Ottawa MPP says Ford government should have enacted shutdown sooner

By Jason White

An Ottawa opposition MPP says the Ford government isn't moving quickly enough with new restrictions aimed at controlling the spread of COVID-19.

John Fraser, Liberal MPP for Ottawa South, points to the government's own experts at the Ontario COVID-19 Science Advisory Table, who raised concerns about the danger of new, more transmissible variants of COVID-19. Fraser argues that the government has been too slow to act against the virus.

“[The government is] going to tell you something on Monday, that's going to happen on Saturday,” says Fraser. “It's a pandemic; you have to move way more quickly than that, because of how effective the virus is at accelerating if you stand still.”

While the province is rolling out COVID-19 vaccines out to pharmacies, Fraser also criticizes its choice of pharmacy locations, calling for more to be located in high-transmission areas of Toronto, heavily populated by essential workers — employed in places like meat-packing plants, Amazon warehouses, and the postal service — who live with multiple generations of their family in one house.

“The virus is really spreading there, and you need to get the vaccines there to slow it,” Fraser says. “The vaccines are the thing that'll help you manage it, just like it did in long-term care.”

While many of those sorts of COVID-19 cases are concentrated in parts of the Toronto area, Fraser argues that putting out the fires where COVID-19 is burning hottest helps everyone.

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