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Newsstand: December 15, 2014
The Raptors beat the Knicks, and even the Leafs succeeded. It was truly a remarkable weekend for Toronto sports teams. In the news this morning: an outsider is coming to review police practices, farm workers get a health clinic tailored to their needs, and doctors at St. Michael's seek to combat health problems by looking at income.
Carding, the controversial police practice of stopping citizens and documenting their identifying information, is going to be reviewed by an outside source. Phillip Atiba Goff, of UCLA and the Centre for Policing Equity, has been brought in as a third-party reviewer of the Police and Community Engagement Review’s effectiveness. The advisory committee of PACER, which includes both police and community members, has been stalled on two significant issues that the Toronto Star described as thus: “a definition of public safety that will describe when police are allowed to card an individual (the community wants it to be narrow); and when, or if, police should advise people of their right to leave when they are not being investigated for a criminal matter.” Goff plans to “help provide and develop, with the community and law enforcement, the language by which the problem gets solved.”
More than 18,000 migrant workers come to Ontario each year to farm, and they pay taxes that contribute to social services. Yet because of systemic barriers—poverty and language differences chief among them—they often don’t seek badly needed medical attention. A relatively new clinic in Simcoe, operating out of a Superstore since May, seeks to change that. The Clinicas De Salud Para Trabajadores Agricolas Migratorios, or Agricultural Seasonal Worker Clinic, is geared specifically toward the 4,000 workers in the Brantford area, and has already reduced visits to nearby Norfolk General Hospital by 80 per cent. Hospital visits tend to be more costly to the government because people have usually put off seeking medical attention until their conditions become severe and require urgent help. Aside from the financial benefit to the government, having consistent access to quality medical care can make a huge difference to farm workers, whose physical jobs can give them chronic pain and other serious conditions.
In other health news, a newly launched program at St. Michael’s Hospital is drawing on “compelling evidence that health and wealth go together” in an effort to increase patients’ health. Many illnesses, such as asthma, depression, cancer, and cardiovascular diseases are all more likely to be found in poor people. Patients in the new program receive a “prescription for income security,” at which point they meet with health promoter Karen Tomlinson to examine their options for social benefits, file tax returns, and look into job programs. As more and more research points to an indisputable link between health and wealth, and as the economic landscape seems more or less permanently skewed in favour of temporary, part-time, precarious work, programs like this could prove invaluable.