 | Friday, September 03, 2021 | |  | Friday, September 03, 2021 | | |  | Dr. Aisha Mirza is an emergency physician at Grey Nuns Community Hospital in Edmonton. (Submitted by Dr. Aisha Mirza) | Canada's western provinces are the driving force behind the country's fourth wave of COVID-19 cases. Alberta has had thousands of new coronavirus cases since last week — and according to frontline workers, they're mostly among unvaccinated people.
Dr. Aisha Mirza has been talking about vaccines with her COVID-19 patients in the emergency department at Grey Nuns Community Hospital in Edmonton. She says most are not opposed to getting vaccinated, but have been hesitant because of mixed messaging.
“These aren't anti-vaxxers. These are just people who didn't make it a priority and/or our province just didn't give them the right message. They're getting mixed messages that COVID isn't that bad, COVID doesn't really exist [or] the pandemic is gone,” she told As it Happens. “And we're still in it. It's really frustrating.”
Mirza says many of healthcare workers are feeling “pretty depressed” and that the government is not helping when they speak about removing restrictions, while medical staff are dealing with acute burnout.
“Sometimes ... my empathy wanes when we have these patients who either have the symptoms and don't want to be tested, or are being told they have COVID but don't believe it, or are still adamant that the COVID vaccine causes deaths and somehow there's a conspiracy that we're hiding this,” she said. “And when I hear these things coming out of people's mouths, it's like being slapped in the face as a front-line worker.”
Mirza says that during this “unprecedented health-care crisis,” they need leaders to be stepping up and telling the people of Alberta what they need to do to stay safe and not talking about how they plan to go back to normal as soon as possible.
“When you're in the emergency department taking care of people, and you see all the people in the waiting room ... there is staff shortages, there's increased patient volumes ... elective surgeries are being cancelled because there's no appropriate hospitals for post-operative care, you think this isn't normal,” she said.
“This is not normal. And for our health-care leaders to try to act like it is normal and we're going back to business as usual seems like they're gaslighting us.”
Read more from As it Happens here. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  | | A man wears a cardboard house on his head during a demonstration calling for more affordable and social housing in Montreal on May 8. Federal party leaders have begun sharing their plans for tackling the country's housing crisis ahead of the Sept. 20 election. (Graham Hughes/The Canadian Press) | "Canadian housing is not in crisis, it's where Canadians want it," said economist John Rapley, noting that Canadians value the gains they've made from a soaring housing market.
With many prospective homebuyers feeling squeezed out of the market, and others struggling to find reasonably priced rent in cities across the country, housing affordability has emerged as a key issue for voters ahead of the Sept. 20 election.
But in order to make housing more affordable, more homes must be built — and that could mean taking a hit on returns from existing properties, he told Cross Country Checkup.
"You can't actually just say we'll build cheap houses here and [have] all the other houses keep their same value. Once you add supply to the market, the price and everything comes down, and that's not popular.”
Many Canadians, Rapley says, treat home ownership as their main investment which can mean savings and retirement funds are tied up in their home's value.
"The fundamental problem is, because home ownership is so high, it's difficult for a party to get the votes to actually do something about it," he said.
The question is whether Canadians are ready for a redistribution of wealth in order to cool the market. Rapley says that's an option, but it relies on homeowners willing to take, for example, a five to 10 per cent hit on their home's value.
"I think probably the best thing that can be done is politicians just address that frankly," he said. "They talk about solutions, but nobody wants to come out and say that's what it effectively involves."
Read more about the hot housing market and how it will affect the federal election here. | | | | | |  | | | Reporter Mellissa Fung with students at Sayed ul-Shuhada High School in Kabul, in 2018. (Aleem Agha/Submitted by Mellissa Fung) | Journalist Mellissa Fung has been trying to help vulnerable people escape Afghanistan, people she's met while reporting there.
“It's really hard to watch,” Fung told The Current. “Thankfully, I'm not really watching TV right now because I just haven't really slept in the last two weeks just trying to help people get out — people who have helped me in the past, contacts, friends who are just desperate to get out.”
Fung was in Afghanistan last month making a documentary investigating the killings of Afghan women and girls for the news outlet Al Jazeera. In 2008, she was kidnapped by armed men in Afghanistan while working as a reporter for CBC's The National. She was held captive for 28 days before being released.
She says that women have not forgotten what it was like between 1996 and 2001 when they were forbidden from going to school or work and were forced to wear full hijab. “They could not leave their home without a male companion,” said Fung. “If they committed anything that the Taliban considered a moral crime, they would be taken out and publicly whipped. Sometimes they would be beheaded.”
“Women in the last 20 years, no matter what you think of the war and the international effort, have really come into their own,” she said. “We educated a generation of women and those women are now at work. They've become judges, journalists, lawyers.”
When Fung’s kidnappers released her, they told her to never come back but she says she couldn’t not return.
“I wasn't going to let them intimidate me, because Afghan women inspire me so much. They've been through so much and they continue to persist and persevere and push forward,” she said.
Read more from The Current here. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  | Francine Gomes holds a "Mother Clucker" chicken sandwich in her Calgary restaurant, the Cluck N Cleaver. Different chicken sandwich versions — whether breaded, saucy or spicy — have proliferated across the vast restaurant landscape in North America. (Tony Seskus/CBC) | If you think the idea of a chicken sandwich sounds delicious, you’re not alone.
While overall restaurant visits were down significantly over the last year and a half (pandemic-related), chicken sandwich purchases were up 14 per cent, according to NPD Group, which tracks industry data and trends.
"Chicken sandwiches are just booming," Vince Sgabellone, food service industry analyst for NPD Group, told Cost of Living. "They're back to where they were two years ago, despite the lack of traffic of people going into restaurants.”
At least 20 restaurant chains across have added some kind of new chicken sandwich to their menu over a two-year period - even seafood chain Red Lobster now sells a Nashville hot chicken sandwich.
Food columnist Julie Van Rosendaal said she believes a few key things have helped chicken sandwiches take flight even after others thought they'd hit their peak years ago.
For one, she said takeout food has performed relatively well during the pandemic, and chicken sandwiches travel well while also being "indulgent."
While marketing is a big part of the chicken sandwich wars, Van Rosendaal pointed out that the food's popularity on Instagram has also helped raise the sandwich's profile.
"When it's really visually appealing, it does very well on social media," she said. "So chicken sandwiches have been driven by social media."
Find out more about why we’re hooked on chicken sandwiches and how long that boom could last. | | | | | | | | | | | Share this newsletter | | or subscribe if this was
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