Brampton Mayor Patrick Brown wants Ford to finish reopening Ontario sooner

Brampton Mayor Patrick Brown is calling on the Ford government to move the province Step 3 of its reopening plan sooner than the planned date of July 21.

Ontario is currently in Step 2 of its reopening plan, meaning that amenities that are open in every other jurisdiction in North America, like indoor dining, gyms, indoor pools, and cinemas, are still closed.

Brown said at a Wednesday briefing that since the province is seeing low case counts and high vaccination rates, it is "time we show the public some more goodwill", CP24 reports.

The vaccination target for Step 3 is to have 70 to 80 percent of Ontario adults partially vaccinated and 25 percent and 25 percent fully vaccinated, a threshold which was met back in June.

Brown added that GTHA mayors support moving into Step 3 one week before its scheduled date. However, he says he'd be comfortable with moving into the final step even sooner than that.

"If you look at the targets for stage three, we have exceeded all those vaccination thresholds and I really want to get our economy going," said Brown.

Adding, "it pains me to think that we still have sectors that are not allowed to be open. It pains me to know that in the middle of a heat wave we've got indoor recreation facilities that our kids can't use and we've got indoor pools that kids can't use. I want to get kids sports back on, I want to see indoor dining opened up and I want to see our economy opened up again now that the sacrifices we have made have paid dividends in terms of health outcomes."

However, the Ford government so far has not indicated that it intends to move the province into step 3 sooner. While it did move the province into the last two steps a few days early, that was under a different Chief Medical Officer of Health.

Ontario's new CMOH, Dr Kieran Moore, says he wants to wait the full 21 days, citing concerns with the Delta variant. This despite research finding that vaccines are highly effective against the Delta strain, with two doses of the Pfizer vaccine being 88 percent effective against the variant.