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Duncan says one of the many takeaways from this crisis is, despite best intentions, the legislation is so prescriptive that it creates barriers to how employees can respond to emergencies. Duncan describes it as a level of micromanagement that infantilizes the sector.

“The government tried to over-regulate and micromanage through legislation how to actually provide care,” she says. “To the point where nurses and RPNs and even PSWs were not allowed to work to their full scope of practice at what they were actually trained to do, because the legislation would say, you can do that but only up to a point.”

Photo by Stan Behal / Toronto Sun

By the time the province had announced the second round of emergency measures, the first two residents at Pinecrest had already died. Duncan says the OLTCA had been asking for flexibility around the regulatory framework for some time, saying that the limitations “set up a culture of failure.”

Still, she says the government moved quickly. “I think the government was very quick to respond once we said, ‘This is coming quickly, you need to give this to us now.’”

Despite the emergency measures, the situation at Pinecrest remains dire, Seymour-Fagan says. “There’s still not enough people to work,” she says, explaining that Pinecrest employees have been pulling 12-hour days and most haven’t had a day off in weeks. “It’s been horrific and they still don’t have enough staff,” she says. And there’s no end in sight.

“Nobody knows when that might be,” the Kawartha Lakes councillor says. “We’ve been telling people as much as we could, but we weren’t getting straight answers from the home. We knew to an extent, but we were not getting enough information. And the information breakdown is how it could have spread further into the community.” It’s still too early to tell the severity of community spread.