City 'laser-focused' on maintaining essential services: Tory

Torontosun.com
Jan. 7 2022
Kevin Connor

The City of Toronto is working to maintain its essential services, Mayor John Tory said Thursday at the city’s COVID-19 briefing.

The redeployment of staff has begun, 100 staff are ready to be redeployed and 1,000 others have been identified.

Staff who can pause their work or be drawn from areas like parks and forestry may step into essential services if those workers get sick.

Staff can volunteer to be redeployed.

“The city’s tiered approach to staff redeployment will ensure essential and critical city services remain operational even as we see increased staff absences due to the Omicron variant,” Tory said.

“We are laser-focused on the continuation of essential and critical city services that residents rely on. Toronto’s emergency services will continue to respond to emergency calls without interruption, and critical operations will continue so that safe drinking water comes out of Toronto taps, the snow gets cleared, the garbage gets picked up, and of course, vaccination efforts continue.”

The plan to cover essential services also includes overtime, shift extensions and callbacks as there are fears pandemic absences could reach up to 60% because of illness.

Officials say there will be no interruption in essential services, but lower-risk and priority calls may have increased response times.

High-risk and priority calls will always be responded to first.

The city’s essential services are now operating at an average of 13.7% unplanned daily absences.

This doesn’t include police or the TTC.

“The city’s COVID-19 strategic command team continues to monitor all essential and critical services to ensure sufficient staff is available to support operations,” said Fire Chief Matthew Pegg, who is also the general manager of the office of emergency management.

Pegg said the city will meet the challenges as they come.

“We have effective, workable plans so essential services are in place,” he said.

The city is also making sure kids can get back to school safely on Jan. 17 for in-class learning.

Toronto Public Health is establishing clinics in schools starting this weekend and the board of education is involved with booking the appointment.