Ontario

Ontario is proposing to further expand pharmacists' scope of practice by adding to the list of minor ailments they can assess, allowing them to administer more vaccines and order some lab tests.

'Pharmacists are not doctors,' OMA says But doctors are pushing back on the scope expansions.

"The bottom line here is that pharmacists are not doctors," said Dr. Dominik Nowak, president of the Ontario Medical Association. "Doctors are trained for years and thousands of hours to diagnose and treat conditions."

So why, years after the Premier promised legal reforms that would deliver “more homes faster” and 1.5 million net new homes by 2030, is the housing shortage even worse? Why are housing starts actually down, year over year? It’s because rather than ending restrictions on midrise housing and slamming the brakes on sprawl and highway schemes that squander construction, Ontario’s changes to land use planning, environmental and transportation laws and policies have done the opposite.

Soon after Premier Doug Ford took office, his government began to dismantle even the modest measures the previous government had taken to promote more efficient housing construction.

Despite calls from housing and environmental experts across the political spectrum — and its own housing task force — to scrap outdated rules such as minimum parking requirements and to permit mid-rise housing on major streets throughout existing residential neighbourhoods, Ford intervened. He personally blocked efforts to legalize even 4-storey “4-plex” apartment buildings.

In recent months, as his government’s failure on housing has become more obvious, Ford has tried to pass the buck by blaming everyone from immigrants to the Bank of Canada. What he glosses over is that the housing market could easily have adapted to population and rate changes, but has instead turned the challenge of high interest rates and the opportunity of a growing population into a housing crisis by willfully sabotaging the solutions.

It’s generally fair to wait for a policy to unfold, to leave some time to judge its effects, before we decide whether it will succeed or fail. The Ford government has done its critics a favour this week, however, with its announced changes to drug policy in Ontario, shutting more than half of the province’s safe consumption sites. The logic adopted by the government and its defenders is that because the province’s overall high rate of opioid deaths has continued, these safe consumption sites are a failure. This is despite the fact that no patient has died of an overdose at these sites precisely because they’ve been monitored and treated.

The bad news for the government, and the good news for its critics, is that if the benchmark for success is "reducing the rate of opioid overdose deaths in Ontario” then nothing announced this week will succeed. That’s not because an emphasis on treatment over harm reduction is itself indefensible. It’s because the scale of the problem that Ontario faces is so far beyond the resources that have so far been committed, and because addiction itself is such a wicked problem for health policy.

For nearly a century, the Beer Store has, in one form or another, operated arguably the best-performing recycling program in the province of Ontario. Its deposit-return system — which sees consumers get refunds of 10 or 20 cents per container returned to the stores — boasts a return rate of nearly 80 per cent overall, and for some specific types of containers, the number is higher still: 89 per cent of glass bottles were returned in 2022, according to the most recent environmental-stewardship report on the Beer Store’s website.

The success of the deposit-return scheme, which has been expanded to include wine bottles and other alcohol-beverage containers, stands in stark contrast to the middling diversion rates achieved by the blue-box program operated by many municipalities. The city of Toronto, for example, achieved an overall diversion rate of just 53.6 per cent in residential collection, and even single-family homes (which perform better than the city’s older apartment buildings) rate only 63.9 per cent. The numbers provincewide aren’t any better overall, and a report from the province’s Resource Productivity and Recovery Authority suggests Ontario’s diversion rates have actually fallen over the past decade.

So the closure of Beer Store locations in small northern communities poses a problem that, at least in some cases, is going to fall on the property-tax bill of local homeowners.

“As a municipality, we now are going to be stuck having to pick up everyone’s empties, and it’s going to impact our landfill space. It’s going to end up in the pile at the front of everyone’s driveway on garbage day,” McPherson says. “We are in the process right now of applying for an environmental assessment for new waste management because the Geraldton landfill is full. This is absolutely the wrong time for us to have excess material going into the landfill.”

Greenstone isn’t alone: Beer Store locations in Nipigon and Cochrane are also reportedly closing in September. In at least some cases, the Beer Store’s former customers will still be able to get beer at an LCBO or a new outlet such as a corner store or gas station — but locals will have nowhere to return empties.

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