The Bill Kelly Show Podcast:

Canadian officials are defending Canada's mix-and-match approach to vaccinations after the World Health Organization warned Monday about “dangerous trends” in individual vaccination strategies, including mixing and matching.

In an online briefing, the WHO’s chief scientist Soumya Swaminathan suggested to reporters that mixing and matching is dangerous because there is not currently enough data to support it.

"It's a little bit of a dangerous trend here. We are in a data-free, evidence-free zone as far as mix and match," Swaminathan said in response to a question about booster shots.

She added that “it will be a chaotic situation in countries if citizens start deciding when and who will be taking a second, a third and a fourth dose."

Canada’s National Advisory Committee on Immunizations, the body that advises federal health officials on vaccines, has said that the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines against COVID-19 can be used interchangeably when a second dose of the same vaccine is not readily available.

In a statement, a spokesperson for Health Minister Christine Elliott said Ontario plans to continue following the NACI recommendations.

ALSO: Pfizer to pitch COVID-19 vaccine booster shots at meeting with U.S. officials

GUEST: Dr. Brian D. Lichty, Associate Professor in Pathology and Molecular Medicine with the McMaster Immunology Research Centre

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Over the next decade or so the province hopes to deliver more than $60 billion worth of transit projects in Toronto and the surrounding area, including completing at least eight new subway and LRT lines or extensions, and making major upgrades to the regional rail network.

Getting so much built at once would be difficult under any conditions. But to keep its transit program on track the province will have to overcome market disruptions caused by the pandemic, address a looming construction labour shortage and repair a fractious relationship with private sector contractors tasked with building the new lines, some of whom charge that provincial agencies’ contentious management of rail projects is driving up costs and hampering their completion.

Given the size of the plan and the challenges it’s facing, can the province get it all done?

GUEST: Stephen Blais, MPP for Orleans and Transportation Critic for the Ontario Liberal Party

Premier Doug Ford’s controversial new campaign finance law is again being challenged in court by unions who argue it is “government interference with a fair and democratic electoral process.”

The 46-page filing comes just four weeks after Ford invoked the Charter of Rights and Freedom’s “notwithstanding” clause for the first time in Ontario history to ram through legislation a judge ruled was unconstitutional because it limited the unions’ election spending.

This time the challenge is predicated on a Charter section that governments cannot override with the notwithstanding clause.

“It’s a challenge under Section 3 that guarantees the right to vote,” Working Families coalition lawyer Paul Cavalluzzo said in an interview Monday.

GUEST:  Duff Conacher, Co-Founder of Democracy Watch

The Bill Kelly Show Podcast:

The Ontario government is moving the province into Step 3 of the COVID-19 reopening plan nearly a week earlier than previously expected.

Officials confirmed on Friday that the province will move into Step 3 on July 16 at 12:01 a.m. Ontario was originally slated to move into the next step on July 21.

“I didn’t see any reason to hold us back given that so many Ontarians have come forward. Over 200,000 (people a day) are coming forward to get immunized,” Dr. Kieran Moore, Ontario’s new chief medical officer of health, told reporters Friday afternoon.

GUEST: Ryan Imgrund, Biostatistician

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Despite receiving 1,002 correspondences calling for the Sir John A. Macdonald statue to be removed from downtown Hamilton, city councillors decided it will stay right where it is.

Ward 3 (central lower city) Coun. Nrinder Nann moved the motion on Thursday, which aimed to remove the statue of Canada's first prime minister from Gore Park and put it into storage. It was defeated in a vote of three to two. 

Also raised at the meeting on Thursday: a city review of landmarks and monuments, including parks and street names. 

The review, which was unanimously passed and is also pending council approval, will "determine opportunities to honour the Indigenous community." 

GUEST: Laura Babcock, President of PowerGroup

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Headlines have been dominated by the news that Mary Simon is to be the next Governor General, RoseAnne Archibald has been elected national chief of the Assembly of First Nations and Jody Wilson-Raybould, the former justice minister, is not seeking re-election in her federal seat of Vancouver-Granville.

The elevation of Simon and Archibald is, at first blush, positive news.

But the new AFN national chief is likely to have a rougher welcome in her new job.

Archibald received the support of fewer than one third of the country’s 634 chiefs. She promises to reform governance in an organization that, earlier this year, she said was guilty of financial improprieties.

After those allegations surfaced, she was accused of harassment and bullying by 10 AFN staff — charges she characterizes as “reprisals” for her own allegations.

GUEST: Richard Brennan, Former Journalist with The Toronto Star covering both Queen’s Park and Parliament Hill

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