TORONTO – The Auditor General (AG) slaps down the Government on Education, Long term care and Public Health. CARP, an advocacy group for seniors’ issues is running a full-blown campaign against the Minister (and Ministry) for longterm health care. The Minister for Education’s head is swivelling in every direction as Covid-19 cases compel the shutdown of schools for health reasons. The Chief Public Health Official is relegated to co-chairing – but not leading – the Covid-19 response team. The Minister for Health seems mere window dressing. The government itself is reduced to mendicant status as it begs for more money from Ottawa. To do what exactly?
Earlier this Spring, it commissioned a management consultancy firm, McKinsey, to assess Ontario’s response strategies to the Covid-19 challenge. The Report(s) by the firm is/are not yet available to the public. The Official Opposition in the Legislature is outraged. And well it should be. The McKinsey report(s) cost $4.8 million to produce over a four-week period. That is the equivalent of approximately 5% of the firm’s global income during the pandemic period so far. The public has a right to read its assessment and recommendations.
Two themes were allegedly central to the firm’s studies. First, ascertain a practical strategy for re-opening of schools in academic 2020-21. So far, we know Minister Lecce had to beg/coerce some school boards to devise an implementable plan as late as the end of August, with little success.
Toronto area school boards “planned” school openings; deferred dates; rewrote conditions for attendance over and over; lost student registrations; put together questionable ad-hoc remote learning strategies “on the fly”; forgot about the basic hygiene safety features for in-class-presence – unless and until Minister Lecce made available federal money to them; teachers’ unions called for common sense approaches to “social distancing in classrooms”.
Minister Lecce was laser focused on the whining by radicals in the BLM, LGBTQ2+ and the anti- colonizers movements. Health and education strategies have all but been forgotten. Do you wonder what McKinsey offered as an alternative?
Long Term Care homes were early identified as warehouses for the elderly and as death traps for their patients-residents. Understaffed, unprepared and seemingly indifferent, they are responsible for anywhere from 66% to 82% of all Covid-19 related deaths in the Province (as well as in the country). They receive more than $3 billion in subsidies annually from the government in Ontario.
We are now in the second wave of the virus. The situation has worsened. Vaccines are a distant pipedream. Their efficacy unproven, for now. Dr. Williams, Ontario’s Public Health Officer is now talking about coercing [the most at risk] to be vaccinated first …or else.
If there is someone who can make sense of the direction being followed by government in providing leadership that individual must be working at McKinsey or one of their competitor management consultancy firms.
Political radical activists have attributed the Covid-19 virus with racialized properties; “hot-spots” are now economically “at-risk” communities. Happy are they who are blessed with exemptions, as local economies and businesses face imminent collapse thanks to the apparent nonsensical direction coming from Queen’s Park.
Apparently, as an Italian saying goes, the small businesses from York regions (Vaughan to be more precise), “have a patron saint in paradise”: two Cabinet Ministers in the Legislature. Evidently their voices are a perfect antidote to the spread of the virus… provided you have a business in Vaughan.
So much for Science.
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Chaos reigns at Queen’s Park: Government by Consultants
