Language barriers. Slow internet. Students sent home with no work. Stephen Wentzell writes on the Liberal government’s broken promise of ‘no child left behind’ after the schools closed because of the coronavirus.
We need a FULL BAN on evictions because of COVID19 and a rent grant program to help tenants pay off arrears and we need it NOW!At 12pm join here to learn how to get more involved and call-in to the Provincial government demanding they stop the upcoming wave of evictions
Kendall Worth tries to shed some light on the wait for the one-time $600 for people who live with disabilities . This was promised by the federal government earlier this month, and then things happened…
What is it that people in Nova Scotia have against masks? Look around you, in the supermarkets, in Spring Garden drugstores downtown – sure, some people are wearing masks – but most aren’t. Halifax writer Barbara Elizabeth Stewart tries to find an answer to that question.
“We were short-staffed to begin with. Now it is a disaster,” says a Halifax long term care worker employed at three separate group homes, reflecting on the first COVID-19 wave. “Of course, when someone feels sick, it is important that they stay home. But nobody is there to replace them. The care responsibilities are falling on fewer and fewer of us. Everyone calls us heroes, but we don’t have a choice. This is our job.”
Students at NSCAD University, the venerable post-secondary art school in Halifax, are worried that tuition fees will be raised once again this year. How are students going to pay the already very high fees, especially Black, Indigenous and POC students who are disproportionately affected by the coronavirus crisis? the student union asks.
Lack of masks, together with the use of substitute workers and the absence of paid sick leave were contributing factors in the many coronavirus-related deaths in long term care facilities across the country. Let’s not make the same mistake twice.
Dr. David Westwood: “Before COVID-19, it was understood that a year or more of planning, development, and refinement was required for a single, high quality online course offering. Now, professors have scarcely three months to change over all of their courses in time for the fall semester. “
Tari Ajadi on the difficult and messy task of health promotion in the middle of a pandemic, ensuring that enhanced police surveillance and harassment does not become another indignity that Black communities face.
“In normal times we’re talking about guys who work for nine months straight, at very low wages. Now with COVID-19 we’ve got workers that have been on board ships for 13 or 14 months. They’re all trapped and they can’t get home to the Philippines, they can’t get home to India, to the Ukraine,” says Karl Risser, an International Transport Workers Federation (ITF) inspector here in Nova Scotia. .“It’s getting desperate. We’ve heard reports of seafarers jumping overboard, seafarers fighting, massive tension on board, because no one knows for how long they will be stuck there.”