Frontline health-care workers paid a second visit to Health Minister Christine Elliott’s Yonge Street constituency office Friday to demand worker and income protections for a profession whose COVID-19 infection rate is nearly 70 per cent higher than in Italy, according to global health data.
The lunch-hour demonstration led by two workers on the frontlines of the coronavirus crisis was part of their provincewide tour known as No Worker Left Behind.
The duo plan to visit Ontario’s 124 MPPs to raise concerns about such things as a lack of protective gear and expansion of the government’s $4 pandemic pay top-up for frontline workers.
Rosie Buote, a health-care worker from Durham, and Sutton-based personal support worker Bruce Lanktree have so far visited the offices of 28 MPPs in the province, including Education Minister and Vaughan-King MPP Stephen Lecce’s King constituency office on May 28, where York Regional Police was called.
“We’ve hit about a quarter of the MPPs in Ontario so far and we’ll talk to anyone that will listen to us,” Buote and Lanktree told NewmarketToday. “We’re bringing the same demands forward to all, asking for basic worker protections, PPE, increases in pandemic pay, a rent freeze, fixing long-term care and making it a public service, as well as a public inquiry into long-term care homes.”
The latest data from Ontario Public Health shows that 5,210 health care workers have been infected with COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic, or 16 per cent of the province’s 31,726 total cases as of June 11.
By contrast, health-care worker COVID-19 infections in hard-hit Italy make up an estimated 11 per cent of the country’s 235,763 cases as of May 26, according to health data.
Meanwhile, a 43.5 per cent jump in coronavirus infection among Ontario’s frontline workers between April 27 and May 5 alone prompted the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) hospital division to sound the alarm on May 6 about the lack of protective gear such as N95 masks that block aerosolized virus particles, and the province’s watered-down safety protocols.
“So many of the frontline health staff who I’ve spoken with are scared, frightened they will be infected at work, and doubly worried they will take the infection home to their families,” CUPE Ontario secretary-treasurer Candace Rennick said.
“They feel abandoned by this government and the province’s medical officer of health who seems immune to the surge in infections among health-care workers. It’s an infection rate that may soon overtake Spain’s happening on his watch,” said Rennick.
For Buote, part of the issue is the quality of the protective gear workers must use.
“I’m given a level-one medical mask, not a level-one surgical mask that would fit your face, for a 12-hour shift, and we are asked to put it in a paper bag while we go on break, and wear it again once we come back from break,” said Buote, who is a member of CUPE Local 63 and 64 Hospital Workers of Durham and CUPE Ontario’s health and safety committee.
“Historically, we’re told those masks would last anywhere from 20 minutes to three hours. Why is it acceptable now to be wearing a level-one mask for a 12-hour shift?” she said. “And we’re at the point that, if we were using an N95, we have to put it in a ziplock bag, put our name, the date, and a check a sticker that says yes or no if it was used for an aerosol generated medical procedure such as intubation.”
N95 masks, which are in short supply due to the global pandemic, provide a higher degree of protection as they filter out 95 per cent of airborne particles.
The Ontario government has urged the health-care sector to conserve its PPE supplies and develop contingency plans to ensure worker safety in the event of shortages.
“It’s shameful, and it’s scary, all we want to do is be able to provide proper care to our most vulnerable people and we really need our decision-makers to stand behind us,” Buote said. “We are putting the N95s in a box and our health-care facilities are storing them in case the government, in the future, is not able to provide more and we need to reuse them.”
The No Worker Left Behind activists say the Ontario government could address the critical shortages of protective gear by overriding its current hospital supply contracts to make purchases outside its supply chain.
“The problem is the government put forward bills to override our collective agreements to redeploy us and change our schedules, so why can’t they override their hospital supply contracts?” Buote said.
Elliott’s office did not directly address a request for comment about overriding its current supply contracts.
But a spokesperson for the health minister said that since March 30, shipments of 16.4 million units of all types of personal protective equipment, including over 6.3 million surgical and procedural masks, have been shipped to over 2,000 health care providers across the province to protect frontline health-care workers, residents and patients.
“Note, this is in addition to PPE that is already in the hospitals’ own stockpile,” a spokesperson for Elliott said.
Aurora resident Braidan Greenlees, who demonstrated at Elliott’s Friday, is an essential worker in the construction trade who said his private company has been able to secure special silica filters for the dust masks worn by workers grinding down concrete.
“But frontline workers in pediatrics aren’t able to get proper PPE?” Greenlees said. “(The government) is willing to override contracts in the name of profit, like with the Beer Store contract override, but as soon as it comes to putting the required PPE gear in the hands of people that need it, it’s something that’s too expensive.”
“Everything in this Conservative government’s line is about profits over people, and they keep talking about regular folks, well, frankly, they’re screwing us over and we’re tired of it,” said Greenlees.
The demonstrators included CUPE Local 905, which represents about 6,000 workers in the paramedic, long-term care, and municipal sectors in York Region, and climate action and protest group Common Ground Coalition, a local pan-partisan group with members from Newmarket and Aurora.
CUPE Local 905 president Katherine Grzejszczak said union leaders have been asking for months for a meeting with Elliott to address the issues, to no avail.
“We’ve been back time and time again to ask for the same things and, unfortunately, we haven’t heard back from this minister. It’s impossible to get a meeting with her to discuss these issues,” Grzejszczak said.
One of the issues about which the visiting labour advocates take issue is the pandemic pay for frontline workers announced by the province April 24, and which ends on Aug. 13.
“Nobody has seen that pay yet,” Buote said, adding that after a second government review of which workers to include, lab technicians that handle COVID swabs and others were still excluded.
“Only a handful of Ontario employers have been paying it out, knowing the government, in trust, said it would pay, but for the most part, almost all have said they’re not giving a cent until they see the money from the government first.”
The government recently signalled the pandemic pay will start flowing to health-care employers beginning June 15, Buote noted.
“So, we’ll see how long it takes to roll out from there, but it looks like it might not be until the end of the pandemic, which sort of defeats the purpose of the pandemic pay because it’s to help us make ends meet during this time,” said Buote.
The No Worker Left Behind tour has so far visited several York Region MPPs, including Thornhill’s Gila Martow, Daisy Wai, who represents Richmond Hill, and Education Minister Lecce.
Today, June 13, Buote and Lanktree, who is also CUPE Local 2730 president, are aboard a “Caravan for Justice” that’s headed to St. Catharines MP Chris Bittle’s office to demand the Trudeau government grant full immigration status to migrant workers after two farm workers recently died of COVID-19 and nearly 500 have so far been infected.
The caravan is led by the Fight for $15 & Fairness campaign, in partnership with the Ontario Federation of Labour, and alliances for migrant workers.
