FIRST READING: Canada may not have a very good health-care system

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TOP STORY

It’s official: The Canadian health-care system has once again been thrown onto the brink of collapse due to a COVID-19 wave. Ontario has halted non-urgent surgeries, Quebec is delaying thousands of routine medical appointments and some facilities have been closing their doors entirely in the face of critical staff shortages.

One of the more remarkable takeaways from the Omicron wave is how few extra COVID-19 hospitalizations it took to throw the system into crisis …

• As of Thursday, Ontario had 314 COVID-19 patients in ICU as compared to 154 in early December – a difference of just 160.
• In Quebec, the entire province has just 319 ICU beds, which is why provincial officials have been so spooked by COVID-19 ICU cases rising from 58 to 207 in just the last 30 days.
• The most recent data from Health Canada had 4,106 total patients hospitalized across Canada due to COVID-19, including 640 in intensive care. Pre-pandemic data had Canada’s total number of hospital beds at more than 57,000.

Writing in the National Post, Sabrina Maddeaux argued that Omicron is walloping Canada particularly hard because our hospitals “teeter on the edge of a fraying tightrope.” Maddeaux cited OECD data to show that, even in normal times, Canada has fewer hospital beds per person than almost any other developed country.

A recent analysis in Bloomberg noted that the U.S. is currently facing down its own Omicron surges without anything close to the lockdowns being imposed in the likes on Ontario and Quebec. It’s something the authors chalk up to a Canadian health-care system with dramatically lower capacity than its U.S. equivalent. On average, the U.S. has one ICU bed for roughly very 4,100 citizens. In Ontario, that ratio is one to 6,000.

MORE COVID NEWS

Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole has made his first 2022 appearance in the headlines with a plea for unvaccinated Canadians to be “accommodated” through alternative measures such as rapid testing. O’Toole’s wish is already coming true by necessity in health regions across Quebec and Ontario as critically understaffed hospitals back off on vaccine mandates in order to bring more workers back into the fold.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau struck a different tone on the unvaccinated this week, saying that Canadians were “angry” and “frustrated” with fellow citizens winding up in hospital due to their refusal to get a COVID shot.

Cineplex has temporarily laid off 5,000 employees as a direct reaction to theatre closures in both Quebec and Ontario.

Patient groups are warning that Ontario’s decision to delay “non-urgent” surgeries could cause a spike in cancer deaths. “You are being told you have breast cancer and in the same breath you are told, ‘We are really sorry, but your mastectomy is being postponed indefinitely,’” Marie-Louise Doyle, executive director of the Ottawa support group Breast Cancer Action, told the Ottawa Citizen.

CULTURE WARS

Canadians briefly set aside their differences this week to collectively hate a group of about 30 young Quebecers who recorded themselves dancing, drinking and otherwise not being very pandemic-conscious on a five-hour Dec. 30 charter flight to Cancun. Aside from the group openly violating Transport Canada pandemic rules, there’s also the more quotidian concern of whether passengers should be allowed to have an unchecked rowdy party in an airplane cabin at 30,000 feet. “A plane is not a cottage you rent where you can do everything you want,” one aerospace expert told the Montreal Gazette.

A tenured professor at Calgary’s Mount Royal University has been fired after criticizing the Black Lives Matter movement and otherwise alleging that her school had been taken over by “woke” forces. Controversial stances aren’t anything new to Frances Widdowson (one of her books, after all, is titled Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry: The Deception Behind Indigenous Cultural Preservation), but she’s said her dismissal is indicative of a trend towards Canadian universities being much tolerant of unorthodox views. As she said in a 2020 interview, “I guess I’m a case study in how the situation has changed on campus. I was hired by Mount Royal in 2008 because of my views.”

Rex Murphy took issue with the recently circulated video from September showing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau lambasting the unvaccinated as “racists” and “misogynists.”  As he wrote in a column for the National Post, “If the federal government’s COVID response was a model of judicious management, quick response and clear communication, Trudeau might claim some room to stir up animosity and grievance towards resistors or protesters.”

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