Health Committee on April 26th, 2021

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

Thank you.

Ms. Choo, I would be remiss if I didn't thank you and S.U.C.C.E.S.S. on behalf of British Columbians for the excellent work that you do in our community in so many areas. I just want to go on the record for that.

I want to ask you about any increase in demand for your counselling and crisis support services through the COVID-19 pandemic. Do you need additional resources or funding from the federal government? Have you found that your services are more in demand now?

[Queenie Choo]

Absolutely.

The escalation of issues in this area has certainly called for a lot of support, especially financial support, to make sure that people's mental health is supported and is well. Certainly, the crisis line, crisis counselling and helpline have increased fourfold from before COVID. We're hoping to have additional funding to support the increasing demands of those people who have suffered from or been a witness to those racial situations.

We definitely need funding to support this.

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ron McKinnon]

Thank you to all the witnesses for your time today and for sharing with us your knowledge, your expertise and your concerns.

Thanks to the committee for the great questions.

We will now suspend and bring in the next panel.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ron McKinnon]

Welcome back, everyone, to meeting number 32 of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Health.

The committee is meeting today to study the emergency situation facing Canadians in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, specifically, today, examining the collateral effects of the pandemic.

First, we will welcome our witnesses. From 360ºkids, we have Clovis Grant, chief executive officer. From the federation of medical specialists of Quebec, we have Dr. Serge Legault, vice-president. With FoodShare Toronto, we have Paul Taylor, executive director. With Madikale Touring Incorporated and Reiny Dawg Productions, we have Mr. George Canyon, owner and chief executive officer, Reiny Dawg Productions Limited.

I should advise the committee that the clerk did send Mr. Canyon a headset, but he didn't receive it. It's one of the important reasons we have to give ample notice to the clerk for witnesses, so that we can get the equipment there and test it out.

Thank you all for coming here today. We will start with our witness statements at this point.

We will start with 360ºkids and Clovis Grant.

Please go ahead. You have six minutes.

[Clovis Grant, Chief Executive Officer, 360 kids]

Thank you.

Through you, Mr. Chair, thank you for the opportunity to speak to the committee this afternoon on behalf of 360°kids.

As one of the leading youth agencies in York region, 360°kids has a 32-year history of providing services to homeless youth, including victims and survivors of human trafficking. We serve approximately 4,000 youth each year, ages 16 to 26, providing them with education, housing and employment and health and well-being supports. Our mission is to transition youth from crisis to stability.

On the impact of COVID-19 on 360°kids, let me first share some comments from the young people themselves. The first comment is, “Being told to stay inside and not leave reminds me of when I was being trafficked and...this causes me a lot of anxiety.” Second comment is “For those of us who have no place to go home to, it’s hard to do the things we are told to do such as staying home, wash your hands. How can you do that when you don’t have access to water. You can’t even take a shower.”

What are the lessons we've learned through the pandemic? There are five things. First of all, great things can happen when we work together. Second, prevention is indeed the best medicine. Third, the marginalized become even more marginalized during a pandemic. Four, youth need very specific solutions. Last, the needs of staff must also be prioritized.

One of the successes of the pandemic that we've seen is organizations coming together. Providers from various sectors in York region, including government funders and private corporations, came together to share resources and their own responses to the pandemic and to collaborate on initiatives. We were able to identify gaps very quickly and respond in real time to address needs for food, technology, housing access, etc. I can really see these built relationships continuing into the future.

Our work at 360°kids on prevention, leading the youth housing stabilization strategy, developed even more significance during the pandemic. This is a group of about 30 cross-sectoral partners and young people working together to better align services and resources to prevent youth homelessness in York region. Why? We know that homeless youth become homeless adults, and the longer you are homeless, the worse your outcome.

We definitely saw how the marginalized became even more marginalized during the pandemic. In our programs, we saw a fivefold increase in the number of youth accessing mental health supports, with past trauma, loss of income and confinement due to lockdowns all contributing to high levels of anxiety.

We need more accessible mental health supports, especially for this population and for those who are Black and racialized. The youth told us that racism was a significant factor in their homelessness. To address these impacts we had to provide various spaces for the young people to share their voices, we expanded partnerships with specific cultural agencies, and at the same time, we reviewed and are updating our own agency equity strategy.

The need for more youth-specific solutions was seen when we closed our drop-ins early in the pandemic. One of my earlier quotes spoke of the challenge some youth who are precariously housed face. We saw that youth living in the rough, these are youth who are living in abandoned buildings, abandoned cars, abandoned spaces in general, many of them went more into hiding due to the closure of many of the spaces they once went to.

To better support the youth, rather than waiting for them to come to us, we went to them. We redeployed staff to do more outreach. We even hired two young people to be outreach workers who were former youth, and we also pushed for a youth-specific isolation facility to make it more accessible for youth to get access to housing.

While we were able to house about 25 youth throughout the pandemic, we know that the need for more affordable housing is so critical. We certainly applaud the government for funding the emergency and short-term needs, but without longer-term housing and wraparound supports to keep people housed, those marginalized young people become even more marginalized.

I close with a reminder about the impact of the pandemic on our staff. Confusing public health messages, concerns about the vaccine, low wages and even the stress of their own family situations, this all took a toll on staff mental health, which worsened with each lockdown. We responded as an agency with additional mental health days off with pay for staff, and with flexibility around their sick time and their child care needs.

The government-funded additional hourly pay, given to frontline workers for a brief period last year, certainly went a long way in recognizing the importance of this sector that is chronically underpaid. We hope to see this kind of support continue.

Unfortunately, for many agencies like ours that are not adequately funded for our programs, it puts pressure on our fundraising. We have seen a significant hit to our fundraising due to event cancellations over the past year.

In summary, it really has been a very difficult year for the young people we serve at 360°kids and the staff who are supporting them on a daily basis. While emergency responses are great, and we saw some great opportunities throughout the pandemic, what is more important are preventative measures and wraparound supports to get people housed and to keep them housed.

Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ron McKinnon]

Thank you, Mr. Grant.

We now go to the federation of medical specialists of Quebec.

Dr. Legault, you have the floor for six minutes.

[Dr. Serge Legault, Vice-President, Federation of Medical Specialists of Québec]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I would like to thank the parliamentarians for inviting me and giving me the opportunity to discuss the impact of the global COVID-19 pandemic on Quebec patients.

My name is Serge Legault, I am a general surgeon in active practice in Laval, near Montreal. I am the vice-president of the Federation of Medical Specialists of Québec.

Since the beginning of the crisis, in March 2020, I have been a member of a national committee called the COVID-19 clinical steering committee, which was set up by Quebec's department of health and social services. The purpose of this committee is to find ways to advise the department on the most prudent strategies during COVID-19.

I am also the chair of the COVID-19 clinical subcommittee—operating room, which deals with offloading strategies during the COVID-19 crisis. We have learned a lot about this over the past year and our responses to COVID-19 have adjusted over time. We can talk about this, if you are interested, during questions.

The Federation of Medical Specialists of Québec is a group of 10,000 medical specialists who work in 59 medical, surgical, imaging and laboratory specialties within the public health network.

Since March 2020, medical specialists have been working on two fronts. The first is the fight against COVID-19 in hospitals—in the ICU, in the wards and in operating rooms to preserve the lives of patients who have been affected and to try to save as many as possible. This onslaught of an infectious disease is one of the worst in modern medical history. Clearly, physicians, managers and all those involved in the health care system had to adapt as quickly as possible.

The second front is to combat the impact of COVID-19, and to ensure the continued health care and management of patients other than those with COVID-19. These patients exist; they have been forgotten for a long time, for 14 months now, and to some degree, they still are forgotten.

I am going to focus today on one aspect of the issue, which is human resources.

Right now, the most glaring problem in Quebec hospitals is a human resources problem, and I believe that this is the same wherever COVID-19 is putting strain on the health care system. COVID-19 has not only disrupted our lives, it has disrupted the delicate balance between our resources and hospitals. These resources are the people at the patients' bedside, working day and night to ensure that the patients are taken care of from the moment they enter the hospital until they leave.

Today, because of the impact of COVID-19, either through absenteeism, illness, or career changes, many of these resources are absent, some permanently. The decline in resources is one of the most alarming trends with respect to COVID-19 right now. Because of the lack of these resources and the offloading effort required throughout Quebec, especially during the first wave, many surgeries had to be cancelled or postponed.

Some surgeries have been delayed since the beginning of the crisis. At the beginning of the crisis, on Quebec's waiting lists, 1% of patients had been waiting for more than one year. Now we have 12%. That's an astronomical number, one that is beyond our imagination. Last week, approximately 150,000 patients were on surgery waiting lists across Quebec. This number is equivalent to the population of the city of Saguenay or the city of Lévis. Too often, these statistics are mentioned without meaning anything to anyone. One hundred and fifty thousand patients is absolutely huge.

If we maintain the current operating rate, which is reduced to about 80% of the usual activity, clearly because of the lack of human resources, we will have nearly 200,000 patients waiting by the end of the year, the equivalent of the city of Sherbrooke.

The Federation of Medical Specialists of Québec recently had the privilege of speaking with Mr. Marchbank, who was part of British Columbia's response to the surgical backlog caused by COVID-19.

Members of Parliament, I think you will agree with me that this British Columbia story is certainly a success. We are looking forward to implementing the good ideas that Mr. Marchbank and the people of British Columbia have implemented to try to respond as effectively as possible to the pandemic.

Of course, at the beginning of the crisis, Quebec had a significant shortage of orderlies. You have heard about the initiative to hire orderlies. Quebec hired 10,000 orderlies, of which more than 8,000 are currently working.

Clearly, human resources are not limited to orderlies. There are also highly trained nurses, especially for operating rooms; respiratory therapists, who can be trained for operating rooms, for intensive care and for the wards; and perfusionists. I don't want to mention all the resources, as I could talk about them all day long.

Today, a lot of resources are lacking. I think one way to address this is to inject some money. The Federation of Medical Specialists of Québec took a stand on health transfers. We believe that Quebec should receive a little more money from the federal government to recruit staff, to increase the quality of work and the quality of working conditions, and to increase the attractiveness of these positions, which are key positions across hospitals, and entail extremely demanding tasks. It is very easy for those workers to become discouraged and decide to go elsewhere, because the financial conditions are not enough.

A polyp that is not removed from a colon today can become cancer in a few years. We don't know the patients who have not been diagnosed. As my friend Louis Perrault just said in his speech, primary prevention and secondary prevention have been sort of put on hold because of the pressure on human resources caused by the pandemic.

The federal government quickly allocated significant funds to cushion the impact of the health crisis on the economy and on the public. We hope that the federal government will be able to provide additional funding to the provinces.

We need to address the needs of the health care system and to ensure its sustainability because this crisis will not go away in one year or two. It will persist for a long time.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ron McKinnon]

Thank you, Dr. Legault.

We'll go now to FoodShare Toronto.

Mr. Taylor, you have six minutes.

[Paul Taylor, Executive Director, FoodShare Toronto]

Thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today.

My name is Paul Taylor. I'm the executive director of FoodShare Toronto, an organization that works in partnership with communities across the city. We serve as a catalyst advancing meaningful solutions to food access injustices. We do this by advocating for the permanent dismantling of the oppressive systems that cause food insecurity in the first place, one of which we know is racism.

The very fact that Black households are three and a half times more likely to be food insecure than white households in Canada is an example of how anti-Black racism causes food insecurity. The anti-Black racism that we experience that causes disproportionate food insecurity is literally making us sick and taking food out of our mouths. It affects our income levels, access to education, housing, employment and a list longer than we have time for today.

It's important for me to start there because COVID-19 didn't create this reality for us. These inequities existed long before the pandemic, but when you add COVID-19 the result has been that Black Canadians are infected and hospitalized at disproportionately higher rates. We're also three times more likely to know someone who's died from the virus. Every day I worry that I'm going to get a call or see a post notifying me that I've lost someone in my community. That kind of grief, sadly, is not new to us, and neither are the ways that our calls to address these injustices have gone ignored.

Here we are, smack dab in the middle of a third wave of this deadly virus, the collateral impact of which is that our community continues to suffer disproportionately. One of the ways we're seeing this play out in this pandemic is the way that the pandemic has induced delays of surgeries and visits to our doctors, whether it's for a checkup to address an existing or a new health issue. We're not able to get the help we need right now.

I've long said that I believe we only have a sick care system in this country, but ultimately we've been forced to depend on it because it's all that our governments seem to prioritize. I say a “sick care” system because a health care system wouldn't be divorced from ensuring things like access to nutritious food and housing for us all. Again, it's all we have at the moment.

The result of these types of delayed visits to doctors and delayed surgeries will be our worsening health and the deepening of health inequities for a generation. Instead of prioritizing our actual health, the reality for Black Canadians is that we are sentenced to things like food insecurity and now less access to vaccines, less access to testing and even more policing of our communities. Ultimately, more government-sanctioned injustice targeted at Black Canadians.

At the intersection of my identity proudly exists both my Blackness and my queerness. Growing up materially poor, gay and Black means that many of us don't always have the typical family support systems to fall back on in times of need, in times of a job loss or at the onset of a serious illness like COVID-19, not to mention that many in the queer community work in the arts and hospitality sectors that have been decimated by the virus, making, again, queer folks especially vulnerable to food insecurity, homelessness and the health impacts that come with both. Like any group, in times of tumult we cling to our community for support. Many of us find chosen family in our community spaces, ones that are safe and accessible. Safe space that we have long been losing thanks to gentrification.

Week after week another of our community spaces or queer-owned businesses shuts its doors for good. We shouldn't have to suffer more as a result of this pandemic because we're queer, Black, trans, disabled, low-income or a refugee. We all deserve to be protected and kept safe, especially in a crisis like this.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ron McKinnon]

Thank you, Mr. Taylor.

We go now to Madikale Touring Incorporated with Mr. Canyon.

Please go ahead for six minutes.

[George Canyon, Owner and Chief Executive Officer, Reiny Dawg Productions Ltd. and Madikale Touring Inc.]

Good morning and thank you to all the members and Mr. Chair for having me on as a witness. I will try not to be too long-winded, but I was born and raised in Nova Scotia, as Chris knows, where we like to tell stories.

I currently live in Alberta where I've lived for more than half of my life—just five minutes south of Calgary, actually. I've been in the entertainment business, the music business, for approximately 30 years. I'm very blessed. Up until COVID-19 hit, I had a very successful career, internationally, in the country music niche. I have also been a recording artist, audio engineer and video engineer for the aforementioned 30 years, and not only have worked on my own career but more importantly have aided in the mentorship of dozens of young artists and charitable causes.

COVID-19 has decimated our business and our industry as a whole. We immediately made moves, of course, as all good change managers do, to pivot, to try to find some economic resource for our entire team, not unlike the time we had to pivot a few years ago when our industry introduced streaming, when my company went overnight from six IPs to one IP and lost 60% to 70% of its revenue generation.

However, hours and hours of free online concerts and virtual appearances brought basically no economic relief, albeit with music—and I'm sure everyone here appreciates music. It made us feel good to be able to bring some solace and comfort to our fans with what we've been blessed to give in music. We were one of the small businesses—I would say “few”, but unfortunately, the more small businesses I've talked to, especially here in Alberta.... We were one of the few to fall through the cracks when it came to receiving any kind of federal economic relief.

In fact, we have a wonderful team of accountants and business managers who work with us, and they've been trying for months to access that funding to no avail. Our situation now is that our entire team and staff, of course, have been laid off. I would love to be the artist who gets to cry over spilled milk, but this is not just about me. It's about 3.1 million people who are directly affected in the entertainment business, who don't have work to go to and who are receiving no funding and help.

More importantly, hope, to us, is everything. We have nothing to hope for because every time something seems to open up.... It's like the shows I was supposed to do that have been moved multiple, multiple times. All of my staff, all of my team, all of those venues are now sitting on their hands again, not knowing what's coming. That, right now, is the absolute worst part for our mental health: not knowing what's going to happen a month from now, two months from now, six months from now, if we're going to be able to feed our families or not, if we're going to have to take subsequent work.

I've talked with many artists, musicians and techs who have been blessed to find other jobs and who will never, ever come back to the music business, to the entertainment business. They will stay working the jobs they've found because—and the rationale actually makes sense—when the next pandemic hits, we will be the first to be shut down yet again, although we treat our clientele with the utmost of safety, I would say, over most industries. Our insurance, our security, our clientele are put above everything else in our business, and unfortunately—

[Marcus Powlowski, Liberal, Thunder Bay—Rainy River, ON]

Maybe at one o'clock we could go to the school to get your other computer.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ron McKinnon]

Mr. Powlowski, you might want to mute.

[George Canyon]

Anyway, I could go on and on, but I think it's more important that you get the opportunity to ask the witnesses direct questions, so I will stand down now and wait for those questions.

Thanks again for having me.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ron McKinnon]

Thank you, Mr. Canyon.

I'm not sure if that was Marcus I was talking to, but someone.... There we go.

Thank you, all, for your testimony. We'll now start our rounds of questions, and we will go to Mr. Barlow to begin.

Mr. Barlow, please go ahead for six minutes.

[John Barlow, Conservative, Foothills, AB]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Thanks to our witnesses for appearing here today and sharing their stories with us.

Mr. Canyon, I want to start with you. You mentioned at the beginning of your presentation something I thought was interesting. Certainly, I have spoken with [Technical difficulty—Editor] many artists in my riding who simply thought themselves—

[The Chair, Liberal, Ron McKinnon]

I'm sorry, Mr. Barlow. You cut out there for a minute. I'm not sure if it was just me or....

[John Barlow, Conservative, Foothills, AB]

I'm getting the “unstable Internet” message on my screen. It's one of the joys of rural Alberta, I guess, but we'll carry on.

Mr. Canyon, you were talking about being considered a small business and not qualifying for many of the federal programs such as CERB, CEBA and the wage subsidy. What are the obstacles that are keeping the music industry from qualifying for those programs? Maybe for you in particular, what has been the stumbling block?

[George Canyon]

Thank you for the question, Mr. Barlow.

Here's one of the biggest things. I'm no expert in this field, albeit I've done the economics for our business for 30 years. We have a company out of Vancouver called Yaletown Financial, which handles all of our business management needs, all incoming and outgoing funds. They have informed me over multiple phone calls that one of the biggest issues for small businesses is that when the ownership—my wife and I, who own our companies—does not take salaries and basically at the end of the year gets dividends, it causes a kind of economic loophole, and that loophole has been the issue.

They've been working both provincially and federally to try to gain access to those monies, which are so needed just in the downstream to support our team, and to no avail.

There are many other reasons economically that they're having issues internally, but it stems right back to the first day they were online and trying to fight with the online system.

I have talked to others in the music industry, to not just pick on one side, and they were able to gain access to funding, but they were a much smaller company and were not an incorporation that was taking dividends. I think that in a lot of small businesses that seems to be the biggest issue. For those companies where the owners are taking the dividends instead of the salary, that caused a big issue right out of the gate.

[John Barlow, Conservative, Foothills, AB]

Thanks for that, Mr. Canyon.

Certainly, some of these programs have not proven themselves to be agile and able to address some of these problems. For the longest part at the beginning of the CEBA account, for example, if you were a small business owner but used a personal account rather than a business account—which I'm assuming many artists who are on a smaller scale than you would probably do—you would not qualify. It took 10 months to a year for the Liberal government to make those adjustments. It's certainly unfortunate when you see some businesses falling through the cracks.

[George Canyon]

The sad thing is using the word “business”, John. Our business is not a business of “I'm going to do this and I'm going to punch a time clock from nine to five”. There's so much passion and there's so much of yourself that goes into it that, when I talked to one of the artists lately who has basically just quit, they could barely speak. They're in tears, because it's a piece of them that is being killed. It's a piece of them that's dying.

[John Barlow, Conservative, Foothills, AB]

You bring up my next question. I talked about this on Friday. I had a young girl in my riding call me in tears about her brother who had committed suicide. I had another one yesterday. A 29-year-old young man in my riding committed suicide yesterday. These are becoming all too common.

When speaking with some of the artists—Mariya Stokes and Lyndsay Butler in my riding—you can tell what stress is on these young artists and what anxiety there is. Maybe you can touch on that a bit. What has been the mental health aspect of seeing your entire industry and your entire livelihood, everything you've worked for, come to a screeching halt, with no light at the end of the tunnel as we continue to see lockdowns and restrictions?

[George Canyon]

As a Canadian citizen and a very proud Canadian—one million per cent Canadian through and through—one of the things that most disappoints me is that we didn't take a deep breath and look at what could be a huge travesty for our mental health, especially when mental health is first and foremost in the minds of most Canadians. In our industry, especially right now, because we have not recovered in the slightest—not 0.001%, not at all—mental health is a huge issue.

Just in talking to my team, which I try to maintain contact with to make sure that everybody is good, I see that everyone is trying to hold their head up and put a smile on—albeit fake. This is what we do in our industry. We're in the industry of hearing no. I've heard “no” so many times that I just kind of expect it now. When you're an artist and you're trying to get record deals or you're trying to get gigs and you're trying to climb that corporate ladder....

Right now, though, the artists I've talked with as of late, they just feel lost. It's not so much the artist in me. It's my family who made the sacrifice for us to get to where we are today after 30 years—my wife and my children. The sacrifices they've made, not just with my wife having to work three jobs at one time so I could play on the weekends, but with my children not having their dad there for the first day of school, not having their dad there when they learned how to ride a bicycle.... All those things add up to mental health, and now, seeing their dad just not being able to work at what they have been a really big part of my success in....

[John Barlow, Conservative, Foothills, AB]

George, I have one quick question left for you.

We talk about the artists here, but how many people would you employ at a typical show? It's not just the artists who are suffering through this. It's those reciprocal jobs. How many people would you be employing for a typical show that you would put on? What's the impact for those careers as well?