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Today’s coronavirus news: Ontario reports 998 COVID-19 cases, 13 deaths, 68 new cases in schools; Ontario budget lays out next stage of COVID-19 response

Oct 7, 2021 , , , , by shlf

The latest news from Canada and around the world Thursday. This file will be updated throughout the day. Web links to longer stories if available.

7 p.m.: Alberta is announcing another record-breaking day of new COVID-19 cases, according to The Canadian Press.

Dr. Deena Hinshaw, the Province’s chief medical health officer, says there are about 800 new infections, CP reports.

However, because of technical problems, she doesn’t have an exact number, Hinshaw said.

The previous one-day record of 622 cases was reported last Friday.

Hinshaw said she will be able to provide detailed figures tomorrow, and the rise in cases is “extremely concerning.”

6:19 p.m.: There have been 251,334 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Canada, including 10,381 deaths, and 207,996 that have been resolved, according to The Canadian Press.

This breaks down as follows (NOTE: The Star does its own count for Ontario; see elsewhere this file.):

  • Quebec: 111,056 confirmed (including 6,378 deaths, 94,884 resolved)
  • Ontario: 80,690 confirmed (including 3,195 deaths, 69,137 resolved)
  • Alberta: 30,447 confirmed (including 343 deaths, 23,874 resolved)
  • British Columbia: 16,560 confirmed (including 273 deaths, 12,806 resolved)
  • Manitoba: 7,177 confirmed (including 91 deaths, 2,920 resolved)
  • Saskatchewan: 3,536 confirmed (including 25 deaths, 2,634 resolved)
  • Nova Scotia: 1,119 confirmed (including 65 deaths, 1,036 resolved)
  • New Brunswick: 347 confirmed (including six deaths, 313 resolved)
  • Newfoundland and Labrador: 292 confirmed (including four deaths, 285 resolved)
  • Prince Edward Island: 64 confirmed, all of which have been resolved
  • Yukon: 23 confirmed (including one death, 20 resolved)
  • Repatriated Canadians account for 13 confirmed cases, all of which have been resolved
  • Northwest Territories: 10 confirmed, all of which have been resolved
  • Nunavut reports no confirmed cases.

3 p.m.: A British Columbia man has been charged with three counts of violating the Quarantine Act, The Canadian Press reports.

Police in New Westminster say the man repeatedly left his home after returning from a trip to the United States late last month, according to CP.

Police say the man had been advised of the mandatory requirement to isolate for 14 days and was issued a ticket for defying the provision, but was arrested Monday for continued violations of the act.

Makhan Singh Parhar, 47, is being held in custody and is scheduled to return to court on Nov. 16.

2:45 p.m.: Jury trials are set to resume in several Ontario cities.

The Superior Court of Justice says selection of jurors and jury hearings will start Monday in Ottawa.

The same will happen a week later in Toronto, Brampton and Newmarket.

The chief justice of the court cites Ontario’s new COVID-19 rules in the affected areas.

Some capacity and social distancing limits will stay in effect.

However, the justice says court staff must be flexible in accommodating those who may not be comfortable attending in-person.

2:30 p.m.: The Quebec government that have closed gyms, restaurants and other businesses in much of the province, Premier Francois Legault said Thursday.

The comments came after the province’s opposition parties demanded the government release a document from Montreal’s health authority that is calling for gyms, museums and libraries to reopen.

“The risk of gatherings is too great at this moment,” Legault said told a news conference in Quebec City.

With 261 new COVID-19 cases reported in Montreal on Thursday, Legault said “the battle” has not yet been won in the city. However, the premier said the government will be reviewing its restrictions to allow more people to meet one-on-one.

Currently, only people who live alone are allowed to have guests, and they can only host one person at a time.

1:50 p.m. Manitoba Premier Brian Pallister is dropping the idea of a curfew to limit late-night socializing and reduce the spread of COVID-19.

Instead, the provincial government is adding enforcement officers to enforce public health orders, running new advertisements and urging people to call a government tip line to report violators.

The province is reporting 426 new cases and four additional deaths.

1:30 p.m. The Manitoba government is adding to its list of people who are enforcing public health orders during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Premier Brian Pallister says fire safety inspectors, motor carrier enforcement officers and municipal bylaw officers will help apply the rules.

He says that will raise the total number of enforcers to more than 3,200.

The province has cracked down following a spike in COVID-19 cases with rules that include a limit of five people for public gatherings.

Winnipeg police said this week they are prepared to start going to people’s homes to enforce that measure if they receive a complaint.

1:05 p.m. New Brunswick is easing restrictions in the Campbellton region due to what public health officials describe as a downward trend in the number of cases.

The region in the north of the province will be downgraded from orange to yellow level at midnight tonight.

The measure allows residents to meet in person with close friends and extended family, eases visitor restrictions for vulnerable settings and raises gathering limits, as long as distancing is maintained and masks are worn in indoor public places.

The New Brunswick government is reporting two new cases today in the Fredericton region, both among people aged 30 to 39 who are self-isolating.

12:40 p.m. Newfoundland and Labrador is reporting two new cases of COVID-19.

Health officials say both are travel-related, and both are residents of the province who returned home from work in Alberta, though the cases are unrelated.

One case is a man between 20 and 39 years old, and the other is a man in his 50s.

The province has had 294 confirmed cases since the onset of the pandemic, with five cases active today.

12:05 p.m. Nova Scotia is reporting one new case of COVID-19, bringing the province’s total number of active cases to 18. Health officials say the new case was recorded in the province’s central zone and is under investigation. As of today, Nova Scotia has recorded 1,119 positive cases, 65 deaths and 1,036 cases that are considered recovered.

11:15 a.m. Quebec is reporting 1,138 new cases of COVID-19 and 28 more deaths attributed to the novel coronavirus, 10 of which occurred in the past 24 hours. Health authorities say hospitalizations decreased by one compared with the prior day, to 538, and 82 people were in intensive care, a rise of one. The province conducted 27,326 COVID-19 tests Nov. 3, the last day for which testing data is available. Quebec has reported a total of 111,056 COVID-19 infections and 6,378 deaths linked to the virus.

11:09 a.m. Ontario is reporting an additional 68 new cases in public schools across the province, bringing the total in the last two weeks to 897 and 2,543 overall since school began.

, the province reported 37 more students were infected for a total of 512 in the last two weeks; since school began there have been an overall total of 1,435.

The data shows there are seven more staff members infected for a total of 78 in the last two weeks — and an overall total of 320.

The latest report also shows 24 more infected individuals who weren’t identified for a total of 307 in that category in the last two weeks.

There are 580 schools with a reported case, which the province notes is 12 per cent of the 4,828 public schools in Ontario.

One school is closed because of an outbreak. Elder’s Mills Public School, a French-immersion elementary school in Woodbridge, of COVID-19. The school is set to reopen on Nov. 11.

There is a lag between the daily provincial data at 10:30 a.m. and news reports about infections in schools. The provincial data on Thursday is current as of 2 p.m. Wednesday. It also doesn’t indicate where the place of transmission occurred.

The Toronto District School Board updates its information on current COVID-19 cases throughout the day . As of 10:45 a.m. on Thursday, there were 189 TDSB schools with at least one active case — 263 students and 66 staff.

The Toronto Catholic District School Board also updates its information . As of Wednesday at 2:55 p.m., there were 110 schools with at least one confirmed case — 88 students and 17 staff.

Epidemiologists have that the rising numbers in the schools aren’t a surprise, and that the cases will be proportionate to the amount of COVID that is in the community.

10:40 a.m. Quebec’s opposition parties are demanding the government release a document from Montreal’s health authority that is calling for gyms, museums and libraries to reopen.

The document, obtained by Radio-Canada, says maintaining the partial lockdown in the city risks causing serious health issues for the population.

Quebec solidaire today called on the government to release the brief while the Parti Quebecois said the province should act on the recommendations contained in it.

The Official Opposition Liberals say the government should take a decision on the document’s recommendations and explain itself clearly to the public.

Most of Quebec has been moved to the highest pandemic-alert level, under which gyms, bars and entertainment venues are closed and gatherings are banned.

Montreal’s public health authority is suggesting gyms, libraries and museums be reopened and that restrictions on outdoor and indoor gatherings be eased.

(UPDATED) 10:10 a.m. Ontario is reporting another 998 cases and 13 deaths in its morning update, with 35,754 completed tests. The seven-day case average is up to a new high of 982 cases/day. The seven-day average for deaths is up to a second-wave high of 11.0 deaths/day. Ontario is reporting 998 new cases of COVID-19 today and 13 more deaths related to the virus.

Health Minister Christine Elliott says there are 350 new cases in Toronto, 269 in Peel Region and 71 in York Region.

She says 948 cases were reported as resolved since the last daily report.

Ontario is reporting 381 patients in hospital due to COVID-19, 86 in intensive care, and 48 on a ventilator.

The province says that there were 68 new cases in publicly funded schools — 37 of those were among students, seven in staff, and 24 unspecified.

8:50 a.m. A version of influenza that’s only had 27 confirmed human cases worldwide since 2005 has appeared in Alberta — prompting an investigation by health officials.

The case of H1N2, which is a first for Canada, was detected in mid-October after a patient sought medical care while experiencing flu-like symptoms, according to a statement from officials Wednesday.

The person had mild symptoms, was tested and has recovered.

Although the case was detected at a time when the coronavirus pandemic has global health anxieties at a fever pitch — timing one observer Wednesday called “pretty unlucky” — experts say the appearance of the rare virus in Alberta does not signal a new public health threat.

8:47 a.m. With Torontonians poised to resume mingling in reopened bars, restaurants and gyms, public health officials are returning to full tracing of all contacts of everyone infected with in the city.

Dr. Eileen de Villa, the city’s public health chief, told reporters Wednesday the “scaling up” of efforts to identify everyone with the virus, and get them to isolate, is vital as the provincial order halting indoor dining and gym visits expires Nov. 14.

The order expires Nov. 7 for the other hot spots, Peel and York regions and Ottawa. Facing rising daily infection numbers that hit a record 427 on Tuesday, Toronto asked Premier Doug Ford’s government before reopening.

Lifting restrictions will increase mingling and infections, de Villa said, and her goal is to have as many safeguards as possible to prevent a disastrous increase in spread.

8:46 a.m. The number of Americans seeking unemployment benefits fell slightly last week to 751,000, a still-historically high level that shows that many employers keep cutting jobs in the face of the accelerating pandemic.

A surge in viral cases and Congress’ failure so far to provide more aid for struggling individuals and businesses are threatening to deepen Americans’ economic pain. Eight months after the pandemic flattened the economy, weekly jobless claims still point to a stream of layoffs. Before the virus struck in March, the weekly figure had remained below 300,000 for more than five straight years.

Thursday’s report from the Labor Department said the number of people who are continuing to receive traditional unemployment benefits declined to 7.3 million. That figure shows that some of the unemployed are being recalled to their old jobs or are finding new ones. But it also indicates that many jobless Americans have used up their state unemployment aid — which typically expires after six months — and have transitioned to a federal extended benefits program that lasts an additional 13 weeks.

8:21 a.m. Only nine intensive care beds were available at one point in the Twin Cities Wednesday morning amid a surge in the COVID-19 pandemic that is sending more Minnesotans into hospitals.

Metro ICU bed space grew scarce Tuesday due to the number of nurses and other caregivers who were unavailable because of their own infections or viral exposures that required quarantines. Episodic shortages have occurred in central Minnesota and other parts of the state.

“We’re at a red alert for ICU beds,” said Michael Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy. “It’s bad.”

A record 908 inpatient hospital beds in Minnesota were filled with COVID-19 patients, according to Wednesday’s update of the state pandemic response dashboard. That includes 203 patients requiring intensive care due to breathing problems or complications from infections with the coronavirus that causes COVID-19.

While COVID-19 ICU admissions have nearly doubled since early October, patients with the infectious disease make up only 18% of total ICU usage. Among all 1,140 patients in Minnesota ICU beds, the majority are recovering from surgeries or being treated for unrelated issues such as strokes and traumatic injuries.

The dashboard shows that Minnesota has a capacity of roughly 1,500 immediately available ICU beds — with another 400 or so that could be readied within 72 hours — but one Twin Cities hospital physician said that overstates availability because open beds are useless without nursing staff to treat patients.

6:08 a.m.: Indonesia’s economy has fallen into recession for the first time since the Asian financial crisis more than two decades ago as the country struggles to control the coronavirus pandemic.

Statistics Indonesia, the central statistics agency, said Thursday that Southeast Asia’s largest economy contracted at a 3.5% annual pace in July-September, the second consecutive quarterly contraction.

The economy shrank at a 5.32% pace in the previous quarter and grew 2.9% in January-March, its slowest rate in almost two decades.

Indonesia has reported more than 425,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19, the largest in Southeast Asia and second in Asia only to India’s 8.3 million confirmed cases.

4:15 a.m.: Ontario’s Progressive Conservative government is set to unveil its first pandemic-era budget today.

The province has said the budget will lay out the details of the

That includes the new standard for long-term care announced earlier this week, which would see nursing home residents receive an average of four hours of direct care every day.

The Tories put off delivering a full fiscal plan earlier this year, citing the economic uncertainty caused by the global health crisis.

The fiscal update it gave in March instead initially included $17 billion in COVID-19 relief, though that projection was updated to $30 billion by the end of 2020-21.

The province also originally predicted a deficit of $20.5 billion, which was later raised to $38.5 billion because of the added spending.

4 a.m.: The latest numbers of confirmed COVID-19 cases in Canada as of 4 a.m. EST on Nov. 5, 2020:

There are 248,218 confirmed cases in Canada.

_ Quebec: 109,918 confirmed (including 6,350 deaths, 94,101 resolved)

_ Ontario: 79,692 confirmed (including 3,182 deaths, 68,189 resolved)

_ Alberta: 30,447 confirmed (including 343 deaths, 23,874 resolved)

_ British Columbia: 16,135 confirmed (including 273 deaths, 12,659 resolved)

_ Manitoba: 6,751 confirmed (including 87 deaths, 2,892 resolved)

_ Saskatchewan: 3,408 confirmed (including 25 deaths, 2,584 resolved)

_ Nova Scotia: 1,118 confirmed (including 65 deaths, 1,034 resolved)

_ New Brunswick: 347 confirmed (including 6 deaths, 313 resolved)

_ Newfoundland and Labrador: 292 confirmed (including 4 deaths, 285 resolved)

_ Prince Edward Island: 64 confirmed (including 64 resolved)

_ Yukon: 23 confirmed (including 1 death, 20 resolved)

_ Repatriated Canadians: 13 confirmed (including 13 resolved)

_ Northwest Territories: 10 confirmed (including 9 resolved)

_ Nunavut: No confirmed cases

_ Total: 248,218 (0 presumptive, 248,218 confirmed including 10,336 deaths, 206,037 resolved)

2 a.m.: India’s coronavirus outbreak rose by more than 50,000 cases Thursday amid a surging third wave of infections in the capital.

The Health Ministry also reported another 704 fatalities in the past 24 hours across the country, raising India’s overall death toll to 124,315.

Nerves are frayed in New Delhi after it reported a record 6,842 new cases in the past 24 hours. Its Chief Minister, Arvind Kejriwal, had admitted Wednesday that the city was going through a third wave of infections. It has more than 37,000 active cases.

In other developments in the Asia-Pacific region:

— Cambodia’s Prime Minister Hun Sen and four Cabinet ministers were in quarantine Thursday after they met with Hungary’s foreign minister the same day he tested positive for the coronavirus.

— China is suspending entry for most foreign passport holders resident in Britain in response to rising COVID-19 cases in the United Kingdom. The suspension covers those holding visas or residence permits issued prior to Nov. 3, with exceptions for diplomatic, service, courtesy or C visas.

Previously: for daily confirmed coronavirus cases as several states posted all-time highs.

Daily new confirmed coronavirus cases in the U.S. have surged 45% over the past two weeks, to a record seven-day average of 86,352, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. Deaths are also on the rise, up 15% to an average of 846 deaths every day.

The total U.S. death toll is already more than 232,000, and total confirmed U.S. cases have surpassed 9 million. Those are the highest totals in the world, and new infections are increasing in nearly every state.

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Under COVID-19, work-at-home has hollowed out Toronto’s core. Will it ever spring back to life?

Aug 25, 2021 , , , , by shlf

Prairie Girl Bakery’s fantastically flavoured cupcakes and designer confections have been longtime favourites of Toronto office workers. Before , they could be picked up for work events or on the way home from five Prairie Girl stores, including two in the underground PATH at First Canadian Place and Brookfield Place.

When COVID-19 shut down the city in mid-March, the bakery’s founder Jean Blacklock remembers thinking that her team would be back to work before the buttermilk in the kitchens expired in April.

They were naive, she says now.

It was around June that Blacklock made the decision to permanently close all but the original Prairie Girl at King Street East and Victoria Street. It is extremely busy, she said, in part because the company’s treats can be boxed individually for safe, distanced celebrations.

“We’re really doing very well for one store — but we had five,” said Blacklock.

“In terms of my business, people will continue to celebrate. Human nature will remain human nature. But the nature of work and where we do it, I think, is changing fundamentally,” she said.

She isn’t alone. Experts say remote work is having a profound effect on office space downtown and the businesses traditionally supported by the people who worked in them, an impact that could reshape or “rebalance” how the city’s core develops in the future.

Mayor John Tory told the Toronto Region Board of Trade last week that he is convening a group of business leaders to help address the long-term effects of the pandemic on downtown. Without minimizing the challenges to main street and suburban business, he said “there’s more at stake” in the core, where the office towers are now only 10 per cent occupied.

“If the whole thing goes into a massive decline then you have a much bigger collective impact on one small area that is important to the Toronto, Ontario and national economy,” said Tory.

According to new data from the board, work in the accommodation and food-service sectors accounts for almost 40,000 jobs or eight per cent of all employment in the core — but has the lowest capacity for remote work of all industries, at just one in 20 jobs.

The figures, found in the board’s regional recovery playbook, Shaping our Future, show that in terms of the current use of commercial space in the city core during the pandemic, about 68 per cent of jobs have the capacity for remote work.

“That’s almost 350,000 jobs having a high capacity for remote work…So that’s a significant amount of traffic that the downtown is not seeing,” said Marcy Burchfield, vice-president of the Board of Trade’s Economic Blueprint Institute.

According to its study, the sectors with the highest capacity for remote work are finance and insurance, which account for 115,875 downtown jobs. About 96 per cent of those industries have the capacity/opportunity for at-home work. The 89,955 positions downtown in professional, scientific and technical services fields aren’t far behind at 88 per cent.

Meanwhile, the study shows that the third- and fourth-largest sectors in terms of downtown employment do not have a high capacity for remote work. The health-care and social-assistance fields account for 46,780 jobs in the core — but just 29 per cent can be done remotely.

Accommodation and food-service jobs downtown might not shift to working from home, but the trend may well impact them all the same. Positions “in food service and retail are directly related to the demand generated by having people coming into downtown for work,” notes the study.

Prairie Girl’s Blacklock doesn’t think big downtowns like Toronto will ever be the same. Companies have become too adept at managing with much of their workforce at home.

“When this is over and it’s no longer a public health crisis why would they return? I think it’s moved beyond a public health crisis into a repositioning of where people work,” she said.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in Toronto’s PATH system, the vast underground network of commercial and walking space. Pre-COVID on any weekday — especially around lunchtime and after work — you could find packed corridors filled with people grabbing meals, shopping, coming to or from their jobs and using transit stops connected to the network.

These days those corridors are empty.

“The term, ‘perfect storm,’ though clichéd, is not far off as it applies to the PATH,” said Karl Littler, vice-president of public affairs for the Retail Council of Canada. “You have an absence of office workers — far more people are working from home as was the case before. The number of people working from home is five times as high as it was in pre-COVID times. There are no tourists or next to none. University and college students are at home.

“Take all of that and you have an obvious foot traffic problem.”

The apparel industry for example — clothing, shoes, accessories — has taken a drubbing. Littler said the apparel industry has in the last four months lost $7 billion in Canada, which suggests about $500 million in losses in Toronto.

“What’s in the PATH in Toronto? A lot of apparel,” he said.

If even a fraction of those Toronto jobs shifted home don’t ever return to the core, there is the potential for a “profound re-balancing of growth” where growth is no longer concentrated in denser urban centres across the region, the Board of Trade study concludes.

What’s clear, said Littler, is we’re going to see some net shift from Toronto to the suburbs as far as shopping — simply by virtue of remote working.

Burchfield said experts are predicting that “dispersed development” as opposed to concentrated growth in urban centres like Toronto. If remote work takes hold, she said, offices may need to provide different uses — some people are talking about child care or possibly affordable housing.

So far, downtown office rents are holding steady in Toronto, according to a third-quarter report released by commercial real estate company CBRE on Tuesday. But the vacancy rate rose in that period to 4.7 per cent, from 2.7 per cent in the second quarter.

Thirty-six per cent of all the vacant space downtown is sublet space, which rose 136 per cent quarter over quarter as companies — many of them technology based — re-evaluated their office requirements, said the report.

Chuck Scott, CEO of commercial real estate firm Cushman and Wakefield Canada, is not predicting the demise of the office. In fact, his company expects Toronto’s need for office space will expand once the pandemic passes.

“The office will always be there. It’s just going to be rethought and part of an overall workplace eco-system,” said Scott.

Companies will reassess their footprint as home-based work takes its place in that eco-system. But that will be offset by the need to provide more square footage for workplace physical distancing — a reversal of the recent trend toward denser offices, Scott said.

“We’re going to see vacancy rise and rents softening in the near term,” said Scott. “But long term, we see the demand (for office space) growing.”

Cushman and Wakefield’s Global Office Impact Study & Recovery Timing report, released on Tuesday, forecasts asking rents for office Canadian office space will start to soften by the end of this year and will decline 5.5 per cent from the peak by the end of 2021. Office employment, though, is forecast to recover by the second quarter of next year, with rents anticipated to recover by the third quarter of 2022.

Toronto will continue attracting “an outsize share” of tech-sector jobs, according to the report.

“From 2022 to 2030 we’re actually expecting office demand to grow by just over 53.9 million square feet in Canada. That’s in spite of a 14.5 per cent drag we’re expecting from the impact of work from home,” said Scott.

Toronto went into the pandemic with record low vacancies and a reputation for attracting top talent. That, he said, will sustain it through the pandemic challenges.

When it comes to attracting global retailers and luxury brands, Toronto also compares favourably to some other global cities, said Arlin Markowitz, senior vice-president at CBRE. Canada’s handling of the pandemic and its relative stability look attractive even next to hot markets like New York or Miami, he said.

Markowitz, who heads up CBRE’s urban retail team, said his group has set up 28 retail leases in the last 60 days, most for service stores — banks, grocers, dentists and cannabis shops.

“In dense neighbourhoods people still need veterinarians, a dentist, a take-out coffee shop, people still want fast food,” he said.

And while the PATH has been hard hit, Markowitz said there are sparks of interest by luxury retail brands in space in the Bloor St.-Yorkville area.

Some businesses think they can scoop a discount because of COVID, he said, “and frankly, that’s what they’re doing.”

However, small is “the flavour of the month” among retailers, he added, suggesting some are leasing spaces as tight as 700 sq. ft.

And while enclosed shopping malls may be struggling, suburban strip plazas have advantages, said Markowitz.

“In the past 10 years the narrative has been urban — the suburbs are dead and all that. Now some of those suburban centres are looking very attractive,” he said. “People like the idea of pulling up to a strip plaza, parking right in front of the store they want to go to. You put on your mask and you get out.

“Retail always finds a way to evolve,” said Markowitz. “Whether it’s cannabis consumption lounges or stationary bikes and treadmills, there’s always going to be a new kid on the block.”

Although Toronto’s core has seen profound changes, the waterfront has managed to maintain almost as much foot traffic as last summer despite the absence of tourism, said Tim Kocur, executive director of the Waterfront Business Improvement Area (BIA).

As part of its pedestrian count, the BIA did a snap survey asking people why they had come. “Of the 100 we asked, 62 gave postal codes that were Dundas Street or south — so a 30-minute walk. Two-thirds of people were actually from downtown and were just spending more time on the waterfront this year,” he said.

The business community plans to build on that local interest by planning events such as public art installations, that add excitement but don’t encourage gathering.

“There’s definitely worry because we can’t fully understand the future so it’s hard to forecast how well we’ll be doing in a year or two,” said Kocur.

But waterfront businesses are optimistic about the area’s “bounce-back potential,” he said.

“We’re hoping that Toronto will actually be even more of a waterfront city because this has been one of the prime destinations for people who couldn’t get out of town.”

Correction – Oct. 2 – This story has been updated to correct the name of Jean Blacklock

Tess Kalinowski is a Toronto-based reporter covering real estate for the Star. Follow her on Twitter:

Donovan Vincent is a housing reporter based in Toronto. Follow him on Twitter:

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Chasing that ‘yes’: Students find resilience in the most trying of times

Jun 30, 2021 , , , , by shlf

When Amna Alyass decided to apply to university, her father and sister took her aside and, with earnest faces, explained why they felt she was setting herself up for failure.

“Slow down,” Alyass, 17, recalls being told last December. “Take another year. Or at least apply to an easier program at a college.”

The words came from a place of protective love for a daughter who has faced more adversity than most, including moving from school to school and fending off bullies who mocked her for wearing a hearing aid and a hijab.

But rather than heed their advice, she plowed through and prevailed, getting into all four universities she applied to — and, after just three years of high school, not four. Today, Alyass is proud to be a first-year student in Ryerson University’s politics and governance program.

“I just didn’t give up,” she says. “I told myself that I am going to finish what I started and anyway, once someone tells me I can’t do something, I need to prove that I can.”

Alyass is a picture of resilience and her story is, perhaps, one of hope for millions of students across the province who are in the midst of a school year like no other.

Last March, forced the sudden shutdown of schools, and when classes resumed weeks later, students and teachers were forced to pivot to online learning with little preparation and no training. The start of the wasn’t much better as boards scrambled to make in-person schools safe and create virtual schools from scratch.

Between delayed starts, shuffling of classes, absent teachers, and, more and more often, the shuttering of classrooms due to COVID-19 outbreaks, it is not surprising some parents and students have wondered, as 2020 comes to a close, whether all these disrupted days of education are adding up to a lost year.

Alyass, a teenager who has overcome much more than — and come out the other end, not only hale and whole, but better off — is an example, along with an untold number of students around the world who have faced educational hurdles in non-pandemic times, whether due to a lack of access to formal schooling or having to battle cancer or to flee war as refugees.

And despite the United Nations Secretary General having warned that an entire generation over fallout from the pandemic — and, there is no research to help us predict specifically what can happen to children who miss a year of school — there is a wealth of evidence from lived experience that shows people can thrive in the face of hardship.

And, in fact, that they can’t become resilient without it.

“Let’s face it,” Toronto behavioural therapist Katy Albert says. “Life is a struggle.”

While it’s difficult, as parents and educators, to see our kids suffer — and we often feel it’s our job to remove whatever barriers are in their way, she says, to do that would invalidate their experience and deprive them of essential skills for the future.

Of course, she says, there is a difference between adversity and trauma. Child abuse, horrible accidents, extreme poverty, violence — those are things that create chronic, traumatic stress that “we don’t want kids to go through,” Albert says, but “we can’t make the world void of stress. Rather, we need to equip our children with coping strategies.”

In situations we can’t control, like a pandemic, she says, the first thing we need to do is allow children to experience whatever the situation brings, and “normalize and validate” those feelings, telling them it’s OK to be scared, sad, bored or upset over missing out. “We need to tell them that they can have some adversity and still enjoy what’s good,” she says, “to still find meaning in things; still treat people well and still do well.”

We’re not all “dandelions,” whose seeds can be dropped anywhere, anytime and from any height, and still grow big, she says. Some of us are fragile and need to be handled with care, given more time and support to acquire the grit and determination to overcome hardship — and do our best.

That describes Alyass.

At age two, her parents left her behind in Iraq with relatives to take her newborn sister to the United States for emergency medical treatment. When her parents finally sent for her, nearly three years later in 2007, the shy girl was devastated once again, this time at having to leave her grandparents, caregivers she had grown to love, and at having to acclimatize to a whole new way of life. That included yet another new baby sister. “It was really hard for me,” Alyass says. “I cried every night.”

By this time, her parents had settled in Toronto.

For the next few years, things didn’t get much better.

Moving from school to school as her parents changed jobs and homes, she never felt like she fit in. And as the only brown-skinned student among a sea of white faces at her Etobicoke elementary school, she struggled to make friends. It didn’t help that she was in French Immersion and spoke only Arabic. And even though, getting a hearing aid in Grade 2, was thrilling — she could hear well for the first time — it also made her a target for bullies. Wearing a hijab starting in Grade 4, gave the bullies yet another reason to poke fun. “I was so different,” she says, today, “they didn’t know what to make of me.”

At first, she says, she was crushed, and would come home crying. But over time she developed strategies to cope. She escaped in books, watched movies to learn English and later in life, took up volunteering at a hearing aid clinic, which, she says, helped her find comfort and friendship. Switching to homeschooling in Grade 6, she says, was also a boon, allowing her to learn at her own pace and curb her anxiety.

But, Alyass says, she wouldn’t have figured out how to keep going all those times without her mom’s support — and advocacy — and her “yes.” Even if she came to her mom with ideas or desires that seemed out of her league or impossible to achieve, she always found an ally. No matter what, she says, her mother would always give her that first “yes.”

And she did once again in September 2019 when Alyass came asking.

Earlier that month, Alyass had discovered she didn’t have enough credits to graduate. She had been mourning the death of her grandfather and didn’t notice that she hadn’t planned properly for what was supposed to be her last year in high school. As a homeschooler she didn’t have the benefit of regular advice from teachers and guidance counsellors — so no one caught her mistake early enough to fix it.

Alyass was devastated, but refused to give up, throwing herself into research and coming up with a plan to meet her goal. It involved convincing an alternative high school to let her take seven advanced courses — all without the prerequisites — and then, to ace them.

Rather than laugh and tell her daughter it sounded impossible, Alyass’ mom smiled and said, “What do you have to lose? Just go and chase that ‘yes’.”

By the time she got into school, it was already halfway through the first semester. She tried to catch up. Her marks were initially poor and her father could see she was struggling. While supportive, Alyass says, like any doting father, hers was only trying to shield the daughter he loved from getting hurt that day last December. And so was her sister.

“I knew that,” she says. “But it was still a lot of extra pressure.”

Nonetheless, she held onto her mom’s yes — pulled her marks up and got into university, carving not only her own path, but beating the odds.

“It was surreal,” she says. “I was like — wait, there must be a mistake.”

There wasn’t. And, these days, navigating the demands of university during a pandemic, Alyass is calm. If ever things get hard, she says, she just reminds herself about what she accomplished last year. “If I got through that,” she says, “I can certainly get through this.”

Like Alyass, Duom Maper, 24, is someone who refuses to take no for an answer.

Her entire life had been shaped in Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya, home to almost 200,000 refugees from East Africa. It’s where her parents, originally from war-torn South Sudan, had met, and where she was born.

Life at Kakuma was harsh. The weather was extreme, and the camp’s brittle homes were hardly enough to shield its residents. Drinking water was only available five kilometres away and food was rationed.　

Education was also difficult for Maper to access. Going to high school meant leaving her family and travelling nine hours south to a boarding school, paid for in part through church fundraising, and where she’d live for the school year.

But even with working hard and finishing high school in 2015, higher education was never a guarantee. “My parents didn’t have money to take me through university,” she says.

Through others at the camp, she heard about the World University Service of Canada student refugee program and wasted no time in applying. It took three attempts before she was given the nod to come to Canada — applications she filed through crushing tears and resignation, and an impending deadline of her 25th birthday, after which she would be ineligible for the program.　

“I kept applying because I knew it was my only hope of going to school,” Maper says.

She now studies biomedicine at Trent University and is in her second year and is hoping to eventually become a nurse.　

Maper remains resilient, a quality she credits to her relentless optimism, fuelled by life lessons passed down by her mother and the responsibility of being the eldest daughter.

“My mom made it very clear that (education) was going to be a way for me to achieve as much as I could,” Maper says, adding her mother was with her every step of the way; from every triumphant report card to every heartbreaking rejection.

And despite being some 11,000 kilometres away from her pillar of strength, Maper remains determined to build a better life for herself and her family who supported her throughout the years.

“I want them to have a better life,” she says.

This is the second of a two-part series about how students are coping in a year like no other.

Read part 1:

Michele Henry is a Toronto-based reporter for the Star, writing health and education stories. Follow her on Twitter:

Nadine Yousif is a Toronto-based reporter for the Star covering mental health. Her reporting is funded by the Canadian government through its Local Journalism Initiative. Follow her on Twitter:

Noor Javed is a Toronto-based reporter covering current affairs in the York region for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: