"Ontario Premier Doug Ford said this week that an "iron ring" needs to go around the province's seniors to protect them. His government is among those that have dedicated more funding for increased screening, cleaning and hiring. It also relaxed some regulations to allow homes to hire help faster."

Long-term residential care shares with other healthcare organizations the negative impacts of neoliberal policies, namely cutbacks in government funding and a failure to keep up with demand for public services, managerial practices that create part-time jobs, contract work that eliminates benefits and irregular hours of work, the downloading of labour to those with the fewest formal credentials, the reduction of staff to a minimum, tight control over workers, and the privatization of ownership as well as the contracting out of work in non-profit and municipal homes. All of these policies and practices have an impact on the conditions of work that are the conditions of care.

The CD Howe estimated that a 75% wage subsidy for private employers would cost $6.3 billion a week, which works out to about $80 billion over three months. This amount works out to over $2,000 for each and every Canadian and is more than the federal government’s total major transfers to provinces, territories and municipalities for health care, social assistance, equalization and many other areas, which were projected to be just below $79 billion—and that’s for the whole year, not three months.

The legendary Prof. Harry Glasbeek of Osgoode Hall Law School at York University has penned the following commentary on how the COVID-19 pandemic is revealing and reinforcing the deep flaws in our economic and social order. It ends on a hopeful note: the people will demand better, when the immediate health crisis has passed. Prof. Glasbeek is the author of Capitalism: A Crime Story.

"Rising stock prices in the United States have in recent years propelled spending. Millions of people are now filing claims for unemployment benefits, while wealthier households are absorbing the reality of substantially diminished retirement savings.

Americans boosted their rates of savings significantly in the years after the Great Depression. Fear and tarnished credit limited reliance on borrowing. That could happen again."