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It's safe to say 2020 did not go as planned. This pandemic has gone on far longer than we could have thought, but with news of vaccines coming early next year, we're beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel. While the end is in sight, we can't let our guard down – it's more important than ever to strictly adhere to public health rules so we can make it out of this second wave safely. My family is already experiencing a real coronavirus wake up call. One of my grandchildren became symptomatic and treated positive for COVID-19 earlier this week. The Medical Officer of Health was right when she said the fastest rising age group is 14 to 17 years of age. So, there will be no playing with the rules for Christmas. We’re all doing our 14 days of isolation in our separate homes. It can happen to anyone, so please review the COVID-19 safety rules and have a quiet ‘Household Only’ holiday. There was so much more we hoped to accomplish this past year, but COVID-19 made sure it was the sole focus. That said, even with this massive obstacle, we still got a lot done. Here's a review of what my team and I were up to in Don Valley North in 2020: Engagement Limits on public gatherings forced us to think creatively about engagement. By now you know how much I value your feedback, so we had to come up with solutions. In the end, despite not being able to gather in-person, I think 2020 was one of our most successful years for engagement! Here are some highlights: Two telephone town halls with MP Han Dong. Over 3000 residents participated, which is something of a record breaker for one Riding/Ward. Weekly virtual issue meetings with special guest throughout September and October on healthy seniors living, development, tenant rights, transportation, and public health. Park pop-ups in the summer to bring the physically distance constituency office to you. Neighbourhood meetings in Brian Village and at Blue Ridge Road on urgent local matters. Hundreds of wellness check phone calls to residents from myself and my team Newsletter, mail drops, a new DVN tenant guide Weekly conference calls with MP Han Dong and all other DVN representatives to coordinate lockdown efforts between governments. Formation of the first DVN Youth Council, now meeting with me virtually each month. Council & Community Mayor's Recovery Task Force John Tory asked me to convene virtual round tables of children and youth service providers as part of the Mayor's recovery roundtable to gauge their needs to get children and youth clients through the pandemic and foster their economic recovery. Transit Even before the pandemic began, I did all I could to champion the order of much needed TTC vehicles to keep our fleet in a decent state of good repair. Initial orders have now been placed for new buses, streetcars and subway cars. Mayor Tory and the City Manager are now working with the other orders of government to expand these orders which will create good recovery employment right here in Ontario. We all understood why it was necessary to temporarily lay off some TTC workers when the city came to a halt during the first lockdown. However, when some work returned and I found myself on a crowded Finch East bus, I fought for the return of laid off TTC operators. Today, they are all back at work but their services are targeted at the busiest routes to help reduce dangerous crowding. Environment The reason I asked to be appointed to the Board of the Toronto Region Conservation Authority is that the new boundaries of Don Valley north mean that one ward is just full of crucial TRCA controlled ravine and river trails. I know many residents want me to advocate for these. Little did I know I would be fighting to preserve our most significant and sensitive wetlands all across Ontario’s Green Belt. Worse still, my fellow board members and I have found ourselves fighting for the TRCA just to maintain its authority over the lands they are charged with, due to new Conservation Act amendments from the Provincial Government. The Bill also allows developers to apply to the Premier for an overriding Ministerial Zoning Order if the Conservation Authority refuses to grant permission to encroach onto environmentally sensitive lands. TCHC I have spent a fair amount of time getting to know the residents of the Sparroways townhouse community. After a spate of tragically violent incidents, active community members told me the trouble started when they began to lose important youth services years ago. I have been able to secure $90,000 in funding for a new community complex and youth space in the Sparroways neighbourhood. TCHC will also contribute and complete this work this year. Bravo to the residents who have worked hard to heal their community. Policing reform and accountability This past year will be remembered, not just for the global pandemic but also for what seemed like the entire globe waking up to the need to policing reform. Tragically, Toronto was triggered by the death of Regis Korchinski-Paquet in the very same week that the world learned of the brutal death at the hands of police of George Floyd. Two very different types of incidents caused communities to mobilize for change. I got very involved in the development of recommendations for the City and for the Toronto Police Services Board to bring about police reform and mental crisis response reform. This is work that I took part in during my time on the Police Board last term. When Council and the Police return in January to confronting anti-black racism in our institutions and to designing a non-police approach to mental health crisis response I’ll be reaching out to you for help. Our fledgling Don Valley North Youth Council has already indicated that they will want lots of opportunity to be key voices on this issue. I’ll be glad to have their real-time input. Thank You I don't want this to be a self-congratulatory piece. The reality is that I couldn't do any of this without your help. The Don Valley North community stepped up like never before and I'm incredibly proud. All of our residents' associations deserve a huge shout out for the incredible work they've done this year to engage and assist their neighbours. The Bayview Village Association, for instance, offered to do grocery shopping for those who are unable to. Many groups held together by holding regular virtual information sessions. So many DVN residents and organizations generously donated to our food banks, North York General Hospital and other essential services. We also worked with the community to resolve contentious development applications in Bayview Village and Consumers Business Park. Thank you to the community leaders and residents who kept right on working virtually to advocate for their neighbourhoods. There is more coming in 2021 but we are all getting better and better and “Zooming” through it. So, while this has been a tough year for all of us, I am left with an overwhelming feeling of optimism and hope. All my best to you and your families this holiday season and for a happy and healthy New Year!

"The neglect, underfunding and overcrowding of Ontario’s long-term-care facilities under the watch of numerous governments over many decades has been tragic. Sadly, the situation has only worsened with the COVID-19 pandemic, which struck residents living in these facilities the hardest, resulting in thousands of needless deaths. Enough is enough, immediate measurable action is required to address this crisis and save the lives of our vulnerable seniors and their caregivers." This is the beginning of a letter writing campaign from the Toronto Star that so many residents of Don Valley North have emailed in this week. The letter, which I share with you here, includes 5 demands for all three levels of government. I completely agree with the hundreds of you who have signed on: this is an issue for every one of us. Let me start by sharing how I believe we got to this terrible place and why the five demands above for urgent Long-Term Care response are critical. There are 626 LTC homes in Ontario. Each municipality is required to run at least one home, so these make up 16% of all LTC homes. Toronto, for instance, owns and operates ten LTC homes that came under management of the new city at amalgamation. Another 27% of LTC homes in Ontario are run by charitable not-for-profit organizations, like the Yee Hong Centre in Scarborough. The remaining 57% are all run by for-profit companies, such as Chartwell, Extendicare, Sienna Living, etc. In 2010, the Ontario government changed the admission criteria for Long-Term Care, requiring new residents to have high or very high physical and cognitive challenges to qualify for admission. New residents now come to Long-Term Care at a later stage in the progression of their diseases, when their health is more likely to be unstable, more complex, and more physically frail. The fatal flaw in that plan, designed to address growing need and shrinking capacity, was inadequately anticipating the impact on staffing needs. If I think back to 1979, when my grandfather was in a long term care home, he was paired with a gentleman of greater mental ability but with mobility issues in a room for two. They filled each other’s gaps with minimal nursing care needed. Throughout Ontario, those same rooms for two are still in use but both inhabitants have very high needs. When you add a highly infectious disease control issue into that environment, it takes constant professional care in that room to guard against risk. Indeed, staffing levels and hours of quality care have shown to be a determining factor in the success of managing outbreaks. The City, for instance, provides a liveable wage to its workers, greater management accountability as a public organization, and has set a policy for more hours of hands-on care, especially for those residents at risk of wandering. The result: homes managed by the City have fared far better than those in private or not-for-profit homes. The aging care infrastructure is also in dire need of an upgrade as the current facility standards have proven to be inadequate to reduce the risk of infection. You can’t wait until each LTC home has an outbreak to bring in additional help. That is too late to prevent death. Since January 1st, 2021, 200 long term care residents and two staff members have died of COVID-19. That does not include those that may have died of the other complications of being in lockdown without adequate physical and mental stimulation. On Tuesday, the Province released new projections that show that up to 2600 more LTC residents could die of COVID-19 in this second wave if we don't take decisive action. This is why I fully support this call to action: The Province must immediately implement constant COVID-19 rapid testing for all LTC residents and staff, in addition to immediate vaccinations in homes, leveraging military healthcare professionals, if necessary. A public tracking systems for vaccinations should be made available on a facility-by-facility basis. The Province must immediately restore the previous LTC home inspection regime that they eliminated last year. There should be mandatory public reporting focused on infections, medical supply, staff availability, and appropriate access to local hospitalization and specialized care. Provincial and municipal inspectors should be deployed to assist this program. The Province and Federal government must provide $100 million in immediate emergency and ongoing funding to hire additional full-time long-term-care staff and raise the wages for all long-term-care workers, as the government of Quebec has recently instituted. The Province must establish an emergency rapid response task force comprised of trained infection-control health-care workers available to act immediately as emergencies are identified. The Province and Federal government must appoint independent federal and provincial ombudsman, respectively, with a national regulatory authority attached to Health Canada, to review all complaints and investigations and to oversee strict new long-term-care standards related to ensuring humane care and residents’ rights, staffing and pay levels, building designs and usage of funds. I should close by speaking to the very shocking projections we heard from the Province on Tuesday and the lockdown measures advised. I share in the confusion and frustration that have been expressed by many, including the front page commentary by Bruce Arthur. In times of crisis such as this, governments must step up to provide clear, consistent, and common-sense rules to address the situation. This must come with a coherent rationale for the rules and a system of enforcement that will be effective. Unfortunately, we have seen none of this from the Province thus far in the second wave of COVID-19. In order to see results, we need clear benchmarks, clear direction on what activities are essential, and a stricter lockdown to save lives. This must also be paired with supports like paid sick leave, a moratorium on evictions, direct supports to businesses and residents, and greater testing and contract tracing. These are all responses that have been described as essential by the Province's own public health experts, but have yet to be enacted by the Provincial government. In the absence of all this, we must follow the advice that Dr. de Villa and Mayor Tory have been giving for the last few months: stay home whenever possible. Only go out for food, exercise, or other essential trips, using your best judgement whenever possible. We are returning to the conditions of March through May. Back then we learned how to grocery shop online, wait in line to enter the drug store, leave family members behind and send in one household member to keep stores less crowded. We checked on one another by phone and by zoom. To support those who lost employment, we donated to food banks and local not-for-profit community agencies. We have to do all of this again but the novelty of it has entirely worn off. I know it will all be harder than when we began last year. We hope you will remember that while my team and I can’t visit you in person, we are here for you and we are still working every day to support the community. Please know that you can call us about anything. If we are not directly responsible, we still want to know what is causing you concern and we’ll quickly direct your concerns to the right place. Remember what we said last March: We Are All In This Together.

What a week. COVID-19 numbers remain high and the lockdown continues. The kids are home. Add to that the Raptors finally winning three in a row and the pageantry of the U.S. presidential inauguration - who would want to sit down and talk about this year’s annual City budget? Why not just keep dealing with the pandemic, control spending on everything else and get to the budget process later? Well for one, there is no ‘everything else’. Municipal governments are responsible for so many direct services affecting our lives that impacts from COVID-19 are visible in every single city department. Secondly, we have no way of knowing exactly when the pandemic will end. In order to continue responding to the crisis and prepare for the full resumption of city activities following the lockdown, we need to keep our finances on track. Even though job Number One is keeping you safe from COVID, as your Councillor, I can’t take a holiday from all of your other needs. Yes, our operating budget has been drafted to deliver something close to last year’s service levels. It responds to COVID-19 as we have been doing, and delivers all of your other services. But there is also a shortfall of $856M, maybe even more, now that we know we will be under lockdown for longer. We’re still far away from approving the final budget numbers, nonetheless I have several unanswered questions on how important City initiatives will be supported. Questions such as: What are we doing to keep needed services afloat while normal revenue is down? What are we doing to meet climate change goals? What are we doing to keep our childcare system viable while children are at home? How can we support our city planners’ work while the province keeps changing the rules? How can we complete our poverty reduction strategy even as the pandemic puts new families at economic risk? What are we investing for the State of Good Repair of our parks, libraries, roads and transit system? What are we investing in youth activities so they can get active and make up for all of the lost opportunities of their lockdown year? How fast can we retrofit our Long-Term Care homes for infection control? These questions won’t all be answered in one mid-pandemic budget. They are a small fraction of the challenges we face on the road ahead. This year, we need to take the right actions to start down that road. I invite you to join me and community members as we discuss those actions and what services matter to you in this budget during our virtual Budget Town Hall (details below).. Both the Federal and Provincial governments were extremely collaborative in filling our budget shortfall in 2020, but we do not yet know if they will come through for us in 2021 and again absorb the detrimental impact the pandemic has had on the City’s finances. If we can’t get help from other governments, the current recommendations call for digging into our capital budget. That means delaying State of Good Repair fixes and other much needed infrastructure renewal projects, and using those dedicated funds to fill the funding hole on the operating side. Every year our city staff presents a 10 year budget forecast for capital projects. The current numbers indicate Toronto’s repair backlog will get progressively worse by 2030: That means worse roads, broken fountains, leaky roofs on libraries and community centres and fewer TTC buses in working condition. Though short-sighted, an inadequate capital funding plan gets adopted by Council anyway. For the past few years, even before we had ever heard of the novel coronavirus, a move began amongst a majority of Council, including Mayor Tory, to reduce the amount of annual new tax dollars we commit to our long term capital program. I disagree with this. The discipline of putting 10% of your property taxes annually to the capital program is very hard to get back if we let it lapse. With this latest funding crisis brought on by COVID, I would submit Toronto is now at a fork in the road ahead that could have easily been anticipated. We must decide how we can continue delivering your services for the long term, solve your problems as they arise, and still maintain our assets for the future. Nominal property tax increases aren’t quite doing it and there isn’t much room to grow there. We need to make a big change in how we capture enough revenue to sustain the city. Asking Ottawa and Queen's Park for an emergency cash infusion will soon be impossible as those governments deal with their own pandemic-related debts. Maybe we should be asking them for permission instead of cash. Collecting an additional penny on the HST dedicated for municipalities, for example, would give us pretty much exactly the projected budget shortfall of $856 million, but that amount would arrive annually in the city’s coffers. Imagine having that much to invest in how you move around Toronto every year. I would love to have you join me for the virtual town hall next week so I can paint a new financial picture, one that provides the city you need and want, but is way more fair and equitable when the time comes to pay the bill. Your City Services in 2021: Virtual Budget Town Hall Wednesday, January 27th at 6:30pm REGISTER HERE Join Councillor Carroll and City Staff to discuss how the 2021 City Budget impacts the City Services you rely upon.

When local activism around police reform and defunding intensified following the death of George Floyd in the U.S. and Regis Korchinski-Paquet here in Toronto, the protests had a particular focus on how law enforcement responds to individuals in mental health crises. This week, we had our first look at how policing can change for the better. At the Mayor’s Executive Committee meeting this week, City staff gave us a first look at a detailed proposal to redirect mental health crisis response outside of traditional policing. The recommendations call for a pilot project to hone this new approach over the next three years. You will get an opportunity to weigh in on the plan before the pilot is finalized, and the next step is a city-wide consultation. Let me give you a quick rundown on the details of the Community Crisis Support Service Pilot. I am not going to walk through all of the recommendations since the main points are probably all that matters at this point. The pilot will be based within Scarborough, Etobicoke and the downtown core, three areas of the city with the highest incidence of calls regarding persons in crisis. A group of expert agencies under contract with the City will deliver care, deploying mental health professionals, not police, as first responders. So, if you call 911 for a person or loved one in crisis, and there is no immediate risk like a weapon, you will be given the option to send in a Community Crisis Support Service unit rather than a uniformed police officer. If you are uneasy about calling 911 - and many BIPOC and their families are for legitimate reasons - you can choose to contact the crisis support service directly by calling 211. Torontonians’ concern over police responding to these types of calls dates back many years - at least as far back as the shooting of Edmond Wai-Hong Yu by police on a streetcar in 1997. The following recommendation was made during an inquest into that incident: The recommendation was based on the rationale that such training was an “integral part” of police training and was given to ensure Crisis Resolution training should never be discontinued. I can confirm that this training is still happening. In 2017 while sitting on the Toronto Police Service Board, I took Crisis Resolution training, which now extends to three days and includes a BIPOC citizen-led anti-Black racism unit. The program utilizes case examples and experiential life re-enactments to teach and evaluate de-escalation. I must also report the training culminates on the third day with a couple of hours of target practice on the shooting range. For this new pilot, City staff worked with various mental health support agencies to develop a new way to support individuals and their families for wellness checks and certain types of mental health crisis. The proposal was approved by the Executive Committee and will now go for final approval at Council next week. During Wednesday's Executive Committee’s meeting, many public deputants made the same point: the pilot will only make people in crisis safer if it’s fully embraced. A person in crisis doesn’t always state, ‘I’m having a mental health crisis’, so the need for mental health support presents itself in domestic violence, drug abuse, addiction crisis and homelessness nuisance calls. A police officer is probably not who 911 should send in these cases, but the whole emergency dispatch is managed by the Toronto Police Service. In the U.S. and throughout the UK, 911 services are centrally managed by the municipality rather than directly by police. Study after study shows the move does nothing to worsen safety, instead it makes emergency response more responsive and adaptable, resulting in better methods and proven results. Toronto should be looking at this right now and consider moving the management of 911 over to the City. I worry three years is a long time for a city anxiously awaiting change. Even if this pilot is successful, and we see a revolution in crisis response, there will need to be trust between the new support units and the police service, and easy collaboration between the two. We can look at Eugene, Oregon, where a method of response called CAHOOTS has functioned well for three decades. CAHOOTS stands for Crisis Assistance Helping Out On the Streets. Eugene is a city of only 375,000 but it was rapidly urbanized due to population growth all along the west coast since the 2008 global financial crisis. Eugene ranks among the highest in both homelessness and drug abuse in America on a per capita basis, conditions common to Toronto. In 2019, 24,000 calls were made to Eugene's 911 system and direct requests to CAHOOTS. Of those calls, police were summoned for back up in only 311 cases. A third party study indicated the city saved between $8.5 and $12 million in annual policing costs. These are dollars that are invested into supportive housing as well as drug prevention and harm reduction programs and other community benefits. Thorough public consultation on the Community Crisis Support Service pilot is the next step. It will be crucial to hear from people who have lived through a mental health crisis that involved calling 911, and involved police response. It will be important for all of us to accept at the outset that these experiences are very different for members of the BIPOC community. As the public has urged, we need to make special efforts to hear directly from the BIPOC community, and in particular the Indigenous community, from families with lived experience of personal crisis. Consultations should include directly reaching out to these unique communities rather than just posting a meeting notice or asking the agencies we’ve already heard from to send their clients. If you want to take part in the consultation and refinement of this new concept for Community Crisis Support Service in Toronto, I would love to chat with you. My team and I will be happy to ensure you are notified of every opportunity to be involved. It takes courage to come forward, and I will support you in any way that I can.

It’s been awhile since I focused primarily about COVID-19 in my weekly Thursday updates. As the pandemic persists, all of us feel the impacts more personally. Whenever I have written about COVID, I've included some of my personal lockdown experiences, as well as what I’ve heard from many of you. My family has been extremely careful, especially since mid-December. There is nothing like a case of COVID-19 in your family to make everyone extremely compliant. My grandson fought off his symptoms in one week, but his virus made all of us knuckle down. No one else in the family tested positive thankfully, but we had to spend our first Christmas ever away from our first born daughter and grandkids. I’m sure many of you faced similar unwelcome situations with your families. Whenever I listen to the daily COVID updates by our governments, it is these personal experiences that start to make me view the actions announced with a more critical eye. It’s natural after all this time, even while ‘we are still all In this together’, to have strong opinions on the progress made in stopping the virus. Premier Ford’s announcement this week that we will soon embark upon another phased re-opening brings such opinions back to the surface. The whole experience brought something into keen focus for me: when a child gets infected with COVID, Mom or Dad also has to quarantine for 14 days - and there is no sick pay for that. Only one person in the household needs to be sick for everyone to need to isolate. In a two parent household, both incomes could vanish for an entire pay period. Sick pay must be addressed if we face another wave of high infections rates before we are all vaccinated. I have advocated that we learn from our pandemic vulnerability and bring back the kind of paid sick leave in the working world that was available during my young adult life in the '70s and '80s. With schools set to re-open and multiple known COVID variants present in the community, however, we are at risk of families, who need to work to put food on the table, keeping positive cases secret. This is how community spread happens and employers - who want a normal economy back - should know by now that facilitating proper disclosure and quarantining with paid sick leave is the fastest route back to normal. Very little has been heard from either Federal or Provincial governments on this situation even though the legislative role they could play is clear. The phased re-opening of businesses is also on the way. While we have an idea on the plan based on what has been announced, there are so many moving parts it may be obsolete by the time you read this. For the most up-to-date information, always consult the province’s COVID web portal. I know that businesses and their employees are suffering, so I support swift action if we see cases continue to climb, especially concerning new COVID variants. There is no longer any space for hesitation in this respect. There is little doubt, for example, Ontario reached the frightening pace of over 4,000 new cases a day in January, precisely because the Provincial government hesitated to lockdown until the last Christmas present was purchased on Christmas Eve. To get through any future restrictions, we will need to see more support for local and small businesses, and an actual moratorium on residential evictions. As Peel Region Medical Officer of Health Lawrence Loh warned yesterday, a re-opening plan, if implemented too quickly, could drive up infections and lead to a third wave of COVID. Lawrence Loh, Medical Officer of Health, Peel Region It seems wrong to have to say, once again, that it is up to you and your family to keep yourselves safe. But that really is the case. You have to fight all of these new COVID variants by following the same rules that apply whether at school, in a store or a restaurant, or even at home when a member of the family is infected. Wash your hands, wear your mask, touch as little as possible and keep two metres apart. Last week, City Council extended the mask by-law until June and also approved more rigorous outreach to reach people in apartment and condo buildings, where proximity and shared spaces remain a sticky problem. Toronto’s Medical Officer of Health, Eileen de Villa, put it very succinctly: "We have to wait for our opportunity to receive the vaccine, mindfully," said de Villa. "Waiting for a vaccine won’t stop community spread. Being mindful of how we avoid the spread of COVID 19 does.” Eileen de Villa, Medical Officer of Health, City of Toronto While the vaccine supply is prepared, Dr. de Villa is setting up vaccine locations across the city. I was disappointed to see some of Don Valley North’s most transit-dependent neighbourhoods, full of frontline and essential workers, are far from the proposed vaccine clinics. As we await supply, I advocate for the City to prepare plans to make vaccines readily available in these neighbourhoods as soon as possible. I know we all need a break from virtual schooling, video fitness workouts and constantly working from home. As we head towards a much needed Family Day long weekend, one which can also include Valentine’s Day and Year of the Ox celebrations, please be careful. Here’s a small and special idea. Gather your household under a warm blanket and watch a movie together. I recommend the lovely Pixar movie SOUL. Let me know how you plan to spend the weekend. Let’s stay safe everyone.

We started the first Toronto City Council session of 2021 on Tuesday. The first meeting of the new year always has a cramped agenda since there is inevitably a list of items to bring forward from the previous year, which couldn’t be completed prior to the Christmas break. Having to hold meetings virtually due to the pandemic frustrates this work further. We all strive to get the work out the door before the annual special Council session to approve the budget, which this year is scheduled for Feb. 18th. This Council meeting is scheduled to continue on Friday. Here’s what’s unfolded so far: Community Crisis Support Service Pilot As I reported last week, staff have worked flat out since July to develop a pilot program to change who responds to certain emergency calls regarding persons in crisis. I’ve been very involved in this one. I was a member of the Toronto Police Services Board during the struggle to end the practice of racial profiling in policing through carding. During that time the board received inquiries into the deaths of Sammy Yatim and Andrew Loku, both shot fatally by police. While on the Board I pushed for change within the police service, but it was a tough slog. At the time, Council was not unanimously focused on our attempts at change, and only a small segment of the community was vocal about the need for police reforms. Now we all see the urgent need for change. This week I worked with Mayor Tory, who still sits on the police board, to craft a motion further enhancing the Community Crisis Support Services pilot, that goes further to improve the role of 911 dispatch in response to persons in crisis. The motion passed unanimously: I only wish that it hadn’t taken more tragic deaths of people in mental health crisis - and the murder of George Floyd recorded on video - for our whole community to begin this change. Basement Flooding Claims The City Ombudsman examined Toronto residents’ experience filing third-party claims against the City in the event of a basement flood. We haven’t had mass flooding in Don Valley North for nearly 16 years, but it does happen sporadically throughout the city annually. I always feel pain for residents anywhere in the city who have to deal with damage to their homes caused by basement flooding. The Ombudsman took us to task for one flaw in our claims procedure in particular that shocked me. All of the councillors whose communities were impacted back in 2005, myself included, were very frustrated to learn from Ombudsman Susan Opler’s investigation that the City doesn’t have a set protocol for residents to know what to do in the event of basement flooding. There is also very little available info on how to proceed with a claim against the city, and on what basis. Council has adopted the Ombudsman’s recommendations to rectify this. We need to work to inform all homeowners to report basement floods immediately through 311 in case they plan on filing a claim. All claims information must include the key note, which is that the City will only pay out claims where city negligence can be proven. Legislation works to indemnify municipalities from infrastructure failure in most scenarios. My colleague Councillor Frances Nunziata moved that staff look into the feasibility of introducing a No Fault Grant Program, similar to the past North York system for flooding, covering homes deemed uninsurable. I will keep you posted on this as it comes forward. We do have homes in this situation in Don Valley North. More Developer Friendly Provincial Policy At Council we received an update on changes to our Development Charge rules. These were designed to mitigate a disastrous piece of provincial policy which came into effect last January. Development charges are designed to pay for infrastructure upgrades, water service, road reconstruction, made necessary by development. The City used to collect them at the point construction of the project goes above ground, to ensure the most up to date rate is applied, in order to match the cost for infrastructure upgrades. The provincial government changed this rule, and now the charge is collected based on the DC rate at the time of the planning approval. That sounds like a minor change, but consider that over 46,000 units of housing were approved prior to the November 2020 development charge rate increase. The difference between collecting the charges based on the pre-Nov. 20 rate and later when the building is under construction is estimated at $200 million - as referenced in the staff report - to the city for crucial city infrastructure needs. This might explain why we are so currently inundated with applications in Don Valley North. Few of those condo projects are likely to proceed until long after the post-pandemic economic recovery. Getting approval now potentially saves developers thousands of dollars in development charges, which are assessed per housing unit. At the end of the day, however, it is not uncommon for developers to delay construction for as much as five years. City staff have instituted an interim policy which collects interest on development charges based on certain conditions to mitigate the loss of the new provincial rule. Where affordable and seniors’ housing are concerned, we will use the new rules to advantage the development cost. I'll follow up with more detail when the City of Toronto’s Development Charge bylaw is up for review next year. By then our city planners and solicitors hope to develop a new charge scheme that is more city-friendly and requires the profitable development sector to pay its fair share. YongeTOmorrow Council endorsed a future plan for Yonge Street, south of Bloor. A hundred-year-old water main will need to be replaced, and the road reconstructed. As per our policy, when such a large project disrupts a key street, we look to coordinate capital works and update the road’s design. As is the case for a road as important as Yonge, a full Class Environmental Assessment was completed and staff have brought it to us for endorsement at the point of 30% design completion. Costs and the final design will be finalized next year through consultation with local residents and businesses. The plan reminds me of many innovative approaches I’ve seen in Europe and in particular, The Hague. I took a transportation planning workshop there that showed us how the main tourist drag is flexibly designed to be car-less at times, while also allowing fleets of limousines and media trucks when world leaders descend on the ‘City of Peace and Justice’, most famously known for housing the International Court of Justice and other major global judicial bodies: When the plan is fully costed it will return to Council, but I want to share with you the words of Cameron Bailey, artistic director of the Toronto International Film Festival, who grew up right here in Don Valley North. I read them aloud to Council naysayers: Cameron Bailey, artistic director and co-head, Toronto International Film Festival

There are some important topics to discuss this week: the budget adopted by Toronto Council today and two important TTC commission debates from the February board meeting. Budget Wrap Up It’s a wrap on the 2021 budget, and I have already written extensively about it. I also held a virtual Town Hall, taking a deep dive into what services property taxes support. To recap, this budget is very much status quo for a year that will be anything but. Every city department will absorb its own inflationary impacts while other governments partner with us to shoulder the costs of COVID-19. We will see no meaningful improvements in libraries, parks, roads, child care and other city building programs. Our plans to address the many inequities that COVID has laid bare - inequities which existed long before the pandemic - are nowhere near robust enough. While we like to employ terms like Build Back Better to describe what a post-COVID recovery will look like, we have no common understanding of the phrase’s meaning. I moved a motion at Thursday’s special Council budget meeting to update our Long-Term Financial Direction to review revenue options and adjust for a post-pandemic world. I worked together with the Mayor and his staff on this motion, which received overwhelming support at Council. As vaccines roll out and we hopefully recover from this health and financial crisis, we will have a community conversation on how to build the Toronto our kids and grandkids need to recover from the impacts of COVID-19. While your property tax rates remain the same from the Budget Launch, I did move motions to enhance certain line items: The ravine maintenance program, on which I worked with Councillor McKelvie Library programs assisting seniors, such as the Community Librarian program and Digital Literacy Pleasant View Library upgrades that will finally apply a participatory budgeting project voted on a few years back along with an expansion proposed by our City Librarian TTC capital funding requests to the Federal Government To find the money for these important initiatives, I applied funding sources which do not change the property tax formula. My fellow councillors chose to support all of the motions. After much consideration, I voted Yes on the final budget and property tax rate, even though I have many concerns, as I’ve listed above. By next year’s budget council meeting, we will have had a more mature discussion on how we invest in our city. The Long Term Financial Direction report I have ordered, again with the Mayor’s support, has the potential to lead us to a more fair approach to city revenues, which could lead us to the Toronto that so many desperately need, and I believe everyone truly wants. Future of Scarborough Transit There are two important matters from February’s TTC board meeting to discuss, which greatly effect Don Valley North’s transit future. Let’s start with the report that got the most attention in the news: the need to decommission the Scarborough RT seven years before the subway replacement is ready. I take no pleasure from this. The pleas from passionate transit-riding residents, and there were many, about the difficulties of life without the RT were heartbreaking. These are people who had no say in the political manoeuvring which caused this situation. When then Mayor Rob Ford cancelled the above-ground, entirely off-road and shovel-ready Scarborough LRT in favour of a subway extension a decade ago, he was fully aware the move would come at the cost of years in delays. Staff was clear the obsolete SRT was on its last legs; switching to a subway would take a decade just to plan, and many years more to construct. Scarborough transit riders were never consulted on the cancellation. There were a couple of bright spots in community members’ deputations at last week’s meeting. They made suggestions to improve staff’s proposed replacement bus network to get through the years without the RT that could make getting to Centennial College’s Progress Campus and UTSC easier from all over the city. One deputant, Jamaal Myers of the Scarborough Business Association, questioned why Scarborough organizations can’t repurpose some of the land for community uses once the RT stations are decommissioned in 2023. Jamaal Myers, director Scarborough Business Association I can’t thank Jamaal enough for putting this idea before the Commission. Normally, this sort of additional concern doesn't occur to us at Council until it is too late and any surplus land has already been handed over to CreateTO, the City’s real estate corporation. It will be important to keep an open mind. I moved a motion at the meeting to consult Scarborough residents on possible community uses for these lands and get a staff report so that the residents can explore the idea, informed by fact-based cost estimates. What would you do with this space? There was also a request from the community that could cause some more political manoeuvring on Scarborough transit. Residents asked us to look into the possibility of developing a Bus Rapid Transit route to run along the RT route. We agreed to have staff report back on it. Once the new Scarborough subway extension is running a short distance east of the RT line along McCowan Road, it will need generous ridership numbers to make it viable. As a point of comparison, Line 4 Sheppard carried 52,600 riders a day before the pandemic according to the TTC. After nearly 20 years in operation, the subway line is finally transporting enough people to no longer be considered a white elephant. The second major item of interest to Don Valley North was an item on Metrolinx transit expansion plans. This report includes no mention of our Sheppard East extension. I have moved items at Council, met with MPPs and stakeholders, and pressed on staff at Metrolinx, TTC, and the City's Transit Expansion Office. Yet, the Provincial government, for all of its talk of transit expansion, is ragging the puck on a project that was supposed to be under construction next year. I am going to continue to fight for transit options to come to Sheppard East faster than 2030. There is too much development that was approved on the basis of a transit line along this corridor for us to lose another decade. How long will residents have to wait before the Sheppard Subway extension is completed? At my request, the TTC will bring a report back to our community on options that could tide us over until the subway (hopefully, eventually) comes in 2040-ish. I'm looking forward to having that community conversation with you.

To paraphrase a recent headline from the Toronto Star , we are all on The Road to Vaccination. What is frustrating for some, even scary, is your municipality, depending where you live, might be at a different point on this metaphorical road. Suffice it to say, Toronto’s vaccination program is in its infancy. All the kinks are getting worked out of the system as those eligible for vaccination - currently a limited group which includes seniors 80 and over living in Long-Term Care and their caregivers - try to find their way through it. I’m sure you’ve heard accounts and frustrations of individuals trying to secure a vaccination for their loved ones: clogged voice mail boxes too full to leave messages; websites missing key details such as how to schedule an appointment; emails urgently sent which receive no response. It was especially frustrating in Toronto this week as the news media shared story after story about vaccination sites already set up in other parts of the province. I know that it doesn’t feel good to turn on the TV, as we did Wednesday afternoon, to discover one hospital had an oversupply of doses. The hospital had nearby family doctors’ offices randomly call in their most senior patients to take the extra doses rather than have them expire. These accounts seem to indicate there are different rules for different municipalities. What looks like inequitable distribution, however, all boils down to the available supply of vaccine doses; different hospitals work through their Phase One supplies faster than others. As Eileen de Villa, Toronto’s Medical Officer of Health, noted this week, the reduction of virus spread in long-term care and retirement homes demonstrates why prioritizing vaccines for people who are most vulnerable to COVID-19 is an effective course of action while the supply ramps up. “We have a lot of people to vaccinate,” said de Villa this week. “The partnership in Toronto health care means we are able to deliver vaccines across the city as they become available. The sooner we have needles in arms – and the more needles in arms we have – the better off we all are.” The most important thing to note is Toronto is following the Three Phase distribution program announced by the Ontario government to prioritize the available supply of vaccines. Each phase lays out who is eligible, and when, to begin receiving their jabs. In the early phases, the goal of the program, as Dr. de Villa noted, is to vaccinate the most vulnerable members of the public Current Ontario vaccine distribution strategy phases Prioritizing groups for the order of vaccinations was a massively collaborative exercise, I’m told. If you look closely at the first phase, you’ll realize it boils down to those at highest risk of death due to living in congregated settings. Toronto’s challenge is size and scope. Those Torontonians eligible for Phase One make up a population group larger than that of entire municipalities in the rest of the Province. It will take another couple of weeks for Toronto to leave Phase One. When Toronto Public Health moves to vaccinating Phase Two - when seniors 79 and under, first responders and other groups are eligible - I am confident we will catch up. It will be critical that the Province provide adequate supply to Toronto, given the larger proportion of Phase One and Two residents in the city. We are told by Toronto Public Health the current map of vaccination sites will be much more fleshed out by Phase Two, including neighbourhoods such as Don Valley North. By that time, I’m also told the instructions for arranging your shot via the Province’s upcoming COVaxON online booking system will be far more widely distributed. I will aggressively promote step-by-step vaccination instructions every week in this space once I am convinced it will get you a better result than we’ve seen this past few weeks. In the meantime, I'm going to provide you the links to the Province’s vaccination page as well as that of Toronto Public Health. I caution these are works in progress: every day many more people receive their first or second doses and the people managing the system learn more ways to improve it. My staff and I pull together daily in our virtual office to compare notes on how we are doing with our efforts updating residents on the most recent changes to Public Health guidelines. We all want to do our best to inform you on all matters COVID-19 virus and vaccination and are here as a resource to help point you in the right direction. The LTC home, where my dad has been confined to his room for much of the pandemic, had a visit from a vaccination crew in January, and he received his first dose of Moderna vaccine. As he is wheelchair bound with severe dementia and rapidly losing his speech, I was supposed to be there as well to get a vaccination alongside all other essential caregivers. The province allows each LTC resident one essential caregiver. Having missed the appointment due to an urgent Council meeting, I am now experiencing the same frustration as many of you trying to secure appointments. Long-Term Care essential caregivers face possible restrictions of visits if they are not vaccinated. My Dad receiving a vaccination dose in January I promise you this: I’m going to do my level best to fight for continuous improvement in our citywide vaccination plan. I’ll start with a motion in Council next week asking for longer hours in all of our clinics once we open up for the general population. Access to your COVID-19 shot needs to be easy and equitable. We’re going have to work around the clock to make that possible.

Let’s start with a quick update on last week’s Vaccination e-blast. Things are moving so fast, information can get out of date in an hour! Since we talked, the new website vaccineTO.ca has launched. When you enter your postal code, you’ll find out how many clinics in your area are accepting registrations for vaccine appointments. VaccineTO.ca is the common website for registering vaccine appointments, but I’m hearing mixed reviews from residents about the system. There's still some uncertainty as to how things will look once the provincial system launches March 15 for registering and booking appointments. My office will post the latest updates regularly, and you can always contact us if you have questions about the registration process. I wouldn’t worry about this media obsession with the “honour system", the sense many outside of the vaccination priority groups are queue-jumping to get their jabs. While you are required to pre-register online or by phone, the very next step is a callback from the clinic or pharmacy where your information is confirmed, and you are screened and provided an appointment time. You are screened again when you arrive at the clinic for the vaccination. The important thing to remember is the delivery system is tweaked and improved daily to ensure no dose goes to waste. Each vaccine administered, whether into your arm or the person's ahead of you, is making us all safer. An explanation by the University of Waterloo School of Pharmacy on how the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines work How MZOs undermine local democracy While vaccinations grab all of the headlines, MZOs are a big news story in their own right. MZO stands for Ministerial Zoning Order, a special legislative tool which poses a real threat to your right to provide feedback on matters of the environment and urban design. Let’s catch up. A MZO is a provincial edict allowing the Provincial Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing (currently Steve Clark) to approve land zoning decisions, bypassing the regular planning process. The local planning process for any Ontario Municipality is less than ideal. Developers have an easy path towards appeals before the Local Planning Appeal Tribunal [LPAT]. What redeems local planning is the understanding the community does have a voice; public input is baked into the final decision, even if we must work within the strict confines of provincial planning legislation. A community can even request an official hearing status to have a voice in the event of an LPAT appeal. MZOs however remove these citizen rights, and sometimes even your Councillor’s rights. MZOs are not new but until recently were sparingly used, usually for needs such as urgent, affordable housing. The key is to use them to meet policy needs. The current Provincial government has grown quite fond of using them to bypass policy. The Ford government claims a MZO is applied only if a local municipal government requests one. That is not always the case. Even so, a council asking for an MZO will not provide residents with much comfort. Ask yourself why a democratically elected body would want to wipe out their residents’ voice in favour of private sector development. Councils can get bedazzled by development proposals promising economic opportunity and job creation, especially in challenging times like these. However real these needs are, they must be balanced against proper planning principles, protection of our environment and Heritage sites, and most importantly, hearing the voices of residents. MZOs were applied recently to override all of these. We learned Wednesday morning, environmentally significant wetland near the Pickering lakefront will reportedly be sacrificed via an MZO for a large Amazon ‘fulfillment’ centre - exactly what the Toronto Region Conservation Board (TRCA) had feared. As a member of the TRCA Board, I moved a motion communicating to the province our opposition to this use, even though Pickering Town Council has already requested an MZO to get the project going. While community groups in Pickering strongly object to the mega-warehouse, recent provincial legislation undermining the role of conservation authorities overrides TRCA's right to refuse development, even on protected wetlands. Closer to home, work crews back in January began tearing down the old Dominion Wheel and Foundries Company buildings located at 153-185 Eastern Ave, months after the Ford Government issued an MZO to sidestep the local planning process. Here, Toronto City Council had not requested an MZO. The Province nonetheless intended to go ahead with the planned development of high-rise residential towers on three provincially owned sites, including 153-185 Eastern Avenue. Our City Solicitor and her team succeeded in stopping the Province’s move to demolish the heritage foundry buildings on Eastern Ave - for now. Construction crews carry demolition work at the Dominion Wheel and Foundries Company site in January In my view every Torontonian needs to support those downtown residents calling for the revocation of the MZO issued for the Foundries site. Residents simply want to take back their rights to the local planning process. There will be plenty of room for affordable housing and the preservation of a Heritage building if the community and city planners can just get their right to plan together. The battle to stop another superhighway This week, Toronto Council joined the chorus of GTA municipalities trying to put the brakes on Provincial plans for a new highway, Hwy. 413 between running through GTA municipalities like Brampton and Vaughan and connecting Hwy. 400 with the 401 and 407 highway interchange. The simple reason to oppose the project: it is very clearly an error-correction. When the Mike Harris government sold the brand new Hwy. 407 in 1999, the province lost control of toll rates and doomed that roadway to underuse, especially by large trucks unwilling to pay massive daily costs. Harris sold the 407 for $3.1 billion. It is now a private asset worth $30 billion. To build another super highway in its immediate vicinity will cost an early estimated $10 billion. The cost to simply negotiate a publicly funded truck-and logistics-rate to make the highway more affordable? Unknown and never tried. There is another very important reason to oppose the development of Hwy. 413 (as Anthony Perruzza, Toronto Councillor and my fellow TRCA member, summed it up at Council this week): our "endless" water supply. Our source waters, ground waters, all of our river courses to the lakefront, make up the perfect place to meet, settle, build and generate wealth - as long as we protect those systems. Our forefathers knew this, the First Nations peoples who were here long before knew this. A great deal went into protecting our natural water systems when the Greenbelt was designated and locked down. The plans for Hwy. 413 threaten it, first through its construction and secondly through surrounding development which this Provincial government has clearly demonstrated it would use MZOs to approve. This was clear to residents in the west end immediately. In Peel and York regions, they have been very loud about their opposition. Perhaps this is why we see the Premier and some formerly supportive mayors pumping the brakes on Hwy. 413. Stay tuned.

There was not a lot of news out of City Hall this week, other than the daily COVID-19 vaccine updates. It was initially meant to be March Break, and to avoid any quorum issues no committee meetings were scheduled. There was, however, a discussion that is crucial for every city in this country. It took place in Ottawa, where the Supreme Court of Canada heard arguments for the City of Toronto's appeal against the province re: its 2018 decision to chop the number of Council seats by nearly half. You may recall that the Ford government enacted Bill 5: the Better Local Government Act, right in the middle of the municipal election campaign, reducing the number of Toronto wards to 25. Make no mistake though, this court case is not just about the number of wards. Toronto Council's first meeting in December 2018 under the 25-ward model When Premier Ford announced his bill on July 27, it was the last day to register as a candidate for Toronto councillor or TDSB trustee. Fortunately, the media had leaked the story the night before. The recollections of the already-registered candidates and incumbents to this news are a mixture of shock and horror to this day. Candidates across the city spent a sleepless night trying to decide whether or not to continue campaigns they had started in May. Some had to guess where to run on the new electoral map, not knowing who else might move their registration the next day. Toronto councillors were in a late night Council session when the news broke, and realized they would be forced to run against the very colleagues they were sitting beside. A short recess was called; tears were shed in The Hall. Bill 5 impacted GTA democracy as well. Ford’s predecessor as leader of the Ontario PCs, Patrick Brown, had to scrap a campaign for Chair of Peel Region and jump into the Brampton mayoral race in a matter of hours. This was not just a blow to an old rival. Active citizens in Peel and York region had fought for a decade to have their Regional Chairs democratically elected. They received Provincial permission in time for the 2018 election, only to have the Ford government rip it away before they could cast a ballot. Some may wonder why this legal challenge has continued all the way to the Supreme Court, even though it's been three years since the Act became law. A smaller council has its conveniences, but good governance isn’t about making things perfect for me or other sitting councillors. It’s about making sure the community has the best representation possible. We deserve public representatives who are well informed and focused on all the potentially life-altering impacts of a decision made with tax dollars. In a thorough review of all Toronto ward boundaries from 2014-2017, the City held many consultations with the community to understand the maximum number of constituents each councillor could serve, and serve well. You also deserve a fair and properly managed election. Whether you are a voter or an actual candidate, it is only fair to demand the rule book handed out to each municipal candidate when they file their nomination papers is respected. As of May 1st during an election year, candidates can register to run, commence fundraising and start knocking on your door. From that moment on, they are enabling your right to be informed about the local election. Shelley speaks with a voter during the past election campaign To restructure an election race once the ‘informing of voters’ has already begun is wrong, several learned Interveners argued at Tuesday's Supreme Court hearing. A quick look at the list of speakers arguing on behalf of Toronto's appeal reveals individuals from across the country. That's because of the possible ramifications of Bill 5 for any local democracy. Imagine a Canada where anytime a provincial government changes, it could radically redesign the governance of any of its municipalities. Taken to its most literal extreme, any provincial government could simply redesign a municipal or school board election mid-stream if it dislikes the field of candidates or how the campaigns are shaping up. In Canada, municipalities are often called creatures of the provinces, a reference to the fact municipalities are located under provincial jurisdiction in the Canadian Constitution. Provincial governments have regularly used this idea to justify heavy-handed intervention in municipal affairs. As our nation matures, it is cities that are often given funds from both federal and provincial governments, and then held accountable for the delivery of key infrastructure on behalf of all three. This makes a growing case to raise the bar to prevent provincial meddling. Politicos need to start the conversation on how to honour municipal autonomy once that city becomes a mega-metropolis – like Toronto. There are thoughtful ways to serve the legitimate interests of both municipalities and provincial governments. A decision by the Supreme Court of Canada is expected this summer Yes, Council meetings are perhaps more easily manageable at 25 members, but this represents just two days of every month. The rest of the calendar is a scramble to meet constituents’ needs and include them in local decision making on a number of important issues like infrastructure, state of good repair and the dozens of service issues my office hears about every day. Councillors must represent populations between 100,000 and 130,000, practically double that of the old 44-ward model. We need certainty we won't be wasting our time should Toronto take a look at the next Census and decide another review of local representation is necessary to accommodate growth. The best outcome we could receive from this Supreme Court challenge is a decision that a provincial government needs more than a simple parliamentary majority to redesign any municipal council. At a minimum there must first be thoughtful engagement with citizens and local government. Let’s all look forward to a decision from the Supreme Court this summer that upholds local democracy.

As some of you may know, long before my entry into politics I walked away from the banking world to operate a home child care centre while my child with special needs was young. Child care centres equipped to accommodate a child with autism were few and far between in those days. That experience always leads me to pore over reports concerning Toronto’s delivery of children’s services. This week, our Economic and Community Development Committee (ECDC) took delivery of a massive third party analysis of our city operated child care centres. The study of this particular component was requested back in 2018 after a review by City Auditor General Beverly Romeo-Beehler on the overall administration of Toronto Children's Services. A lot has happened during the pandemic to compromise the way child care is delivered in this city. This disruption has stretched on so long it would be easy to lose sight of what the system once was, or even the goals we had for improving it. Luckily, the study presented at ECDC on Thursday morning stubbornly sticks to the deep analysis its authors completed in 2019. It focuses on a sub-set of 46 city-run centres and presents us with recommendations which will prove very useful as we recover and rebuild the world of work post-pandemic. First of all, a quick explanation of the system and its history. Children's Services functions in a variety of ways. It is the administrator and placement coordinator for a licensed child care system that includes over 1,000 child care centres. These consist of for-profit and not-for-profit centres, licensed home care providers and lastly, 46 fully city-operated entities known as ‘Toronto Early Learning Child Care Services, or TELCCS. The system's origins date back to the 1960s when the Regional Municipality of Metro Toronto was formed, incorporating the City of Toronto along with five surrounding municipalities. Licensed child care was expanded to take advantage of child care fee subsidies made available through federal funding initiative known as the Canada Assistance Program (CAP) which matched provincial spending for poverty alleviating programs. For Ontario, the funding breakdown was 50 percent federal, 30 percent provincial with municipalities making up the final 20 percent. I’ll quote the TELCCS study in order to briefly deliver the history of how the city became a part of delivering child care and providing subsidized child care spaces: In other words, this funding arrangement plays a role in the viability of all child care, whether city-run or for-profit, because the funds go to subsidizing the fees of families unable to afford the full costs. At $1,200 to $1,700 a month per child, few families can. Most child care centres would be half-empty and no longer viable if they depended on affluent families alone and had no subsidized clients. Needless to say, without the city-run centres, many, many mothers who need to work or return to school to provide for their children would be blocked from any economic opportunity. Over time, the federal government removed itself from this funding arrangement and has played more of an ad hoc role in expanding child care spaces. A new national child care strategy announced shortly before COVID-19 is showing promise. While we wait for the federal strategy to unfold, the pie chart below gives you the dollars and cents of this year’s child care funding, and where your tax dollars fit. A decision by the Supreme Court of Canada is expected this summer Given all of our tax contributions to child care in our city, the TELCCS study was requested after the Auditor General’s review. Romeo-Beehler made several immediate recommendations that made the whole system more accountable - elements such as how we track ongoing eligibility for subsidies, how fees are transferred and accounted for - to make sure we are all getting proper bang for our buck, especially the kids. The AG also recommended we take a deep look at the TELCCS. Council agreed we should make sure these unique centres, although slightly more expensive to run than other child care providers, still deliver the added benefits we expect and set the bar for quality of all child care across the city. The result is 115 pages of analysis. I read it all so you wouldn’t have to (unless you have a particular interest). It all boils down to the compelling conclusion as depicted in this graphic: TELCCS centres are situated in areas where other operators are less inclined to set up business but where family needs are still great. Some of these are purpose-built with other government investments; others are former child care operators since absorbed by the city. Because these centres are used to serve a diverse group of child care needs, such as families experiencing a radical change in circumstances and special needs diagnosis, every staff member is a certified early childhood educator. This means the payroll is often higher than other child care centres, although the auditor general uncovered great savings in the city's management for all TELCCS. The authors of the study found other operators and stakeholders are glad these TELCCS centres exist. Because the city operates them, these 46 centres can hold a small supply of vacancies so a family in crisis is accommodated in certain cases. It can be heartbreaking for the hundreds of non-TELCCS childcare sites when every spot is full and they must turn away a child in urgent need. Whatever the needs of children, and of course some have perfectly average needs, TELCCS are integrated learning spaces of high quality and care. They help families give their kids a head start for schooling and a better future. They demonstrate best practices for the rest of the system. In a review of all of the literature concerning TELCCS centres, the study authors found Children’s Services designs its program relying on eight themes: The study recommends these themes as a path to a beneficial environment for children and affirms my strong belief we should find ways in the future to expand the use of TELCCS beyond the regular child care to make them even more vibrant community use spaces. I’m convinced after reading this report these centres are the best places for us to begin to define that phrase we keep hearing, “Build Back Better” as we recover and rebuild from COVID-19. Situated in neighbourhoods where family needs are highest and where the pandemic has created the deepest economic impacts, TELCCS centres are right where we need them. Strengthening the TELCCS network is how we help children and families begin the journey back to earning incomes and onwards to prosperity.

I put on a brave face this past holiday weekend as the third wave of the pandemic came rolling in hard. Here in Don Valley North, we were rocked by a school closure and saw entire grade cohorts sent to COVID-19 testing centres. The intensive care unit at North York General continued to fill up, as did those in hospitals across the province. At the office, our phones rang off the hook with calls from people frustrated by vaccine guidelines, financial pressures, outrageous car racing, and other issues. This latest wave of infection comes as all of us are running on empty. I also spent this past weekend baking to cheer up one very sad kid. Last year, on April 2, 2020, my youngest grandson Tyson was the first in our family to celebrate a pandemic birthday. “Don’t worry,” I assured him, “You will be ten next year and that’s a way better time for a big party.” This weekend, Tyson didn’t complain. Even at ten, he seemed to know that our family has been lucky to get through this alive and well. I got a little more vocal on social media over the Easter weekend as well. I have often bitten my tongue throughout the pandemic. I know it’s hard to lead in a crisis. More recently, however, I’ve made my disappointment with Provincial leadership clear. Provincial orders have felt contradictory to medical advice since the end of 2020, when our Premier kept the Province open long after doctors warned that a full lockdown was needed to curb the second wave. It’s hard not to imagine that we might be in a better position today if that medical advice had been followed. It seemed the Premier was continuing to ignore medical advice last week when he imposed an “emergency brake” that did little more in Toronto than close outdoor dining, a privilege we’d only been granted two weeks prior. Schools and businesses remained open as case numbers soared. I wasn’t the only one who spoke up a little louder after that announcement. Many in the community were scared that Ontario was losing control of the pandemic. Last Monday, Dr. Lawrence Loh, Peel’s Medical Officer of Health, overrode the Provincial government and closed schools in Peel region. By Tuesday, our Medical Officer of Health Dr. Eileen De Villa followed suit and closed Toronto schools. We finally saw evidence on Wednesday that the Premier might be listening to our doctors, on some things at least. The Province imposed another stay-at-home order, effective today. Non-essential businesses are now closed to in-store shopping, with big box stores finally required to only sell essential grocery and pharmacy items. Capacity in stores will go back to being carefully counted. Hopefully this will lead us back to sending only one family member to the store at a time. The Province has also stopped evictions from being enforced until the end of the stay-at-home order. Toronto is doing what it can with the modestly funded Toronto Rent Bank and payments are not being required on its rent loans during this time. Perhaps the most important part of Wednesday’s announcement was the expansion of the vaccination program to essential workers and “hot spot” neighbourhoods across the Province. I’ve outlined the full details in my vaccine update section below. As the Toronto Star reported, “Premier Doug Ford says he expects 40 per cent of adults in Ontario to be vaccinated by the end of a stay-at-home order… which is effective until May 7.” These measures are certainly needed to stop our cases numbers from climbing even higher, but I’m worried that they’re not enough. My team and I have seen the toll this pandemic has taken on our community, especially our families that have lost loved ones and are struggling to make ends meet. If we want this latest lockdown to be effective, and hopefully be our last, we need more action from higher levels of government. We need a full moratorium on evictions until this pandemic is over. Tens of thousands of homes in Toronto are in rent arrears. The Provincial and Federal Governments have to start working now to design housing safeguards that give individuals and families time to get back on their feet. We do the economy no favours if we stand by and watch more people be plunged into homelessness. More than anything, if we want to beat the third wave, we need to implement measures that will target the virus where it’s most active. We need the Premier to understand his role in mandating paid sick leave. He seems to think that the Federal Recovery Sickness Benefit (CRSB) is all that’s required. This program is helpful, but it does not replace a paycheque and will not stop struggling workers from going to work sick. A benefit that provides only $500 per week, less than what can be earned working full-time at minimum wage, does not provide enough income to allow people to stay home. The Provincial government needs to implement proper paid sick leave, the kind many of us received from our employers back in the sixties and seventies. Many people are going back to work despite direct exposure from an ill family member because their family is counting on that paycheck. Doctors are telling us as loudly as they can that this is how the virus is spreading: along the frontlines and in lower wage sectors of employment. Paid sick leave is what’s needed to give workers the confidence and financial support to stay home when they’re sick. I’ve been advocating for paid sick leave since this pandemic started, and I need you to do the same. Talk this up in your own virtual social circles, and help us get our communities talking about this until it cannot be ignored by our Provincial Government any longer. I know this latest stay-at-home order is hard to bear, and I share in many of your frustrations. We need to advocate for better action from our governments, and we need to hunker down as tightly as we did in April 2020. These next few weeks are crucial, and will tell us whether or not we are winning the war against the fast-spreading COVID variants. We can also start making our own vaccination plans to help the Premier reach the goal of getting 40% of Ontario’s adult population vaccinated by May 7. We expect that the details about vaccines for essential workers and those living in our high priority postal codes in Don Valley North, M2J and M2M, will be revealed in the next day or two. As soon as we receive this information, we will be shouting it out from the rooftops. My staff team and I want to support you in whatever way we can as you make your vaccination decisions, and I encourage you to call or email my office with any of your questions or concerns. We’ve also been promoting our upcoming Vaccine Town Hall (details below), which will give you a chance to hear from Dr. de Villa, NYGH CEO Karyn Popovich, and one of North York’s most beloved family doctors, Dr. David Eisen, head of NYGH Family Medicine. If you are still waiting to vaccinate and have questions of any kind, this is a medical superstar team that can really help. So how do we do our best to make this lockdown our last? We follow public health guidelines, stay at home, and help our family and friends get vaccinated. We also demand more from our Provincial government. We make sure that renters are protected from eviction, small businesses are supported, and that every worker has access to paid sick leave. I promise you that I’ll continue to fight for these measures and support our community so that we can finally get through this pandemic together.