From medical doctors citing doubtful circumstances when billing for fitness-to-drive experiences to airport chaos, we’ve chosen a number of the greatest lengthy reads of the week on thestar.com.
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The experiences streamed into the Ministry of Transportation, day after day, week after week.
In each, the Ottawa physician knowledgeable the federal government {that a} affected person had a medical situation that will make it harmful to drive.
For every report – which may result in a licence suspension for the affected person –– the physician billed the province $36.25.
The physician filed extra of those experiences than any of his colleagues at The Ottawa Hospital and greater than another physician in his specialty of sleep medication, in response to authorities information.
He has filed greater than another physician in Ontario.
The median variety of these experiences filed by Ontario physicians has been 5 over almost a decade. The Ottawa physician filed greater than 4,800 –– billing the province greater than $175,000.
It was a memo that appeared to verify tenants’ worst fears.
A company memo posted on-line laid out the options of varied properties held by a Toronto firm — together with a Sixties midrise at 1570 Lawrence Ave. W. secured after a greater than $33-million deal this 12 months. It additionally outlined its targets in black and white: to vacate all flats and usher in a brand new “demographic” of renters.
Quite a few tenants on the midrise’s most important flooring had already obtained discover of an eviction utility towards them, with their new landlord stating a have to empty their items for renovations to the constructing’s plumbing system. To a number of of these households, the memo and its purpose solely bolstered their worry of being pushed out.
The corporate says it was an error — telling the Star the wording was copied, mistakenly, from one other doc a few challenge to transform scholar leases into longer-term houses. In an announcement, it mentioned it might respect ejected tenants’ authorized proper to return, if desired, at a fee much like what they’re presently paying. “Now we have no historical past of renovictions and have been appearing in good religion,” the assertion learn.
Even together with her teenage brother in excessive ache, his knee swollen from a nasty fall and looking out like a melon, Luna Garcia’s household hesitated to take him to hospital.
As an alternative, they waited a day to see a health care provider, appearing solely when the struggling turned excruciating for the 15-year-old — all as a result of the undocumented Toronto household feared hospital employees would ask for his or her immigration standing and demand charges upfront that the household couldn’t afford.
However due to the Ontario authorities’s short-term measure to increase well being care to uninsured residents through the pandemic, there was none of that. Garcia’s brother received the medical consideration he wanted and averted lasting injury to his knee.
Well being-care suppliers say that through the pandemic they noticed first-hand the advance within the care of the uninsured. They now hope the “milestone adjustments” will keep.
“As a front-line supplier, I’ve seen many sufferers entry pressing health-care companies, life-saving therapies at occasions, that they’d in any other case both have been denied or felt afraid searching for,” mentioned Dr. Ritika Goel, a Toronto household doctor.
4. First came the cancer diagnosis, then the news her treatments could leave her infertile
When it got here to her well being, Rebecca Musgrove had all the time performed all the things proper. The 32-year-old farm lady and working room nurse in Calgary had common Pap smears, obtained the human papillomavirus vaccine and customarily taken care of herself.
Illness was one thing she cured in others.
Till a girl from the walk-in clinic the place she had had an ultrasound for some pesky signs referred to as to say her outcomes had been again they usually weren’t good: she had a five-by-five-centimetre tumour on her cervix. Musgrove knew the plot; she braced herself for what was coming. There have been biopsies after which a name from her gynecologist confirming superior most cancers.
“We talked for a minute,” Musgrove mentioned exterior a espresso store as a thunderstorm gathered behind her. “After which he let me go. I had a scream and an excellent cry. When he referred to as me again, we talked about what it meant and what subsequent steps can be.”
That was the tip of April. Over the following a number of weeks there have been a referral to an oncologist, an MRI, a CT scan. And her gynecologist requested: Had she considered freezing eggs?
Toronto actual property gross sales are plummeting and residential costs are dropping as rates of interest proceed to climb, pushing patrons and sellers to attend on the sidelines.
However the place are the buyers?
The pandemic market of the final two years resulted in a feeding frenzy for buyers drawn to decrease borrowing prices, specialists say. For many who determined to promote, they had been in a position to make substantial revenue as costs soared. In recent times, those that personal a number of properties turned the biggest slice of Toronto’s home-purchasing market, overtaking first-time homebuyers, in response to Teranet.
However the market has modified drastically — and whereas some actual property specialists consider it’s ripe for buyers to scoop up extra property, with much less competitors, rising rental demand and falling costs, others say rising rates of interest are additionally preserving buyers on the sidelines, ready for costs to drop additional.
6. Toronto’s airport is now worst in the world for delays. The reason may not be what you think
The safety line exterior U.S. customs in Terminal One at Toronto Pearson Worldwide Airport — the busiest airport in Canada and, in response to new information, presently the worst airport for delays on the planet — seems to be, at 4 a.m. on a Saturday, one thing like a diagram of the small gut. Drained travellers wind in unruly traces from the closed safety doorways. They puff out into all accessible house, from kiosk to exit, shuffling in bulging coils, ready for one thing — something — to occur that can allow them to transfer.
Contained in the terminal, the temper feels a bit like a nightclub when the lights come on crossed with a packed theatre at a slasher movie. Everybody appears drained, wired and anxious. There are individuals slumped over asleep in chairs, on the ground, on windowsills and even one couple in a hammock. The entire place appears braced for one thing to go flawed. And no marvel.
For greater than three months, Pearson airport, a world financial hub that hyperlinks a area of greater than seven million individuals to greater than 160 locations all over the world and facilitates greater than $28 billion in commerce yearly, has been present process an excruciating public meltdown.
The small print, by this level, have been so nicely lined they barely want repeating: overflowing customs halls, delayed flights (greater than half of all Pearson departures have been delayed this summer season, in response to information compiled by FlightAware, making it the worst on the planet as measured by delays as a share of scheduled flights), missed connections, lost bags, stranded passengers, stuck planes and, in fact, the planes that by no means depart in any respect.
Greater than 8,000 flights have been cancelled at Pearson to this point this 12 months, in response to information from Cirium, an aviation analytics firm, a quantity so giant it nearly renders summary the sheer quantity of distress it represents. (Virtually each passenger I spoke to for this story used, sooner or later within the interview, a variation on the phrase “and that’s after I began crying.”)
And issues have solely been getting worse.
7. This luxury apartment building caters to downsizing seniors. Here’s why Toronto needs more of them
Philipa and Aubrey Caplan, 73 and 83, promised that after they retired they’d promote their gracious 2,700-square-foot dwelling in Winnipeg — full with a pool and backyard “to die for” — and be part of their two sons and their households in Toronto.
They deliberate to promote final summer season however chickened out. In January, their agent referred to as they usually offered inside 48 hours of the place going in the marketplace. Their sons’ happiness “was off the Richter scale,” mentioned Philipa.
Then got here the difficulty of the place to reside in Toronto.
The couple wished to hire so that they had the liberty to lock the door and journey with out worrying about break-ins or watering the backyard. They wished to be near buddies within the St. Clair Avenue West hall or Summerhill, walkable neighbourhoods with a mixture of housing, not only a assortment of towers.
However like many downsizers, the Caplans had been caught between small fashionable flats with unhealthy layouts in totally vertical neighbourhoods, and older, dreary buildings in want of updating.
In 2017, the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota — the biggest mall in america —introduced a author in residence. The 5.6 million-square-foot purchasing centre encompasses, just like the West Edmonton Mall and the Woodbine Centre in Etobicoke, a theme park and a Exhausting Rock Café, unlikely backdrops for a literary expertise. Brian Sonia-Wallace, an L.A. poet, recalled the second in a piece for the Guardian: “A fast Google search turned up reams of articles skewering the residency as nothing however a shameless publicity stunt for the largest mall in North America,” he wrote, “deriding the concept that a author would come and be impressed by a Nordstrom or its prospects.” Undeterred, he despatched in photos of himself and his typewriter, together with a writing pattern. He received.
By the second day he was operating a tally of the quantity of people that, after studying the customized poems he dutifully produced for them, proceeded to cry, proper there, in entrance of the Nordstrom. Like a first-season Santa, he was confronted with a visit to the mall that was additionally an emotional expertise.
American structure critic Alexandra Lange wouldn’t be shocked. Lange has spent her profession writing in regards to the methods design — from company campuses to kids’s play areas — influences our most intimate selves. Doing the analysis for her new e book, “Meet Me By the Fountain: An Inside Historical past of the Mall,” Lange had her personal model of the Santa expertise. “Individuals advised me about their first jobs, their first piercing, their first boyfriend, their first CD.” She additionally discovered herself musing on her personal relationship with malls. “The mall was our observe metropolis, coaching wheels for the true world.”
Tens of millions of {dollars} have flowed from Hockey Canada to greater than 20 victims of sexual misconduct going again to 1989, it emerged Wednesday, because the curtain was not less than partly pulled again on how the group — now beneath a cloud of suspicion and scandal — has systemically handled allegations towards its members.
Hockey Canada has settled 21 sexual misconduct claims, paying out $8.9 million in compensation, executives with the group revealed earlier than a committee of MPs in Ottawa.
The admission to the standing committee on Canadian heritage was accompanied by calls from a few of these MPs for Hockey Canada president Scott Smith’s resignation, at the same time as he sat earlier than them.
Smith advised the committee that ought to the board of Hockey Canada or the governance evaluation launched not too long ago advocate it, he would step apart.
“Canadians have been clear, they count on these representing our nationwide sport to do higher,” Smith mentioned.
“We personal it.”
10. A day in the life of Brooke Henderson — Canada’s only two-time major winner
Brooke Henderson and her sister Brittany had been sitting in workplace chairs, laughing, whereas tons of of followers lined up exterior a golf retail retailer for an opportunity to fulfill their hero. It’s not stunning that they had fallen right into a deep chuckle. That’s what they do. The recollections they’ve made over the past decade or so, collectively, often lead to humorous moments.
This time they had been debating if the important thing to town Brooke Henderson was going to get from Ottawa mayor Jim Watson later that day can be an actual key. It’s her third. Generally you lose monitor of this stuff. Calgary and Smiths Falls, Ont. – their hometown – additionally gave Brooke one.
“I’m racking them up,” she says.
In Calgary it’s not a key in any respect, although, it’s a white cowboy hat. The scale was a bit of off, so it ended up simply sitting on prime of Brooke’s head. They hold having bother with hats. When she received the CP Girls’s Open in 2018 her father, Dave, took a hat from a Mountie and tried placing it on his daughter. No actual luck there, both.
The gang exterior was rising. Some children had skipped college. A middle-aged lady introduced a garden chair to make her wait exterior extra comfy. A father stood together with his two women, aged eight and 11, who all the time watch Henderson on TV. “She’s an enormous inspiration,” he says. Teenage boys tried to maintain their cool. Star-struck younger women who wish to be like her (they wish to be her) had been there. A man with an extended purple beard and a Harley-Davidson cap and a shirt with ‘Depraved Crowes Outaouais’ on the again was all smiles. He was in a bike membership. It might need been a gang.
Everybody loves Brooke Henderson.
11. Why did Chadd die? 15 months after a ‘struggle’ with off-duty Toronto cops, his mom needs answers
Chadd Facey’s grave lies close to a pond simply off Freeway 50, a five-minute drive from the Brampton home the place he grew up. Practically daily for the previous 15 months, even after a draining shift on the long-term care dwelling the place she works, Fay Fagan stops in to go to her son.
She washes away any dust that’s gathered on his gravesite. She generally brings flowers, ideally blue, the brilliant hue of her son’s bed room partitions. Most days she wears an merchandise of Chadd’s clothes, his extra-small shirts now becoming since she shed 52 kilos after his loss of life, when she had no urge for food for the meals introduced over by buddies.
She closes her eyes and photos her youngest little one, attempting to put aside for a second the questions that cling over his loss of life.
For over a 12 months, Fagan and her household have lived a nightmarish actuality: Chadd is gone they usually don’t know why. On April 26, 2021, the 19-year-old with a love of hip-hop and sneakers skipped a dentist appointment and went out. He returned dwelling at dinner, clearly unwell: inside his buddies’ automobile, Fagan discovered him confused, going out and in of consciousness, and with a bruise on his brow — which Fagan, a registered sensible nurse, and paramedics described as a “hematoma.”
Hours later, he was lifeless.
12. Pope Francis, we don’t accept your hollow apology. Here’s why
The apology we heard from Pope Francis in Maskwacis this week was certainly historic, however predictably missing in substance, writes contributor Pamela Palmater.
In what gave the impression of a really rigorously worded apology, the Pope disregarded the Catholic Church’s complicity and cover-up of the sexual abuse of hundreds of Indigenous kids over many generations. His failure to acknowledge the church’s position — each on the particular person degree and as an establishment and governing physique — not solely deflects accountability, but in addition serves to place extra kids in danger. His failure to additionally acknowledge its position in genocide was a obtrusive omission that damage many Indigenous Peoples.
The Pope’s “penitential pilgrimage” to Canada and his apology meant an important deal to some Indian residential college survivors and their households. These survivors — who’ve skilled horrific acts of violence, racism and oppression by the hands of Catholic monks, nuns, clergy and employees, need to have no matter they want for their very own private therapeutic journeys. This papal go to is a really painful and triggering time for Indigenous Peoples and we should proceed to help them.
On the similar time, it is crucial that we acknowledge that many different survivors, households and communities need greater than an apology — they need justice. Indigenous Peoples have mentioned numerous occasions that true reconciliation should embody substantive actions by the church to finish the continued abuse and make reparations for the harms performed.
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