This month, The BUZZ won’t be in print. We know that many of you prefer it on newsprint, but with the latest highly-infectious spike in the COVID-19 pandemic, we didn’t want to risk the health of our volunteer delivery team going door to door. We hope to be back in print in February.
You can read the paper either as a PDF or as individual articles on centretownbuzz.ca. The one advantage of going online is no limit on the number of pages we can print – except the number of articles our volunteers can write and edit!
These last two years have put an incredible strain on our community, both in Ottawa and in Ontario. It’s been a constant adaptation and invention experience trying to find the best way of handling a completely new and constantly-morphing virus – and still keep ordinary life and the economy going. In the process too many have died, either from the virus or from not being able to access health care in time.
The crisis has also exposed existing, endemic problems: not enough nurses; lack of staff and the need for more patient-centred care in long-term care homes, as well as the health implications of the for-profit LTC model; and poor school ventilation. At the city level, we’ve had to deal with the underfunding of public health; the continuing opioid crisis; and serious questions about the usefulness of public-private partnerships.
This will be your opportunity to judge how well our governments have handled this crisis and other priorities. This year will see two elections: provincial on June 2 and city on October 24. The BUZZ will be starting provincial coverage in February. Our city coverage has already started in this issue with interviews with two local candidates, one for mayor and one for city councillor, who have announced their intentions to run. We will cover other local candidates as they announce.
Give us your views on city and provincial issues, with a letter to the editor or an op-ed. Now’s the time to start this debate.
– Alayne McGregor