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Friday July 23, 2021

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Friday July 23, 2021

If Justin Trudeau doesn’t win a majority in the next election, Jagmeet Singh may be the reason

Some polls have Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole doing poorly, others have him doing worse. But all agree on one thing: NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh is in a political sweet spot.

June 24, 2021

If Justin Trudeau fails to win a majority government in an election that could be called as early as next month, it might not be Mr. O’Toole who brings the Liberal leader up short – it might be Mr. Singh.

Leger and Angus Reid have the Conservatives narrowly trailing the Liberals, while Ipsos and Abacus have the Liberals far ahead.

Canadians believe their governments have, on the whole, managed the COVID-19 pandemic reasonably well, and over the course of that pandemic have rewarded incumbent governments of all stripes with re-election.

The similarities between the COVID-19 pandemic and the Second World War appear strong. Both were traumatic and transformative. As society emerged from crisis, people looked to governments to build a strong recovery. People today are also worried about what appears to be the accelerating impact of climate change. Systemic racism and Indigenous reconciliation are important issues.

The Conservatives have offered no clear plan for how they would have handled the pandemic – and will handle the recovery – differently. They are not a party associated with fighting climate change, combating racism or improving Indigenous relations. We do not live in Conservative times.

March 2, 2021

But Mr. Trudeau is not a terribly popular prime minister. A recent Abacus poll has about an equal number of people saying they have a positive or negative impression of him, and Mr. O’Toole is quite unpopular. The only national party leader with a positive approval rating is Mr. Singh.

All recent polls have the NDP sitting at around 20 per cent, well above the 16 per cent they garnered in the 2019 election. If that number holds, the NDP should pick up seats: in B.C.’s Lower Mainland, in Toronto, elsewhere in Ontario, maybe here and there in the Prairies.

Here’s something else: The accessible voter pool – those who might consider voting for a political party – is now higher for the NDP (48 per cent) than for the Conservatives (41 per cent).

That doesn’t mean there is going to be some Orange Crush, in which the NDP smashes through in B.C. and Ontario, scattering Liberal MPs and sending the Conservatives into third place, which the NDP under Jack Layton did to the Bloc and Liberals in 2011 in Quebec. But the NDP popular vote, combined with its accessible voter pool and Mr. Singh’s popularity, suggests the likelihood of gains.

September 10, 2019

This shouldn’t be all that surprising. In the 2019 election, Mr. Singh was unknown, he was out of his depth and the party was practically bankrupt. Today the NDP has paid off its debt and will be able to finance a respectable national campaign. Mr. Singh is a better-known, more confident and more experienced leader. (Globe & Mail) 

Meanwhile, the Green Party and its associated fund are taking their battle with party leader Annamie Paul to court — ending a tentative truce between Paul and party executives just as a federal election call is expected within weeks.

June 18, 2021

The conflict between Paul and her party hit a crisis point in May when, during an escalation of violence in the Middle East, Paul issued a statement calling for a de-escalation and a return to dialogue.

Fredericton MP Jenica Atwin, who left the Green Party for the Liberals in June, called the statement “totally inadequate.” Her departure left the Greens with just two MPs. (CBC) 

 

Thursday November 19, 2020

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Thursday November 19, 2020

The province is dodging the truth on COVID-19 in long-term care

On Monday, Ontario’s long-term-care minister, Merrilee Fullerton, assured Ontarians that in spite of COVID-19 spreading through long-term-care homes, they’re actually doing better than they did in the first wave of this pandemic.

June 17, 2020

Speaking at Queen’s Park, the minister summed up: “There’s no doubt that lessons have been learned from the first wave and the data shows our homes are doing much, much better.”

Really? On Tuesday, 26 of 32 new COVID-19 deaths were in care homes. The province says 678 nursing home residents have the virus. And 100 of the province’s 626 care homes have outbreaks. 

Does that sound like “much, much better” to you? It doesn’t to us, either. And it doesn’t to many health experts. 

Health experts like Dr. Amit Arya of McMaster University, who described the first wave in long-term care as “a horror movie” and who says now: “We really have not done anything close to what we should have done to prepare for the second wave.”

Natalie Mehra, executive director of the Ontario Health Coalition, agrees. She has said in media reports: “It’s devastating … The numbers right now are just exploding.” She also says “we’re shaping up to have a worse second wave.”

Indeed, according to Doris Grinspun, CEO of the Registered Nurses’ Association of Ontario: “The number of residents with COVID is increasing, the number of staff with COVID is increasing and the number of residents who die is increasing. How can anyone sleep well at night with that?”

May 27, 2020

It’s a good question. Notwithstanding Minister Fullerton’s claims to the contrary, it doesn’t seem as if Ontario’s retirement home care system is in a better place than it was during the first wave. It’s clear that the Ford government is concerned and has been trying to put improvements and protections in place, but the reality is that it started too late, and it had repeated warnings during and after the first wave.

The Registered Nurses’ Association, for example, asked the government to make investments in staffing with registered nurses, nurse practitioners, registered practical nurses and personal support workers in homes across Ontario. The government didn’t act. And so when the second wave hit, staffing levels were already at or below operative minimum, and that was before staff began to get sick and be absent. 

The government’s own LTC commission, in its interim report on fixing the system, released a series of recommendations urgently calling for action on things like staffing levels and compensation. Fullerton said her department was “carefully reviewing” the recommendations. 

July 17, 2020

This is all happening at the same time as a Toronto Star investigation revealsprivate LTC operation is such a lucrative business opportunity, private equity funds are being set up to cash in on the potential. That’s not surprising given the shortage of beds that continues to exist and our aging population. 

But keep in mind this is specifically about private, for-profit LTC operations. In Ontario, for-profit homes account for a little more than half of the province’s long-term-care beds. But they also accounted for 70 per cent of COVID deaths in the first wave of the pandemic. According to a Star analysis, so far in the second wave for-profit homes have just under 80 per cent of the deaths.

So if you’re a wealthy investor, there’s money to be made in for-profit long-term care. What is less clear is whether the for-profit model, where the bottom line is always going to competing for the top priority, even over resident care, has a place in the long-term-care system. That the government isn’t even considering that is troubling. (Hamilton Spectator Editorial)

Tuesday November 3, 2020

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Tuesday November 3, 2020

Canadians await U.S. election in fear, as poll reveals anxieties about aftermath

Canadians absorbed the first trickle of results Tuesday as their American neighbours went to the polls, capping a campaign marked by voter intimidation, threats of postelection violence, and concern about the potential breakdown of democracy itself.

November 6, 2012

The first returns showed U.S. President Donald Trump ahead, as expected, in Indiana and winning Kentucky, while an early see-saw for the crucial state of Florida was underway. But it was going to be a long night that would likely not produce a definitive result, said Mark Feigenbaum, the Toronto tax lawyer who is the chairman of Republicans Overseas Canada.

“It’s really encouraging that a lot of people are out voting. Whomever they’re voting for, I think it’s good,” he said.

Bessma Momani, an international affairs specialist at the University of Waterloo, said it was too early to draw any definitive conclusions.

“People are just projecting their own hopes,” she said.

November 11, 2016

“The early voting is pretty spectacular. From the academic side of this, usually early voting does not indicate a vote for the incumbent.”

Earlier Tuesday, a new poll from Leger and the Association for Canadian Studies found a clear majority of Canadians surveyed worried that the United States will suffer a breakdown of its system marked by “social chaos” if no clear winner emerges.

That fear was driven by the assumption that Trump won’t accept defeat if he does in fact lose, or may prematurely declare victory on election night before all votes, including mail-in ballots, can be legally counted.

The Leger poll found that three-quarters of those surveyed in Canada are worried about the U.S. election, and 68 per cent worry that there will be a “complete breakdown of the political system in the U.S. leading to a period of social chaos.”

Four out of five respondents said they were concerned that increased racial tension would lead to protests and violence. (CTV News) 

 

Wednesday September 16, 2020

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Wednesday September 16, 2020

Wildfires and weather extremes: It’s not coincidence, it’s climate change

Right on the heels of arguably the West Coast’s most intense heat wave in modern history comes the most ferocious flare-up of catastrophic wildfires in recent memory. Meanwhile, just a few hundred miles east, a 60-degree temperature drop over just 18 hours in Wyoming and Colorado was accompanied by an extremely rare late-summer dumping of up to 2 feet of snow.

July 14, 2020

It’s not coincidence, it’s climate change. 

These kinds of dystopian weather events, happening often at the same time, are exactly what scientists have been warning about for decades. While extreme weather is a part of the natural cycle, the recent uptick in the ferocity and frequency of these extremes, scientists say, is evidence of an acceleration of climate impacts, some of which were underestimated by climate computer models.

“This is yet another example of where uncertainty is not our friend,” says Michael Mann, distinguished professor of atmospheric science at Penn State. “As we learn more, we are finding that many climate change impacts, including these sorts of extreme weather events, are playing out faster and with greater magnitude than our models predicted.”

July 21, 2020

On Wednesday NOAA released its latest State of the Climate Report, which finds that just during the month of August the U.S. was hit by four different billion-dollar disasters: two hurricanes, huge wildfires and an extraordinary Midwest derecho.

Just one such extreme event can strain emergency resources — a situation West Coast firefighters find themselves in now. However, in two dramatic cases this summer, the nation was hit simultaneously with concurrent catastrophes, some of which had no precedent in modern history. It’s a concept scientists call compound events, and it is necessary to factor these confluences into future projections to properly estimate risk, response and resources.

In mid-August the West suffered through an extended heat wave which saw Death Valley surge to 130 degrees, the hottest temperature ever reliably measured on Earth. The tinderbox conditions caused by the heat, along with a rare lightning outbreak, sparked the first round of major wildfires in California this season, escalating into three of the four largest fires in state history. At about the same time a powerful derecho caused billions of dollars in damage in Iowa and Illinois, and Hurricane Laura plowed into the Gulf Coast of Louisiana as a Category 4 with 150 mph winds and 16 feet of storm surge. (Continued: CBS News) 

 

Tuesday September 15, 2020

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Tuesday September 15, 2020

In ‘Hoax,’ Brian Stelter Ventures Where No Author Has Gone Before

Aside from a vague sense that time is now divided into “before the pandemic” and “during the pandemic,” it’s hard to have perspective on the events of the past six months. Brian Stelter’s “Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth” is among the first books to explore where we are now — and it’s certainly the first to examine how the president’s preferred news source played a role in the dissemination of misinformation about coronavirus.

August 7, 2020

“Fox’s longest-tenured medical analyst, Dr. Marc Siegel, told Hannity on March 6, ‘at worst, at worst, worst case scenario, it could be the flu,’” writes Stelter, who is CNN’s chief media correspondent, in the book’s prologue. “This was shockingly irresponsible stuff — and Fox executives knew it, because by the beginning of March, they were taking precautions that belied Siegel’s just-the-flu statement. The network canceled a big event for hundreds of advertisers, instituted deep cleanings of the office and began to put a work-from-home plan in place. Yet Fox’s stars kept sending mixed messages to millions of viewers.”

In a phone interview, Stelter explained how he became interested in the president’s relationship with Fox because “it’s the only story of the Trump years that’s left.” He said, “It’s not as if Trump is addicted to the best-researched, most in-depth, meticulously sourced material in the world. If he were, we’d all be better off, right?” The book was late — “I had blown through deadlines” — so, “come February and March, we realized that the pandemic was an essential part of the story because of Fox’s downplaying the disease and President Trump’s failures early on.”

January 24, 2017

“Hoax,” now in its second week on the hardcover nonfiction list, was originally called “Wingmen” because “Trump has wingmen, like Sean Hannity,” Stelter said. “My editor gets all the credit for the title. In this war on truth we are all living in, ‘hoax’ is a potent, malicious, ugly little word and Trump has been using it more every year. So has Fox.”

Stelter has been “over the moon” about the response to the book: “I keep hearing from readers who say ‘Hoax’ helps them understand their own family a little bit better. There are so many families that are divided by Fox and Trump. I think a lot of people have been surprised by just how deep and how corrupt the roots are — how there’s been collusion between Fox and Trump right in plain sight the whole time, and yet it’s not often recognized.” (NYT) https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/10/books/review/brian-stelter-hoax.html

Meanwhile, The president visited California after weeks of silence on its wildfires and blamed the crisis only on poor forest management, not climate change. “I don’t think science knows” what is happening, he said. (NYT)