The Commonwell Mutual Insurance Group is donating $500,000 to the Ross Memorial Hospital (RMH) Foundation in Lindsay.

The donation will help the hospital accelerate technological advancements, which are not funded by government, that better connect patients to care.

“We believe in investing in the resiliency of our communities and helping to make them stronger, and believe it’s part of our responsibility as a corporate enterprise,” says Commonwell CEO Tim Shauf, who is also campaign chair on the RMH Foundation’s board, in a media release.

“We’re incredibly grateful for this leadership gift from The Commonwell Mutual Insurance Group,” says RMH Foundation board chair Ryan O’Neill.

“This generous investment in our local hospital is helping to improve care and grow services. What’s more, The Commonwell gift will emphasize to the Ministry of Health the commitment in our community for the modernization and growth of our hospital.”

“We’re very excited to have the support of The Commonwell as we embark upon the next generation of care at Ross Memorial,” says RMH Foundation CEO Erin Coons. “On behalf of the patients and families who will benefit from The Commonwell’s generous support, we thank their team. Together, we are the Ross.”

The Commonwell Mutual Insurance Group was established in 2014 as an amalgamation of Farmers Mutual Insurance Company (Lindsay), Glengarry Mutual Insurance Company, and Lanark Mutual Insurance Company. For more information about how The Commonwell donates its time and funds to local communities, visit thecommonwell.ca.

Police have made a sixth arrest in connection with the August 13th incident at the Peterborough police station where followers of self-proclaimed “Queen of Canada” Romana Didulo attempted to “arrest” police officers.

On Thursday (August 25), police obtained a warrant to enter the home of a 67-year-old Peterborough woman and arrest her in connection with her actions at the incident, which police describe as “including grabbing the body armour of an officer, interfering with the arrest of another protester, and striking an officer with a stainless-steel travel mug.”

The woman has been charged with assaulting a peace officer, assaulting a peace officer with a weapon, obstructing a peace officer, and mischief. She was released on undertaking and is scheduled to appear in court on September 20, 2022.

On Wednesday (August 24), police arrested a 57-year-old Peterborough woman on similar charges arising from the August 13th incident. Police had previously arrested and charged four men in connection with the incident.

Police are continuing their investigation and are asking ayone with information on the identity of people who may have been involved to call the Peterborough Police Crime Line at 705-876-1122 x555 or Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-8477 or online at stopcrimehere.ca.

Campbellford Memorial Hospital has announced it is temporarily closing its emergency department overnight, from 6:30 p.m. on Thursday (August 25) until 7:30 a.m. on Friday, due to an unexpected nursing staff shortage.

In a media release, the hospital states it has implemented a contingency plan “to ensure the impact to patient care is as minimal as possible.”

EMS and other emergency services are aware of the temporary closure, the hospital states, and ambulances will take patients directly to the closest area hospital that offers emergency medical services.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the implications of the shortage of health human resources throughout the province,” says Eric Hanna, the hospital’s president and CEO, adding the hospital is “continuously re-evaluating our strategies to recruit and retain members of our team during these challenging times.”

The hospital says area residents requiring emergency health care treatment during the closure should call 9-1-1, and those with urgent health care treatment should go to other hospitals in the region, which include Northumberland Hills Hospital in Cobourg, Trenton Memorial Hospital, Belleville General Hospital, or Peterborough Regional Health Centre.

A grassroots initiative to build a village of 50 “tiny homes” for homeless people in Peterborough is one step closer to reality.

Peterborough Action for Tiny Homes (PATH) will unveil its first “tiny home” — a sleeping cabin with a lockable door — at 1 p.m. on Saturday (August 27) at Grace United Church at 581 Howden Street in Peterborough.

Members of the public are invited to join the launch celebration, which will include a tour of the model cabin along with live music from Paul Cragg and others, poetry, and home-baked treats.

Chris Cleary of Cleary Homes, who built the cabin with a volunteer construction crew headed by Ross Allen of Grace United Church, will be at the celebration along with Allen.

Drew Merrett of Merrett Home Hardware supplied materials for the cabin at cost along with Ken Wood at Charlotte Paint and Wallpaper. In partnership with PATH, Grace United Church raised $10,000 in a fundraising initiative spearheaded by church member Bev Templar.

“I’ve always been passionate about helping to solve homelessness,” says Templar in a media release.

At the launch celebration, retired priest Father Leo Coughlin and PATH steering committee member Marie Howran will present the group’s vision: a cluster of brightly painted cabins, within secure fencing with attractive murals, to be up and running for the winter, when PATH hopes to house 15 people experiencing homelessness.

That initial cluster will be based on a campground model, with auxiliary outbuildings including washroom and shower facilities (while the cabins will have electricity for lighting and heating, they will not have indoor plumbing). The group’s ultimate vision is a village of 50 self-sufficient tiny homes.

PATH has also committed to finding wraparound services to support the village, including trauma-informed care and the offer of employment in social enterprises.

“All social services costs drop when people have a home for shelter,” says Dave Sumner, who helped build the first cabin and helps administer PATH’s public Facebook group. “Police calls are reduced. Medical emergency calls are reduced. Fire and police services are not required to displace unwanted tent communities. Fear and concern among businesses and downtown shoppers are reduced. Putting vulnerable people into housing is a low-cost solution with every imagined advantage. This is a win, that our city leaders can brag about.”

The idea of using sleeping cabins to alleviate homelessness as an alternative to traditional shelters and tents in public spaces is not new. Tiny homes provide people with a roof over the heads, a door they can lock, and a sense of safety — all of which advocates say are essential to transition out of homelessness. Many U.S. states have already turned to tiny home and, in Ontario, the cities of Kingston and Kitchener have both implemented tiny home projects.

In Kingston, a group called Our Livable Solutions created a sleeping cabin community at Portsmouth Olympic Harbour as a pilot project initially funded by $257,000 from the province’s pandemic social services relief fund and a $150,000 private donation. The cabins in the Kingston project are fully insulated and wired with four 20-amp receptacles, an indoor light, an outdoor light, a heater, an air exchanger, and a tamper-proof smoke and CO2 detector. The community has shared bathrooms and showers, which the residents assist in keeping clean.

In Kitchener, the “A Better Tent City” project consists of a row of 24 insulated cabins and an indoor warming space, garbage and recycling, kitchen, washrooms, showers, and laundry. Activist Tony D’Amato Stortz, who worked at A Better Tent City for more than a year, recently published a book called A Home of Their Own: A Guide to Building a Tiny Homes Community.

For those unable to attend PATH’s August 27th launch event at Grace United Church, the model sleeping cabin will remain on display at the church until September 3. After that, the cabin will be “roving” around Peterborough: it will be at Cathedral of St. Peter-in-Chains at 411 Reid Street from September 3 to 10, at Emmanuel United Church at 534 George Street North from September 10 to 17, and at the Purple Onion Festival in Millennium Park on September 25 (update: the Purple Onion Festival has now been cancelled).

At these locations, members of the public can take a look at the cabin and ask questions of volunteers, including some people who have been (or are currently) unhoused.

“People are invited to sign up for shifts at the cabin or to volunteer for the many needs of this amazing grassroots project,” says Charlene Avon, the coordinator of the roving cabin tour. “Everyone needs a place to sleep, and we can be part of the solution.”

To help support PATH’s tiny homes initiative for Peterborough, you can donate at the August 27th launch event at Grace United Church. The church is also challenging other faith groups, businesses, and individuals to raise funds to build additional sleeping cabins for the project.

For more information, email pathadm22@gmail.com or call Charlene Avon at 705-761-4408.

Police have made a fifth arrest in connection with the August 13th incident at the Peterborough police station where followers of self-proclaimed “Queen of Canada” Romana Didulo attempted to “arrest” police officers.

On Wednesday (August 24), police arrested a 57-year-old Peterborough woman for her actions during the incident.

In a media release, police describe those actions as “including grabbing the duty belt of an officer and interfering with the arrest of another protester.”

The woman has been charged with assaulting a peace officer, obstructing a peace officer, and mischief. She was released on undertaking and is scheduled to appear in court on September 20, 2022.

Four men were previously arrested and charged in connection with the August 13th incident.

Police have provided no information on their investigation into another suspect in the incident, a white woman wearing a light blue plaid blouse and sunglasses who was captured on video assaulting a counter protester.

As the manager of Harm Reduction Services with PARN – Your Community AIDS Resource Network in Peterborough, Pollock’s daily mission is to mitigate any harm associated with substance use.

As such, the annual day of substance use awareness and education, which will be marked from 1 to 4 p.m. on Wednesday, August 31st at Millennium Park in Peterborough, will see her train others in how to administer naloxone, a lifesaving medication that temporarily reverses the all-too-often deadly effects of overdose from opioid use.

Training people who don’t use substances to administer naloxone is key to saving lives according to Pollock, who was a member of the Mobile Support Overdose Resource Team (MSORT) prior to her current position.

“Even if a person who engages in substance use carries and is trained in administering naloxone, if they go down they can’t administer naloxone on themselves,” she says. “They rely on peers and others in the community who carry and have the training to administer naloxone. The more people who are trained, the better.”

So it that on August 31, Pollock and her colleagues will provide that training and also distribute naloxone kits, not only in Peterborough but also at similar events in the City of Kawartha Lakes, Haliburton, and Northumberland.

Prior to International Overdose Awareness Day, naloxone pop-up events are being held 1 to 4 p.m. on Wednesday (August 24) at Peterborough Square, 1 to 4 p.m. Thursday (August 25) at the Peterborough Public Library, and 1 to 4 p.m. Friday (August 26) at Victoria Park.

Training to administer nalaxone, notes Pollock, is “quite simple. It usually takes 5 to 10 minutes to complete. The training is pretty straightforward.”

Pollock points out there are two types of naloxone: one administered nasally and the other injected intramuscularly.

“With both nasal and intramuscular naloxone, there are five steps,” Pollock says. “First, you ‘shake and shout’ to determine whether the person is responsive. If they are non-responsive, you call 9-1-1. When emergency services is on the way, you then can administer naloxone. If the person does not come around after two to three minutes after administering naloxone, you can administer another dose. You can continue to administer doses of naloxone every two to three minutes, until the person either becomes responsive or until emergency services arrive.”

“If the person does become responsive after administering one or multiples doses of naloxone, stay with them until emergency services arrive as naloxone can wear off and a person can fall back into an overdose,” Pollock continues. “Naloxone sends those with opioids in their system into immediate withdrawal — it is not fun. For this reason, it is important to administer naloxone only to someone who is non-responsive. If someone is on the nod from opioid use but is still responsive, naloxone is not necessary at that point in time. If someone does not have opioids in their system, naloxone will not harm them.”

She explains that intramuscular and nasal naloxone are the same medication, and both kits come with two four-milligram doses.

“The only difference is the method of delivery. The nasal naloxone is more widely requested as it is a more straightforward nasal spray, versus the intramuscular version which involves drawing up the medication into a syringe from a vial and injecting into a muscle.”

“Some have a preference for intramuscular for a few different reasons, one being familiarly with injection and another being the ability to titrate the dose, where that is not really an option with nasal naloxone,” says Pollock, explaining that drug titration is the process of adjusting the dose of a medication for the maximum benefit without adverse effects. “With the intramuscular, you can draw up a portion of the dose and see if that works. If it does, the fact that it’s a lesser dose will result in less severe withdrawal symptoms.”

Besides providing naloxone training and distributing naloxone kits, the Millennium Park event will also see various organizations — including Moms Stop The Harm, Peterborough Public Health, MSORT, Peterborough Safer Supply, and the Elizabeth Fry Society of Peterborough, as well as PARN — host information booths.

Through PARN, T-shirts will be available to purchase — with slogans such as ‘Get High, Not Die’ and ‘My Community Includes Those Who Use Drugs’ — to raise money for the organization’s Harm Reduction Program,

“The day’s real purpose is to provide the right answers to questions and correct any misinformation,” says Pollock, noting there’s no shortage of the latter. The more informed people are, the better — not only to reduce stigmatization but also to increase the number of people with naloxone kits at the ready. Pollock says the establishment of public naloxone stations, not unlike that of public defibrillator units, “would be a great thing to see.”

The advent of the Consumption and Treatment Services (CTS) location at Simcoe and Aylmer streets in downtown Peterborough, Pollock says, “was a long time coming,” adding it’s huge in terms of “keeping people alive.”

“One of the big impacts of overdose is people using alone,” she explains. “The CTS addresses that. People can go to that site, they can use, and they can have after-care to make sure that, if they go down, there’s a paramedic, a nurse practitioner, and harm reduction specialists to take care of them.”

While Pollock recognizes some people have concerns with providing resources for substance users, she points out the alternative can be worse.

“People may say we’re enabling addiction because we distribute injection and inhalation equipment, but it’s a less of a cost for taxpayers than to cover the cost if users become infected with HIV or hepatitis C or other harms attributed to the reusing and sharing of drug using equipment. And if there are fewer calls for overdoses, that means somebody who goes down when they’re shovelling snow will more likely get quicker attention.”

Pollock also counters the misconception that making resources available for substance users somehow encourages drug use.

“Nobody’s going to walk past a needle exchange, a CTS, or a safe supply pilot project and say ‘Oh, opioids! That’s an idea.’,” she says. “That just doesn’t happen. We know that substance use is a fact of life. We’re just trying to mitigate the harm around that.”

That harm includes the dangerous quality of the drug supply — a situation that showed itself in a big way during the pandemic and continues.

“The supply gets cut (with other substances) in part because access to cross the border became more limited or simply because it’s cheaper and more accessible to cut it with other substances,” notes Pollock, adding “So they just cut and re-cut and re-cut — that’s a huge thing we’re seeing right now.”

“We’re trying to move away from the language of overdose toward the language of drug poisoning. Overdose, in a way, feels like it’s putting the onus on the substance user — it’s on them because they’re using too much. But that’s not what’s happening. What’s happening is they’re not getting what they’re buying. They’re buying opiates or they’re buying cocaine, but it has benzodiazepines or fentanyl in it. That’s a large part of why people are going down.”

Despite all the stresses and stigma-induced frustrations, Pollock still loves what she does and is inspired by those she serves.

“I love the substance-using community so much. They’re such beautiful people. They give me hope. It’s not them that have to change — it’s us that have to change! It’s our support of and for them that needs to change.”

“The substance user, in my experience, is more likely to give you their last dollar or their last cigarette than the next person,” Pollock reflects. “I see so much heart and compassion and generosity from the substance-using community. It hurts a lot when I hear stigmatizing language directed at them.”

At the end of the day, Pollock says she and her team members aren’t there to encourage or discourage substance use, but to support substance users whatever their goals may be, whether moderating their use, abstaining from use, or just using more safely.

“Harm reduction doesn’t impose goals upon them,” she says. “We better enable those who do use substances, to do so more safely.”

The original version of this story has been revised to clarify the steps involved in administering naloxone and updated with other corrections.