Mayor John Tory is calling for a regional reopening strategy when it comes time to lift some COVID-19 restrictions, telling reporters that you only need to look back to the weeks prior to Christmas to understand the problems posed by a more disjointed approach.

Tory made the comment during a news conference to announce a new affordable housing development on Church Street on Thursday morning.

He said that while decisions around the reopening of Ontario will ultimately be made by the provincial government, it is his belief that it would be “advisable” to treat the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area as one region, even if case counts vary between communities.

“I think we saw in the pre-Christmas period that if you try to take a region that functions very much as a region in terms of how people get around and live their lives and piece it off into different treatments for different parts of the region, human beings the way they are will go where they can go and do the things they can do (there) if they cant do it somewhere else and that defeats the purpose of having a staged reopening for example,” he said.

Toronto and Peel Region were both placed under lockdowns on Nov. 23 and York Region followed on Dec. 14 but other parts of the GTA remained under the less restrictive red category until the provincewide lockdown took effect on Boxing Day.

The disparity resulted in many Torontonians flocking to malls in other parts of the GTA to get their Christmas shopping done. One mall in Hamilton even extended its hours to accommodate the increase in traffic.

“I think the benefits to be derived from a regional treatment in this big region of the GTHA and the fact that people move around in the region as they proved they would do before Christmas is very advisable,” Tory said. “It is not absolutely necessary in every single instance and there are some who will disagree with that because they think they are being lumped in with Toronto or Peel or this or that. But I think you have to do what is sensible and what is going to be effective at making sure that if we have wrestled this virus at least in part to the ground that we can keep the virus down. We just don’t need to go through another wave and another set of closures of schools or business. It is too hard on people.”

At this point it is unclear when the government might look to lift restrictions but Premier Doug Ford said on Wednesday that there might be an announcement next week.

It should, however, be noted that some epidemiologists advising the province have also expressed concern about reopening the economy prematurely while a number of new COVID variants are circulating.

“It is those jurisdictions that have maintained their public health measures while they have been coping with this new variant that have actually had some success and I worry a little bit about relaxing them as the prevalence of the new variant increases. It could really lead to an almost vertical like takeoff in terms of the number of cases with doubling time really shrinking down,” Dr. Adalsteinn Brown, co-chair of the province’s COVID-19 science table, told reporters last week.

In the spring, the Ford government opted for a staged-approach, allowing businesses to reopen in some health units within the GTA prior to others.

For example, Durham, Halton, York and Hamilton entered Stage 2 nine days ahead of Toronto in June, allowing personal support businesses in those cities to reopen and restaurants to start serving customers on their patios.