Joel Harden MPP / Député, Ottawa Centre

Here are today’s new developments: 

• Canada is rolling out a package of supports to help students, who have been excluded from Canada’s emergency income program. The supports include a Canada Emegency Student Benefit (CESB), and an incentive for students who volunteer in COVID-19 relief efforts
• Canada’s urban Indigenous population say they feel excluded from the federal government’s COVID-19 response. 
  
• More than a third of patients in Canada admitted to hospital and ICUs due to COVID-19 are under the age of 60, a new report finds. Health officials are encouraging younger people not to dismiss the severity of the virus. 
• The Premier is asking the federal government to bring in the military to support five long-term care homes hit hard by COVID-19, though his long-term care minister refused to identify the five homes—we have been asking the government to take immediate action to save lives and stop the spread of the virus in long-term care homes. 

Here are some concerns we are working on, and solutions we’re pushing for:

• We are calling on the Ford government to immediately make in-home testing available to people with disabilities, who the Ontario has made no plan to support. 
• Official opposition MPPs across Ontario are calling on the government to make major changes to long-term care and home care to save lives. The proposal includes:

- Aggressively recruiting home care and long-term care staff

- Mandate that more staff be scheduled on each shift in each long-term care home

- Immediately increase salaries for staff to a minimum of $22/hr in order to retain and attract workers, including Personal Support Workers (PSWs) and Registered Practical Nurses (RPNs)

- Assign each staff member to one facility only, and ensure they have full-time hours, to eliminate the potential for staff to transmit COVID-19 to other facilities, ending all exceptions.