2020-20

Thursday June 11, 2020

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Thursday June 11, 2020

Brazilian president’s pandemic denial has cost lives, but may not hurt him politically

What do you do if you are in charge of dealing with the pandemic and the number of deaths is getting out of control?

Simple. Stop publishing the number.

August 28, 2019

Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro has been having a bad time with the pandemic. His default mode has been callous disinterest: when told in early May that the country’s COVID-19 death toll had reached 5,000, he said “So what? I’m sorry. What do you want me to do?”

So on Sunday, with Brazil’s death toll about to pass 40,000 and become second only to that of the United States, Bolsonaro stopped his government from publishing the total any more.

From now on, only today’s number of infections, deaths and recoveries will be announced. No more awkward comparisons with other countries, no five-digit running total to confront him with his failure each day. And of course no attempt to establish the real number of deaths, which is almost certainly at least twice the official number since many victims never got to hospitals.

December 16, 2019

There is a temptation to group the three populist leaders of big Western democracies together, and they do have a lot in common. Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson removed a similarly damning piece of data from the daily news conference when the UK’s death toll per million overtook that of every other major European country. (It is now second-worst in the entire world.) 

America’s Donald Trump, Bolsonaro’s idol, spent just as much time in the early months of this year belittling the gravity of the threat (Bolsonaro: “It’s only a little flu”; Trump: “It’s going to disappear. One day it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.”) None of the three men will wear a mask, and they are all compulsive serial liars.

March 16, 2020

Nevertheless, there are major differences. Johnson manages to sound as if he cares about all the lives lost, and Trump at least goes through the motions occasionally. Johnson eventually declared a lockdown, although much too late, and Trump at least went along for a while with the lockdowns declared by almost all of the states.

Bolsonaro, by contrast, openly condemned the lockdowns declared by the various Brazilian states and ostentatiously disobeyed them. He held rallies and took crowd baths. He swiped his nose on the back of his hand and then shook hands with a fragile old lady. He showed up at a barbecue on a Jet Ski.

May 3, 2017

He has fired two successive health ministers since January because they were taking the pandemic too seriously and hindering Brazilians’ return to work. He joined a street protest calling for a return to the military dictatorship that finally fell in 1985. He regularly vilifies the poor, the left, Indigenous Brazilians, gays and non-whites.

And he is currently presiding over a pandemic that will probably kill over 100,000 Brazilians without lifting a finger to stop it.

Yet in late 2018 he won the presidential election in the first round with 55 per cent of the vote, and his character was hardly a secret even before the election. A recent poll showed that his popularity is now down to 32 per cent, so Brazilians have noticed that something is wrong with him, but it still verges on the inexplicable. Or does it?

The electorate that voted for Bolsonaro in 2018 was little changed from the one that gave Luiz Inácio (Lula) da Silva, the absolute antithesis of Bolsonaro, two terms in the presidency immediately before him. Just as the American electorate that put Trump in office in 2016 was little changed from the one that elected Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. (Gwynne Dyer – Hamilton Spectator) 

 

Wednesday June 10, 2020

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Wednesday June 10, 2020

Outrage and calls to ‘defund police’ in Canada

Citing decades of failed reform, Canadian protesters against anti-Black racism have rallied around another mantra for change: “defund the police.”

October 13, 2012

Instead of tweaking the current system of law enforcement, activists say that a more powerful approach could be a new kind of law enforcement altogether. The start of that change is removing and reallocating massive sums of money provided to police forces in the country, they say, which could help prevent more police-involved deaths like the ones that have spurred ongoing outrage, including Minnesota man George Floyd and Toronto woman Regis Korchinski-Paquet.

More than $15 billion was spent in Canada on policing in 2017-18, according to Statistics Canada, an increase to the year prior.

The push to defund is gaining momentum in some parts of Canada. In Toronto, where almost a quarter of each person’s property taxes go just to funding the police, two city councillors on Monday put forward a motion to cut the city’s police budget by 10 per cent and shift it to “much-needed community supports.”

December 13, 2012

Thousands have signed petitions in other parts of the country, from Vancouver and Regina to Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., and Montreal for similar reallocations of police funding.

When asked recently if he would consider defunding the RCMP, which receives a large sum of the national policing budget, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau didn’t reject the notion. 

“I think there are many different paths toward making a better country. We need to explore the range of them,” he said. 

Mental health is an essential piece of the call for defunding since many police-involved deaths in Canada have involved mental health and substance abuse issues, including Korchinski-Paquet’s death, which occurred afterpolice responded to a mental wellness check on May 27. The money, activists say, could go to boosting community support for mental health and creating what Black Lives Matter Toronto co-founder Sandy Hudson called “a new emergency service.” (ctv) 

 

Tuesday June 9, 2020

June 9, 2020

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Tuesday June 9, 2020

“Thousands more” Ontario frontline healthcare workers need pandemic pay: union

An Ontario union is calling on the federal government to extend pandemic pay for frontline healthcare workers, who are “risking their lives ad the lives of their families,” tackling the COVID-19 pandemic.

May 29, 2020

“Many frontline health workers risking their lives — and the lives of their families — are not getting pandemic pay,” Warren (Smokey) Thomas, president of Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU), said in a statement. 

He is calling on the federal government to “step up.”

“Pandemic pay is vital recognition of the sacrifices these workers are making to get us through this pandemic, but there’s a void,” said Thomas. “Why isn’t it being offered to all of the healthcare workers in our hospitals, and other congregate settings?”

According to the union president, the provincial government has indicated that it has run out of funding after offering pandemic pay to 375,000 workers.

On April 29, Premier Doug Ford expanded pandemic pay to more frontline workers which included, staff working in long-term care homes, retirement homes, emergency shelters, supportive housing, social services congregate care settings, corrections institutions, and youth justice facilities, as well as those providing home and community care and some staff in hospitals.

However, Thomas says there are “thousands more who are facing exactly the same kinds of risks and hardships.”

Adding, that Ford has said he would “love to extend it to all workers” if only the province had the money.

Which is in Thomas’ opinion, where the federal government needs to come in.

According to the union president, with outbreaks still happening in long-term care homes, manufacturing and meat-processing plants, and amongst migrant workers the burden on health care workers is only becoming greater.

“It’s imperative for the federal government to show its support for all of Ontario’sfrontline health heroes and come to the table with more support,” Thomas said. “The sooner the engine of the national economy emerges from the pandemic, the sooner Canada will be able to recover. Prime minister, Ontario needs your help.”

On May 7, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that the federal government had reached a $4 billion deal with the provinces and territories to top up wages for essential workers.

Who received the wage top up was up to the premiers and provinces, according to the prime minister. (Daily Hive News) 

 

Saturday June 6, 2020

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday June 6, 2020

Toronto hairstylist launches petition, calls for Ontario to reopen salons, barber shops

April 25, 2020

A long-time Toronto hairstylist has launched an online petition calling on the Ontario government to reopen hair salons and barber shops, months after closing amid the COVID-19 lockdown.

Norm Wright, who has spent most of his three-decade career at Taz Hair Co. in the Yorkville neighbourhood, opened a petition on Change.org this week to voice his frustration about remaining shut down.

As of Thursday night, it had nearly 10,000 signatures.

Ontario is the last remaining province without an announced opening date for the industry, Wright said. With new health and safety measures already in place at his salon and others in the hair industry, he insists they are ready to reopen now, “We are taking steps that businesses that have been allowed to be open have not [taken] and we don’t feel that we are being taken seriously,” he said.

“If these family-owned businesses aren’t being taken seriously for much longer, they’re going to close.”

Donna Dolphy, who owns a salon in Toronto, told Global News she is worried that if shops like hers remain closed much longer, customers will turn to the underground market.

Life in a Pandemic

“Where are they going to go? Nobody wants to look like a sheep dog for very long,” she said.

“They’re going to want to have service done. And if this continues we may not have clients come back in our chair.”

New measures at many barber shops and hair salons include taking clients’ temperature at the door, fewer work stations, no blow-drying and removing items like magazines, Wright explained.

“If this continues on the velocity it’s continuing on while other businesses that aren’t taking the same precautions are allowed to reopen, hair and beauty in Ontario will be decimated,” he said. (Global News) 

 

Friday June 5, 2020

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Friday June 5, 2020

We should have done more, admits architect of Sweden’s Covid-19 strategy

Sweden’s chief epidemiologist and the architect of its light-touch approach to the coronavirus has acknowledged that the country has had too many deaths from Covid-19 and should have done more to curb the spread of the virus.

May 6, 2020

Anders Tegnell, who has previously criticised other countries’ strict lockdowns as not sustainable in the long run, told Swedish Radio on Wednesday that there was “quite obviously a potential for improvement in what we have done” in Sweden.

Asked whether too many people in Sweden had died, he replied: “Yes, absolutely,” adding that the country would “have to consider in the future whether there was a way of preventing” such a high toll.

Sweden’s death rate per capita was the highest in the world over the seven days to 2 June, figures suggest. This week the government bowed to mounting opposition pressure and promised to set up a commission to look into its Covid-19 strategy.

“If we were to encounter the same disease again knowing exactly what we know about it today, I think we would settle on doing something in between what Sweden did and what the rest of the world has done,” Tegnell said. It would be “good to know exactly what to shut down to curb the spread of infection better”, he added.

In an interview with the Dagens Nyheter daily, Tegnell subsequently said he still believed “the basic strategy has worked well. I do not see what we would have done completely differently … Based on the knowledge we had then, we feel we made the appropriate decisions.”

According to the scientific online publication Ourworldindata.com, the number of Covid-19 deaths per capita in Sweden was the highest in the world in a rolling seven-day average to 2 June. The country’s rate of 5.29 deaths per million inhabitants a day was well above the UK’s 4.48.

The Swedish prime minister, Stefan Löfven, told the Aftonbladet daily that the country’s overall approach “has been right”, but it had failed to protect care homes where half of all Sweden’s Covid-19 deaths have occurred. Social affairs minister Lena Hallengren told Reuters the government had been “at all times prepared to introduce wider, further measures recommended by the expert authority”.

Life in a Pandemic

Relying on its citizens’ sense of civic duty, Sweden closed schools for all over-16s and banned gatherings of more than 50, but only asked – rather than ordered – people to avoid non-essential travel and not to go out if they were elderly or ill. Shops, restaurants and gyms have remained open.

Although there are signs that public opinion is starting to shift, polls have shown a considerable majority of Swedes support and have generally complied with the government’s less coercive strategy, which is in stark contrast to the mandatory lockdowns imposed by many countries, including Sweden’s Nordic neighbours.

But the policy, which Tegnell has said was aimed not at achieving herd immunity but at slowing the spread of the virus enough for health services to cope, has been increasingly and heavily criticised by many Swedish experts as the country’s death toll has increased.

Sweden’s 4,468 fatalities from Covid-19 represent a death toll of 449 per million inhabitants, compared with 45 in Norway, 100 in Denmark and 58 in Finland. Its per-million tally remains lower than the corresponding figures of 555, 581 and 593 in Italy, Spain and the UK respectively. (The Guardian)