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Canada has approved a 15-minute COVID test. But the lineups will still go on for hours

Sep 16, 2021 , , , , by shlf

Health Canada has given the green light to a rapid test for , but experts say people shouldn’t expect the testing backlog — and lineups — will disappear anytime soon.

“It’s sort of sold as reducing the backlog,” Dr. Zain Chagla, an infectious disease specialist with McMaster University, said about the newly approved ID Now test. “I’m uncomfortable with this. I don’t think this is going to significantly reduce the backlog by any means.

“It is nice to have another tool to get people tested, but this is probably not the test that’s going to change the provincial testing queues altogether.”

Ottawa announced Wednesday it approved the test developed by Abbott Laboratories, which can deliver results in less than 15 minutes of a patient being swabbed, without having to first send the sample to a lab for processing.

Neither the company nor the federal government will be more specific about when the test kits will start arriving, other than “the coming weeks.”

The approval came a day after the federal government announced it had signed a deal to buy nearly eight million of the tests from the U.S.-based company, pending Health Canada approval, as well as 3,800 of the analyzer machines that process the results.

The ID Now test has been approved and used in the United States since the end of March under an emergency authorization, but not without controversy. Several clinical studies have since raised concerns over its accuracy, though others concluded with more favourable results.

“If you look at some of the literature that has come out around this machine, it does miss some positives,” noted Chagla. “From reading the U.S. experiences, people who are still having symptoms after a negative test are recommended to get another test.

“There’s limitation with this machine but it’s better than nothing at this point.”

According to an Abbott spokesperson, the test needs to be administered by a trained health-care provider.

A swab is taken either from the nose or the back of the throat, and then mixed with a chemical solution that can “recognize a unique section of the Coronavirus genome, while ignoring other viruses even if they’re similar strains,” the spokesperson told the Star in an email.

“ID NOW delivers reliable results in minutes, rather than hours or days, on the frontlines of the COVID-19 pandemic with accuracy rates as high as 94.7% compared to lab-based PCR reference tests in the acute phase of illness.”

Dr. Andrew Morris, an infectious disease specialist at Sinai Health and University Health Network, called the approval of the rapid test “welcome” but not a surprise. The test “has been approved in almost every jurisdiction where there’s been an application,” he said.

The question now is when these tests are going to arrive.

Other countries and the World Health Organization have also purchased them, and it’s not clear “where we are in the pecking order,” Morris said.

“Inevitably it’s going to help us but we really needed it several weeks ago to avoid our backlog,” he said.

The province also needs to figure out how the new tests will be used as part of a larger strategy, which should include “surveillance, screening and diagnostic testing.”

That’s something “we’ve been really challenged by,” Morris said. “This will expand our capacity for testing, it probably won’t be used in the highest stakes, because almost certainly its quality is not going to be as good as the gold-standard PCR test.”

While the rapid test can relieve the pressure on the back end of the testing process at labs, Chagla said people still need to go through the same registration at COVID assessment centres and line up to get tested.

Local health authorities need to take a look at what their testing needs are and how the test can meet those needs.

The rapid test works best in remote areas where test centres and labs are far and apart, for asymptomatic people and at high-risk workplaces where routine testing is called for, said Chagla.

“We need to develop a system to determine who is best for what test,” Chagla said.

Dr. Isaac Bogoch, an infectious disease specialist at the University Health Network, said the approval will “provide incremental help” and is “an excellent move” but “not a silver bullet.”

It might be particularly helpful in remote or northern communities that are far from labs, for some workplace outbreaks, or even in underserved urban neighbourhoods that have been hard hit by COVID, to “remove barriers” to testing.

The newly approved rapid ID NOW test is not to be confused with antigen tests, which test proteins on the surface of the virus. Health Canada said Tuesday it’s still reviewing those.

The goal, said Bogoch, would be a rapid antigen test that you could do at home, before heading to work or school, similar to a pregnancy test.

If it was positive, he said, it would trigger a more formal test at the centre. But in the meantime it would let you know not to go to work and to isolate, to avoid infecting others.

Nicholas Keung is a Toronto-based reporter covering immigration for the Star. Follow him on Twitter:

May Warren is a Toronto-based breaking news reporter for the Star. Follow her on Twitter:

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‘The hearing went on without us’: Legal clinics warn that emailed eviction hearing notices aren’t reaching tenants

Aug 27, 2021 , , , , by shlf

When Angelica Donato was first notified about an eviction hearing against her at Ontario’s Landlord and Tenant Board, the notice was delivered by mail, for a date this summer that was eventually postponed during the province’s COVID-era eviction halt.

But when the case was rescheduled for a virtual hearing in early September, Donato said that notice never arrived — claiming it was delivered by email to a misspelled address.

Although her landlord appeared before the tribunal, Donato said she only learned about the new hearing date after an eviction was granted.

“The hearing went on without us,” she said. And Donato isn’t alone.

In recent weeks, legal clinics across the province have been sounding alarms about the shift to digital operations by the Landlord and Tenant Board (LTB) during the pandemic — including problems with hearing notices being sent by email.

“It’s not just the tenants that are saying they didn’t get notice,” said Julius Mlynarski, director of South Etobicoke Community Legal Services, who is helping Donato.

“We are not getting notice … we’re not sitting there lying about it, or trying to make up excuses,” he said. At his clinic alone, there have been two cases in recent weeks. From colleagues at other clinics, he’s been told of nearly 15 cases in mid-to-late October.

Since Ontario’s eviction moratorium lifted at the end of July, the board has been working through its backlog of pre-pandemic cases. But they’ve started to cross that threshold recently, with Tribunals Ontario confirming late last month that they were scheduling LTB hearings before the end of December in cases where landlords applied to evict their tenants in March.

While Premier Doug Ford pledged that no one would lose their home for missing rent during COVID-19, the board processed 668 applications to evict tenants for unpaid rent from March 17 to 31; 1,407 applications in April; 1,711 in May; 1,415 in June and 1,414 in July — plus 1,708 in August, after the moratorium ended. Those applications aren’t guaranteed to result in eviction orders, but are the first step in that process.

Dozens of legal clinics across the province recently endorsed a report laying out issues with the LTB’s current operations. It calls on the board to stop relying on email to deliver notices of hearings — unless it’s specifically requested and all contact information is confirmed to be correct — and to halt any proceedings where one party doesn’t show up, unless the board could be satisfied that the missing person knew their hearing was happening and had reliable means to access it.

“These are legal proceedings,” said Yodit Edemariam, director of legal services at the Rexdale Community Legal Clinic. “People have a fundamental right in a society to access those proceedings, to defend themselves and to participate fully.”

In addition to missing notices, Edemariam said there were cases where people were getting their notices shortly before a hearing was due to take place, which jeopardized their ability to seek legal advice or submit evidence to the board.

A missed, or nearly missed, notice could be as simple as an email landing in a junk filter, said Andrew Hwang, supervisory duty council with the Advocacy Centre for Tenants Ontario. But the consequences could be severe, if tenants were facing evictions during the pandemic, said Edemariam.

As for Donato, she’s currently waiting for a review hearing, and pursuing a motion to void the eviction order because the money she owed at the time of the hearing was paid off — through the Toronto Housing Stabilization Fund, which she qualified for as a social assistance recipient.

Her landlord, Charles Gerditschke, said that Donato should have known about the hearing whether she received her formal notice of hearing or not, because he provided his evidence to her.

In response to an inquiry from the Star about missed or nearly missed hearing notices, Tribunals Ontario said it sends a notice of hearing by regular mail to all parties two to three weeks before a hearing, and by email in cases where they have addresses on file.

Asked about Donato’s case, the agency did not comment on whether her notice was sent to a misspelled address, but said anyone who didn’t receive their notice “may wish to contact their local regional office” to request a copy or ask about their next steps.

The recent report endorsed by the group of legal clinics called on the LTB to use courier instead of mail or email for notices of hearings, orders and other time-sensitive documents, claiming that mail delivery in many Ontario communities had been “significantly delayed.”

Each time someone missed their notice of hearing, Mlynarski said, it triggered reviews, and potentially new hearings — which he argued was contrary to efforts to work through the board’s backlog efficiently.

Even if emailing the notices meant working faster, Edemariam urged other priorities to prevail: “Efficiency can not come at the expense of real access to justice.”

Victoria Gibson is a Toronto-based reporter for the Star covering affordable housing. Her reporting is funded by the Canadian government through its Local Journalism Initiative. Reach her via email:

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Susan Delacourt: Is COVID-19 the antidote to Trump-style populism in Canada?

Jul 27, 2021 , , , , by shlf

In the aftermath of unexpected election victory in 2016, and his Liberals went out looking for a vaccine against populism.

Four years later, an antidote has been found, in the unlikely form of a global pandemic.

With Trump facing his reckoning with the ballot box next week in the U.S., evidence continues to mount that has seriously weakened the spread of Trump-style populism into this country.

The latest comes in a report out this week from the Samara organization, charting a “profound change in the hearts and minds of Canadians” when it comes to trust in government and institutions. Even as the virus has been rippling through the country, Canadians are feeling much more positive in 2020 about how they’re governed, , and a lot less nostalgic for bygone times.

This isn’t the year to launch a “Make Canada Great Again” campaign, in other words, unless you’re talking about turning the clock back eight or so months.

Samara’s report is based on research carried out by the Consortium on Electoral Democracy, also known as C-Dem — a partnership of academic researchers and civil society groups doing extensive polling on the democratic health of the country.

Satisfaction with how Canadian democracy is functioning is up seven percentage points from last year, according to this polling. Confidence in the federal government was up a whopping 21 percentage points, while provincial governments saw an even larger, 24 per cent increase on the same question.

“Barely half of Canadians think governments ‘used to be better at getting things done,’ compared to two-thirds just a year ago,” the Samara report goes on to say. “This is a remarkable shift to observe in a year when life became almost universally more difficult.”

Granted, the C-Dem survey was carried out in May, before Justin Trudeau’s government weathered the WE Charity controversy and while Canada was still in the early months of the COVID crisis.

But other polls have been tracking the same trend away from populism, notably a large Canada-U.S. survey carried out by Innovative Research several weeks ago, and over the Thanksgiving weekend.

The C-Dem/Samara survey, based on 8,170 responses gathered online earlier this year also found — as the Innovative Research study did — that people are more inclined to trust experts in 2020 and less confident in the wisdom of “ordinary people.”

Many Canadian politics-watchers, including this writer, were saying when Trump was first elected that it would be more difficult for MAGA-style populism to catch on here, simply because we’re a less polarized country.

But still, federal Liberals fretted. Trudeau launched a series of cross-country town hall meetings in January 2017 and delivered a major speech in Hamburg, Germany in February sounding an alarm about the politics of “us-versus-them” and economic anxiety turning into anti-government anger.

A year later, Doug Ford was supposed to be the next Trump when he ascended to power, but the Ontario premier has gone right off the U.S. president, as evidenced by the gagging gesture he displayed in earlier this month.

People’s Party Leader Maxime Bernier gave Trump-style populism a run too, but he fared dismally in last year’s election campaign and couldn’t manage to get more than 3.6 per cent of the vote in this week’s byelection in York Centre.

You don’t need a doctorate in political science to understand why populism’s charm has faded through the pandemic — at least the populism that is defined by mistrust of governments and experts.

Governments are helping people hold their lives together and experts, specifically public-health officials, are helping save lives. All Canadians need to do is glance south to see what happens when politicians drop the ball or ignore the medical advice they’re getting.

Canada didn’t shut its border with the U.S. when Trump got elected, but it’s shut now to most traffic, and it seems clear that we’re happy to keep it closed — not just to keep out the virus, but to shield us from the populist sentiments that Trump is still trying to whip up in his bid for re-election next week.

The Samara report warns that this pandemic-inspired turn against populism might be more momentary than enduring, and that Canadians are still feeling powerless to change the course of government too. But who isn’t feeling powerless in 2020 — besides Trump, of course, who has been telling Americans that the virus can be dismissed with sufficient will.

Four years after Trump was elected, and on the eve of his date with re-election destiny, his brand of populism is no longer the most-feared virus in Canada.

Susan Delacourt is an Ottawa-based columnist covering national politics for the Star. Reach her via email: or follow her on Twitter: @susandelacourt