Tag: Healthcare
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Ontario Bill 175 Should Be Scrapped
Ford’s New Home Care Bill Will Compound the Pandemic Disaster Bill 175 is the new home care law of the Conservative Doug Ford government. It proposes to gut existing home and community care legislation, dismantles public oversight and parcels out currently public home care functions to an array of providers including for-profit companies. Excerpts from The … Keep reading »
Breaking Point in Long-Term Care in Ontario
Violence, the Pandemic, and Healthcare Workers The COVID-19 pandemic has ravaged Ontario’s long-term-care homes. The majority of the province’s pandemic deaths have occurred in these institutions, where conditions became so dire the province was forced to call on the Canadian Armed Forces for desperately needed help. Those soldiers, in turn, observed conditions so appalling that a … Keep reading »
COVID-19 and the Crisis in Long-Term Care in Ontario
The Ontario Health Coalition sent an open letter to Ontario Premier Doug Ford signed by family councils, health professionals, social organizations, cultural organizations, seniors’ and retirees’ groups, health coalitions, legal clinics, and many others who collectively represent more than 1.5 million Ontarians. Almost unbelievably, the Ford government is rushing through their new home and community … Keep reading »
India’s Kerala Is Combating COVID-19 Through Participatory Governance
The effective handling of the COVID-19 pandemic by the left-ruled Indian state of Kerala has garnered widespread attention across the world. For a small state, successful control over the pandemic has to do with its people-centrist policies and participatory governance, in tandem with a collaborative public sector. Keep reading »
COVID Life and the Asset Economy
Following the 2007-08 financial crisis the creation of a less unequal and fairer world appeared to be a major prospect. As is by now all too familiar, after the financial crisis, instead of becoming more progressive, societies turned out to be more unequal, with inequalities and asset-based class divisions becoming more embedded and entrenched, and … Keep reading »
Novel Virus, Old Story: Government Failings Put Healthcare Workers at Risk
An Ontario nurse with COVID-19 is terrified she will infect her young child. A COVID-19 screener in a small urban hospital isn’t provided with personal protective equipment (PPE) as she undertakes nasopharyngeal swabbing of suspected cases. A personal support worker (PSW) in a long-term care (LTC) facility sits in her car in tears before starting … Keep reading »
Bethune’s Socialized Medicine and the Public Health Crisis Today
“…that consumption and the other pulmonary diseases of the workers are conditions necessary to the existence of capital.” — Karl Marx We are at war! The heads of states throughout the globe are posing as chieftains in this quixotic war against an enemy who no one understands. War rooms are being set up to manage … Keep reading »
Food Inequality, Covid-19 and the Community Restaurant
Far from the COVID-19 pandemic bringing us together, it has revealed and exacerbated existing and brutal social inequalities. The UK’s food system was intensely unequal before COVID-19, but the crisis has exacerbated these underlying trends. Looking at the UK’s socio-economic inequalities through the prism of its food – the way it is produced, marketed, prepared … Keep reading »
Don’t Blame the Virus for Capitalism’s Latest Crisis!
Is corona-virus driving Canada into recession? Some people want us to think so. As early as March 27, CBC News referred to “the recession caused by COVID-19.” The Toronto Star picked up the refrain April 9, referring matter-of-factly to “the recession brought on by COVID-19.” The Globe and Mail repeated it on April 13. And … Keep reading »
Choosing Between Life and Capital in Latin America
As in most parts of the world, Latin America is struggling to contain the COVID-19 pandemic with confirmed cases and deaths still escalating. In some countries, notably Brazil and Ecuador, the situation is grim, while in Mexico and Peru the setting remains anxious, and no country is insulated from the threat of a deadly virus … Keep reading »
Following Mexico’s Worker Strikes, the US Steps in to Keep Border Factories Open
In Washington, D.C., President Donald Trump is trying his best to reopen closed meatpacking plants, as packinghouse workers catch the COVID-19 virus and die. In Tijuana, Mexico, where workers are dying in mostly US-owned factories (known as maquiladoras) that produce and export goods to the US, the Baja California state governor, a former California Republican … Keep reading »
Will the Pandemic Set Women Back?
By sapping demand for garments and other goods produced in export-oriented developing and emerging economies, the COVID-19 pandemic poses an acute threat to women workers and progress toward greater gender equality. In addressing the economic fallout of the public-health crisis, policymakers must tailor their response accordingly. In April, the International Labour Organization (ILO) predicted that … Keep reading »