policy and strategy

This webinar is hosted by the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness, Bernie Pauly.

Harm Reduction during COVID-19 is a challenge being felt widely across the sector. How can frontline staff keep their clients safe? What policies and interventions exist? How can managed alcohol and safe supply programs be implemented in response to social isolation and social distancing requirements?

Recent regulatory changes in Ontario affect how alcohol can be served and sold at events hosted on municipal property. Some of these changes may increase the risk of health harms to patrons, event staff, and the public due to alcohol use, which remains a leading, preventable cause of disease, injury, and death in Ontario. Municipalities have the authority to reduce these potential risks by requiring events to adopt additional mitigation measures; this also has the benefit of reducing liability to the municipality.

This Globe & Mail opinion piece reminds us that very few Canadians can access good mental health care, and those that can are the ones that have the financial means to afford it.

Those most in need are the most consistently failed by the system.

Today in Toronto, on World Mental Health Day, Education Minister Stephen Lecce announced that the provincial government will be investing nearly $40 million dollars to advance student mental health and permanently funding approximately 180 frontline mental health workers in secondary schools. 

Editorials of the summer from the Thunder Bay Chronicle Journal, St. Catherine’s Standard and Toronto Star seek to sort out the good and bad of the expected income benefits policy reforms by the Ontario Ministry of Children, Community and Social Services.  While there is the potential of discussion sounding too political on government decisions, there are also facts about these actions that impact on the decades of building effective resources to advance the Recovery Model, but how to find them?

A big thank you to Sheryl Spithoff for clearly stating the public health side of this debate. Check out the article in the Toronto Star and be sure to vote in their short poll!

https://www.thestar.com/opinio...ules-on-alcohol.html

While not news for anyone working in the homelessness sector of support and care, Mitchell Katz bolsters at least my own courage and better still multi level community, government policy focus to shift the shelter focus of homelessness.