Toronto’s medical officer of health, Dr. Eileen de Villa, is calling a second consecutive day of record COVID-19 cases a “blunt warning” that must be heeded to stop the spread of the virus.
The province earlier reported 727 new cases for Toronto, but in an update later Tuesday, de Villa boosted that number to 761.
“This figure represents a new high for a second consecutive day in the city,” she said in a release. “Today’s case counts are a blunt warning. COVID-19 continues to spread easily and widely.”
De Villa said research of COVID-19 data in the city shows that 1 in 5 infected people, or 21 per cent, confirmed that they had people visit their home, or went inside someone else’s home, where there were 10 people or less during the period they acquired the infection.
Other findings among infected people in Toronto:
- 21 per cent identified their spouse or partner as the source of illness
- 16 per cent identified a friend as the source of illness
- 16 per cent identified a co-worker as the source of illness.
In total, 35 per cent of cases reporting close contact indicated that their close contact with known cases were only non-household contacts. This underscores guidance to keep contact within your household,” De Villa’s release states.
A psychiatrist hired by the defence is set to continue his testimony today at the trial for the man who killed 10 people in Toronto’s van attack.
Dr. Alexander Westphal says Minassian suffered from a lack of empathy and struggled to understood others his entire life.
Westphal is testifying on behalf of the defence and is expected to say Alek Minassian is not criminally responsible for his actions on April 23, 2018, due to autism spectrum disorder.
Minassian has pleaded not guilty to 10 counts of first-degree murder and 16 of attempted murder.
He has admitted to planning and carrying out the attacks with his state of mind at the time being the sole issue at trial.
Last week, Westphal refused to testify if court didn’t give in to his demands to seal his videotaped interviews with Minassian and play the clips to court in secret.
If buses are parked because of the snow, learning is going to look a little different for some students and staff in the GTA this year.
These changes stem from the new way of learning due to the pandemic.
If an inclement weather day is declared and transportation is cancelled, York Region District School Board and Durham District School Board secondary students attending class in person will move to online learning.
York Catholic District and Dufferin-Peel Catholic District boards have said schools will close and impacted students will be taught remotely.
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For Peel District School Board, in-class instruction will be cancelled for schools, and staff and students will switch to online. Child care programs will remain open.
In Durham, there is no changes for elementary students, they’ll still have to attend school.
Elementary students in the York District School Board will be given learning activities.
The YRDSB and Dufferin-Peel Catholic’s said decisions will be made by 6 a.m. DDSB and York Catholic’s school board have said 7 a.m.
The Toronto District School Board and Toronto Catholic District School Board are in talks about how those days will look when buses are cancelled.
Students currently learning online will operate as business as usual.
The family of a woman who died after an altercation with security guards at Toronto General Hospital last May is demanding accountability after learning new, “gut-wrenching” details about her death.
An Ontario Coroner’s report found that Danielle Stephanie Warriner, 43, died as a result of a brain injury consistent with “restraint asphyxia” after a violent struggle with four guards that was partially captured on surveillance video.
The Coroner’s investigation revealed that a surveillance camera was “purposely turned away” during the altercation.
Warriner died less than a few weeks later.
“Something’s got to happen,” Warriner’s sister, Denise told CityNews. “Some action needs to be taken.”
Warriner, who family refer to as “Stephanie” was in the lobby of the hospital on May 11 when she was approached by a team of four security guards. According to the report, a “verbal exchange” took place between her and a female guard before she is pushed against a wall.
At that point “video footage moves away from the scene” and the next two-and-a-half minutes aren’t captured.
After seeking answers for months, Toronto police allowed Denise to view the security footage of the incident that does exist.
“One of the security guards aggressively and violently grabs my sister and crushes her face first into a concrete wall,” she said. “I don’t know if I’ve ever experienced gut-wrenching horror. In my life, I didn’t understand what those words meant until I saw that video. You can’t help but replay those traumatic images, over and over, in your mind. It haunts me.”
When the security camera returns to its position, the coroner’s report said Stephanie “appears limp” while she’s handcuffed and put in a wheelchair.
They then move into another hallway near some service elevators where she is given CPR and resuscitated after 10 minutes. At that point, she was intubated and transferred to intensive care.
The report determined that “this case fits death due to restraint asphyxia” and she died as a result of a brain injury due to a lack of oxygen.
Warriner did suffer from a pre-existing respiratory condition and had been in the hospital twice in the weeks leading up to the incident. She was also diagnosed as bipolar, had mental health issues and dealt with drug use in the past but her sister said she was seeking help. “I will say she tried really hard,” Denise said. “She was part of different groups. She was committed.”
According to a spokesperson from the University Health Network, two staff members involved with the case are no longer working with UHN. Two others have reportedly faced disciplinary action.
In a statement sent to UHN employees last week, President and CEO Kevin Smith acknowledged the incident saying: “to have this happen while Ms. Warriner was a patient in our hospital is disturbing and distressing to everyone.”
The message refers to Toronto police involvement and said “we will offer to meet with the family to go over what we have learned, the recommendations from the investigations, and the actions we must take in response” when it’s concluded.
“What the video showed me is that there is a culture of this behavior,” Denise said. “This is a culture and even the persons who might not have been directly involved in the attack, there’s a complicity here.”
Denise’s expectation is that criminal charges will be laid and some sort of internal review will take place at UHN.
“I won’t give up,” she said. “I will continue to fight for her and for the rest of us. There needs to be accountability and change.”
Toronto police have not yet responded to a request for additional information.
Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland’s first fall mini-budget finds new funds for families and businesses and scratches a longtime provincial itch over transfer payments as she tries to find a delicate balance between pandemic anxiety and political prudence.
Freeland defended the federal government’s record deficit of more than $381 billion as affordable — given low interest rates — and necessary and accused the former Conservative government of withdrawing stimulus too quickly after the last recession 12 years ago.
“As we have learned from previous recessions, the risk of providing too little support now outweighs that of providing too much,” Freeland said.
“We will not repeat the mistakes of the years following the Great Recession of 2008.”
However Freeland responded to calls for some sense of when the federal largesse will end only by promising what she calls “fiscal guardrails” based on employment numbers, to guide when post-pandemic federal stimulus will start to be phased out.
“These data-driven triggers will tell us when the job of building back from the COVID-19 recession is accomplished, and we can bring one-off stimulus spending to an end,” Freeland said.
Freeland is also using the fall update to respond to calls from numerous political critics and interest groups with funds for parents of young children, aid for hard-hit sectors like tourism and entertainment, and another $1 billion to help provinces with the long-term care homes that have left our oldest citizens tragically vulnerable to COVID-19.
Fully aware that the Liberal government needs support from at least one other party to stay alive she handed the NDP another win by extending the federal interest holiday for student and apprentice loans through to the end of the next fiscal year. The Liberals stopped requiring interest payments earlier this year but that holiday ended Oct. 1.
A week ago the House of Commons unanimously backed a motion from NDP MP Heather McPherson to extend the interest-free period through to the end of next May. Freeland is going even further and eliminating the interest on the federal portion of the Canada Student Loan and Canada Apprenticeship Loan programs for all of 2021-22.
Thus far the NDP has been the only party showing a willingness to negotiate with the government to support it during confidence measures. In September the NDP supported the throne speech after succeeding in getting the Liberals to include paid sick leave and increased pandemic aid to individuals.
Freeland also threw out another olive branch in Ottawa’s often difficult with provincial premiers by promising to answer their years-long call to overhaul the fiscal stabilization fund that sends federal cash to provinces facing serious drops in revenue. The program offers federal aid to provinces that see a drop in non-resource related revenues of more than five per cent compared to the year before, or more than a 50 per cent drop in resource revenues. But the payments have been capped at $60 per person in a province for more than three decades.
The premiers made the program the target of a request to the federal government almost exactly a year ago, issuing a joint statement out of their December meeting in 2019 for the fiscal stabilization fund to be changed. Freeland’s office said at the time she was open to a discussion about it.
The issue has been particularly acute for Alberta Premier Jason Kenney, whose province accessed the program in 2015-16 and 2016-17, during a significant drop in oil prices. The province received $251 million in each of those years. Freeland intends to increase the payments to $170 per person retroactive to 2019-20, and will index the amount in line with economic growth going forward. There will be other changes to the program, including how eligibility is calculated.
Alberta would get more than $700 million under the program if it qualified now.
When the premiers made their call, the expectation was no province would face a serious downturn in 2020. Nobody knew the virus that would cause the COVID-19 pandemic was already starting to spread in China. Alberta alone is projecting a revenue drop of more than 10 per cent now.
President-elect Joe Biden will have an all-female senior communications team at his White House, led by campaign communications director Kate Bedingfield.
Bedingfield will serve as Biden’s White House communications director. Jen Psaki, a longtime Democratic spokeswoman, will be his press secretary.
Biden also plans to name Neera Tanden, the president and CEO of the Center for American Progress, a liberal think-tank , as director of the Office of Management and Budget, according to a person familiar with the transition process granted anonymity to speak freely about internal deliberations.
All three are veterans of the Obama administration. Bedingfield served as communications director for Biden while he was vice-president; Psaki was a White House communications director and a spokesperson at the State Department; and Tanden served as a senior adviser to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and helped craft the Affordable Care Act.
“Communicating directly and truthfully to the American people is one of the most important duties of a President, and this team will be entrusted with the tremendous responsibility of connecting the American people to the White House,” Biden said in a statement.
“These qualified, experienced communicators bring diverse perspectives to their work and a shared commitment to building this country back better,” he added.
Karine Jean Pierre, who was Vice-President-elect Kamala Harris’ chief of staff, will serve as a principal deputy press secretary for the president-elect. She’s another Obama administration alum, having served as a regional political director for the White House office of political affairs.
Pili Tobar, who was communications director for coalitions on Biden’s campaign, will be his deputy White House communications director. She most recently was deputy director for America’s Voice, an immigration reform advocacy group, and was a press staffer for Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.
The transition also announced the appointment of three Biden campaign senior advisers to top communications roles. Ashley Etienne, a former communications director for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, will serve as Harris’ communications director. Symone Sanders, another senior adviser on the Biden campaign, will be Harris’ senior adviser and chief spokesperson.
Elizabeth Alexander, who served as the former vice-president’s press secretary and his communications director while he was a U.S. senator from Delaware, will serve as Jill Biden’s communications director.
The hires reflect Biden’s stated desire to build out a diverse White House team — four of the seven top communications roles will be filled by women of colour, and it’s the first time the entire senior White House communications team has been entirely female.
But they also reflect what’s expected to be a return to a more traditional White House press operation, after President Donald Trump upended the ways in which his administration communicated with the press.
In contrast with the precedent set by administrations past, Trump’s communications team held few press briefings, and those that did occur were often combative affairs riddled with inaccuracies and falsehoods. Trump himself sometimes served as his own press secretary, taking questions from the media, and he often bypassed the White House press corps entirely by dialing into his favourite Fox News shows.
After his campaign went virtual due to the coronavirus pandemic, Biden faced some of his own criticism for not being accessible to reporters. But near the end of the campaign, he answered questions from the press more frequently, and his transition team has held weekly briefings since he was elected president.
The choice of a number of Obama administration veterans — many with deep relationships with the Washington press corps — suggests a return to a more congenial relationship with the press.
Meanwhile at OMB, Tanden would be responsible for preparing Biden’s budget submission and would command several hundred budget analysts, economists and policy advisers with deep knowledge of the inner workings of the government.
Her choice may mollify progressives, who have been putting pressure on Biden to show his commitment to progressive priorities with his early staff appointments. She was chosen over more moderate voices with roots in the party’s anti-deficit wing such as Bruce Reed, who was staff director of President Barack Obama’s 2010 deficit commission, which proposed a set of politically painful recommendations that were never acted upon.
A man is dead following a collision in Mississauga between a motorcycle and a transit bus.
Peel police say the crash occurred in the area of Mavis Road and Novo Star Drive just after 1:30 p.m.
Police say it appears a Mississauga Transit bus was turning left on to Crawford Mill Avenue when the motorcyclist hit the bus.
Paramedics say they transported the man in critical condition to a local hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
A family member confirmed to CityNews the victim is 28-year-old Gilberto Garcia from Mississauga.
The defence’s star witness is set to testify today at the trial of the man who killed 10 people in Toronto’s van attack.
Dr. Alexander Westphal is expected to say Alek Minassian is not criminally responsible for his actions on April 23, 2018, due to autism spectrum disorder.
Minassian has pleaded not guilty to 10 counts of first-degree murder and 16 of attempted murder.
He has admitted to planning and carrying out the attacks with his state of mind at the time being the sole issue at trial.
CityNews reporter Adrian Ghobrial is covering the trial, follow his tweets below:
Last week, Westphal refused to testify if court didn’t give in to his demands to seal his videotaped interviews with Minassian and play the clips to court in secret.
The judge begrudgingly gave in to sealing the videos after the psychiatrist warned they could incite more violence, but will allow journalists to watch the videos.
Testing of asymptomatic students and staff at Thorncliffe Park Public School has led to the discovery of 19 positive cases of COVID-19 at the school.
In a letter to parents on Sunday, Principal Jeff Crane said 433 tests were conducted at the school on a voluntary basis under a Ministry of Education pilot program to test students and staff without symptoms for COVID-19.
Tests were conducted on Thursday and Friday last week and initially found 20 cases, but one has since been revealed as a false positive. A total of 18 students and 1 staff member have tested positive over two days of testing.
The Toronto District School Board tells 680 NEWS that 14 classes have been asked to self-isolate.
Crane said the school will conduct a deep cleaning of the building before school starts Monday morning. Along with other safety protocols including masks and physical distancing, Toronto Public Health has also asked siblings to stay home if one child in the household has symptoms.
“Since COVID-19 continues to spread in the community, finding additional cases in schools from broad testing is not
unexpected at this time,” said Crane.
He added that Toronto Public Health does not believe the school needs to close at this time because compared to the rest of the Thorncliffe Park community, the rate of positivity within the school is significantly lower.
The school now has a total of 21 cases of COVID-19.
A renowned forensic psychiatrist will continue his testimony Friday at the murder trial for the man who killed 10 people when he drove a van down a crowded Toronto sidewalk.
CityNews reporter Adrian Ghobrial is covering the trial, follow his tweets below:
Alek Minassian has pleaded not guilty to 10 counts of first-degree murder and 16 counts of attempted murder.
The defence argues the 28-year-old from Richmond Hill, Ont., should be found not criminally responsible (NCR) for his actions on April 23, 2018 due to autism spectrum disorder (ASD).
Dr. John Bradford said Thursday that Minassian doesn’t show signs of being psychotic and does not meet the “traditional” test to be found not criminally responsible (NCR) for his actions.
However, he said Minassian’s ASD likely led to ritualistic and obsessive behaviour and contributed to his problems with feeling empathy.
“The traditional condition that leads to an NCR finding on the basis of a mental disorder is some psychotic condition, most usually schizophrenia,” he said.
When asked why someone with high-functioning ASD would be considered for a not criminally responsible defence, Dr. Bradford gave two main potential reasons.
Firstly, he cited something called the theory of mind deficit, which affects a person’s ability to perceive the emotional states of others, and their own emotional states. This can lead to a lack of empathy and defects in moral reasoning, he testified.
Secondly, he added, people with ASD can become hyper-focused, exhibiting abnormally narrow interests, becoming fixated on certain issues that can affect their behaviour.
Dr. Bradford admitted he wasn’t an autism expert, but earlier told the court that through his research he’s learned that people living with ASD are rarely violent, saying they are “more likely to be victims than perpetrators (of violence).”
