'I am angry': Alberta farmers will continue fight over world class motorsport resort
The rolling hills leading to the hamlet of Rosebud are dotted with sprawling farms and cattle pastures -- and a sign sporting a simple message: No Race Track.
When news of the first cases of COVID-19 began cropping up in Canada in early 2020, Linda Silas was one of the first to ring alarm bells about the lack of proper personal protective equipment for health workers.
While early indications showed the virus was spread by droplets that settled on surfaces, Silas, president of the Canadian Federation of Nurses, urged health authorities to learn from the SARS outbreak of 2003 and take the highest level of precaution.
Now she knows she was right -- the virus is airborne -- but she is still desperately calling for more protective equipment for nurses two years later.
Regional unions across the country report that nurses who have requested fit-tested respirators still can't get them in some cases, despite the Omicron variant being far more transmissible than previous variants.
The shortage of healthy nurses to address the massive wave of the Omicron variant has meant hospitals and other health institutions have deployed nurses with confirmed cases of COVID-19, and still some are not offered appropriate masks, she said.
"These vulnerable patients might have a COVID positive staff treating them, and without the proper PPE it's plain dangerous," she said.
Canada's chief public health officer, Dr. Theresa Tam, describes the spread of COVID-19 as a cloud of smoke coming from someone's mouth and nose. She and other medical officers have suggested the public use more effective masks to protect themselves.
Silas said often in places such as vaccine clinics, members of the public seem better outfitted with the proper protective equipment than the health workers.
"It's a mishmash, and it's a fight," Silas said in an interview with The Canadian Press. "In long-term care it's a real fight, in community care it's a real fight and in acute care it depends where you work."
Different hospitals seem to be taking different approaches when it comes to providing PPE to nurses, which doesn't make sense, she said, "because the science is the science."
Canada's supply chain is likely to blame, said University of Windsor professor Anne Snowdon, a registered nurse who studies health systems and supply chains.
"The problem has always been the supply chain. The outcome of the limitations of our supply chain is not being able to access those protective products that are so important in terms of reducing the risk of transmission of this virus to our workforce, and also to our patients," Snowdon said in an interview with The Canadian Press.
The scarce supply of PPE may have been more understandable in the early days of the pandemic, but critics like Silas question how Canada could still be in a similar situation in many parts of the health system.
The answer, Snowdon said, is that the infrastructure was so poor to begin with.
"We're building the bridges we're driving over," she said.
In other sectors, like construction, essential workers would not be in the same situation, Silas said, because they would have the right to refuse to work in unsafe conditions.
But health workers can't do the same without the ethical guilt of abandoning patients. It's the same guilt that has nurses working 16 to 24-hour shifts, or taking on large patient loads, she said.
"It's that ethical guilt that presses on the health-care workforce."
In Quebec, unions representing nurses also expressed concern that N95 masks are not automatically given to nurses by their employers. They said this was particularly important as the province has ruled that some nurses who have tested positive for COVID-19 but have no symptoms can go to work to treat patients with the virus.
Julie Bouchard, president of the Federation Interprofessionnelle de la Sante du Quebec, a Quebec union representing nurses and respiratory therapists, said she was worried that N95s were not available to all nurses in Quebec to protect them from the Omicron variant.
"Faced with a much more contagious variant, we stepped up our interventions to remind the government and CNESST (Quebec's workplace safety body) that it was their responsibility to apply the precautionary principle and to implement all the necessary measures, starting with access to the N95 mask, for all caregivers to protect them and their vulnerable patients," she said.
"However, the government is still slow to comply with the CNESST directives, as well as to ensure that the N95s are available in the field."
NDP health spokesman Daniel Blaikie called on the federal government to give nurses a pandemic pay bonus to recognize their key role in fighting the Omicron wave.
The NDP said, though health policy is determined by provinces, "hero pay" for nurses would be possible if the Liberal government wished to bring it in.
It said during the first COVID-19 wave the federal government introduced a fund to help provinces and territories offer a danger bonus to essential workers such as nurses.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Jan. 14, 2022.
The rolling hills leading to the hamlet of Rosebud are dotted with sprawling farms and cattle pastures -- and a sign sporting a simple message: No Race Track.
Dozens of Ontarians are expressing frustration in the province’s health-care system after their family doctors either dropped them as patients or threatened to after they sought urgent care elsewhere.
For decades, North Bay, Ontario's water supply has harboured chemicals associated with liver and developmental issues, cancer and complications with pregnancy. It's far from the only city with that problem.
A man who tried to access Drake’s Bridle Path mansion earlier this week returned to the property Saturday and was apprehended again for allegedly trespassing, Toronto police say.
After weeks of preparation, crews are scheduled to conduct a controlled demolition Sunday evening to break down the largest remaining span of the collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge in Maryland, which came crashing down under the impact of a massive container ship on March 26.
Multiple people at the protest camp torn down at the University of Alberta campus Saturday say police's actions against protesters were "violent" and "disproportionate."
When West Virginia Republicans vote in Tuesday's primary, they will have a hard time finding a major candidate on the ballot in any statewide race who openly acknowledges that U.S. President Joe Biden won the 2020 election.
Thousands more civilians have fled Russia's renewed ground offensive in Ukraine's northeast that has targeted towns and villages with a barrage of artillery and mortar fire, officials said Sunday.
Amazon's paid subscription service provides free delivery for online shopping across Canada except for remote locations, the company said in an email. While customers in Iqaluit qualify for the offer, all other communities in Nunavut are excluded.
A family of fifth generation farmers from Ituna, Sask. are trying to find answers after discovering several strange objects lying on their land.
A Listowel, Ont. man, drafted by the Hamilton Tigercats last week, is also getting looks from the NFL, despite only playing 27 games of football in his life.
The threat of zebra mussels has prompted the federal government to temporarily ban watercraft from a Manitoba lake popular with tourists.
A small Ajax dessert shop that recently received a glowing review from celebrity food critic Keith Lee is being forced to move after a zoning complaint was made following the social media influencer’s visit last month.
The Canada Science and Technology Museum is inviting visitors to explore their poop. A new exhibition opens at the Ottawa museum on Friday called, 'Oh Crap! Rethinking human waste.'
The Regina Police Service says it is the first in Saskatchewan and possibly Canada to implement new technology in its detention facility that will offer real-time monitoring of detainees’ vital health metrics.
Just as she had feared, a restaurant owner from eastern Quebec who visited Montreal had her SUV stolen, but says it was all thanks to the kindness of strangers on the internet — not the police — that she got it back.
The stakes have been set for a bet between Vancouver and Edmonton's mayors on who will win Round 2 of the Stanley Cup playoffs.
A grieving mother is hosting a helmet drive in the hopes of protecting children on Manitoba First Nations from a similar tragedy that killed her daughter.