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ontario Ontario says 'enhancements' to paid sick leave coming as COVID ICU admissions near 800 Debate over paid sick leave workers front and centre at Queen's Park Ontario reported another 4,212 cases of COVID-19 and 32 more deaths linked to the illness on Wednesday, as the government confirmed "enhancements" to the federal paid sick leave program are coming. According to the Ministry of Health, public health units also administered a new high of 136,695 doses of vaccines yesterday. The previous single-day high for vaccine doses was 115,634 on April 16. Ontario's COVID-19 vaccine task force has said it hopes to reach a benchmark of at least 150,000 shots per day when shipments of the Pfizer vaccine ramp up in coming weeks. Dr. Isaac Bogoch, an infectious disease physician and member of the task force, attributed the high "almost exclusively" to uptake of the AstraZeneca vaccine by adults over 40. The province lowered the eligibility age for the AstraZeneca vaccine to 40 from 55 last weekend. Notably, a country-wide Rogers outage led to an undercount of the number of shots that were given out on Monday in Ontario because some clinics had to move to paper-based reporting. It's not clear if any doses missed in Monday's count were added to today's figure, which would mean it could be artificially inflated.

canada Greens, NDP call for stronger national response as COVID-19 variants surge MPs clash over strategy during House of Commons emergency debate Opposition MPs criticized the federal government's response to the COVID-19 pandemic on Wednesday and called for more national leadership as variants of concern spread rapidly across many provinces. During an emergency House of Commons debate, Green Party MP Elizabeth May said — because Canada is a "fragmented federation" — its pandemic response has been plagued by a lack of co-ordination between the federal and provincial governments. "Collectively, as a country, we are not doing what Canadians want and what Canadians deserve," said May. "This is a place full of people who have been elected to serve the public of this country and we have to be of service, and at this time that means blowing the whistle and saying what we're doing now isn't working." The rapid spread of more contagious and potentially more deadly coronavirus variants across Canada is driving a resurgence of cases, hospitalizations and deaths in many provinces. Canada has identified 70,300 variant cases to date out of a total of 1,139,000 since the pandemic began. The B117 variant of concern, first identified in the U.K., accounts for almost 96 per cent of the variant cases and has become the dominant strain in Canada's four largest provinces — B.C., Ontario, Alberta and Quebec.