In the News

As we recover from COVID-19, we need our leaders to decisively chart a course that addresses the health crisis, prejudice and inequity, and the climate crisis.

The City of Toronto’s shelter resident death statistics haven’t been updated since January — owing to decisions to delay certain “routine” reports during the COVID-19 pandemic, Toronto Public Health told PressProgress. CPJ’s socio-economic policy analyst Natalie Appleyard told PressProgress, “reporting publicly on the health outcomes and mortality rates of people experiencing poverty and homelessness is critical…

In an August 2020 brief to the House of Commons standing committee on finance pre-budget consultations, CPJ said that “the COVID-19 pandemic has sharpened our collective focus.”

COVID-19 has almost completely choked off the flow of refugees to Canada, which has refugee sponsors worried about the backlog building up.

Sending irregular border-crossers back into the U.S. risks putting them into the custody of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency and endangers their lives,” said Stephen Kaduuli, CPJ’s refugee rights policy analyst.

COVID-19 has laid bare what we already knew about the precarity and inequity of our existing systems: millions were already living in poverty; climate change was already affecting northern communities’ access to food; a lack of affordable housing stock was already barring newcomers to Canada from successful economic integration; and inadequate funding and disputes between levels of government left many Indigenous communities without the healthcare they need.

We are all bound together in our well-being as people and as a planet. COVID-19 has reminded us that we cannot wash our hands of the shared responsibility of caring for our neighbor or creation.

The campaign, called “For the Love of Creation,” launched April 22, the 50th anniversary of Earth Day. It sets out several ways they hope to harness the “long history of work in ecological conservation, environmental activism and advocacy for climate justice.”

Karri Munn-Venn has been watching the changes in practice wrought by the pandemic and the shifts in perspective it might produce.

Stephen Kaduuli, a refugee rights analyst with CPJ, said that detainees “feel like sitting ducks.”