More than 3 years since pandemic started, some still take advantage of virtual school

Story by The Canadian Press 


TORONTO — When Cheryl Ambrose readies her granddaughter for the first day of second grade, the pair won't be walking to the bus stop or driving to school together.

Instead, the seven-year-old will mosey over to the front room in their Kitchener, Ont., home and set up for another year in a virtual classroom, as she has since she began junior kindergarten.

While many caregivers welcomed the end ofremote learning with open arms, Ambrose is among those clinging to virtual schooling options. For some, the continued spread of COVID-19 and potential risk of long COVID are motivating factors. Others found their children learn better outside of a traditional classroom.

It was a combination of the two for Ambrose, though the decision was not without compromise. She had enrolled her granddaughter in French immersion for the first grade, but the Waterloo Region District School Board stopped offering the program for remote learners this year due to a lack of demand.

"It's more important for her to be safe and for us to be safe — as safe as possible — than it is for her to continue with French immersion," Ambrose said.

In fact, if the school board stops offering a remote option, Ambrose said she'll start homeschooling her granddaughter rather than sending her back into a physical classroom.

"I never imagined I would be teaching. It's not one of the things that was high on my list of things to do. However, I'm well organized, and we have access to resources, so I would move into homeschooling," said Ambrose, who is partially retired but still manages business operations for her husband's construction company from home.

As it stands, the Waterloo public board said 248 elementary students were learning remotely along with 143 secondary students, compared to 501 and 308 the previous year.

While remote learning is no longer compulsory, many jurisdictions continue to offer it as an option.

In British Columbia, for example, 18 districts offer online schools, as do 16 independent school authorities. Saskatchewan has remote options for kindergarten through Grade 12, while Manitoba offers virtual classes for high schoolers.

In Ontario, each board was given the option of whether to provide remote schooling.

The province's largest, the Toronto District School Board, said roughly 1,250 elementary students and 950 high schoolers were enrolled in virtual learning for the upcoming school year, down from 2,300 and 1,375 the previous year.

While popularity waned significantly as the spread of COVID-19 slowed and enclosed spaces became less frightening for many, the pandemic-induced period of online learning pushed the field forward, said Roopa Reddy, a lecturer in social enterprise at the University of Waterloo with a particular interest in course design.

"There is a big difference between emergency remote teaching and learning that we started to experience a few years ago at the start of the pandemic, and courses that are designed to be online," Reddy said.

Over the last three years, she said, teachers have learned when to employ synchronous -- or simultaneous -- learning and when it's most effective to let students do things at their own pace.

For example, Reddy said, she's found luck creating "mini lecture videos."

"Duration is important," she said. "It's difficult to expect somebody to watch a one-hour or two-hour video of a lecture."

But a five, 10 or 20-minute video is much more approachable for students, Reddy said.

"My approach in general does depend on the context of my students -- things like the size of the class, the subject area, and the goals of the course all matter for those decisions of what makes more sense to be synchronous online, or synchronous in person, or asynchronous," she said. "All of that depends on the context."

Dave Cormier, a digital learning specialist at the University of Windsor, said that context can't be minimized.

"It's easy to forget that there are lots of people who still don't have good connection to the internet," he said.

That's of particular concern for students in remote or rural areas, who he noted stand to benefit the most from remote learning because it gives them access to more specialized courses that may not be offered nearby.

Statistics Canada found in 2021 that 1.2 per cent of households with children did not have access to the internet, and the portion jumped to 4.2 per cent for those in the bottom 25 per cent of income distribution.

"If you come from a family where there's one laptop and there are four kids, you're going to struggle to have the time to be able to do the work," Cormier added.

StatCan said 58.4 per cent of households with internet had fewer than one device per person.

Ambrose said she's acutely aware that not everyone can take the path she's on with her granddaughter's schooling, whether it's because of internet access, technology or even having to work from an office.

"Not everyone is able to take advantage of those opportunities," she said. "We're coming from a very privileged position. I can't emphasize that enough."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 30, 2023.

Nicole Thompson, The Canadian Press

Return of US nuclear weapons to UK would be an escalation, says Russia

TO SAY NOTHING OF NUKES IN BELARUS

Story by Julian Borger and Andrew Roth •The Guardian

Photograph: Chris Radburn/AFP/

The Russian foreign ministry has said Moscow will view any move to return US nuclear weapons to the UK as an escalation and will respond with “countermeasures” for its own security.

The foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova was responding to a report last week about an item in the 2024 US air force budget for building a dormitory at RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk for personnel on a “potential surety mission” – military jargon for nuclear safety and security. It raised the prospect of the return of US nuclear weapons to British soil for the first time in more than 15 years.

“If this step is ever made, we will view it as escalation, as a step toward escalation that turn to UK? Evidence suggests process underwaywould take things to a direction that is quite opposite to addressing the pressing issue of pulling all nuclear weapons out of European countries,” Zakharova said.


Related video: US nukes to return to UK? Evidence suggests process underway (WION)

“In the context of the transition of the United States and Nato to an openly confrontational course of inflicting a ‘strategic defeat’ on Russia, this practice and its development force us to take compensating countermeasures designed to reliably protect the security interests of our country and its allies.”

The US is estimated by the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) to have 100 B61 gravity bombs deployed in Europe and another 100 B61s – the only tactical weapon in its arsenal – in storage in the US. If US nuclear weapons were sent back to Lakenheath, they would almost certainly be a modernised version of the B61.

FAS estimates Russia has 1,816 tactical, or non-strategic, weapons (shorter range and intended for use in battle rather than for the destruction of whole cities). These have been held until now in storage facilities, but Vladimir Putin announced in June that some nuclear warheads would be deployed in Belarus within a month. There has so far been no confirmation by western intelligence that they have been moved.

The warheads are intended for use on Belarus Iskander missile launchers or as bombs to be dropped by Belarusian Su-24 or Su-25 jets. If the transfer is carried out, it would be the first time Moscow has put nuclear weapons in the hands of allies since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Matt Korda, a senior research fellow at the FAS nuclear information project who first spotted the US budget item for a surety dormitory at Lakenheath, said: “While the potential return of US nuclear weapons to UK soil certainly merits scrutiny, it’s a bit rich to see it coming from a government who has spent the past year initiating the exact same thing with Belarus.

“It’s highly unlikely that the Russian government would describe its own nuclear sharing arrangements in Belarus as escalatory or destabilising and yet the parallels between the two situations are clearly visible.”

JON STEWART INTERVIEWS TREASURY SECRETARY JANET YELLEN

Mexico's Sheinbaum favorite to win presidential nomination, polls show

Story by Reuters 

FILE PHOTO: Former Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum holds a rally in Mexico City© Thomson Reuters

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) -Former Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum held a comfortable advantage in the race to be the leftist ruling party's 2024 presidential nominee, according to opinion polls published on Tuesday, the eve of the announcement of the winner.

A telephone survey by newspaper El Financiero, using the same methodology chosen by the National Regeneration Movement (MORENA) to select its candidate, put Sheinbaum at 36% support, followed by former Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard at 25%.

The Sept. 1-2 survey polled 500 Mexican adults and had a margin of error of plus or minus 4.4 percentage points. Sheinbaum's advantage was wider than the seven-point lead she held in an El Financiero poll conducted July 28-29.

A separate face-to-face survey of 800 Mexicans by polling firm Parametria from Aug. 30 to Sept. 3 showed Sheinbaum with 32% support and Ebrard on 21%, a gap one percentage point narrower than a prior survey done through early August.

Six candidates are running in the MORENA race.

The Parametria survey had a margin of error of plus-or-minus 3.5 percentage points, and showed Ebrard was the best-known contender in the presidential contest, recognized by 73% of respondents compared to 67% for Sheinbaum.

MORENA will on Wednesday announce who will be its candidate to succeed President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, based on national polling over the past week that gives a 75% weighting to the question of who is the preferred choice.

The remaining 25% is determined by the public's perception of how contenders score on five questions relating to their honesty, proximity to the people, knowledge of the country, whether they keep their word, and how favorably they are viewed.

Sheinbaum was clearly ahead on all of the supplementary questions except for her knowledge of the country, where the experienced Ebrard narrowly beat her, El Financiero said.

Ebrard has raised concerns about the way in which the poll has been conducted, and did so again on Monday evening.

Sheinbaum, a close ally of Lopez Obrador, has been viewed for months as the one to beat. The popular Lopez Obrador cannot seek a second six-year term because Mexican law prohibits it.

Lopez Obrador's approval ratings of around 60% have been crucial for MORENA, and the Parametria poll showed the party and its allies currently have more than double the combined support of the main opposition alliance for the presidential election.

(Reporting by Dave Graham; editing by Jonathan Oatis and Ed Tobin)

MANITOBA ELECTION

From rapper to reporter to politician: A profile of Manitoba NDP Leader Wab Kinew

Story by The Canadian Press 

NDP Leader Wab Kinew

WINNIPEG — Rap artist. Journalist. Economics student.

Wab Kinew's path as a young man, including several brushes with the law and some convictions, did not appear a likely path to politics.

But as he entered his 30s, he decided political office might be where he could make a difference.

One of the reasons he cites is what happened to the family of his wife, Lisa Monkman, whose mother was on social assistance in the 1980s and was given an opportunity for education and a career. A government program helped the family out of poverty. Monkman would follow up with her own education, go to medical school and become a physician.

"The trajectory of their lives was changed for the better — through their own hard work, first and foremost, but they also had a few public policy interventions that were made at that time and helped," Kinew recalled in an interview.

"That's something that speaks to me — education, economic improvement, people doing it themselves, but maybe a little bit of a nudge on the public policy side."

Kinew was born in Ontario and lived on the Onigaming First Nation as a young boy. His late father was a residential school survivor who endured horrific abuse and passed on to Kinew the importance of Anishinaabe culture and language.

Both Kinew's parents were well educated and wanted the same for him. He spent some of his formative years in a suburban neighbourhood in southern Winnipeg and graduated from a private high school.

Kinew studied economics in university and became a rising star at CBC, where he hosted shows including the national documentary series "8th Fire." He was later hired by the University of Winnipeg as its first director of Indigenous inclusion.

Courted by a few political parties at the provincial and federal level, Kinew opted to run for the Manitoba New Democrats in 2016. The party's then-leader, Greg Selinger, had been one of the teachers in the education program that Monkman's mother had taken, Kinew said in a 2016 social media post.

Kinew was touted as a star candidate and was elected in the NDP stronghold of Fort Rouge in Winnipeg. But evidence of his past wrongdoings had begun to surface.

cbc.ca

Voters from Winnipeg swing ridings have their say on Manitoba's political party leaders

Duration 7:27

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Lyrics from one of his songs in the early 2000s had him bragging about slapping women's genitalia. A Twitter post from 2009 surfaced in which he mused about whether it was possible to get avian flu from "kissing fat chicks."

There were also criminal charges, and questions about how honest he had been about them.

In his 2015 memoir, "The Reason You Walk," Kinew admitted to some of his legal troubles from 2003 and 2004 — convictions related to impaired driving and an assault on a taxi driver — and apologized for his past behaviour. Kinew later received a record suspension, commonly called a pardon, for all his convictions.

But the book painted a tamer picture of the taxi assault than the facts read into the court record, which said Kinew had used racial slurs and had punched the driver in the face.

The book also did not mention two domestic assault charges Kinew had faced in 2003 involving his girlfriend at the time. Those charges were stayed several months later and Kinew has consistently denied that he ever assaulted his former girlfriend.

When he launched his successful bid for NDP leader in 2017, Kinew said he had no more skeletons in his closet. That was four months before the domestic assault charges came to light.

Now in his early 40s, Kinew says he turned his life around years ago and his troubled past is one reason he's running for the premier's office.

"I believe that because I've been able to make good on a second chance at life ... that I have something to contribute in how we can improve things."

As for that economics degree, Kinew says his university days helped shape his political views.

"One of my fundamental political beliefs is that the economic horse pulls the social cart, meaning yep, we've got great ideas on health care and education and community initiatives. But in order for any of those things to happen, the economy has to be strong," he said.

"That's why a balanced-budget approach (and) costing out the commitments that we make, I think are a foundational piece."

That deficit-fighting intent, along with recent campaign promises including a vow to not defund police agencies, may rub some of the more left-leaning NDP activists the wrong way, said Royce Koop, who teaches political studies at the University of Manitoba.

"He's definitely showing a pragmatic streak," Koop said.

"He's going to take positions that he needs to, and he's not going to kind of stick to a certain ideological line."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 5, 2023.

Steve Lambert, The Canadian Press

Manitoba NDP Leader Wab Kinew holds a campaign event – September 5, 2023

CPAC Sep 5, 2023

Manitoba NDP Leader Wab Kinew addresses supporters and takes questions from reporters at an event in Winnipeg as the provincial election campaign gets underway. Voters in the province head to the polls on October 3. They will either re-elect Heather Stefanson's Progressive Conservative Party, or choose a government led by Kinew. The Manitoba Liberal Party under Dougald Lamont is hoping to increase its number of seats in the provincial legislature in order to gain official party status.

UNCUT VIDEO: Manitoba NDP says it will reopen 3 Winnipeg ERs shuttered under current government

 

The Manitoba NDP is promising to reopen emergency rooms that were shuttered at three Winnipeg hospitals if they form government in the upcoming election. That plan will start with building a new ER at the Victoria Hospital to meet the needs of south Winnipeg's growing population, NDP Leader Wab Kinew said at a news conference on Monday. Afterward, the New Democrats would reopen ERs at Seven Oaks General Hospital and Concordia Hospital, Kinew said. "This is a common-sense, smart and incremental program that we are committing to today," he said outside Winnipeg's St. Boniface Hospital. The Opposition party's latest election promise would undo what were controversial efforts that began in 2017 to cut wait times and find inefficiencies in Winnipeg's health-care system, which included closing the three Winnipeg ERs. All three currently operate as 24/7 urgent care centres. Wait times at Winnipeg emergency departments and urgent care centres haven't dropped, however. The median wait for the past year has been 2.5 hours, well above the 1.5 hours that was reported before the first of three emergency departments was closed.

The effort to add young minority hockey players in North America turns its attention to keeping them




ARLINGTON, Va. (AP) — Braeden Montague walked into the Washington Capitals practice facility following a long drive back from a summer trip to Winnipeg. The crowd inside made it worth the trek.

In the building were more than 100 fellow hockey players of color. On the ice were four Black coaches. Montague, who is of Black and Indian heritage, was stunned.

“I’m not the only one,” the 15-year-old recalled thinking.

That was the point.

The Rising Stars Academy in late August was designed to provide minority hockey players with elite on-ice skill development and off-ice training geared toward problem-solving and handling some racist elements in a sport that remains predominantly white. Fifteen years in the making, the program — one of only two of its kind around the NHL — represents the next step for players and their families who have already chosen hockey with the aim of retaining them and showing them a path to playing in high school, college and beyond

“Events like these are exactly what I wanted and craved when I was a kid,” lead instructor Duante’ Abercrombie said. “I feel as though I’m speaking to the next little Duante'. The whole reason for events like this is to open their eyes to see that there’s so much you can accomplish.”

Abercrombie, a member of the Capitals Black Hockey Committee who served as the Toronto Maple Leafs coaching development associate last season, worked with the team's youth hockey program to craft the two-day clinic to teach local players everything from proper nutrition and conflict resolution to college recruitment.

Capitals director of youth hockey Peter Robinson pointed out the sport has several different avenues for players to climb the ladder, many of which are different than baseball, basketball or football. Developing the clinic took time because, first, hockey had to expand in the Washington area, and many families now in various programs are wondering what's next.

“We’ve established providing opportunities and providing entry level opportunities for kids,” Robinson said. “Now that we’ve done that, we built that base of the pyramid, as we like to say ‘the pyramid of participation,’ we can now focus on the kids that are participating and help then go from maybe (recreational) to elite or elite to that top tier, maybe help a kid get from house to travel or travel to tier one or from high school to college.”

That is exactly the experience Braeden's mother, Raveena Seeraj-Montague, wanted for her son and why she was willing to drive 24 hours back from her hometown in Manitoba for it. A goalie and left wing with the surgically repaired knee to show for playing hockey growing up, she told her son it would be a life-changing experience.

Recounting some of the racist incidents she and Braeden has been subjected to, Seeraj-Montague expressed disappointment that her son was having a worse experience in hockey in the D.C. area than she did back in the late 1970s and early 1980s in Canada. The chance to hear stories and advice from Abercrombie, former Navy hockey captain Ralph Featherstone and longtime Fort Dupont Cannons coach and U.S. Hockey Hall of Famer Neal Henderson was worth it.

“Hearing Duante' speak about his experiences, you’re really changing one mind at a time when it comes to parents, players,” she said. “It helped him to understand he is not alone."

Abercrombie recounted receiving a hand-written apology letter from a former high school teammate, who is white. Featherstone described multiple attempts to make teams growing up and being discriminated against for being Black.

Featherstone, who recently retired after 24 years in the Marines, believes that off-ice training is more valuable to kids than the on-ice work because it shows them they're part of a community and how to deal with racism and other challenges.

“Stuff like this where you’re like: ‘Oh, there are other kids that look like me that do this sport. I’m not alone, OK, I’m in the right space’ is invaluable to keeping them in the game,” Featherstone said. “Because if they feel like they’re alone, if they feel like no one that looks like them does the sport, then then we’ll lose them.”

They're not losing Montague, whose mother said he is not getting pushed out of the sport he loves because of racist episodes. But she recognizes there are plenty of other kids around the country who could benefit from a similar program.

Organizers borrowed some ideas from the Pittsburgh Penguins' Willie O'Ree Academy started in 2021 and added some other aspects. Robinson said the Capitals were eager to share their experiences with other NHL teams to grow minority participation in the sport around the U.S.

“With diversity brings a different way to solve complex problems,” Featherstone said. “It’s not just representation. It’s about, hey, we can make this sport better by including folks from different backgrounds that bring a little flair, a little bit something different.”

___

AP NHL: https://apnews.com/hub/NHL

Stephen Whyno, The Associated Press

Far-right network OAN settles 2020 election defamation suit brought by ex-Dominion executive

Story by By Tierney Sneed and Marshall Cohen, CNN •

Far-right TV network One America News and one of its on-air personalities settled a defamation lawsuit brought by a former executive at Dominion Voting Systems, the election technology company that was falsely accused of rigging the 2020 election, according to new court filings.

Dominion’s former top security official Eric Coomer sued OAN and its correspondent Chanel Rion in the wake of the 2020 election, when they repeatedly peddled unfounded claims that he and Dominion were involved in massive election fraud in 2020 by flipping millions of votes from Donald Trump to Joe Biden.

Terms of the out-of-court settlement, which was made public in a court filing, weren’t immediately available. The filing said OAN and Rion “have fully and finally settled the disputes” with Coomer, but did not provide any other details. Court records indicate that the deal was brokered late last week.

A spokesperson and attorney for OAN did not immediately respond to CNN requests for comment. Coomer’s attorney declined to comment.

The new court filing indicates that other figures that Coomer sued — including Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign, Trump’s former lawyer Rudy Giuliani and former Trump campaign lawyer Sidney Powell — haven’t reached a settlement yet and are still active defendants in the case.

By negotiating a deal with Coomer, OAN is resolving one of several pending lawsuits tied to the 2020 presidential election that could lead to dire financial consequences for the small network.

The conspiracy-peddling channel still faces two blockbuster defamation suits from Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic, voting technology companies that OAN falsely claimed had rigged the election against Trump. Those cases are still in the discovery phase, and the litigation is expected to stretch well into next year, barring a settlement.

As a correspondent for OAN, Rion has been at the forefront of the network’s pro-Trump propaganda, and she hosted a special called “Dominion-izing the Vote,” which promoted debunked conspiracies about the 2020 election results.

Coomer’s Colorado-based litigation forced several top Trump allies to sit for depositions about their bogus fraud claims. Publicly released excerpts shed light on how little vetting these Trump allies did before peddling the allegations on social media and on television, including on OAN and Fox News.

In the wake of the 2020 election, Dominion, Smartmatic and Coomer have transformed from relatively unknown figures to prominent players in the effort to seek accountability for Trump’s election lies.

But the sprawling litigation has also revealed some unflattering comments Coomer privately made about Dominion, including a 2019 email where he said “our products suck” and a message he sent weeks before the 2020 election saying the company’s software was “riddled with bugs.”

Dominion famously reached a $787 million settlement with Fox News earlier this year, after it sued the right-wing network over similar election-related lies.

 CNN 

CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M
Lawsuit claims mobile home park managers conspired to fix and inflate lot rental prices

CHICAGO (AP) — A lawsuit seeking class-action status accuses nine mobile home community management companies and a mobile home market data provider of conspiring to fix and inflate lot rental prices at more than 150 locations across the U.S.

The lawsuit filed last week in federal court in Chicago claims the management companies bought up mobile home parks and used “competitively sensitive market data” provided by Grand Rapids, Michigan-based Datacomp Appraisal Systems Inc. to exchange pricing information and conspire to raise rents.

“In the face of these significant manufactured home lot rent increases, some manufactured home residents were not only facing severe financial pressures, but even the threat of eviction,” Gregory Asciolla, an attorney with Chicago-based DiCello Levitt, one of the law firms filing the suit, said in a news release.

“These individuals — whose median annual household income is approximately $35,000 — were overcharged for what was meant to be affordable housing,” DiCello Levitt partner Adam Levitt said. “Manufactured home lot rental prices were blatantly inflated at a staggering rate of 9.1% per year between 2019 and 2021.

Institutional investors led by private equity firms and real estate investment trusts and sometimes funded by pension funds have swooped in to buy mobile home parks.

The purchases have put residents in a bind, since most mobile homes — despite the name — cannot be moved easily or cheaply. Owners are forced to either accept unaffordable rent increases, spend thousands of dollars to move their home, or abandon it and lose tens of thousands of dollars they invested.

Telephone and electronic messages seeking comment were left for Datacomp and its Chicago-based parent company, Equity LifeStyle Properties.

The Associated Press

TYRANNY

Tunisian police arrest two top officials in main opposition party

Story by By Tarek Amara •

Mondher Ounissi, vice president of Ennahda party, speaks during a news conference at the party headquarters in Tunis© Thomson Reuters

By Tarek Amara

TUNIS (Reuters) - The two top officials in Tunisia's main opposition Ennahda party were arrested, the party said on Tuesday, the latest targeting of opponents of President Kais Saied.

The interim head of Ennahda, Mondher Ounissi, was detained by police and minutes afterward so was Abdel Karim Harouni, who was placed this week under house arrest, the party said.

Ounissi's arrest follows the publication of audio recordings on social media this week attributed to Ounissi in which he accused some officials of his party of seeking to control Ennahda and receiving illegal funds.

The Public Prosecution Office on Monday opened an investigation into the recordings. Ounissi said in a video on his Facebook page that the recordings were fabricated.

Harouni heads the Shura Council, the highest-ranking body in Ennahda, which was the biggest political party in the parliament closed by Saied in 2021.

The police this year arrested the party's leader, Rached Ghannouchi, the most prominent critic of Saied, as well as several other party officials.

The government also banned meetings at all Ennahda offices and police closed all party offices, in a move Ennahda said aimed at consolidating a dictatorial regime.

Police this year have detained leading political figures, who accused Saied of carrying out a coup after he closed the elected parliament in 2021 and moved to rule by decree before rewriting the constitution. Saied has described those detained as "terrorists, traitors and criminals".

(Reporting by Tarek Amara; Writing by Tarek Amara and Moaz Abd-Alaziz; editing by Jonathan Oatis, Lincoln Feast and Grant McCool)

CANADA
Public Health Agency looks to revamp national stockpile for a future disaster

Story by Ryan Tumilty •1d
POSTMEDIA

Chief Public Health Officer Dr. Theresa Tam attending a news conference in Ottawa.© Provided by National Post

OTTAWA — With the pandemic largely in the rear-view mirror, Canada’s public health agency is looking to reshape the country’s emergency stockpile in the hopes it will be better prepared for whatever the next calamity to hit the country will be.

The National Emergency Strategic Stockpile (NESS) was created in the 1950s and began as a warehouse for iodine tablets, shelters, tents and the kind of items Canada might need after a nuclear attack. It evolved over time, stocking vaccines and medicines for rare diseases and focusing more on bio-terrorism than a nuclear strike.

When the pandemic hit in 2020, the stockpile was not up to the job, with inadequate supplies for the sudden massive demand for personal protective equipment, an inefficient inventory system and revelations that the government had actually thrown away millions of masks the year before.

Auditor General Karen Hogan criticized Public Health for being caught short when the shortfalls were well known.

Government officials say national stockpile not designed for pandemic: 'We do not focus on PPE'

“As a result of long-standing, unaddressed problems with the systems and practices in place to manage the National Emergency Strategic Stockpile, the Public Health Agency of Canada was not as prepared as it could have been to respond to the surge in provincial and territorial needs brought on by the COVID‑19 pandemic,” Hogan wrote in 2021.

In a recent interview, Dr. Theresa Tam, Canada’s chief public health officer, said with the pandemic now considered over, the agency is aiming to present a new plan for the NESS by next spring.

She said the pandemic drastically increased the size of the stockpile, which had just 170,000 square feet of supplies before COVID-19.

“We went to three million square feet at the height of the pandemic, and now we’re at 1.7 million square feet, which if you want to think about it is 100 hockey rinks,” she said.

Citing security reasons, the agency won’t reveal the locations of the warehouses full of supplies or allow site visits by journalists, but Tam said the facilities now have an electronic inventory system and are better supplied for future crises.

Having a better handle on the inventory was a recommendation made in several audits before the pandemic to prevent waste. Tam said they’re hopeful they are going to be able to do that, but she acknowledged that there will be some waste.

“Decision-makers need to understand there will be some; you want to minimize any kind of wastage, but there will inevitably be some for several reasons,” she said.

Tam said the new stockpile will have a lot more personal protective equipment, but her agency is also working with the provinces to set clearer expectations about what they can reasonably expect.

“We provide a surge to the provinces and territories at their request, but, of course, we’re also expecting them to be prepared in a reasonable manner to most emergencies and that requires a level of dialogue and a common consensus,” she said.

Tam said as they decide what the stockpile will hold, they’re paying closer attention to where items are manufactured. Karen Walton, a director with the NESS, said when something is manufactured in only one country and could be critical in an emergency they want to ensure Canada has a robust supply.

“If it’s concentrated in a certain part of the world, and there’s not many manufacturers, you create potentially a variable approach in terms of how much you potentially need to stockpile to mitigate that.”

Canada was not alone in dealing with problems with its emergency stockpile during the pandemic, with many countries finding their supplies were wasted or inadequate.

During the pandemic, researchers Scott Laing and Ellen Westervelt, writing in the Canadian Medical Association Journal , called on the government to scrap the system and create instead a “prime vendor” system where the government would buy materials and then ship it to hospitals, holding back enough for a stockpile.

“The prime vendor would keep stockpile warehouses full and sell supplies to hospitals, private clinics and long-term care facilities for routine use, thereby keeping stocks fresh and ensuring adequate supply for emergency responses,” the study suggested.

Tam said the new plan for the NESS will examine all options.

Before the pandemic, Canada made virtually no personal protective equipment, buying all of it, mostly from China. The government has since awarded large contracts and grants to companies to make PPE here at home.

Tam said fixing the issue will require a country-wide effort to keep those manufacturers in place so Canada isn’t caught off guard again.

“It demands that the whole health system, and not just the federal government, which doesn’t consume a lot of these things, but the provinces and the territories as well to buy into the concept that domestic supplies are part of the strategy.”

Twitter: RyanTumilty

Email: rtumilty@postmedia.com