be a very bad idea. ease restrictions. But the projections about where the virus was heading, the modeling, well, it showed that easing up would be a very bad idea. Hospitalizations and ICU admissions could quickly soar. The new B.1.1.7 COVID variant is aggressive and it was spreading. Here's John Michael McGrath from TV Ontario. And those public health measures, as you say, as they are lifted, cases could rise dramatically. Am I missing something here or is this presentation actually predicting a disaster? Am I missing something or is this predicting a disaster? And here's Brown's answer. No, I don't think you're missing anything. The message was crystal clear, as it had been in the past, as it would be time and time

again during the months that followed. Scientists and public health officials saw a disaster coming in Ontario, and the government had the same information and ignored it. You've probably heard doctors say that this third wave is a different pandemic. What they're talking about are variants of concern. In Ontario's case, the more transmissible, more aggressive B.1.1.7. It completely ravaged the UK, where it was first recognized. By January, experts were warning that it may spread twice as fast as the original COVID. Britain's Prime Minister is clearly worried. There is some evidence that the new variant may be associated with a higher degree of mortality.

This is what the February modelling from the science table was taking into account. But despite this evidence from the group of experts, and despite the warning signs from the UK, on February 16th, just five days after that disaster moment, Ontario lifted a stay-at-home order across most of the province. And by March 8th, that order was lifted in Toronto and Peel, the province's two hardest-hit regions. Now you could go into retail stores with limited capacity. Big malls could open. Ten people could gather inside for religious services, weddings and funerals.

Doug Ford's government called this the gray zone. One of a dizzying array of color-coded, often indistinguishable terms piled on top of each other through the course of the pandemic that experts say only further confuse people. Lockdown, shutdown, gray zone, red zone. Gray zone is worse than red for some reason. Emergency break. Anyway, the same day that Ontario eased restrictions, the province reported a surge in new COVID cases, 1,631. The case count would not look back. Day after day, the rolling average began a terrifying climb. Around this time, the beginning of March, a field hospital was being constructed at Sunnybrook Hospital in Toronto. If field hospital conjures war zone images for you, it should. This facility, meant to handle patient overflow, is a series of squat army green tents with white roofs strapped to enormous concrete blocks split down the middle by a raised steel walkway in a parking lot in the richest province in the country. At the time, there were 300 patients in Ontario's ICUs, and doctors and

other experts were sounding the alarm. Anecdotally, physicians were also telling stories of who was coming into those ICUs. It's a shifting demographic. There are people who are essential workers and they are working jobs where they have no choice but to go to work and if they don't go to work they won't be able to pay their bills and there's no alternative to that. By March 17th, Toronto's Chief Public Health Officer Eileen de Villa said the city was not ready to move into a less restrictive zone. The province's health table had said Ontario was in a third COVID wave, and this is important. They also said that the new dangerous COVID variants were driving the spike, accounting for 53% of all new cases. Yet by March 20th,

Toronto and neighboring Peel opened up for patio dining, which I do want to note many experts have said they're okay with. In other parts of the province, though, more people were allowed to eat inside restaurants. Gyms, hair salons, and nail salons remained closed. A reporter asked Doug Ford whether loosening restrictions while cases climbed sent a mixed message. Ford said the province should still be on high alert, but... You know, I'm going to be frank. People are tired. I'm telling you, they're tired, they're exhausted out there. They need a little bit of fresh air.

But please do it very carefully. That's all we're asking. By the end of March, an analysis by Ontario's COVID-19 Science Advisory Panel, the same group that predicted the disaster back in February, showed the province at a complete tipping point. Hospitalizations were 20% higher than they had been before Ontario lockdown at the end of December. And it confirmed what the physicians were reporting from the front lines. The number of COVID patients in ICUs who are younger than 60 had also gone up by 50%. Here's head of the advisory panel, Peter Giuny, again.

If we, right now, if we were able to really react as a society strongly for three weeks, the way we did it a year ago, three to four weeks, let me say four, so we shouldn't go into, you know, we're trading these numbers of weeks, but something like that, this will make a tremendous difference. Junie was super clear. There was no way out of the dire scenario without a widespread lockdown coupled with other measures, including paid sick leave for essential workers. Speaking of paid sick days for essential workers, of the cases that the Ontario government can trace back to an outbreak, one in four happened in a workplace, according to our own analysis. Toronto Star-Labour reporter Sara Mojahed-Sede found one Amazon warehouse where 600 workers have gotten sick with COVID since the beginning of all of this.

Gagandeep Kaur says she's heard from workers at the facility about safety concerns. Even though they had that staggered start time, the staggered break times, but then still while they were in the work floor, it was literally hard for them, close to impossible, for workers to maintain the social distancing. For nearly a year, advocates have been calling for mandated paid sick leave so that people can stay home if they have symptoms without losing their income. Millions of people in the province work for companies who don't provide this.

The federal government has a COVID program to help people who need to isolate. Maybe you've heard Premier Doug Ford talk about it. Folks, because of all the premiers and the federal government, we negotiated $1.1 billion of sick pay. There's still $750 million available. So to all the opposition and everyone that's preaching about the sick days and playing politics, rather than do that, why don't you try to help someone by telling them where they can go? Here's the problem, though. Lots and lots of experts say the federal program isn't good enough, that it's cumbersome and could take days or weeks for people to get the money, and that it's less

than what most people would earn at work, leaving them short to pay their bills when they need it. And they also say that the eligibility requirements are too steep, meaning that if a worker wakes up and has a tickle in their throat, but they're not sure if it's COVID, they might decide not to risk that they won't get the benefit and just go to work anyways. So advocates want the provincial government to make bosses provide seamless, immediate sick leave, on your paycheck, no complications. Over and over, doctors demanded it, reporters asked about it, normal

people said it would have kept them and their communities safe. The Ford government, who actually cancelled provincial sick days in 2018 when it took power, refused to budge. Okay, so we've hit the beginning of April here. Time to check how many cases Ontario is reporting. April 1st, 2,557, 433 people in the ICUs. April 2nd, 3,089, 435 people in the ICUs. April 2nd, 3,089, 435 people in the ICUs. April 7th, 3,215, 504 people in the ICUs. April 9th. 4,227 cases. 550 people in the ICUs. The floodgates had opened. In the middle of this, on April 3rd, the anger boiled over for Dr. Michael Warner, an ICU physician at Michael Guerin Hospital. He went on television and told this really heartbreaking story about one of his patients.

Her husband was forced to go to work at a factory that had an outbreak because it wasn't on his shift. He didn't want to go to work, but he doesn't have any paid time off for sick leave unless he gets COVID. Well, guess what? He got COVID, the variant, and so did everyone else on his shift. And yesterday I sent her to a quaternary care centre to be on a heart-lung machine. I've never had a patient so close to death in my career. It took five doctors, actually 17 people yesterday, to keep her alive.

By that afternoon, she was dead. Her family, who I've spoken with, they didn't get to see her from the moment that she entered the hospital. They'll never see her. And the closest they got was a Zoom meeting while she was in the prone position on a ventilator that's the closest they got and then the updates for me multiple times a day and you know when i listened to myself being interviewed earlier today i could tell how angry i was and i'm i think i'm beyond angry now i'm just All right, so what was the government response to all of this? On April 1st, 153 ICU doctors wrote to the Ontario government calling for stronger measures ASAP. Other doctors and experts, including those on the government's own COVID-19 science advisory table, said nothing short of a full stay-at-home

order would be enough to stop the exponential spread of the variants. And once again, they said we need paid sick leave, targeted vaccine delivery, not based on age but by risk and need, and to close everything that isn't actually essential. Recent reporting from the Globe and Mail shows outbreaks of more than 20 cases in places like a retail marketing firm, a sports uniform company, and a metal polishing company. Instead, the province announced an emergency break. Non-essential retail could stay open. Parents in the province were getting scared. There were stories of teachers in ICUs, whole families getting COVID after school exposure, essential workers, delivery workers, cab drivers.

They said they were living in fear too. And yet, as he has done through the entire pandemic, Ontario's Education Minister Stephen Lecce insisted schools were safe. And back in the fall, he wasn't wrong. But gradually, the numbers started to tell a different story here. By the last week of March, Ontario was reporting more than 1,300 new cases in schools that week alone. On April 5th, Peel Region had had enough and moved to classes online. Then the next day, on April 6th, a mind-melting moment. Let me set the scene for you.

on April 6th, a mind-melting moment. Let me set the scene for you. Doug Ford is at a news conference, and he says that schools are safe. Where we saw the problem, and everyone remembers this, at Christmas, when the kids go back into the community, that's where it's happening. It's not happening in the schools.

It's happening when there's a community spread in hot areas. But meanwhile, the Toronto District School Board has decided they don't agree. They're pulling the plug and moving to online-only classes after the spring break. And here was the trippy part. These two things happened at almost the exact same moment. So on TV screens, you could see two contradicting headlines in the chyron. Quote, Premier insists schools are safe. And right next to it, quote, breaking news, all Toronto schools will close.

The pressure was mounting. Here's Doug Ford on April 7th announcing a stay-at-home order. Even the people that were showing us the charts and where we were going, the ICU has taken off. The capacity at the ICUs and these variants have taken off even beyond what they told us. That was not true. The scientists behind the modeling hit back in a tweet saying they absolutely did predict this. In fact, this was closer to their best case scenario. Ontario Solicitor General Sylvia Jones was pressed by my colleague Robin Brushnahan on why the province waited so long to issue the stay-at-home order. Here is her answer. We wanted to make sure that the modeling was actually showing up in our hospitals.

We've seen that now. Throughout the winter, the Ford government railed against the federal government for not getting the vaccine sooner. This is the root cause. We do not have enough vaccines against the federal government for not getting the vaccine sooner. This is the root cause. We do not have enough vaccines from the federal government and it's a joke. Every day we're giving out less vaccines than we have the capacity to administer is a day we lose. We've shown the people of Ontario we have the capacity, we have the infrastructure. And at the end of the day, they've dropped the ball, Major League. I've said this on the show before, and I want to say it again.

A lot of people think there are very valid criticisms of the federal government here. But it was also a surprise to no one that the vaccines weren't coming in big batches until the spring. That fact has been very clear. And when the vaccines did start coming in larger numbers, criticism of the province's rollout, which had been bubbling for some time, seemed to really explode. First, people took aim at the raw numbers. They were furious that the province was averaging about 72,000 vaccines administered each day, when they repeatedly had said they had the capacity to do more and now they had the inventory. But maybe more importantly here, many people were angry

that the province was sticking to a purely age-based strategy instead of one that targeted the people, neighborhoods, and work settings most affected. Just like the debate over paid sick days, again, experts said vulnerable groups were being left behind. For example, in the first week of April, a full 22% of residents in Toronto's wealthy St. Clair and Rosedale area had gotten at least one shot. Compare that to Jane and Finch, one of the lowest income and most diverse areas of Toronto, with one of the city's highest infection rates. By that same week, only 5% of residents in the neighbourhood had been vaccinated. I spoke about this with Dr. Nahid Dasani, a palliative care physician and health justice activist, about two weeks ago. Every death from here on in should be labelled not just a COVID-19

death, but a vaccine- vaccine preventable death. A delayed rollout has had significant consequences on our communities, but on those communities that have been hardest hit by COVID-19. So on April 7th, the same day they announced the stay-at-home order, the government said that all adults 18 and over in high-risk neighborhoods, starting with those in Peel and Toronto, could get a vaccine. We're moving into the next phase of our vaccine distribution strategy. As we speak, mobile vaccination teams are being organized to get vaccines to where they will have the greatest impact. Sounds like everyone who fit that bill could get the shot, right?

Well, not really. You had to be over 50 in a designated neighborhood to book online. People between 18 and 49 in hard-hit areas, the people we so clearly know are getting sick. For the most part, they'd have to try to find a pop-up or mobile clinic with very little information about when those might be coming through their neighborhoods. There were stories of people booking appointments, getting confirmation codes, showing up to their appointment, and being turned away. Stories of hospitals that pre-registered people in hotspots but didn't have vaccines. And then there were the hotspots themselves. A CBC analysis found the province

was sending hotspot vaccines to areas hit less hard than others, including five postal codes that were actually below the province's average. Four of those postal codes happened to be in ridings held by conservative MPPs, including Ontario's Minister for Long-Term Care, Marilee Fullerton. Health Minister Christine Elliott has said the list is solely based on expert medical advice. And another CBC analysis found it was also way harder to find the AstraZeneca vaccine in pharmacies in harder hit neighborhoods because the government has authorized way less pharmacies to give out shots in those areas. And on the topic of AstraZeneca, I just want to mention one thing to be fair here. You've probably heard a lot about vaccines in freezers, and that is in part because there is also a lot of AstraZeneca in

freezers, according to Dr. Isaac Bogosh, who sits on the province's vaccine task force and who is a regular on the show. A national board has recommended the vaccine only be given to people over 55 because of a very rare risk of blood clots. Health Canada, on the other hand, says it's fine for people over 18. And there are now calls for premiers to open it up and let people decide for themselves. Well, on Sunday evening, Ontario said they would open it up to people over 40 starting this week. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection.

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With nearly 5,000 cases a day, ICU stretched with 700 patients, completely overwhelmed and headed for collapse. Doctors and nurses and specialists on the brink. Clearly something has to change. So Doug Ford calls a press conference and announces that projection I mentioned at the top, the cases could rise to as many as 30,000 per day by June, 30,000. So what's his plan? A whole bunch of outdoor spaces will be closed. You can't take your kids to the swings. You can't shoot hoops. Some store capacities will be decreased. Most construction

will continue. Land borders will close. The stay-at-home order will be extended for another two weeks. Leave the house and police will have the power to arbitrarily stop you and ask you where you're going. The fine, a $750 ticket. We need to step up enforcement. We need to focus on those who are deliberately putting others at risk by ignoring the stay-at-home order. But sick pay? Closing down some of the warehouses and other workplaces which we now know are the site of so many outbreaks? Still not on the table. And through it all, Ford and his ministers and staff blame and threaten Ontarians. For our employers and employees, take note.

This is your last warning. The strength of our measures is very important that the people take it as seriously as we do. So strong measures require strong cooperation and strong participation. If you are not willing to comply, then you are breaking the law and there is an option for the police officer to issue a ticket. Well, we have some folks. I took a drive, you know,

just to check out the area down here. You go by the parks and it's like business as usual. I just don't, I don't understand it. I've been up here ringing the alarm bells. And after a year of breaking points, this, well, people really and truly lost it. Scientists and even normally neutral journalists screaming their frustration on Twitter. Pundits on TV calling for the premier to resign. It's catastrophic. In any other circumstance, if we're dealing with a kind of a normal problem, a government that performed as badly as this government performed today should resign or be defeated in the legislature. Conservative and liberal newspapers united in criticism. Parents engaging in quiet civil disobedience and heading out for the teeter-totter. And despair, absolute despair from the doctors and nurses. Toronto ICU physician Shelley Dev sent me an email on Sunday.

She says her hospital feels apocalyptic and that she and her colleagues are stretching themselves quote beyond reason and plausibility. Over the weekend one doctor at Toronto's Mount Sinai Hospital tweeted that he had more pregnant patients in the ICU than on the labour ward. The story has gone international. Canadian doctors are now on CNN ringing the alarm. Talk to me about the distress in your patients and their families right now. There is clearly a difference in this wave compared to what we saw in the earlier waves. So people are younger and they're clearly sicker and we're having a hard time getting them stable enough for them to leave hospital. And as I mentioned at the very

beginning of this episode, Peter Youni, the head of the province's COVID science table, thought about quitting. Yesterday was one of the darkest days in my professional and career and also personally. By Saturday, police forces across the province said they would not enforce the new rules. Some jurisdictions were looking into whether they could ignore the rules about parks. So Doug Ford walked it back. The police powers were tempered. You can take your kids to the park.

You can't play tennis or basketball, though. Which leaves one huge question, and it's not an exaggeration to say it's a life or death one. What now? Well, on Sunday, Prime Minister Trudeau made an announcement, without Ford, about how he would support Ontario. He said that the feds were going to work with cities directly on more rapid testing and hotspots. Federal health workers would be sent to Ontario and the GTA in particular. The army could be used to fly doctors and nurses from other provinces to Ontario. To essential workers and their families, I hear you when you say that you're scared for your health or the health of someone you love. We see you. We're there for you.

You're not in this alone. We will do everything we can to lift the burdens you're carrying and make sure you're not at any further risk at work or anywhere else. It's government's job to protect you. Ford has asked other provinces for help. Alberta said no. Three Atlantic provinces say they've spoken to Trudeau about it and they're considering. And the feds once again offered to send the Red Cross in to help give people vaccines. Doug Ford refused though. He says that what Ontario

needs is more vaccines, not people to administer them. And on Sunday, he was contacting European consulates, trying to source them. And on Sunday, he was contacting European consulates, trying to source them. All right, that is all for today. I want to send a huge shout out to the incredible reporters who helped us with this episode and whose reporting built out huge chunks of it.

Ellen Morrow, Lauren Pelley, James Waddy, Mike Crawley, Valerie Ouellette, and Dexter McMillan. Thanks to Bob Rempel, who is a ton of help sourcing audio. And of course, FrontBurner producers, Allie Janes, Katie Toth, Derek Vanderwyk, and Nick McKay-Blocos. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thank you so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.