The city wants your help to protect its trees
The Urban Forest Ambassador Program will teach residents how to detect threats to trees, like Dutch elm disease and emerald ash borer.
Training begins next Thursday from 7 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. at Lois Hole Library, and more sessions will be scheduled this summer.
Space is limited and registration is required online.
Edmontonians who become Urban Forest Ambassadors will contribute to the reporting of the long-term health of elm and ash trees and raise awareness in their neighbourhoods as key community contacts.
How to spot Dutch elm disease
The city is also reminding people not to bring firewood from other communities back to Edmonton because it could have insects that spread Dutch elm and other diseases.
Tree owners are asked to prune diseased, dying and dead branches from elm trees from October to March. To dispose of it safely, burn it, bury it, chip it or take it to the Edmonton Waste Management Centre, the city said.
People who see signs of Dutch elm disease – brown staining in the sapwood or leaves that wilt, droop or curl from late June to mid July – are asked to call 311.
Dutch elm disease was spotted in Killarney last August. The infected trees and a number of nearby elms were removed to control the spread.
The city hired six new arborists after that to help monitor the disease.
There were no new cases over the winter.
Elm trees make up nearly 22 per cent of Edmonton's forestry, the city said earlier this year.
For more information on Dutch elm disease and the city's efforts, click here.
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Globe and Mail
6 minutes ago
- Globe and Mail
Morning Update: Sunscreen skepticism goes viral
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Globe and Mail
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- Globe and Mail
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CBC
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- CBC
A crisis foretold: 3 decades of warnings on N.B.'s aging population
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Earlier in the week, Horizon issued a public plea for the province to grant "critical state admission prioritization status" for more than 650 hospital patients who did not need acute care but were waiting for placement in a long-term care facility such as a nursing home. "It causes emergency department wait times to grow longer. It forces care to be delivered in hallways, dining areas, lounges, and other makeshift spaces — conditions that are far from ideal for patients, families, and staff," CEO Margaret Melanson said. Holt's government agreed to the measure for 30 days. The premier said the estimates of how many people need care in nursing homes and special-care homes "has increased and increased and increased" faster than the creation of beds in such facilities — despite the trend being well-known for a long time. "We live in an aging society and with that brings different challenges," Progressive Conservative premier Bernard Lord said during the 2006 election campaign. "Seniors need more senior care." He was visiting the construction site of a nursing home outside Saint John, a project that had been delayed multiple times. He said the new home would "ease some of the pressure from what is often called bed-blockers" in New Brunswick hospitals. But Lord didn't promise any additional new nursing homes in that campaign. Nor did the leader who defeated him, Liberal Shawn Graham. "Home care has to come first and foremost, but will they fix it?" said Cecile Cassista, executive director of the Coalition for Seniors and Nursing Home Residents' Rights. "I've been saying that for 20 years: 'You need to fix it.' And they're not fixing it." "There's no political will. If there was, they'd do it. They make lots of promises during elections. But there is no will to fix the issue. They know there's an issue, but they only jump on it when there's a crisis." Last week, Holt blamed the Progressive Conservative government of Blaine Higgs for not moving fast enough on primary care to head off the pressure facing hospitals this summer. And home care "hasn't really had any attention over the last number of years," she said. The 1991 McKenna government report forecasting an aging population and calling for more home care, was the first of many. But leaders often focused their promises elsewhere. In 2006, Lord and Graham sparred over who would do more, and who would move faster, to exempt seniors' assets from the calculation of what they pay toward nursing home costs — in other words, to put a larger share of the expense on taxpayers. A subsequent report by the province's auditor-general concluded such policy changes contributed to huge increases to the waiting list for nursing home care. Population of seniors is over 196,000 A 2008 Graham government report on senior care, "Be Independent. Longer," also called for expanded home care. That report underestimated how much the population was aging, projecting that 188,300 New Brunswickers would be 65 years old or older by 2026. But Statistics Canada estimated last year the number was already above 196,000. In 2012, PC premier David Alward said the potential cost of caring for a larger and larger cohort of seniors kept him awake at night. Alward commissioned a report that called for New Brunswickers to "fundamentally change the way they view aging and the role of older adults." A 2017 report for the Liberal government of Brian Gallant also warned of an aging population. It called for more provincial support for home care programs, which it said was in "a sorry stage." At that time, Horizon hospitals were looking after an average of 466 alternative-level-of-care patients — people who could have been in nursing homes or special care homes. The number increased to 480 in 2018-19, dipped for three years during the COVID-19 pandemic, and was pushing 500 in 2022-23. It surpassed 600 this year. One government attempted bold action during that time: the PC government of Blaine Higgs launched a reform in 2019 eliminate night-time emergency care at six small hospitals and turn them into alternative-level-of-care facilities with a total of 120 beds. But the ER reductions were so unpopular, Higgs backed down within days. Expansion of Nursing Homes Without Walls program Last week, when the Holt government agreed to Horizon's request to put alternative-level-of-care patients at the top of the nursing home wait list, it was unable to say how many people might actually be transferred. On Monday, the province agreed to a similar request from the Vitalité Health Network for the Chaleur Regional Hospital in Bathurst. The Liberals hope an expansion of the Nursing Homes Without Walls program, put in place by Higgs, will make it easier for some seniors to remain in their homes — and make more beds available for transfers from hospitals. The program provides some nursing home-style services to seniors living in their own homes. "We're starting to see some of that work snowball a bit, but there's a lot more to be done," Holt said. She also acknowledged that the performance target she set for nursing homes in her state of the province speech in January may seem underwhelming. The goal is to keep the provincial waiting list exactly where it was at the time — 1,088 patients — until 2028. Given the growing number of seniors in need of care, even that isn't easy, Holt said. "The current demographic projections would see the number of people waiting in hospitals and waiting at home for those beds going up exponentially," she said. "And so for us, it was the the best we believed we could do was reduce that exponential increase, such that we were maintaining the list as is." That's not a great forecast for hospital administrators, but Holt said other initiatives, such as improvements to primary care, should ease the pressure further. And after more than three decades of warnings, simply preventing the problem from getting worse would represent a grim achievement.
