Front Burner - Ontario is moving in the wrong direction—why?

Episode Date: May 25, 2020

On Saturday, images of thousands of people at a crowded park in downtown Toronto went viral, infuriating people across Ontario for the flagrant disregard of social distancing. It was a bad look for the city, where the spread of the virus is increasing as Ontario fails to meet testing benchmarks. With some COVID-19 restrictions relaxed in the province, experts say Ontario is moving in the wrong direction. So, what will the Premier Doug Ford do to fix it? CBC’s Ontario Provincial affairs reporter Mike Crawley joins us to explain.

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. Hi, I'm Pia Chattopadhyay. Thousands of people spent a sunny day in downtown Toronto on Saturday, enjoying the weather in large groups, infuriating people across the province. You know, I thought it was a rock concert at the beginning when I went out there.

I was absolutely shocked. That was Ontario Premier Doug Ford, who has been relaxing COVID-19 restrictions in his province at a time when the spread of the virus is increasing and as testing fails to hit benchmarks. Today, Ontario moves in the wrong direction. Why? And what will the Premier do to fix it? CBC's Ontario Provincial Affairs reporter Mike Crawley is with me. This is FrontBurner.

Mike, hi. Hi, Pia. So we need to start with Trinity Bellwoods. This is a park in downtown Toronto. It is very popular. What was the scene like there this past Saturday? Well, it was like something pre-pandemic, if you can imagine those times. Lots of people, lots of young folks mostly, gathered together in, you know, some fairly sizable groups and a lot of intermingling going on. It really took off on social media when people sent out photos of it. I mean, this is a park that, you know, it's not one of Toronto's largest parks, but it's very central.

And so it's going to attract a lot of people on a really nice sunny day, which we haven't had very many of them lately. So yeah, lots of folks hanging around. There's a bit of smoke and pot going on. People sharing drinks, that kind of thing. So it was not the finest example of physical distancing you've ever seen. The city decided to open up all of the parks and not open up all of the bathrooms. So all of us live on the street. And then what happened?

Everyone was coming to pee. My 10-year-old saw three ladies and two men urinating on the wall right here. And a lot of the people who use that park in that general area live in Toronto-sized condos, so they don't at home have a lot of outdoor space of their own to go and enjoy the outdoors. That is another reason this park is so popular. Well, and absolutely, Pia. But, you know, I spent the whole day outside on Saturday, the same day, and actually not that far from Trinity Bellwoods Park. I was down more along the waterfront. I saw lots of people, but they were not intermingling.

There weren't really big groups. There's a lot of opportunity for people to go places. For some reason, on Saturday, Trinity Bellwoods became a really big hipster hangout. People tend to lounge around that park on any nice day. So it wasn't a shock to anyone that people would be out there. But what was a shock, and Premier Doug Ford, Ontario's Premier, called it shocking, was the amount of people and how close many of them were and just the kind of party atmosphere that was going on at Trinity Billboards yesterday. I get it. It's a beautiful day out.

Everyone wants to get out and have a great time. I fully understand. And that's the reason we opened the parks, so people could get out there and enjoy the weather. But the images I saw, we just can't have that right now. It's just too many people, too close. How have other officials responded to the outcry over this? There's been a lot of tutting about it from people like Toronto's Mayor John Tory.

You know, everybody else in the city seemed to figure out the fact that you can be outside. You can do that while keeping your distance. Pictures of Toronto Mayor John Tory in trendy Billwoods circulated online. And in them, the mayor's mask does not appear to be put on properly. The mayor has released a statement in which he says, I want to apologize for my personal behavior yesterday. I visited trendy Billwoods Park to try and determine why things were the way they were. Medical officer of health Eileen Davila, Davila, telling people to observe physical distancing.

And clearly there's this pent-up desire among people to get out and socialize. Toronto's medical officer of health, Dr. Eileen Davila, called the crowding of that park particularly selfish and dangerous, is how she described it. Especially knowing the many sacrifices that have been made by Torontonians for the last several weeks. And I continue to be concerned that we don't want those sacrifices

to have been in vain or to be wasted. I want to take a step back for a second because what happened in that park on the weekend didn't happen in isolation. Premier Ford has been relaxing pandemic restrictions in Ontario and he's released a series of benchmarks that he says Ontario has to meet for those restrictions to keep being loosened. And we need to keep in mind that all of this is dependent on the numbers. The truth is, we can't fully predict where things will go. So what are people in Ontario allowed to do at this point? Because every province is different.

Okay, so the key changes that were introduced last Tuesday after the Victoria Day weekend were that retail stores were open, whereas previously they could only do at the most curbside pickup. Non-essential retail stores could open and customers could go inside. The other major thing that happened on that Tuesday after the long weekend was that non-essential construction could resume. But also a whole bunch of outdoor activities were allowed. So provincial parks have been open now. Dog parks can be open.

There are restrictions on the size of social gatherings. The maximum you can have is five people who are not from the same household. And that's whether it's a private space or a public space. The chief medical officer has been very clear. And the guidance on social gatherings remains the same. Ontario's schools are not open, and the schools are going to continue to stay closed until the rest of the school year, so they're not going to open any earlier than September.

The only daycares that are allowed to run are very small in-home daycares, as well as the emergency daycares that exist for the children of frontline workers. And all of this that has reopened was all contingent, according to the Premier, that Ontario being able to keep the curve down, planking that curve, how is that going in Ontario? Yeah, so the big criteria that Ontario set out around when they would start lifting the restrictions was to see the daily number of new cases head steadily downward for at least two to a four-week period. And that curve started heading down around about the 22nd, 24th of April.

That's when the daily number of cases peaked. And then it started, you know, coming down quite steadily through till about May the 11th, May the 12th. And then very shortly after that May 11th to 12th period, it just seemed to just sort of flatten a little bit. So you're ending up with, you know, 300 or so cases every day in the low 300s. And then the province announced the lifting of the restrictions. And what we've been seeing since May the 11th to 12th, though, is that after that little bit of a few days of plateauing, it's been just going steadily upward and upward and upward. We're now back to basically over the last week having an

average of more than 400 cases a day. And so that means that instead of continuing to go down, it's gone up since that May 11th, May 12th trough. The latest number on Sunday, 460 new cases. There's a couple of interesting key factors here about these cases that make it particularly troubling. Most of the cases are happening out in the community, not in the outbreak settings of long-term care, which was responsible for the majority of the cases in Ontario through April. So that's a concern because it means that it is spreading outside of those congregate care settings. The other one is that the bulk of the cases are in Toronto and the greater Toronto area. Now, people often think that, okay, well,

that's because everybody in Ontario lives in Toronto and the GTA, right? Well, it actually accounts for less than half of Ontario's population, but it's accounting for significantly more than half of the new cases. We're up to, you know, almost 70% of the new cases are happening in Toronto in the GTA. And so it's a concentrated pandemic that's happening, you know, in the Greater Toronto Area, and it involves spreading in the community. And I should say, when we talk about the Greater Toronto Area,

the GTA, Mississauga, which is a city just very close to Toronto, essentially just outside to Toronto, essentially just outside of Toronto. The mayor of Mississauga, Bonnie Crombie, has said, look, it's too early to reopen. This is the tale of two pandemics in Ontario. Unfortunately, we are the outliers, which is why we must take this slow and steady. While I understand the desire to move forward as a province, I truly believe that we need a tailored regional approach for the GTHA. So it's not all politicians saying reopen, reopen. There is some pushback against the

premier in all of this, isn't there? Yeah, and there's also been some pushback around the question of reopening the entire province at the same time, Pia. This is a situation in which Premier Ford is out of step with his counterparts in Quebec and Alberta. Premier Legault and Premier Kenny, who Premier Ford respects quite highly, both of them, they have brought in different phase-outs of their restrictions in different parts of the province. So in Quebec, because the pandemic has been far, far worse in the Montreal area than elsewhere in the province, you saw schools and shops and things reopening outside the Montreal area first.

Another date change for the province. Premier François Legault now says elementary schools in the Montreal region will not reopen until September. We've concluded that the conditions are not met. In Alberta, Premier Kenney kept the restrictions on in Calgary and in Brooks where there have been a number of infections in meat processing plants, whereas the rest of Alberta was allowed to have more freedoms. We are proceeding with the next phases. Hairstyling and barbershops will be permitted to reopen in Calgary and Brooks this upcoming Monday. And I'm hearing from people in lots of different regions who are wondering why the same restrictions need to be put on a place like Thunder Bay that is 1,600 kilometers

away from Toronto that only has, you know, enough cases that you can count them on your fingers and that the restrictions were loosened in the greater Toronto area, which accounts for the bulk of these 460 new cases that you just heard on Sunday. 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. Okay, so the next big question, Mike, is about testing.

Why is Ontario failing to meet its own testing benchmarks? That is a really good question, Pia, and I wish I know the answer. I and my colleagues at Queen's Park have been asking that question pretty much every day for a week since the testing numbers fell off a cliff. Ontario's target is to test 16,000 samples a day. The labs in Ontario actually have the capacity to process up to 20,000 samples per day. But if you look back through May, Ontario was only hitting that 16,000 target basically every other day. And then since Victoria Day long weekend, one week straight didn't hit 16,000. It didn't actually even come

close to 16,000 any day. So at first, the government was blaming the really low numbers, they were down around 5,000, 6,000, 7,000 on the long weekend, saying people didn't show up at the assessment centers on the long weekend. But then that continued. The average for the past week has been a little over 10,000 tests a day. Ontario has failed to meet its daily testing goal for a week straight now. Yesterday, just over 11,300 tests were done, and there's capacity in Ontario for 20,000. The assessment centres, Ontario has over 120 assessment centres. These are places typically outside of hospitals, separate buildings, so you don't need to go into the ER.

You enter and they can do the swabs. But for the longest time, right up until just a little over a week ago, Ontario wouldn't test everybody who showed up with symptoms. You had to fit into a priority category. And this is partly because they didn't have a capacity to test everybody. And so they were rationing the tests and the priorities were test everybody in the long-term care centers, test people who are frontline workers who show up with symptoms. And if you didn't meet those categories, you couldn't get a test. So I heard loads of stories of people feeling really sick and that the doctor even would say to them,

you've probably got COVID-19, I can't test you because you don't fit into these categories. So there's been a bit of hangover of that, I think, of people, you know, not going and showing up at the assessment centers. The province has been changing its testing strategy gradually. Only about a week ago did they open it up to everybody who has symptoms. Gradually, only about a week ago, did they open it up to everybody who has symptoms. They have been testing a bunch of the residents in long-term care and the workers in long-term care, whether or not they had symptoms. And then just this past weekend... Doug Ford is urging anyone who is worried that they might have the virus to go ahead and get tested.

Even if you're not showing symptoms, please go get a test. You will not be turned away. You don't need an appointment. Just show up. Also this weekend, the government has started to test asymptomatic frontline health care workers. So that's going to, you know, increase the testing. You know, Mike, we have been hearing for weeks now that in order to get a handle on this virus, one of the key, key, key, key components is the contact tracing. What do we know about how well Ontario is doing on that front? So Ontario set a goal of being able to trace 90% of the contacts of each new case within a 24-hour period. So the latest figures we heard from the health minister was that they were up to 93% on that.

There is some evidence. Admittedly, it is anecdotal, but it comes from a very credible source. Michael Warner, he's an intensive care unit physician at the Michael Garron Hospital, and he's been saying that he's seeing confirmed cases of COVID-19 in his ICU with the family members saying that they'd never been contacted and that the tracing hadn't been done. I've had personal experience where I've spoken to family members of patients

who have COVID in my ICU two or three days after they've been diagnosed, and they're asking me when public health is going to call them. And then I do the public health education on the telephone with them about how they should be self-isolating. And that's not acceptable. And we spoke with Dr. Michael Gardam, who's an infectious disease specialist and chief of staff at Humber River Hospital here in Toronto. He's very concerned about Ontario's strategy.

The data that people are talking about is that the majority of cases are community spread, and we don't know where they got it from because we haven't done a really thorough job in terms of contact tracing. It's very heavy on sort of human resources to find out who people were in contact with and find out where they were and for how long. We got, I mean, public health units got overwhelmed very quickly with this, especially in the big metropolitan areas. And I don't have insight into why we haven't been able to make that better. I know that public health units were looking at bringing on additional staff to help out with this, etc.,

etc. I know they've scaled back some of the other work that they do to allow them to redistribute resources for COVID-19. But again, kind of like the testing strategy, I don't understand. There are certainly questions about the strength of the tracing system. And, you know, back when the numbers were lower a couple of weeks ago, the public health units weren't hitting that 90% target of tracing the contacts. So it is a concern. And I've heard that from, you know, a wide number of sources. It is a concern, and I've heard that from a wide number of sources. And as those numbers increase, the harder and harder it gets to trace them, especially if lockdown measures are loosened and there are more people that all of those confirmed cases are actually in contact with.

Mike, if I just take this down to brass tacks, you have told me since we've been talking that in Ontario, retail and parks have reopened. We had reportedly thousands of people in a downtown park over the weekend who were not, for the most part or for a large part, socially, physically distancing. And cases are increasing day after day. Ontario is failing on testing and we can't be really sure what's happening with contact tracing.

So why? Why hasn't the Premier, why hasn't Premier Doug Ford slammed on the brakes here? Look, the Premier has leadership responsibilities, clearly. I mean, he's not the person out there, you know, actually managing the testing system, but he has the responsibility as premier to make sure that what he asks for actually gets done. So I know that there are some people who are questioning, you know, why is it that Premier Ford stamps his feet about testing and then you don't actually see things change? I'm disappointed on the chief medical officers in certain regions. I'm not going to name them. They know who they are.

Start picking up your socks and start doing testing. I don't know what the big problem is with them testing. It's frustrating as anything. You know, there probably are some constraints and, you know, we don't know all of the complexities about what's going on within the testing system. The challenge here is, Pia, is knowing to what extent the loosening of the restrictions has contributed towards the spread because, you know, it's been going on for the last couple of weeks, this increase in cases, and that happened before things were loosened. But look ahead in the coming days, and it is certainly possible that you could see a

change. Well, part of it may also be that the Premier himself has been caught up in breaking some of the rules, visiting with his family on Mother's Day and going up to his cottage when he told the rest of Ontarians, please don't go visit your cottage. So there may be a political calculation as well for him at this point. You know, the Premier has had a few missteps. And I think the discovery that he went to his cottage after saying to people, don't go to cottage country, you know, he said he just went up and dealt with a plumbing issue and didn't come in contact with anybody. It was the first time I got off in, I don't know, two months. And it's weighing on me because a couple years ago,

we had burst pipes, made a terrible mess, thousands of dollars of damage. But there was a certain amount of, you know, how fair is that? And then the Mother's Day one was clearly something that struck a nerve with people. Well, and therein lies the question, because something has to change here, because if we carry on the way we are in Ontario, it seems like our case numbers continue to rise, perhaps more than arise, may explode. So which one is it, Mike, a better public health response or a return to lockdown? It could be a combination of both. I mean, when you look at the curve in Ontario with the shape of it, some people are looking at it and thinking, wow, is this the beginning of a second wave?

on the messaging from public health, on a bit of a slip up on physical distancing and realizing that this virus is still spreading out there in the community and we haven't put a lid on it. Mike Crawley, thank you. Good to talk to you. Thank you for helping me understand this. You're welcome, Pia. All right, that's all for today. I'm Pia Chattopadhyay. Thank you for listening to FrontBurner. We'll talk again tomorrow. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.