Canada

Thursday April 30, 2020

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Thursday April 30, 2020

School boards grapple with how to make Quebec’s ‘improvised’ back-to-school plan work

Coronavirus cartoons

School board administrators across Quebec have two to three weeks to figure out how to organize bus transportation, classroom layouts and recess protocols, after the provincial government decided it would be the first in the country to reopen public schools.

Premier François Legault announced Monday that elementary schools in most regions of Quebec will reopen May 11, while those in the greater Montreal region, where there are far more cases of COVID-19, would have an extra week to get ready for a May 19 start date.

The chair of the Eastern Townships School Board, Michael Murray, said there are still many unknowns, including how he’ll manage to get his students to school in the first place, with 80 per cent of the student body relying on bus transportation. 

Quebec Cartoons

Physical-distancing rules mean only one student per bench, so buses can carry just a fraction of the students they usually do.

“Typically our buses run pretty full, so we would need four times the number of buses in order to transport students,” said Murray.

Education Minister Jean-François Roberge said Tuesday while bus transportation will be “a challenge”, he said there will be more room because high-school students will be staying home.

“I think we will be able to manage it,” Roberge said. Among the measures the government is suggesting is putting up plexiglass between drivers and the students as added protection, especially for drivers over the age of 60.

The chair of the Central Quebec School Board, Stephen Burke, doesn’t think it will be that easy to solve the transportation issues.

He said his school board covers a third of the province’s territory — from Quebec City to Shawinigan to La Tuque — and 90 per cent of students take the bus.

“Those are issues that I don’t believe the minister or the government has really understood — nor what it means to reopen a school board such as ours,” Burke said. (CBC) 

 

Friday April 24, 2020

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Friday April 24, 2020

Federal COVID-19 testing program will determine how far coronavirus has really spread

The Trudeau government committed more than $1 billion to COVID-19 research Thursday, including a proposal for widespread testing to better understand the coronavirus that led to the pandemic and to chart a recovery course for the country.

Coronavirus cartoons

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Canada needs research to respond to the pandemic in the best way possible.

“The better we understand this virus, its spread and its impact on different people, the better we can fight it and eventually defeat it,” he said.

The funding includes $40 million to do viral sequencing to track the virus and its different strains, $23 million for vaccine research, $600 million for private sector trials of drug treatments and vaccines, $114 million to the Canadian Institutes of Health research for research into measures that could reduce the spread, and a host of smaller initiatives.

The government is also setting up a “immunity task force” that will do widespread blood testing to determine just how far the virus has spread.

Unlike the current testing using nose and throat swabs, this wider testing using blood samples will be able to track people who may have had the virus, but had little or no symptoms and have now recovered.

Dr. David Naylor, a former dean of medicine and president of the University of Toronto, with an extensive background in epidemiology, who also chaired the national advisory committee on SARS, is on the task force.

He said there are likely many people walking around who have fought off the virus without even knowing they had it. Those people are believed to be immune and knowing how many there are can help the government make decisions on easing restrictions following the national lockdown that’s been in effect to fight the pandemic.

“The level of background immunity gives us some sense of how fast we can move on easing some of these restrictions,” he said. “If a lot of people are immune then this will be an easier lockdown to lift. If they aren’t we have to be a lot more careful.”

Widespread blood testing will be required to determine the prevalence of the virus. While it’s expected to take months to get a full picture, early results should give a sense of the scale of the disease, Naylor said.

“I would not be surprised if there is going to be a bit of a range within Canada. We can’t test every Canadian. We can’t test everyone everywhere, but we will test a sample across the country.”

Naylor said even when the immunity testing is completed, there will still be a need to quickly test and trace people who get sick. He said once people are out of social distancing it will be harder to test outbreaks of the virus, which is why Canada has to be prepared to move quickly.

“Immunity testing alone is not the answer, you still have to have the firefighting,” he said. “As soon as we get very active intermingling again then it is going to be much harder to fight the flare-ups and we have to have our ‘A’ game in testing and tracing.”

As of Thursday, Canada had tested 620,000 people for the virus and reported more than 41,500 cases, including 2,141 deaths. (National Post) 

 

Tuesday April 21, 2020

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Tuesday April 21, 2020

Politicians putting partisan interests ahead of safety

Across Canada, and around the world, people are learning how to do things remotely. Things they never would have dreamed they would need to learn. Some very unlikely things — including publishing newspapers and websites. 

Coronavirus cartoons

Churches are meeting remotely. Executives at all levels are doing it. Students of all ages. Doctors, counsellors, financial advisers, planners, scientists and civil servants. Musicians are performing from their basements and home recording studios.

It can be frustrating, and there are a range of indirect problems that can result from working in isolation. But we do it, because it’s what is best from a public health perspective. And that is what the vast majority of us agree is most important right now.

But Canadian Parliamentarians cannot meet remotely, apparently. At least, Andrew Scheer and his Conservatives aren’t supporting virtual parliamentary sessions. Instead, they want a reduced number of MPs to meet in Parliament face to face. 

January 23, 2020

The governing Liberals, the NDP and the Bloc Québécois all agree that virtual parliament is doable. The lone holdouts are the Conservatives. A vote was scheduled for late yesterday afternoon that will see an unhappy compromise — MPs will meet together once a week, on Wednesdays, for in-person sittings. There will also be two virtual sessions per week that will include two-hour-and-15-minutes for questioning cabinet ministers, and another session for debating new legislation. 

The Conservatives are expected to vote against even this compromise. Instead, they want three in-person sittings per week. Scheer’s defence is that since construction work on the Centre Block can continue, so can face-to-face parliament sittings. “If they can safely renovate the building that houses our parliament then surely we can do our duty to uphold the bedrock of our democracy.”

But why can’t virtual sittings work? Scheer doesn’t have a good answer for that. His best attempt seems to be that virtual sittings aren’t possible immediately and MPs “cannot wait for the weeks and weeks that it may take the House of Commons administration” to provide necessary technology. 

But that excuse doesn’t wash either, since House Speaker Anthony Rota has written in a public letter that virtual sittings should be available by May 6.

October 31, 2019

Given Scheer doesn’t have a sensible answer, the real reason for his resistance to something all other parties can agree on is undoubtedly partisan. Scheer doesn’t want to give up the partisan bear pit that is traditional Parliament, especially Question Period. Doing so takes away his partisan soapbox, and means less face-time on TV.

It would be bad enough if this was just about MPs risking their health and spreading COVID-19. But it’s not just about them. Some support staff — pages, laundry and cafeteria staff for example — won’t need to be recalled. But others, such as broadcast technicians, clerks and interpreters will have to come to work in the West Block. When the House met on Saturday, April 11, 40 additional employees were required so that 32 MPs could do their work at the emergency sitting.

So let’s be entirely clear. Scheer is putting his own partisan interests ahead of public health. Even though the vast majority of Canadians are working hard to live by the distancing recommendations from public health leadership, Scheer is insisting on up to 100 people meeting, and at least in some cases, not being able to practice physical distancing.

There is still a chance that Scheer might relent on this terrible position, perhaps recognizing how the optics make he and his Conservative party look awful. That would be a wise reversal. (Hamilton Spectator Editorial) 

 

Friday April 16, 2020

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Friday April 16, 2020

The Bank of Canada rolls the dice

Coronavirus cartoons

If desperate pandemic times demand desperate government actions, the Bank of Canada just delivered big-time. 

It’s printing money out of thin air to fund an estimated $200-billion-plus spending-spree intended to keep the nation’s economy alive. 

The best name for this historic and, frankly, alarming intervention is quantitative easing, and every Canadian should pay close attention to what amounts to a roll of the dice by their central bank.

That’s because while quantitative easing is justified under the circumstances, it’s unconventional, controversial and highly risky. Our 85-year-old central bank has never tried it before, and no wonder. It may cure what’s ailing the Canadian economy today only to infect it with new illnesses a year from now.

It all began at the end of March when the Bank of Canada announced it would spend at least $5 billion a week in the coming months to buy Government of Canada bonds on the open market. In other words, it would buy up much of the federal government’s debt.

That action was meant to ease the pressure on the federal government’s growing debt burden while injecting badly-needed cash into an economy ravaged by the COVID-19 pandemic.

And that part of quantitative easing makes sense because it works. The mind-bending part of it comes with the realization that all these billions of dollars are being created digitally. 

It’s as if Bank of Canada Governor Stephen Poloz had donned a magician’s cape, put his hand into a top hat and — poof — the Canadian economy had what it needed to buy its way out of this crisis.

What Poloz did was correct, according to experts such as former Bank of Canada governor David Dodge. At the time of Poloz’s intervention, the rapid spread of COVID-19 across Canada had already triggered government-imposed business shutdowns, huge job losses and what could become the nation’s sharpest economic downturn ever. 

The federal government was mobilizing its fiscal forces to prop up revenue-starved businesses and extend a financial lifeline to the newly unemployed, whose numbers could reach 2.8 million this month.

Other governments around the world were doing the same. And other central banks, most notably in the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union, were also playing their part by making new money to ease the debt loads of their governments.

The Bank of Canada doubled down on that strategy this week when it expanded its bond-buying program to include purchases on the open market of the debts of provincial governments and corporations. They need help, too, but it will mean pulling another $50 billion in new, digitally-created money out of Poloz’s magic hat. 

The sheer magnitude of all this newly manufactured cash is worrisome. If countries can get everything they want by simply printing more money, why doesn’t everyone do it all the time? 

The answer is the world’s financial markets wouldn’t let them get away with it. The U.S. Fed and the European Central Bank are considered to be big and powerful enough to do what they deem necessary. 

Canada, with its much smaller economy, probably won’t be cut the same slack. The value of its currency may slide if quantitative easing lasts too long. Inflation could rise to unmanageable levels even as millions of Canadians remain unemployed and the nation’s economic engines are struggling to fire on all cylinders. 

This spring, the Bank of Canada had no choice but to experiment with quantitative easing. In short order, it must provide Canadians with a plan and timetable for getting out of it.

Canada, with its much smaller economy, probably won’t be cut the same slack. The value of its currency may slide if quantitative easing lasts too long. Inflation could rise to unmanageable levels even as millions of Canadians remain unemployed and the nation’s economic engines are struggling to fire on all cylinders. 

This spring, the Bank of Canada had no choice but to experiment with quantitative easing. In short order, it must provide Canadians with a plan and timetable for getting out of it. (Hamilton Spectator Editorial)

Thursday April 9, 2020

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Thursday April 9, 2020

Why we should all be wearing masks — and how our public health authorities got it wrong

Coronavirus cartoons

For months, as the COVID-19 crisis escalated and Canadians and Americans watched people across Asia increasingly wearing masks in public spaces, our health authorities stuck to their long-held policies, strongly advising against this. 

That is, until Friday. That’s when the U.S. Centers for Disease Control reversed course, advising the public to use “cloth face coverings” to help slow the spread of COVID-19. They may have preferred to make this a quiet change on their website, but a characteristically bombastic press conference (and victory lap) by Donald Trump ensured that there was no saving face (no pun intended). 

The Public Health Agency of Canada made the same policy change Monday, and I suspect that the World Health Organization will not be far behind. And with these reversals come an eroding in public trust in the very organizations we need people to trust the most, at the very moment when our collective survival most depends on that trust.

So what went wrong? (continued: Toronto Star)