About 40 years ago, the story goes, several Tibetan Buddhist monks declared that they had discovered the centre of the universe in the mountains north of Kamloops, British Columbia. The monks, who visited several times, were reportedly able to identify the spot—a grassy knoll near Deadman River—by its distinctive volcanic topography and through a series of numinous tests, one of which was the ability to start a fire in the area without an ignition source.

In 2016, Marshall Potts bought 160 acres of land about an hour’s drive from the centre of the universe. Like the monks, Potts—a 54-year-old country-rock musician and self-described “spiritual guy” who’d previously lived in the Lower Mainland—found the landscape magical. There were soul-stirring groves of Douglas fir, verdant grasslands, and unspoiled lakes and creeks. Mule deer, black bears and bighorn sheep roamed the woods and cliffsides. Potts and his partner, Jo-Anne Beharrell, an accountant who moonlights as Potts’s manager, wanted to turn the property into an off-grid hobby farm and live self-sufficiently. They cut and milled trees to build a house, grew their own vegetables, and acquired chickens and a small herd of cattle. They set about installing solar panels. It was undeniably remote—Kamloops was a two-hour round-trip drive along a narrow, sometimes treacherous, gravel road—but that was part of the attraction. “You learn to drink your coffee black,” Beharrell told me, “because there’s no corner store to run to when you’re out of cream.” They christened the place Seven Sparks Ranch, named in part for a nearby body of water, Sparks Lake.

It can get hot on the ranch in summer, but the summer of 2021 in the south-central part of B.C.’s Interior was mind-bendingly hot. On June 28, the temperature in Kamloops hit a high of 44 degrees Celsius, almost 20 degrees above average. Potts and Beharrell went down to Criss Creek, a half-hour’s drive from their house, to cool off and have a picnic lunch. When they returned home a couple of hours later, they noticed a plume of smoke above the trees to the south of their property. The smoke was pale grey, the plume still small. They raced over to a neighbour’s place a few kilometres away and saw a grass fire spreading. It was so hot, and the wind so fierce, that the fire was already moving very quickly. “We just heard a roar, and then the flames started coming toward us,” Potts said. Back home, Beharrell called 911, who transferred her to the BC Wildfire Service, the province’s wildfire-fighting corps. “We thought the fire was significant,” Potts said, “but we figured they’d be able to put it out.” 

They didn’t. Or at least not right away. An hour passed, then another. From their home, Potts and Beharrell watched with mounting anxiety as the plume became a column and its smoke got blacker, indicating that it was burning more vegetation. After four or five hours, BC Wildfire flew planes overhead, observing the fire. By the next morning, as firefighters arrived by helicopter and began to strategize, the blaze had already spread. Potts and Beharrell had lost power by then, and started moving farm equipment onto the grass away from trees. The fire crews told the couple that by the time the fire hit a nearby ridge, they’d have to evacuate. It hit the ridge later that day. “It was a monster,” Potts said. They grabbed what they could: a couple of Potts’s favourite guitars and an amp, a laptop and a hard drive, some photos, their two dogs (one of whom was pregnant). They took a forest service road out of the back of their property and drove to Kamloops. 

Even in town they couldn’t get away from fire. They ended up in a motel near the neighbourhood of Juniper Ridge. Before the night was over, a different, smaller wildfire broke out just behind the motel. After about a week, they went to stay at Potts’s brother’s place at Pinantan Lake, 20 kilometres away. Soon after they arrived, another fire was menacing that community, and it was eventually put on evacuation alert, too.

The Sparks Lake fire was the largest of the season, a conflagration that raged for more than two months, devouring 95,980 hectares of land and trees and destroying or damaging more than 35 buildings. Hundreds of people were forced to evacuate; countless animals and birds were killed or displaced. The fire cut a broad swath through the region, from the Deadman River valley, across the territory of the Skeetchestn Indian Band, and up north into Bonaparte Provincial Park.

There were few places anybody could go in B.C. that summer. In terms of area burned, 2021 was the third-worst fire season on record in the province’s history. In terms of its broad impact, however, the 2021 fire season was the most devastating B.C. had ever experienced. Between April 1, 2021, and March 28, 2022, there were 1,642 wildfires, 67 of which were bad enough to be classified as “wildfires of note” by BC Wildfire. Then there was the disorienting drought and blistering heat waves of late June and early July that made the fires so much worse—the “heat dome” that settled over the Pacific Northwest and immediately transformed a normally temperate climate into one better approximating Death Valley. 

A home in ruins: Jo-Anne Beharrell and Marshall Potts loved the woodland landscape where they built their house. Today, half the trees are gone.

On June 29, Lytton broke the record for the all-time highest temperature in Canada—49.5 degrees Celsius—and the next day, the entire village was wiped out by yet another wildfire. Two people died in the Lytton fire, and the heat would kill more than 600 across the province. Just a few months later, with the charred terrain stripped of water-absorbing vegetation, extreme rainfall in mid-November flooded homes, swept away highways and forced the evacuations of thousands more across the southern part of the province. Like so many people, Marshall Potts and Jo-Anne Beharrell were cut off from their family in the Lower Mainland. They were able to get back into their house by Christmas—firefighters had ultimately prevented its destruction—but they spent the holiday alone.

There had been disastrous fire seasons before. Potts and Beharrell had previously been evacuated, during 2017’s Elephant Hill fire, another monster that destroyed a good chunk of the area’s forest. Experts argued that such megafires were a harbinger of climate change, and a sign of environmental catastrophe to come. But the cascade of natural disasters in 2021 made it clearer than ever that a climate emergency is irrevocably upon us. Mike Flannigan, the British Columbia research chair in predictive services, emergency management and fire science at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops—he calls himself a “fire guy” on Twitter—told me that he hadn’t expected climate events like those in B.C. last summer to occur for another 15 or 20 years, and yet there they were. Last year, it seemed, was a terrible tipping point. “You think things are crazy now,” Flannigan said, “but it’s only going to get crazier.” 

And if Flannigan wasn’t prepared for what had already happened, how will the rest of us fare? Residents of B.C., at least outside densely populated Vancouver and its expanding suburbs, have always proudly accepted the risks that come with living in or near the bush. That was part of the deal—like living with the chance of hurricanes in Florida or earthquakes (and wildfires, for that matter) in California. Now things are different. What was once incomprehensible today feels inevitable. It’s one thing to understand risk as an occasional and distant possibility. Now your brain has to accept that life, going forward, will be even more frequently marred by displacement, loss and death. You have to completely recalibrate your ideas of safety and vulnerability. Enormous changes are going to come at the last minute. And simple, age-old questions about the weather—“Hot enough for you?” “Which way is the wind blowing?”—are going to be freighted with existential dread.

***

In early May, I travelled from Abbotsford up through the Kamloops Fire Centre to see the ravages of last year’s fires, what the recovery looked like and how people were coping. 

I spent a fair bit of time in the region as a kid, learning to tack and ride horses. It is achingly beautiful, physically imposing. In the space of an hour, you can travel through snow-capped mountains and desert mesas, coniferous trees giving way to sagebrush. There are long stretches of empty highway, interrupted by somewhat drab, ramshackle villages and hamlets, as if the architects of these developments saw no point in competing with the natural beauty surrounding them. The people who live here are, generally speaking, people who make their living from the land—farmers, miners, ranchers, loggers—and who also spend most of their free time out in it, fishing and hunting, swimming and skiing. For someone like me, who now spends about 99 per cent of his life in cities, the membrane between the human and natural world in this country feels unusually thin.

“You think things are crazy now,” one fire expert said, “but it’s only going to get crazier”

As I drove into the mountains on the Coquihalla Highway, I passed dozens of work crews cleaning up debris from last year’s mudslides—immense tangles of rock, branches and other vegetation—and repairing chunks of road that had been melted by the heat or ripped apart by floodwater. Each site was marked by long strings of orange safety flags that fluttered overhead, lending an almost festive air to what still seemed like a disaster zone. The first dead trees I saw were near the Coldwater Indian Band Reserve, south of Merritt. Suddenly, the landscape was drained of colour. All I could see were grim groves of black pines and firs, stripped of needle and cone. Over the next few days, I’d encounter many other such stands, and each time was a fresh shock, like discovering new tumours in a body that was supposed to be cancer-free.

Then there was the other destruction, still also visible, of human settlement—of family homes, of small businesses, of carefully tended gardens and trusty vehicles. Lytton, whose cleanup and recovery has been plagued by inexplicable bureaucratic delay, was still, almost a year later, closed to the public. An opaque barrier had been placed up on the highway to deter gawkers, but a narrow gap below that barrier still permitted a glimpse of the devastation: block after block of levelled structures, dunes of ash, hollowed-out lives. 

All over the world, the recipe for wildfire is the same, requiring just three basic ingredients: vegetation (what forestry and fire people call fuel), ignition and conducive weather—hot, dry, windy. In B.C., particularly in the last five years, all of these elements have taken on extreme dimensions. The first ingredient is the most easily—but also the most contentiously—addressed. Long before settlers arrived in the province, Indigenous peoples kept wildfire in check through prescribed and cultural burns; that is, intentionally setting highly controlled fires at low-risk times of year. The practice was designed to thin out forests, render the bark of old-growth trees more fire-resistant, remove dead grass and encourage the growth of beneficial plants. These burns would occur every five to 25 years and essentially rebalance the ecosystem.

Such maintenance was more or less outlawed in the late 19th century by colonial governments, which viewed any kind of fire as destructive to valuable timber. Several decades of commercial logging made the landscape even more vulnerable to fire, with diverse woodlands largely replaced by tree farms consisting almost entirely of conifers. The region’s pine, notoriously, has been ravaged by the mountain pine beetle, with dead and weakened trees becoming highly flammable fuel on the forest floor. Other sloppy and short-sighted practices—not removing scrap wood left behind by loggers, as well as a policy of reflexively, blindly stamping out all wildfire—turned the province’s forests, over time, into tinderboxes. “We’re up against a major issue, which is a hundred years of fuel loading,” says Kira Hoffman, a Smithers-based fire ecologist who is in training to be a burn boss (someone who plans and implements prescribed burns). “We’ve become really, really good at putting out fires.” While prescribed fires are again a part of fire management, both by Indigenous and non-Indigenous groups, the province needs to clean up all the fuel from forest floors at a much larger scale before those burns can be effective. 

Human-caused wildfires—ignited by stray cigarette butts, downed power lines or arson—account for about half of all fires, on average, across the entire country. Thanks to fire prevention education and vigilance, the number of human-caused fires has actually been declining. In B.C.’s 2021 fire season, just 35 per cent of fires were attributed to people. At the same time, thanks to a warming planet, lightning strikes, which account for the other half of Canada’s fires, have increased exponentially. During last summer’s heat wave, more than 710,000 lightning strikes were recorded in B.C. and western Alberta, up from a five-year average of 8,300 during the same time of year. The wildfires themselves, now so notoriously aggressive and unpredictable, can create their own firestorms and yet more lightning—a terrifying feedback loop. 

Dead wood: The trees around the community of Logan Lake were scorched in last summer’s wildfires. Thanks to careful preparation and a shift in the wind, the town itself was spared. (Photographs by Troy Moth)

Since the early 1970s, the amount of forest that burns every year in Canada has doubled to about 2.5 million hectares—about half the size of Nova Scotia. In the 1980s, as more people moved into or near wilderness, and built homes and businesses there, so-called interface fires became more common. (“Wildland-urban interface” is the firefighting term used to describe the transition zone where human development brushes up against the natural world.) In B.C., in 2003, the Okanagan suffered the largest interface wildfire event in the province’s history. More than 25,000 hectares burned, 238 homes were destroyed or damaged, and more than 33,000 people evacuated from Kelowna and the community of Naramata. Then came the horrific fire seasons of 2017 and 2018. Over the course of the summer of 2017, more than 65,000 people were evacuated province-wide, and 1.2 million hectares burned. In 2018, there were over 2,000 fires and 1.35 million hectares burned. “Growth into the wildland-urban interface increases every year,” Ian Meier, executive director of the BC Wildfire Service, told me. “So the challenge increases every year.” There are about 1.1 million high-risk hectares in B.C. 

In 2017, the worst fire season to date, the province spent $649 million fighting fires; it spent another $565 million last year. The insurance payouts from just two of 2021’s megafires—Lytton Creek and White Rock Lake—came to $179 million. If wildfires have been made worse by climate change, climate change has also been made worse by wildfires: Elephant Hill, for example, spewed 38 million tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. And while it’s impossible to pinpoint exactly how much harm the smoke from last summer’s wildfires caused, a report in the Lancet published in September of 2021 estimated that short-term exposure to wildfire smoke causes 440 deaths in Canada every year.

On an average summer’s day, most fire management agencies can put out wildfires without too much trouble or damage. That can completely change when the heat is extreme—days, even weeks, of extreme weather are now, of course, increasingly common. The heat dome, once considered a thousand-year event, is now expected to recur as frequently as every 25 years. By 2050, average temperatures are expected to be higher, with daytime highs in Vancouver as much as 3.7 degrees Celsius warmer than they are now. Under such conditions, another diabolical cycle is set in motion—a warming atmosphere sucks more moisture from vegetation, essentially baking that fuel, resulting in overwhelmingly intense fires that are difficult, if not impossible, to extinguish. Those fires are the biggest threat. “It’s just a few really large fires that are responsible for most of our problems,” Mike Flannigan told me. “Three per cent of the fires burn 97 per cent of the area burned. And these often happen on a few critical days—the extremes of the extremes.”

***

As I made my way across the fire centre, I occasionally smelled smoke. I saw it, too, from time to time, and once, on a ridge just outside of Kamloops, the flicker of flames. Someone’s burn pile? A pulp mill? It was nothing threatening, ultimately, but it gave me just the smallest hint of the fear that many locals live with.

I was in a particularly fretful frame of mind that day. I had just been visiting with Kody and Ashlynn Kruesel, a couple in their early 30s. Last August, the Kruesels’ tiny village of Monte Lake, a half-hour drive east of Kamloops, was engulfed by the White Rock Lake fire, one of those few really large fires that Flannigan mentioned. In a matter of eight hours, its flames travelled 18 kilometres and consumed at least 28 homes and one business. The Kruesels were able to evacuate in time, but just barely. After driving for 45 minutes, glowing embers from the fire were still floating down onto their truck. When they returned home the next day, they discovered that every one of their outbuildings—including a garage, a garden shed, a workshop and an old sauna—had been destroyed. The A-frame house they’d bought two years earlier had been spared. Their neighbours’ homes on either side, however, were completely gutted. Almost a year later, the fire’s unbearable caprice was still evident—I saw a scorched hand cart lying in the mud, one rubber wheel intact and the other, just inches away, completely melted.

While the Kruesels fled the fire at first, they returned to help fight it. For several days after the fire blew through Monte Lake, they told me, the BC Wildfire Service was nowhere to be seen. Kody, a former CN heavy equipment operator whose father had been a volunteer fireman, quickly joined forces with some neighbours, taking up hoses, pumps and buckets. The fire front had come and gone, but there were still numerous spot fires that needed to be put out. A change in the wind could have been lethal, but there were homes to salvage, animals to save. Days later, Solicitor General Mike Farnworth publicly excoriated Monte Lake residents who defied the evacuation order, saying they were putting themselves and firefighters at risk. “We didn’t want to be here,” Kody said. “It wasn’t fun. But this is my home—I’m not going anywhere if nobody else is taking care of it.” When firefighters showed up in Monte Lake, the Kruesels said they were apologetic. “ ‘We’re super embarrassed we weren’t allowed up here,’ ” Kody remembered BC Wildfire firefighters telling him. “ ‘This is our job. We should have been up here.’ ” 

On edge: Kody and Ashlynn Kruesel fled a big fire in their tiny village of Monte Lake with little time to spare. They returned soon after to help fight it.

I talked with the Kruesels on their front porch, as their ducks gurgled nearby and their black cat, Robin, nuzzled my leg. All around us, the devastation of last summer was still on full display. Houses reduced to cinder-block foundations, pooling with brackish water. Mounds of scrap and brush being belatedly burned. Further down the road, the charred, flattened husks of cars piled up against each other. The horizon was dominated by now-familiar dead, black trees—silent, skeletal sentries at a crime scene.

But it was a crime scene in which the survivors, broken and sad, kept living, reminded daily of their trauma. The Kruesels had moved to Monte Lake because it was one of the few places where they could afford to buy a house, but also because they loved the hiking and kayaking that were literally in their backyard. After the fire, the local roads they used for camping and fishing were all closed, choked off by fallen and dead trees that still hadn’t been removed. With the woodlands decimated, there was nothing to break the wind that frequently whipped through the community. There was an arsonist in the area, too, Kody said, who had, incredibly, started 18 fires in a single day. It was drizzling as we talked, but Kody was nervous about the coming fire season. “We’re going to have a week, maybe two, of rain,” he said. “And then we’re going to hit another dry summer again. So we’re a little on edge.” 

When I asked what they could do to prepare for future fires, Kody shrugged. “You go slowly,” he said. “You try to purchase some sprinklers and generators and pumps. But it all costs money. And what do you pick as a priority?” Ashlynn works as an office manager at Kamloops Alarm, a security company, but Kody is currently unemployed, nursing some bad tendinitis. Their insurance had expired before the fire hit. Aside from a tiny GoFundMe that a friend had set up—it raised a few hundred dollars—they had received no financial assistance. Thanks to the fire, though, they’ve become much closer to their neighbours, solidarity bred of tragedy. They’ve formed a private Facebook group, making sure everybody has each other’s phone numbers, knows exactly how many people live in each home, how many animals they have, and what kind of equipment they can offer in case of another fire. Everyone has an escape route planned. There’s a rough chain of command. There are plans to co-purchase a large truck outfitted with a big water tank and pump. If someone sees a fire anywhere, they immediately inform the group. It’s all improvisatory—“half-assed,” in Kody’s words—but at least it provides some security. “We’ve learned we can’t rely on our own government,” Kody said, “so we’ve come together as a community.”

***

The Kruesels are angry at a lot of people: the Red Cross, the logging companies, the media, the looters and the looky-loos—tourists who still occasionally pass through Monte Lake, snapping pics of the ruins. But it is BC Wildfire that draws their greatest ire.

The BC Wildfire Service is a division of the B.C. Ministry of Forests, Lands, Natural Resource Operations and Rural Development. Its basic job is to manage and mitigate wildfires on behalf of the provincial government, and to protect lives and values (the agency’s word). The agency has about 1,700 firefighters and support staff and works with many other organizations: the First Nations’ Emergency Services Society of B.C. and the Forest Enhancement Society of B.C., as well as local fire departments and private firefighting companies. It provides equipment, personnel and strategy during the fire season and is also responsible, alongside private landowners, for the maintenance and mitigation of forests and grasslands, including the use of prescribed burns. Like organizations in comparable fire zones—California’s Cal Fire and Quebec’s SOPFEU—BC Wildfire works with firefighters from other places, who are able to parachute in when their own regions are not experiencing overwhelming threats. After the 2021 season, the provincial government made BC Wildfire expand its year-round operations. It also provided its biggest budget to date. Of $600 million earmarked for climate-related disasters, prevention and recovery, the agency received $453 million that would be spent on mitigation and risk-reduction, various preparedness initiatives, forest road maintenance and better public alert systems.

The money was welcome, for sure, with some of it going toward more prescribed burns in an attempt to correct decades of poor forest management. But it wasn’t enough, according to many residents I spoke with. There are deeper, more intractable problems within the organization. Ranchers, farmers and foresters, people who have lived and worked on the land their entire lives, say they are repeatedly ignored when wildfires break out, or their equipment—CATs that could be used to dig fire breaks, say—goes unused. After the 2003 and 2017 fire seasons, reports were commissioned to determine what went wrong, with both strongly recommending the same thing: that BC Wildfire make better use of local knowledge. Now, years later, this remains an issue. “It’s still very much an agency-led approach,” Kira Hoffman, the fire ecologist, said of BC Wildfire. “If someone hasn’t gone through their accreditation or certification process, BC Wildfire doesn’t think that person knows what they’re doing.”

“The Sparks Lake fire—last summer’s largest—devoured nearly 96,000 hectares of land and trees”

Eighty per cent of all Indigenous communities live in forested areas, and the hunters and gatherers in those communities, in particular, know best the roads, the water sources, the wind patterns and which parts of the woods are heaviest with fuel—in short, all the things you need to know to put out a fire. At the same time, and crucially, because of a lack of money and decent infrastructure, wildfire disproportionately affects those communities. 

Mike Anderson, a 72-year-old professional forester who runs the Skeetchestn Natural Resources Corporation, watched the Sparks Lake fire build for two weeks. While the Skeetchestn Indian Band was forced to evacuate, scattering band members for a month, Anderson’s crew of about 15 stayed behind to fight the fire. They set up a command centre where firefighters and volunteers could be fed, dug large firebreaks to guide flames into prescribed burn areas and put out spot fires. When BC Wildfire showed up a few days later, Anderson and his crew repeatedly offered advice and guidance, but were frequently ignored or told to get out of the way. They were told they didn’t have the right equipment or training, Anderson said, or that they weren’t properly registered. “What I witnessed was mismanagement and ignorance by BC Wildfire Service,” Anderson told me, adding that the agency was “arrogant” and “territorial.” Hoffman argues that the root issue is both obvious and complex—colonialism itself. “The thing about fire is that it is so embedded in Indigenous sovereignty,” she said. “It becomes this huge issue with Crown land, and who owns what.” 

By the time the Sparks Lake fire had been put out—as had another one that followed on its heels—Anderson had watched, heartbroken, as two-thirds of his woodlot, which he’d grown, tended and selectively logged for 35 years, went up in smoke. So had one hundred per cent of Skeetchestn’s woodlots. Darrel Draney, the band’s Kukpi7, or chief, was furious and saddened by it all. His community included generations of firekeepers, experts in the ways fire behaves and should be treated. Draney insisted that future fires could largely be prevented if his territorial patrol, and the patrols of other Indigenous communities, had sufficient funds and the proper equipment to fight them. “If we were resourced properly,” he told the CBC last year, “there wouldn’t be 300 big fires in B.C.; there’d be 20, maybe 30.” While no Skeetchestn structures were ultimately harmed, much of the land surrounding the community was burned, damaging valuable hunting grounds and watersheds for decades. 

Anderson and Draney later proposed to BC Wildfire that every rural band’s natural resources centre be staffed with firekeepers and people who know the land, whom the agency could officially train to serve as an initial attack crew on fires. “Any fire, if you get on it right away, is not much of a fire,” Anderson said. “If you’re there when the fire’s an acre, and you have the right equipment, it’s not much of an issue.” When I spoke to Anderson, he and Draney were still waiting for their proposal to be taken up.

Communication and clarity seemed to be a problem in general for BC Wildfire. A number of people I spoke with were unclear about why the agency set particular back burns—a controlled burn to direct the fire—or why it wasn’t fighting fires at night, when it was cooler. Most significantly, there was confusion about why firefighters were in one place and not another, or why it took them so long to get to certain fires. 

BC Wildfire’s general policy is to put out a fire wherever and whenever it starts, no matter how close it is to human development. This is largely because in B.C., almost every square foot of land is valuable—as timber, as a pipeline route, for housing or highways. Ontario, by contrast, has a policy of letting a fire take its course unless it directly threatens a community. The point, says Mike Flannigan, is twofold: one, fire is natural and can often be beneficial. Two, trying to always fight fire, especially now, is both counterproductive and a waste of resources. Even with firefighters working all year and around the clock, there are just too many fires for them to keep up. “Canadian fire management agencies are among the best in the world,” Flannigan told me. “They’re well-trained and professional. But they can’t put out all the fires all the time.”

In 2021, BC Wildfire couldn’t count on assistance from other jurisdictions because so many places were dealing with the same problem (and the pandemic made travel challenging). Firefighters were completely overwhelmed, constantly endangered and separated from their families for weeks on end. Ian Meier, the executive director of BC Wildfire, told me there were periods last summer with 80 new fires a day,  and it was just too much. “The system gets overloaded,” he said. “There’s more fire than resources.” 

When I spoke with Meier in May, he still sounded exhausted. He’s been with the agency for 25 years, and none of the criticism that I passed along was news to him, especially after last year, when a number of people—Kamloops-South Thompson Liberal MLA Todd Stone, Thompson-Nicola Regional District chair Ken Gillis, every surviving Lyttonite—expressed their disappointment and anger with the government’s response. Meier acknowledged, wearily, that the complaints—about the poor communication, the insufficient cooperation with Indigenous and local communities—were things that the agency was working on and slowly getting better at. “We’re using a year-round workforce to connect to those communities to do cross-training,” he said. “We work together so when it’s time to hit the ground running, we’re ready to go. Each year we make incremental change and we’ll continue to do that.” He talked about forging better relationships with First Nations leaders. Last summer, for example, through an agreement with BC Wildfire, the Simpcw First Nation established an Indigenous initial attack team that will fight fires in Simpcw territory. “We’re committed to learning and changing,” Meier said. “In some people’s eyes, we’re probably not changing quick enough.”

***

Is anybody changing quickly enough? BC Wildfire was created as a response to emergency. But wildfire is now a permanent emergency, an emergency that exceeds our imagination. This is the story of our entire lurching response to the climate crisis, one that’s been ad hoc, fragmentary, too-little-too-late. It’s not just B.C., and it’s not just wildfire. It’s drought in the Prairies, floods in Ontario, killer heat waves across Quebec.

You can’t hold climate change accountable. You can’t get mad at it, you can’t point a finger at it, you can’t sue it. It’s so big, and so frightening, you can barely get your mind around it. So, in the face of that helplessness, you take a hard look at the human stuff, the fixable stuff. You make sacrifices and changes. That doesn’t mean giving up, but it means giving up certain things and adding others. You don’t go to the beach when the smoke’s too bad. You don’t let your kids ride their dirt bikes because an errant spark might ignite a fire. 

FireSmart is a national organization dedicated to reducing losses from wildfire. All across B.C., communities as diverse as Whistler, Coquitlam, Belcarra and Slocan have developed community wildfire resiliency plans that incorporate a number of FireSmart mitigation principles and programs. Such plans include figuring out a community’s best evacuation routes, clearing nearby forest fuel, hardening homes (i.e., ditching cedar hedges, installing fire-resistant siding, cleaning gutters of pine needles). Common-sense stuff, really, but not top of mind when you think of wildfires as a once-in-a-lifetime event rather than something that’s now likely to happen every few years at least. 

Other more challenging and expensive measures are starting to be implemented. Like including lessons on Indigenous fire practices in the elementary school curriculum and spending more on mental health supports for burnt-out firefighters. Like updating the emergency alert system to include extreme heat, fire and flood. Like turning hockey arenas into fireproof permanent evacuation centres.

What people aren’t doing, usually, is moving. I asked everyone I met in B.C. who’d been affected by the fires if they’d considered going somewhere else. Most said no—this was their home, and besides, where would they go? In West Kelowna, some insurance companies now refuse to insure new homes that are being built too close to fire zones. Even wealthy Vancouver, surrounded by Stanley Park and Grouse Mountain, is susceptible to wildfire. Then there are Indigenous communities whose people have lived in their territory for thousands of years. Having had their homes stolen at least twice—once by the Canadian government, and then by fire exacerbated by that government’s policies—they remain defiantly rooted. 

During their evacuation, Marshall Potts and Jo-Anne Beharrell were allowed to come back every other day to check on their property and the animals they had to leave behind. These so-called wellness checks were encouraging on one hand—firefighters fed their cats, their house was still standing—but also, increasingly, depressing. Though their house survived, their furniture and mattresses and clothes were all black with soot. A sprinkler had shot up under their roof, and water had poured in through the ceiling, wrecking the insulation. All their fencing was destroyed, so other ranchers’ cattle had wandered onto their land, devouring their grass. They had lost one of their cats. And, of course, all the beauty—one of the reasons that they had moved to the area to begin with—was transformed. Half of the trees on their property were gone, and the view from their living room would now be one of stump-strewn grass instead of woodland. Other ranchers, they heard, had to put down several dozen cows, some of which were burning alive, others half-dead from smoke inhalation. One day, down by the creek where they had enjoyed that picnic lunch the day the fire started, they found the rotting corpse of a cow. One of the cow’s calves had made it up to their property, terrified, and when Potts tried to rope it, it ran off and disappeared.

Ten months later, when I visited the couple in their living room, they seemed tired and demoralized. They were fighting with the insurance company, which had misplaced their claim for several months. It was difficult to get tradespeople and materials up for repairs. A friend was installing drywall—so much for the wood walls they planned to build themselves. “I kind of wish it had all burned down,” Beharrell said. “Because the cleanup and the fix-up is harder than a rebuild.”

Because of the lack of green trees, it’s highly unlikely that their particular corner of the world will burn again. Or at least not for a few decades, anyway. The couple will, with time, adjust to the new landscape and eventually get new cattle that will have new land to graze on. They will keep rebuilding, and add a new recording studio. They’re even considering hosting a music festival on their property. “This was a bit of an ego punch,” Potts said of the fire. “But you want to find something good in the problem, in the chaos.”

During their evacuation and the months after, Potts recorded an album titled The Storm. It was inspired, naturally, by the cataclysm of the previous summer. But Potts, a surprising and resolute optimist, didn’t want to dwell on the misery in his lyrics. “When the wind comes it brings change,” he sings on the title track. “And only truth alone remains. ’Cause it reveals your pain, that’s why the storm came.” He realized that he had taken the beauty for granted for so long, had always assumed that it, and the land, and his home, would be here forever, unchanged.

This article appears in print in the August 2022 issue of Maclean’s magazine. Subscribe to the monthly print magazine here, or buy the issue online here. Click here to subscribe to our e-mail newsletter to receive the best of Maclean’s directly in your inbox. 

The post The Age of Wildfires appeared first on Macleans.ca.

If you’ve been asking yourself why the Russian strongman Vladimir Putin appears so confident that he can get away with a war of conquest in Europe aimed at the subjugation and takeover of a NATO-backed democracy, you might want to consider the findings of an exhaustive, data-driven study of the meteoric rise of police states—and the 16-year retreat of democracy worldwide—released this week.

The Freedom House study also helps explain why China’s Xi Jinping, Putin’s key ally in foreign relations and the United Nations Security Council, is going out of his way to give contradictory and seemingly ambivalent responses to Putin’s belligerence in Ukraine, as though he were just hedging his bets: Yes to Ukraine’s sovereignty, yes to Putin’s invasion. But only three weeks ago, Xi unambiguously endorsed Putin’s foreign “policies” and his professed grievances against NATO in a historic, 5,300-word manifesto the two autocrats jointly authored and published, setting out their vision for a new world order. 

A non-partisan American institute that has been tracking these things since 1941, Freedom House concludes, in a nutshell, that the world is dividing in two, and the dictators are winning.

“The global order is nearing a tipping point,” it says, “and if democracy’s defenders do not work together to help guarantee freedom for all people, the authoritarian model will prevail.”

In the Moscow-Beijing manifesto, published on the eve of Putin’s hero’s welcome at the Winter Olympics opening ceremonies in China, you could say Putin and Xi agree with the Freedom House analysis, and they’re downright chipper about the authoritarian model they’re advancing all over the world. 

It has become commonplace to raise the spectre of the Cold War now that the “rules-based international order” is crumbling and the regimes of theocrats, kleptocrats and Dear Leader cults are in the ascendant from Tehran to Caracas and Minsk. It’s an imperfect analogy—the apparatchiks of the Cold War weren’t often welcome guests in the parlours of democracy’s capitalist legislators. But Xi and Putin are content to double down on the analogy and take it further: what they’ve got going on between them, they say, is better than back in the days before the Berlin Wall came crashing down.

In this new world, “inter-State relations between Russia and China are superior to [the] political and military alliances of the Cold War era. Friendship between the two States has no limits,” the manifesto boasts, adding, “there are no ‘forbidden’ areas of cooperation.” So, however robust the NATO capitals’ new tranches of economic and targeted sanctions against Russia might appear, no dealings are “forbidden” to Xi and Putin. And Xi affirmed that he’s got Putin’s back by announcing, in tandem with the manifesto, that the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) will be buying $117.5 billion of Russian oil and gas over the next 10 years from Russian oil giants Rosneft and Gazprom.

No matter what “limits” the NATO countries might want to impose on dealings with Russian entities in the new sanctions of this past week, nothing is off limits to Beijing. This presents a particular awkward set of challenges to the NATO countries, especially for countries like Canada.

The sanctions Prime Minister Trudeau announced this past week are mostly cut and pasted from the American and British lists of the individuals, entities and corporate bodies that we’re all now forbidden to have dealings with. But as just one example, CNPC, the main buyer in the new China-Russia oil and gas arrangement, holds about $1 billion worth of Canadian oil properties through its various subsidiaries and spin-offs. 

This is a bit awkward, and for Beijing, too. It should come as no surprise that, while Xi and Putin endorsed and affirmed one another’s foreign policy benchmarks, Ukraine is not explicitly mentioned in their manifesto. Taiwan is—Russia agrees with the People’s Republic of China’s baseless claim that the thriving island democracy has no sovereignty of its own and is merely a possession of the Chinese Communist Party. 

But Beijing is incessantly hectoring liberal democracies for noticing its brutal occupation of Tibet and its outrages in Xinjiang and Hong Kong, citing China’s sovereignty in its routine outbursts. So Beijing has lately been saddled with the awkward propaganda challenge of squaring the circle of its recognition of Ukraine’s sovereignty with its endorsement of Putin’s right to do whatever he likes to Ukraine.

Putin and Xi meet on Feb. 4 for the start of the Winter Olympics in Beijing. They published their manifesto on the eve of the Games’ opening ceremony. (Alexei Druzhinin/Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

Meanwhile, the dictators’ forces fan out around the globe, not just in the shabby fatigues of proxy armies and the crisp uniforms of military attachés. There are all those dapper-suited business executives from state-owned enterprises, too, and their inducements have proven quite effective. But now, the promise of post-political career appointments to the boards of Russian entities has suddenly become somewhat less tempting. It’s just embarrassing.

Former Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi has resigned from Delimobil, Russia’s giant car-sharing service. Former Finnish prime minister Esko Aho has now resigned his directorship of Sherbank, Russia’s largest bank. Former Austrian chancellor Christian Kern has just bolted from the Russian rail company RZD. Former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder appears to be sticking with Rosneft, however, and former French prime minister François Fillon appears to be keeping his seat on the Sibur petrochemicals conglomerate. 

In these comfortable sinecures, awkward questions about torture chambers, mass murders and ethnic cleansings are not fit for polite company. 

And that’s just one way that full democracies and fledgling democracies have been backsliding so dramatically. Freedom House notes that 60 countries worldwide have suffered democratic declines just in the past year. “As of today, some 38 per cent of the global population live in Not Free countries,” the Freedom House report found, “the highest proportion since 1997.” Only about a fifth of the world’s people now live in free countries.

“Democracy is in real danger all over the globe,” says Freedom House president Michael Abramowitz. “Authoritarians are becoming bolder, while democracies are back on their heels. Democratic governments must rally to counter authoritarian abuses and support the brave human rights defenders fighting for freedom around the world.”

And now those freedom fighters are facing Russian tanks in Ukraine.

The post Why sanctions over the Ukraine invasion won’t stop Putin appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Andrew Kushnir is a playwright, actor and artistic director of Project: Humanity in Toronto

I spent the first 24 hours of this war in Ukraine “doomscrolling” through tweet after tweet, messaging friends in Kyiv and in the eastern part of the country, texting with the guys I grew up with in Montreal, and my mother. A time of little sleep and diminished appetite. My body has been giving me familiar mixed signals: that I am here, safe, and that I am inextricably tethered to this other country and its imperilled citizens. I speak some of the language, in an antiquated accent that betrays when and where my grandparents left. I feel initiated in some of its culture, its customs, its history – as a playwright and maker of theatre, I’ve written about this part of the world and its diaspora. But more than anything—and it feels absurd to say it—I identify as Ukrainian. To feel this deeply, I must. And it’s not my fault, entirely. Some product of inheritance and relationship land me here. Some product of love.

I am a second generation Ukrainian-Canadian. My maternal grandfather—my dyido—served in the Waffen SS Galicia Division (eventually turned 1^st Ukrainian Division) as a messenger. He was 17 years of age and the story goes that he’d read correspondences before delivering them in order to figure out how to best avoid conflict zones. In my own mind, I cast him as some kind of objector or pacifist. What I do know of him: he was a Ukrainian nationalist, much like his father and brothers. So, more likely, he was willing to fight, but was preserving himself for the ‘right fight’ as he saw it; the one he believed in.

After the war, he was at risk of being (fatally) repatriated to the Soviet Union. My understanding is that he escaped his POW camp in Italy by crawling through over a kilometre of sewage pipe. He went on to become a celebrated watchmaker in Canada who designed North America’s last railway grade pocket watch. He was CP Rail’s last company clockman. In 2018, after he passed, I inherited the timepiece he designed and in 2019, I retraced his journey to Canada from his boyhood village. I interviewed people along the way about history and war, about family and memory. My dyido’s timepiece was ticking away in my pocket the whole time.

I grew up in the Ukrainian Youth Association (CYM, pronounced “soom”) in Montreal—as had my parents. Picture the boy scouts but more stoic and Ukrainian Catholic. In some of my more autobiographical playwriting, I’ve spoken to that time. How I attended a camp outside Chertsey, Que., every summer where—along with swimming, sports, arts and crafts—we’d get Ukrainian history lessons and, strikingly, take part in rather militaristic morning routines. In khaki uniforms, we’d line up in formation on a little field, ceremoniously raise a flag as we sang the Ukrainian national anthem. It’s opening line: “Ukraine is not dead yet.” Two lines later: “Our enemies will vanish like the dew in the sun.” As a young boy I would be proudly calling out the CYM slogan “Honour to Ukraine! Ready to defend!” having no idea what that really meant. As a young person, it felt good to yell something out, in unison with others.

To the outside eye, and to my own adult eyes looking back at those days in the 80s, I see ‘Those kids are being trained to become an army to go back to Ukraine and snatch the Homeland from the Soviets.’ That very line used to garner a laugh when I’d perform it, years ago, in one of my plays. I get it. And yet, there are all kinds of narratives planted in me by the adults that raised me: stories about an oppressed glory, about how much poetry lives inside the Ukrainian people, how we must protect it from harm. And these stories come to the surface of my skin when the tectonic plates move in that part of the world: the Orange Revolution in 2004, the Maidan revolution in 2014, when Putin launches rockets at Kyiv and Kharkiv.

I have been fixated in these past hours and days on the wellbeing of my friends. (I feel compelled to give them pseudonyms here so as to not put them at any further risk). There’s Ivan and Daria and their little girl Alina—a young family who recently moved into central Kyiv from one of its suburbs. I came to know Ivan through a childhood friend of mine, who himself had lived in Kyiv for a few years. In late 2019, Ivan accompanied me on a trip back to my maternal grandfather’s home village near the city of Lviv. A distance of 112km took us over two and a half hours to drive on account of the country’s infamous potholes. We had to swerve so widely to avoid some of them that my GPS would call out “Proceed to the route.”

Ivan joined me at an impromptu mass in the tiny village church to commemorate the one-year anniversary of my grandfather’s passing—the priest sprang the idea on me shortly after I met  him and I obliged out of politeness. It turns out, years ago, my grandfather had bought the three brass bells for that parish as a way of honouring his hometown. These were bells that I personally clanged by hand before the service, pulling a rope from their place in a tower, summoning any locals who may want to join us. From the smallest of villages, two dozen strangers came.

There are the LGBTQ activists in eastern Ukraine, call them Antin and Pavlo, that I befriended back in 2010—my first time visiting the so-called “old country” and discovering its contemporary life force. Only two years ago, these activists organized their first-ever pride parade, an event called ‘100 Meters of Pride’. It was no euphemism, they could only safely march 100 meters. There were more police protecting them from right-wing hooliganism than the 80 brave participants.

On the first day I met these men they invited me to theirs for supper, an apartment where they lived as a couple in secret. I worried that they had limited means, so I offered to buy the groceries, to which they agreed. When we got in line at the cash, Antin quickly pulled me away “We forgot the cheese, Andrew. Let’s find one you like.” By the time we got back, Pavlo was standing beyond the cash, with the grocery bags hanging from his hands, grinning. He said, “We were never going to let you pay.”

In 2014, after the Maidan revolution, Ivan messaged me from Kyiv: “It’s incredible and difficult to believe, people rebelled against the regime. At last we are becoming a nation.” A week ago he wrote me: “Thanks for your worry, we are good, at home, getting ready for it.” Then earlier today: “Our military and civilians are performing great, Ukrainians are unsubdued.” Last I heard from him, he told me that he and his family remain in their home, awaiting further instructions. They’ve been hearing explosions, but until now, at some distance from where they are.

Facebook, a platform that makes me feel ambivalent at the best of times, has become a way of monitoring survival and lowering my own heart rate. Over the past day, if I can see that a friend is “active” or “active 11m ago” or even “active 58m ago”, I can breathe a bit more easily. A little green dot on a screen becomes a perverse lifeline.

Antin and Pavlo are bracing themselves. They remind their LGTBQI community members to only trust reliable news sources, as so many accounts and narratives infiltrate their part of the world. “It’s terrific to be here right now,” Pavlo writes, reminding me that something terrific is indeed about terror. “And we were warned that Russia has a black list of activists, including LGBTQI activists, and they have plans for us.” I have since heard it called a “kill list.”

My dyido always told me that he felt that Ukraine is a “sleeping giant”. It never sounded to me like a disparaging thing; more of a caution to those who underestimate the Ukrainian spirit. Perhaps he was cautioning me. What I have come to learn is that my love for that place, for its people, is giant. It has been wide awake over these past weeks, and now, wild-eyed in these past hours and days. I came into this term “the near abroad” when I visited Ukraine once as a way of referring to the countries in the immediate region. But even from where I write, half-a-world-away, I feel the “near abroad” within me.

I don’t entirely understand why I shudder with love for a place that isn’t mine. Or rather, I don’t really understand how that’s of use to anyone. My dyido shuddered with love for a place. Does that mean this love can be contagious? And what is it worth, halfway across the globe? Might it be worth something here, closer to home?

Even if it doesn’t matter much beyond me, I can’t rid myself of it. And I wouldn’t want to.

The post My love for the giant that is Ukraine appeared first on Macleans.ca.

It would be difficult to exaggerate the danger of this moment.

Our modern world is built out of the rubble of the Second World War. That was the last time a European power attempted to violently annex a neighbour. The western world responded to the horrors that followed with a rules-based international system, an over-arching respect for sovereignty, and a strong reliance on collective security. This allowed us to create an unprecedentedly peaceful, interconnected and prosperous world that was unimaginable in the late 1940s—one that lasted generations and ended last night.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, in his pre-invasion address, made it explicitly clear that he intends to make Ukraine a part of Russia. He added a warning to the rest of the world, that attempts to interfere would be met with “consequences you have never seen.”

And so Thursday morning the western world is faced with moving forward along a path that has the precipitous collapse of a stable international order on one side and falling into an open war with an aggressive nuclear power on the other.

It is possible for us to choose our steps wisely and decisively and avoid both. But that will require an extraordinary set of measures, resolve and coordination—all to a degree not previously achieved by either Canada or its allies.

READ: Will Canada help save Ukraine?

The collective goal is to put immediate pressure on one man, Putin, either directly or through his oligarchs, his government or his people.

Putin himself is widely believed to be worth billions of dollars, and those assets are not exclusively in Russia. Unfortunately, just the week before the invasion the life-long civil servant repatriated his $100 million yacht from Germany. But doubtless there are bank accounts, shares and other personal holdings—long tracked by western intelligence agencies—that can be seized overnight.

The oligarchs who surround and support Putin are more vulnerable. Their consumption has long been conspicuous, and it would be relatively easy for NATO countries to seize their villas, penthouses and football teams. None of these can be sailed back to Kaliningrad.

Western nations can also disconnect the Russian economy from the international monetary system, isolating the banks and corporations that fund the oligarchs. Likewise, trade can be slowed down and in many cases stopped entirely.

The Russian government that facilitates Putin’s war is also a readily visible target. Western allies could freeze state funds, and kick them out of international organizations. It would be straightforward to ban the Russian state’s various propaganda arms, such as Russia Today. Countries could, within hours, recall their ambassadors and expel Russia’s. Embassies would stay open, and diplomatic dialogue can still continue, but the spectacle of mass expulsions is one that the Russian people will notice.

And while the Russian people are not to blame for Putin’s war, they must feel the consequences of his actions, too. All visas should be cancelled. Russian students should be sent home. All flights international could be stopped overnight, including all parcel delivery services.

This morning Gary Kasparov, the famous Russian chess grandmaster and long-time Putin critic, argued sanctions against Moscow must also be matched with support for Kyiv. He recommended opening the floodgates for military support to Ukraine, including weapons and intelligence; waiving visa requirements for Ukrainians, and setting up refugee reception centres across the EU.

Canada can play an important part in all of this. There are not many Russian yachts it can seize, but it can offer a home to Ukrainian refugees (now, and not like we did with the Afghans two or three years in the future). Ottawa can apply broad and deep economic sanctions, cancel visas, send more military equipment to Ukraine, and fight hard in every international forum to isolate Russia until it withdraws.

What is required is simply for the Prime Minister to ask the Privy Council Office to prepare a list of immediate measures that can be implemented with existing authority and regulatory powers, including the Canadian Magnistky Act that already enables Canada to target the assets of foreign nationals. Trudeau and his cabinet would only need to meet to approve that list and issue an Order in Council, which is signed by the Governor General, and executed by the various agencies and departments. Wider sanctions would require possible negotiations with opposition parties, and the tabling of legislation.  These would almost certainly be supported by the NDP and pass without trouble.

The choke point for Canada is not legislative or regulatory. Our government has it within its power to do all these things. What is missing is a willingness to take a decision and to do so swiftly.

Faced with this unprecedented crisis Canada needs to do far more than it has ever done before. And it must act with its allies. However, generally and with this government in particular, Canada is not known for moving quickly or meaningfully. If past is prologue then in the coming days our government will tell us it’s complicated, that it is considering a “wide range of measures”, that announcements are coming, and then what eventually trickles out will be half as fast and a quarter as forceful as our allies.

But the invasion of Ukraine presents Ottawa with an opportunity for some redemption. Our Prime Minister could step up and announce an aggressive set of sanctions. He could acknowledge that some of these will hurt our economy, but it is a price Canada must pay to defend its allies and global peace. He could encourage our allies to make similar sacrifices and offer Canada’s help to ease any resulting shortages.

Others are already moving swiftly. A few hours ago Norway boarded and seized an oligarch’s yacht. The Union of European Football Associations cancelled the Champions League final in Moscow. London announced Aerflot flights are banned. And European nations who were just last night lobbying for carve-outs in the EU sanction package have backed away.

This is a once-in-a-century moment and it requires an unprecedented response from this government. Ottawa must fight its long-cultivated instinct to focus on why something can’t be done, and instead argue loudly for why everything should be done. Otherwise, the consequences of failing this test will last for generations.

The post The only acceptable response to Vladimir Putin appeared first on Macleans.ca.

It’s hard to say definitively what impact the federal Emergencies Act declaration had on the truckers and blockaders at Coutts, Alta., leaving fewer than 24 hours later. The roadblock’s organizers maintain the invocation of the act wasn’t behind their quick exit, though it’s easy to imagine the prospect of federally compelled tow-truck operators, frozen bank accounts and de-insured trucks would figure into one’s calculus on whether a continued illegal occupation would be the wisest way to spend yet another weekday.

The group’s stated reason for clearing the largest Alberta-Montana border crossing after two weeks was a reminder that these “freedom convoy” actions are—when you strip the down beyond the tractor-trailer air brakes, massive trade disruption and disavowal of mainstream public-health science—public-relations exercises for their preferred cause. In that regard, they are not too different from that of a few dozen or hundred people waving signs in a public square against some foreign conflict or local budget cut.

Monday’s RCMP seizure of a massive cache of weapons and arrest of 13 people apparently cast a pall over the Coutts blockade. “We were always here peacefully and to control that narrative, we wanted to leave peacefully,” Marco Van Huigenbos, an organizer and town councillor in nearby Fort Macleod, told the Toronto Star. That’s why they left. To control the narrative. It’s not as though this ballcaps-and-buffalo-check-jackets crew had done like the Ottawa Police and hired consultants with Navigator, but narrative framing was near the forefront of their ambitions all the same.

PAUL WELLS: The Emergencies Act: What’s ‘seriously endangered’?

Facts, whether real or in some funhouse alternative form, have to mesh with feelings to have any resonance.

Echo chambers don’t allow for a singular “narrative” to form, of course. While much of Canada interprets this as a hardened anti-vaccine/anti-mandate/anti-Trudeau minority holding hostage a key economic corridor until policies bend to their wishes, the narrative the blockaders’ believers have internalized is them as peaceful conscientious objectors who will be welcomed by most right-thinking Canadians as liberators and freedom fighters.

The Coutts gang’s problem, it appears, was that their small corps included a decent contingent that was armed to the teeth, and that threatened to overshadow all other narratives with a dark one. And hours after of the blockade ended, with group photos and a handshake-and-hugs receiving line with police officers—oh, the narratives police have woven these last few weeks—it emerged that three of those arrested were charged with conspiracy to murder, reinforcing the grimmest of assumptions that some protesters had intentions that had nothing to do with a vaccine mandate for truckers.

By now, it’s clear that the Coutts situation was a different beast from the Ambassador Bridge blockade, which is not the same as Ottawa’s occupation. And within that group, many have bought into the vast right-wing narrative and funding flowing from United States activists, as evidenced by some protest boosters urging the Alberta group to “stand your ground” and await “help coming from the south.”

Ottawa’s first-ever mashing of the Emergencies Act button certainly gives them a couple more tools to finally crack down on the law-breaking in that city’s core, to eliminate from Wellington Street (and any future truck-squatting venue) those who have learned how to weaponize holding their breath until they turn blue.

The new federal tactic’s ambition contains its fair share of narrative-building, too. Part of that is as a provocative signal to the protestors, but to an anxious citizenry as well. After all, the last several hellscape years have featured one official state of emergency declaration after the other. There are recurring (or unending) local and provincial states of emergency for COVID-19, for the opioid crisis, for climate disasters like floods and wildfires. They ostensibly serve to reorganize government’s internal response and action systems, and equip officials with some tools unavailable in normal times. But for most of the public, it comes across as a politician’s way of adding a double-underline to the situation.

The public’s ultimate reception of the Emergencies Act will no doubt come with how it’s used and what the outcome is. Fifty-two years ago, the War Measures Act became synonymous in Québec with military in their streets, but imagine how it would be remembered if Pierre Trudeau’s “just watch me” act had failed to defuse the FLQ terrorist threat and October Crisis? On the streets of Ottawa, this story is still being written.

The post The Coutts blockade and controlling the narrative appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Anyone who has taken a trip to the grocery store recently has experienced a heavier hit to their wallet than usual. Eggs that rang in at $5.86; 500 grams of extra lean ground beef at $8.80; a loaf of bread for $3.61; a $7.25 bundle of asparagus and a carton of milk at $4.55 all reflect rapid escalation in food prices over the past few months, with a five to seven per cent price hike forecast in 2022. 

This, paired with generally stagnant wages and overall inflation at a 30-year high, has many anxious about how they will feed their families. But for more than five million Canadians already grappling with food insecurity, it’s a bleak reality that could lead to greater reliance on food banks, thrusting them farther to the margins of society.

Food insecurity is a growing problem and one that experts claim should be addressed through policy intervention. It would be reasonable to assume, then, that the issue is top of mind for a recently elected federal government. But the latest batch of so-called “mandate letters” to federal ministers, in which the Prime Minister identifies policy priorities he’d like them to pursue, makes no mention of tackling hunger or food affordability. 

Did the issue fall by the wayside? 

As recently as last year, the Liberals had cited food insecurity as a matter of importance: four ministers found it in their January 2021 mandate letters, and it got a mention in the 2020 Throne Speech. The government insists it still has a plan to address the issue through a number of related policy initiatives, hinting at opportunities in the upcoming budget. 

But advocates and food policy experts worry the Trudeau government has turned its attention elsewhere, noting the issue was absent from its most recent Throne Speech, too.

Melana Roberts, chair of the non-profit Food Secure Canada, says the lack of mention of food security in the mandate letters was a “glaring” omission that suggests the government has lost its sense of urgency to address the issue; she points to the UN Sustainable Development Goals Canada signed onto, which commits the government to end hunger by 2030.

(Photograph by Lucy Lu)

As such, Food Secure Canada is also focusing on politicians outside Liberal tent. The decentralization of power in a minority government, says Roberts, offers opportunity to get hunger and food insecurity onto the federal radar, even if they’re not in the explicit ministerial mandates. Ahead of the most recent election, the organization ran a non-partisan campaign that mobilized constituents across Canada to speak with their federal candidates on issues around food insecurity. Roberts sees it as a launch pad for politicians to propose more informed policy. This could include private member’s bills, motions or parliamentary e-petitions.

“We have an ongoing dialogue with all the different parties to ensure that robust solutions are being put forward that are backed by community leadership to address root causes and see the kind of change that people are more than ready for,” she says. 

Food Secure Canada and other advocates have called on Ottawa to recognize food as a human right. But narrower goals are well within reach, they say. In an analysis of recent mandate letters, Robert’s group was critical of the government failing to outline food insecurity reduction targets, or committing to build resilient local food systems.  

 The organization’s report, however, was supportive of the government’s intent to develop a national school food policy, working towards a national nutritious meal program. The Liberals had first proposed a variation of this in its 2019 budget, saying they would create a “national school meal program.” 

Despite omission of food security from ministers’ to-do lists, the government claims it has other policies in place to address the issue. An emailed statement from a spokesperson for Karina Gould, the minister of families, children and social development, pointed to its latest mandate letter directive to develop a national school food policy in promoting food security. But it said the government was pouring its resources into broader initiatives like delivering its poverty reduction strategy, implementing a community services recovery fund for charities and non-profits and reducing regulated child-care fees to $10 a day. 

The spokesperson also mentioned existing measures like the Canada Child Benefit, Old Age Security Pension and the Emergency Food Security Fund for food banks. “At its core, food insecurity is a function of income and poverty,” the statement went on, adding that the government is focused on making life more affordable for Canadians. “As we emerge from the pandemic, these are the same priorities that will form the foundation of Budget 2022.”

Still, as it stands, the NDP is the only party with influence in Parliament that highlighted food security in its recent election platform: among other things, it promised to develop a national food policy. The party has also received credit for pushing income measures earlier in the pandemic that relieved hunger, such as the $2,000 monthly CERB payments, and a wage subsidy for businesses. With the balance of power in the Commons, say advocates like Roberts, the party is well-positioned to bolster policy.

Seasoned researchers, like Valerie Tarasuk, aren’t optimistic that the government’s current policy and proposals will be enough to alleviate the problem. She too was disappointed by the omission of food insecurity and hunger from the mandate letters, but not surprised. 

“I don’t think they get it— at least the political leaders, I don’t think they have a good understanding of food insecurity,” she says. “The behaviour through the last couple years suggests that.” 

Tarasuk, who leads PROOF, an interdisciplinary research team investigating household food insecurity in Canada, says the government shouldn’t be cutting cheques to food banks and charities if it wants to get to the root of the problem—a reference to the federal Emergency Food Security Fund and the Community Services Recovery Fund. 

“Things are really bad in terms of the sheer magnitude of people that are food insecure,” she says. “I think things are going to get harder and we’ll see an eroding of health around physical or metabolic issues related to diet and stress.”   

Tarasuk says the only intervention that’s been documented to have an impact on food insecurity has been income-based transfers, adding that the development of a basic income would be a positive step. Since that isn’t outlined in the mandate letters, she suggests the government take a look at its poverty reduction strategy and find ways to patch up existing social safety nets to ensure Canadians have enough income to meet their basic needs. 

Still, with no sign of food insecurity rates or grocery prices falling soon, these troubles will define life for many Canadians as they navigate another year of the pandemic. But for families scraping by, and the advocates who support them, the pressure to find some solution is mounting. Not too long ago, they had a reason to hope for robust action on the part of Ottawa to tackle a growing problem. That hope is starting to fade.

The post A glaring omission from Trudeau’s letters to his ministers: hunger appeared first on Macleans.ca.

At the top of our annual Power List are the unknown victims of residential schools—hundreds of children who lost their lives before they were finally heard.

Here, in brief, is the thinking behind our decision, which some may consider unorthodox. In 2021, amid report after report of presumed grave sites being found on the former grounds of residential schools, non-Indigenous Canadians undeniably experienced an awakening.

Everyone from random citizens doing TV street interviews to the Prime Minister himself voiced horror and dismay, as if blindsided by the fact that the assimilationist project this country ran for the better part of a century had claimed the lives of children. Many, many children.

We were not blindsided, of course. The deaths of young Indigenous kids at places like Tk’emlúps, Cowessess and Williams Lake, B.C. were shared widely in the accounts of former students, who passed the knowledge to their children and grandchildren. They were meticulously reported by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2015.

We’ve a long way to go to fulfill the essential goals of that commission. But the massive shift in public attitudes that followed the grave discoveries is undeniable. Before making this choice, Maclean’s consulted privately with Indigenous, Métis and Inuit leaders, who unanimously approved of, and in some cases applauded, the idea. The grave finds, they agreed, changed the tone and substance of debate over Indigenous rights. Whether that change yields action, they’re waiting to see.

Go straight to the ranking ↓

As in 2021, our ranking hews toward good-faith actors pursuing positive change, even if their approaches, or their notions of positive, are not universally shared. Pierre Poilievre, the presumptive frontrunner for the leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada, is not everyone’s first choice as a seatmate on a long flight. But the Tory MP excels in his role as an opposition critic, holding the government’s feet to the fire.

And again, we’ve looked beyond mere status. The nabobs of banking, lobbying, telecom and other arms of the establishment must do more than occupy corner offices to merit berths on our ranking.

The result, we believe, is a list that reflects the pressing issues facing the country, and the opportunities ahead. Attentive readers will notice that Canadians who guided us through the first years of the pandemic—public health leaders, epidemiologists—have given way in this year’s ranking to those who will guide us out of it.

It’s our version of cautious optimism. With luck and good sense, we’ll emerge from Omicron into a world where COVID-19 is a managed risk, and we’ll refocus on the challenges that define Canada and its place in the world. As ever, our ability to navigate these problems will rest heavily on our brightest, bravest and most accomplished. Remember their names, and lend them your ears.

The post The Power List appeared first on Macleans.ca.

A few months ago, Alex Fecioru was working two jobs, both of which aligned with his long term goals. He spent half his time mixing live music at a local Eastern European music venue, and the rest freelance sound editing on the side. That he was working only two jobs, and that both involved sound production, was a welcome change. Fecioru, 25, graduated four years ago with a degree in sound design with dreams to work full-time in the music business. For most of his adult life, he’s supplemented his music and editing work by hopping from food-service job to food-service job, toiling in kitchens, scraping by on minimum wage while striving to make the leap to his chosen vocation.

The last few months were supposed to be a pivotal stretch in that transition. Instead, they’ve turned into some of the hungriest of Fecioru’s young life. The monthly rent at his small Toronto apartment is $820, a small sum by the standards of his city, but enough to consume the lion’s share of his income. It leaves him with little to spend on other essentials—like food. 

Worse, the pandemic abruptly closed off his other employment options, including his beloved sound work. He’d no sooner found a position in November as a coat-check attendant at a major art gallery than renewed COVID restrictions forced the museum to lay him off. Even the kitchen jobs dried up, as restaurants closed to in-person dining.

RELATED: The Inuk woman using TikTok to expose high food prices in the North

The result has landed Fecioru within a troubled and growing demographic: young, educated, working Canadians who sacrifice food to meet their other financial obligations. Even when he’s had restaurant jobs, Fecoriu has made tough calls at the grocery store, surviving for weeks at a time on pita bread and peanut butter. 

As the Omicron wave lingers on, his crisis has deepened. To keep a roof over his head and the heat on, he has reduced every cost in his life that is not fixed, including what he eats. He tries not to spend more than $5 a day on food—an extreme measure that saps him of energy he needs to do the work that pays his rent. Sometimes, when he’s desperate, he’ll steal away to his parents’ house for a day, Fecioru says. There, at least, he can get precious, nutritious vegetables for free.

Emotionally and physically, it’s a taxing existence. “I’ve been pushed to a point where I’ve broken down mentally,” Fecioru says, referring to times when he’s worked two and even three jobs at once. He pauses, picking his words. “There have been times where it’s hour 14 of a 16-hour day and I just break down in front of customers.”

Fecioru is far from alone. As the pandemic enters its third year, low-income workers across the country are getting caught in a pincer, with the cost of living escalating rapidly and the labour market thrown into flux. Even as employers report a desperate need for workers, repeated lockdowns, and the increased threat of contracting the virus, have made in-person service work more precarious, forcing workers like Fecioru into long stretches without paycheques. 

On top of these myriad obstacles, many workers are no longer able to rely on the COVID income supports that kept many of them afloat for the first year-and-a-half of the pandemic.

 The effects have rattled down to kitchen tables with alarming speed. In a recent countrywide poll, nearly 60 per cent of respondents—including half of 18-24 year-olds—told the Angus Reid Institute that they’re having trouble feeding their families. That’s an increase from 36 per cent when the question was last asked in 2019.

Even before the pandemic, millions of Canadians were struggling to keep food on the table. A 2020 StatsCan report found that one in seven lived in food-insecure households, up from one in eight Canadians in 2018—a difference of nearly 700,000 people, and the highest rate since StatsCan began recording the information. The food-stressed do not fit tired stereotypes of people who’d rather collect welfare than take a job: at last count, 65 per cent of food insecure Canadians were in the workforce. 

Alex at home in Toronto (Photograph by Lucy Lu)

The problem, says Sylvain Charlebois, director of the Agri-Food Analytics Lab at Dalhousie University, is that the cost of food is far outpacing the money people are making. The “inflation sweet spot” for food prices, he says, is about 1.5 to 2.5 per cent. Food prices are supposed to increase at about that rate every year to keep up with the usual level of inflation of the rest of the economy. If they do, groceries should remain affordable.

But in 2022, food is expected to cost anywhere from five to seven per cent more that it did the year earlier, according to the latest edition of Canada’s Food Price Report, an annual look at the year ahead in food security published by Charlebois and his colleagues at Dalhousie. He attributes this increase mainly to the state of supply chains in Canada: food is moving around the country at a much slower pace due to COVID restrictions. As a result, manufacturers and transporters are incurring greater costs, escalating the overall price of the food they’re delivering. 

But grocery prices, Charlebois stresses, are not at the root of the longer-term crunch. “The real problem,” he says, “is affordability.” And he’s quick to offer up what he sees as the solution: “I think it’s high time for our country to have a conversation about a guaranteed minimum income.”

A guaranteed minimum income involves the government paying a liveable wage to those who don’t have the means to survive financially. It is distinct from a universal basic income, where all Canadians periodically receive a cheque from the government regardless of their economic standing. Guaranteed minimum income would, in practice, look a whole lot like the earliest iterations of federal pandemic income supports.

READ: Has enthusiasm for the CERB paved the way for a universal basic income?

The Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB), and its successor the Canada Recovery Benefit (CRB), were vital lifelines to low-income workers during the lockdowns of 2020 and 2021. They provided $500 per week to workers who had lost their jobs or significant chunks of their income for COVID-related reasons, allowing people to focus on staying home and reducing the spread of the virus instead of working dangerous, contagious jobs so they could pay their rents.

They also allowed people to get back on their feet after being knocked down, financially speaking. But the CRB was replaced in late October with the scaled-down CWLB, which is available to workers who have lost work due to regional lockdowns. The federal benefit has been pared back 40 per cent, to $300 per week before taxes. Many people lurching in and out of work don’t meet the eligibility requirements, and if they find employment while receiving the benefit, they might have to pay the money back.

Regardless, the $300 hardly makes a dent in most people’s expenses, and is a far cry from the much more robust programs that preceded it.

Two federal parties, the NDP and the Greens, support a basic income, pointing to CERB as proof that a government-funded income program is both possible to implement and highly effective in fending off poverty. Delegates to a Liberal policy convention last year also overwhelmingly endorsed a basic income program. But the Trudeau government didn’t include it in its summer election platform, and seems focused on other priorities.

“Frankly, in light of our debts and ongoing deficits,” acknowledges Charlebois, “I think it’s going to be a hard conversation to have with Canadians.”

***

Perhaps, but it’s a conversation that could change the course of Rachel McDonald’s life. The 23-year-old works at a small café in Charlottetown, where she was recently promoted from barista to supervisor. For McDonald, the barista job was working just fine—she didn’t go to college or university and only has experience in customer service, so when she was offered a job at the café working for $14 an hour, she took it. 

Then came COVID. It’s cheaper to live in P.E.I. than many places in the country, but the pandemic has hobbled McDonald’s efforts to keep a roof over her head and food on her table. The island’s isolation has spared its residents of the lockdowns plaguing some of the country’s metropolitan areas. But its economy relies heavily on tourism, an industry that effectively came to a standstill when the pandemic began.

McDonald’s hours were scaled back, forcing her to move out of her bachelor pad and into a house with several other roommates. She pays half the rent she did before, but she’s still barely scraping by, unable to squirrel away any money and just making enough to survive. About half her money goes to rent and the rest of it is split between groceries, bills, and minor purchases. 

“A person working minimum wage cannot support themselves living alone,” says McDonald, sighing. “I feel like I have to go out and face the fire just so I can continue to survive.”

This permanent state of fragility carries both economic and human costs, says Frances Woolley, a professor of economics at Carleton University. “We have an economy where things are precarious,” says Woolley, “and when things are precarious and something goes wrong, you may not have the resilience to recover.”

The $2,000 a month that CERB and CRB provided was just around the average living wage for a Canadian, an amount understood to comfortably pay for an individual’s basic needs—food, housing, and child care. But minimum wages in many provinces fall short of living wages for many Canadians, and the gap between what people are able make and what they need to buy food and other essentials has been widening.

Woolley sees the challenge of securing decent wages for all workers as the greatest obstacle in the Canadian economy—one that seems simple to overcome, yet hard to get powerful people to face. “Wages are really sticky,” says Woolley. “As an economist, one of the things that I find the most puzzling about our economy is that when people find it hard to hire workers, they don’t think, ‘Oh, maybe we should be paying people more.’

“It seems to be something about human psychology.”

***

For workers struggling to keep food in their refrigerators, the economic forces Woolley describes—combined with the disruptions of the pandemic—can be crushing. 

Fecioru, for one, thought he’d turned a corner when he landed the coat-check job last December. It wasn’t flashy—a temporary contract at the Art Gallery of Ontario with no guarantee of extension. But it was unionized, and paid a few dollars an hour more than minimum wage. He could pursue his sound-production work free of financial unease, and without gnawing hunger.

The reprieve lasted about a month. In December, as the Omicron variant seeped into Toronto, Fecioru tested positive for COVID. He was forced to isolate just a month after starting his job, and lost two crucial weeks of income. A week after his isolation period ended, Ontario locked down yet again. All of his work ceased. Again.

The day before we spoke, Fecioru received an email from his employers at the gallery. It said if the lockdown in Ontario extended beyond its currently scheduled end date of Jan. 25 then they would be terminating his contract. This was money and work that Fecioru was depending on to survive post-pandemic. As he finished reading the email, he violently paced around his apartment. His anxiety spiked, and at 25 years of age, his heart began to palpitate. 

Mercifully, that worst-case scenario did not come to pass. After Ontario eased restrictions on Jan. 31, the gallery brought him back, and even paid him for the shifts he lost during the lockdown. Still, his hours have been significantly reduced, and COVID still looms, poised to strike as it sees fit.  

“It feels like there’s moments where you can poke your head up above the surface of the water, but then the water keeps rising and you’ve got to keep persevering,” says Fecioru. “There’s not enough time to catch your breath.”

The post Young, working Canadians face a dilemma: eat, or pay the bills? appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Well, it looks like the Conservative caucus has decided to do the stupid thing. 

Shortly after the election, I wrote here at Maclean’s that dumping leader Erin O’Toole would be short-sighted—regardless of how angry anyone was over the disappointing results or their leader’s performance. Very few nail it on their first time out, and there were plenty of indicators suggesting O’Toole’s moderate conservatism did, in fact, make inroads on the crucial 905 region. 

Alas, after the trucker convoy pulled into Ottawa, drawing support from Conservative MPs and a meeting with O’Toole himself, a substantive majority of the Conservative caucus decided that my argument wasn’t compelling enough to warrant giving O’Toole another shot at becoming Prime Minister. And so they decided to oust him at the moment of maximum chaos, when a manifestation of inchoate anger at long-running—and sometimes illogical—COVID restrictions has descended on the capital, along with a handful of Confederate-flag and swastika waving extremists. Great timing, everyone. 

PAUL WELLS: O’Toole is out. Meet the new new new new Conservatives

I’m sure that this is all going to be very reassuring to the Canadian swing voters who are sick of the Liberals but were too concerned with the wingnuts in the Conservative caucus to pull the switch. I wrote during the election that there was something about the Conservatives that didn’t feel ready for prime time; and real concerns that O’Toole didn’t have a handle on his caucus. Those who stuck with the Liberals on these grounds have been justified. 

Very well, then. The Conservative Party is now confronted with a full-blown crisis of identity, and none of the incentives bend toward moderation. Now that they’ve booted the last leader for flip-flopping and failing to be Conservative enough, any future leader will be required to placate the most extreme elements in the caucus room. It’s possible that this will not lead to a bad outcome.

It’s possible that I have misdiagnosed the electorate, and that the more conservative Conservatives are correct; that swing voters are not looking for a skim-milk Conservative Party, and that they are instead eagerly seeking a robust right-wing alternative. After all, why throw your lot for the unknowns when all they’re offering you is a slightly modified version of the Liberal Devil They Already Know? 

I find at least one aspect of this argument compelling. 

Conservative voices have already pointed out that the party’s failure to articulate sensible opposition to the more nonsensical COVID restrictions has pushed otherwise sensible people to the fringes of politics. We are seeing this in the rise of the People’s Party of Canada, and in the trucker convoy itself. 

It would have been awfully nice to have a true opposition party in Parliament in recent months; one that was willing to point out that our dependence on lockdowns is predicated on the fragility of our health-care system compared to peer nations. Our drive to make our universal health-care system more efficient in recent decades left it ill-equipped to manage the historic demands of a once-in a generation pandemic. Our lack of surge capacity is a systemic problem we’re going to need to confront. That process is going to challenge old pieties about the status quo about how health care is funded and delivered. 

Many would have welcomed an opposition that felt much more empowered to point out that the vaccine mandate on truckers actually won’t do much to staunch the spread of Omicron while needlessly placing fragile supply chains at risk. Or maybe the CPC could have been more vocal in pointing out that requiring PCR testing for vaccinated travellers presents a ridiculously expensive and onerous restriction on free movement—and unnecessary one when rapid antigen tests are widely available. 

And two years into this pandemic, what is the real value of vaccine passports when Omicron is clearly blowing through vaccine-acquired immunity? By the way, those cloth masks aren’t doing much good for you anymore, either. 

At this point, it’s pretty hard to ignore some uncomfortable truths; some COVID restrictions still make sense. Others do not. And some are guided more by politics, optics and tribalism than by science. An opposition party really shouldn’t be afraid to make that point. 

Perhaps if the sizeable and growing minority of anti-lockdown protestors felt that they had a voice in Parliament, they wouldn’t be descending on major cities and border crossings en masse. The wobbly-eyed chickens are coming home to roost, and they’re driving very large trucks that the Ottawa police department has admitted it is helpless to manage. 

Anyway, it’s quite possible that after several years of increasingly nonsensical COVID restrictions, and however many years of a Liberal government, a plurality of Canadians really won’t be looking for Liberals painted blue. It’s possible that the charm of performative politics that papers over our crumbling institutions, declining capacity, and a self-flagellating political culture will have very much worn off. It’s possible people are going to be looking for something very different. 

Perhaps there will be room for a Conservative Party to articulate rational and sensible opposition on the host of problems that face this country—from economic woes and institutional capacity challenges to fear-and-panic driven COVID restrictions. 

But can we trust a party of sh–posters to stay rational and sensible in the face of an exhausted, angry and increasingly polarized electorate? Nothing about how this party has behaved in recent days gives me hope that this caucus is as clever or politically savvy as it imagines itself to be. 

The post The Conservative Party’s identity crisis, post-O’Toole appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Cindy Blackstock, a member of the Gitxsan First Nation, is the executive director of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada and a professor at McGill University.

I really don’t like inquiries. They often amount to a lot of political show and not much action. But today I am making an exception—mostly out of profound desperation. We need a public inquiry into the departments of Justice and Indigenous Services Canada to stop their repeated abuses against First Nations children. In the wake of residential schools and tearful apologies from federal politicians and officials, Canada continues to treat First Nations people as if they are not worth the money by providing deficient public services on reserves and choosing to not implement solutions. The ongoing choices made by these two departments—and collateral departments, to ignore solutions to properly fix its inequitable First Nations public services and other injustices is literally costing the Canadian public tens of billions of dollars and costing First Nations children their childhoods and, in some cases, their lives.

Just earlier this month, three First Nations children died in a house fire at Sandy Lake First Nation. Community officials connect the deaths to woefully insufficient fire and emergency services, saying that “a lack of adequate water lines and infrastructure prevented the use of fire hydrants” to put out the fire. The lack of adequate resources and infrastructure on First Nations reserves is not news to Canada; the federal government has known about this problem for years and chose not to fix it. When stories of the injustices hit the media, Canada does sometimes act, but often in just a perfunctory way to defuse public pressure. Consider a recent Department of Justice’s news conference announcing $332,270 to support the families of over 4,000 murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls. That is about $83 per victim.

RELATED: Cindy Blackstock: A relentless champion for Indigenous children’s rights

The cost of this chronic negligence came into stark relief this past month when the government finally admitted that its ongoing discrimination towards First Nations children required $40 billion to compensate victims and fix inequalities in federally funded First Nations child welfare services. This federal announcement was not voluntary. It came after 15 years of litigation by the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society and the Assembly of First Nations, over 30 government losses in Canadian courts and significant public pressure. All of this was necessary to fix a problem that would have only cost hundreds of millions to fix back in 2000 when the federal government agreed its under-funding of First Nations child welfare was driving more First Nations children into child welfare than during residential schools. Instead of fixing the problem then, even though it had a surplus budget, the government chose to kick the problem downstream, and now the receipts have come due, and Canada has to pay. But First Nations children have already paid with their childhoods.

Half of the $40 billion will compensate First Nations children and families victimized by Canada’s apartheid public services; many of them are still children. Nearly 60,000 First Nations children (that is more than the populations of New Westminster, B.C., or Fredericton, N.B.) were removed from their homes since 2006 because Canada’s deficient public services denied families the chance to recover from the multi-generational harms of residential schools. Other children were denied public services because they were First Nations. Undisputed evidence shows that the government denied a four-year-old girl in palliative care respiratory equipment, capped the number of catheters and feeding tubes, and denied basic educational and respite supports for special needs children.

Even after Canada was ordered to cease its discriminatory conduct in 2016, it continued its wrongdoing. Over 20 non-compliance and procedural orders were required to get to the $40-billion announcement. During this time, First Nations children continued to go into foster care at record rates because service providers did not have the funding needed to keep families together, and at least three children died because Ottawa defied legal orders and failed to provide mental health supports.

This whole matter of the government’s choice to not do better for First Nations children when it knows better needs to be “ventilated” in a public inquiry. That is what Peter Henderson Bryce, Canada’s health inspector for the Indian Department, called for in his 1922 booklet called A National Crime. It was part of his repeated attempts to save the lives of “Indian” children in residential schools who were dying at a rate of 25 per cent per year from tuberculosis fuelled by Ottawa’s unequal health care funding for “Indians” and terrible health practices in the institutions, which he first reported on in 1907. Canadian media covering the story in 1907 characterized the government’s behaviour as “Absolute Inattention to the Bare Necessities of Health” and reported that “Indians are dying like flies.” In 1908, lawyer Samuel Hume Blake famously noted that, “[i]n doing nothing to obviate the preventable causes of death,” the Indian Department brings itself “within unpleasant nearness to the charge of manslaughter.”

When the images of the unmarked graves ignited a public outcry this past summer, I found myself wondering: how many of those children would have been saved had Canada listened to the people of that period? And how many children could be saved if Canada stopped fighting First Nations children in court and complied with the legal orders to stop its discriminatory conduct now?

Political claims that Canada has “done more than any other government,” is “making good first steps and is committed to reconciliation” are an affront to the suffering of First Nations children and families who continue to be treated as if they are not worth the money.

Once implemented, the $40 billion in support will help families, but it will not end all the inequalities in public services on reserves. To ensure Canada ends its repeated offences against First Nations children, we need a public inquiry into Canada’s continued failure to provide equitable infrastructure and services, and we need a public and comprehensive plan to fix the discrimination across the board. As Sandy Lake First Nations Chief Delores Kakegamic asserted after the tragedy in her community earlier this month: “We should have the same level of support as anyone else in Canada. Lives are at stake.”

The post The case for an inquiry into Canada’s treatment of First Nations children appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Ryan Gemser on rescuing cattle by Sea-Doo during the B.C. floods in November (Jennifer Gauthier/Reuters)

There was talk about moving cows from my friend’s farm next door onto dry land, on Highway 1. We tried running the cows at first, to see if they would go on their own. That didn’t work. So we jumped to Plan B.

I’ve had a Sea-Doo for two years. I live two minutes from work, so I just hooked up to it and took off.

It’s obviously really hard to pull cows through water, but it was a great team effort. I pulled a cow to the freeway, where they had cattle trailers loading them right away. By the time I got back to the barns, they had another one ready for us.

When we had to call it quits, many people had been standing in waist-high water for five hours. I didn’t stay dry, either—everyone had got pretty cold by the end.

We didn’t lose any cows. If they had stayed there, they probably wouldn’t have made it. I was just focused on getting them to safety. Farmers can adapt to a plan pretty fast. If it might work, they’re gonna try it.

I did a small part. I’ll do it again, in a heartbeat. If I could be out there more, I would, but my boss still has a farm that has to be run.

This story was told to Michael Fraiman by Ryan Gemser, 34, an equipment manager on a dairy farm in Abbotsford, B.C. When the area flooded on Nov. 15, he helped rescue 40 cows from his friend’s farm.

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After much of Ontario and Quebec got walloped by almost two feet of snow this week, life in major urban centres from Hamilton to Montreal came to a fluffy stop. Canadians were faced with a familiar suite of marshmallow-world problems: snow days, closed businesses, dangerous driving conditions and the age-old dilemma of where to discard the excess snow enveloping your vehicle. Street parkers who wanted the luxury of entering their cars had it the worst, and there’s no right or wrong answer here. Tossing your snow on the street can inconvenience drivers, and there’s a law in Ontario against it—though it’s almost never enforced. (Don’t believe it? Check Section 181 of the Highway Traffic Act.) Shovelling it onto the sidewalk creates a hazard for pedestrians, and is an affront to property owners responsible for keeping walkways clear. But piling it on the curb is a nuisance to parkers, while chucking it on someone’s lawn just seems impolite. As the icy aftermath melts away, these moral quandaries will linger on.

The post Fine, let’s shovel. But where are we supposed to put the snow? appeared first on Macleans.ca.

When it comes to getting COVID-19 vaccines into the arms of the 5-11 crowd, there is one clear winner among Canada’s provinces and territories: Newfoundland and Labrador. Since vaccination efforts started across the nation for that cohort at the end of November, the province has built an almost insurmountable lead: to date, it has given first doses to 74.7 per cent of all children ages 5-11, well above the rest of pack—Nova Scotia is second at 61.4 while Quebec has third place at 57.4—and a whopping 26 percentage points above the national average of 48.3 per cent. 

Share of 5-11 age group with first doses:

N.L.: 74.7%
N.S.: 61.4
Que.: 57.4
NWT: 53.3
Yukon: 53.3
N.B.: 52.9
Man.: 50.1
Nunavut: 48
Sask.: 47.5
P.E.I.: 46.9
Ont.: 46.4
B.C.: 43.6
Alta.: 37.5

Source: Health Canada (data up to Jan. 8) 

What is the secret to Newfoundland and Labrador’s success? 

For one, the province has had a focused public health communications strategy, led by its chief medical officer of health, Dr. Janice Fitzgerald. “She’s consistent, she’s clear, she is an excellent communicator to the public, she’s honest,” says Dr. Natalie Bridger, a pediatric infectious diseases physician in St. John’s, who took part in the press conference launching the children’s vaccination effort. “She’s been very, very steady in the past two years guiding us, and has engendered a lot of trust, so people take her advice seriously,” including regarding the need for pediatric vaccines. 

DEEP DIVE: Chronic exhaustion, derailed lives and no way out. This is long COVID.

In Newfoundland and Labrador “there is a background culture of vaccine acceptance,” says Bridger. “We’ve got a bit of a history of being superstars when it comes to childhood vaccines,” thanks in part to a strong public health nursing system, which for decades has overseen those efforts. Newfoundland and Labrador is a notable provincial outlier for its COVID-19 vaccination rates: it’s the only province to reach more than 90 per cent when it comes to first doses, according to data from Health Canada (93.8 per cent to be precise, which is 12 percentage points above the national average); it also has the top spot for two doses: 86.2 per cent, compared to the Canadian average of 77.1 per cent. 

Newfoundland and Labrador got off to a fast start with pediatric vaccines, immediately opening its booking system when the vaccines were approved for children, and having mass clinics operating within days. “We wanted to get as many shots in arms as possible before the Christmas break,” says Bridger. “We’ve got this vaccine–it’s approved–let’s not sit on it forever but get going as quickly as possible.” The province also offered doses to students on-site in schools. “Parents and caregivers really have lots of options for getting their kids vaccinated,” Bridger says. 

And, in addition to press conferences and letters to parents regarding the province’s plans, the province held a photo-op similar to those that marked the very first COVID-19 vaccinations in December 2020, with Dr. Fitzgerald giving two girls their doses while Deputy Premier Siobhan Coady looked on. 

RELATED: Health Canada approves new COVID treatment

Whether other provinces can adopt some of Newfoundland and Labrador’s successful strategies depends on how well they know their own populations, Bridger says. “I think it’s really important for the leadership to understand what motivates people to behave in a certain way.” For those in her province, a big motivator is seeing loved ones: “The inability to see grandparents and great-grandparents has been devastating for a lot of Newfoundland and Labrador children.” 

The province also launched an advertising campaign that emphasized the message that vaccinating children helps prevent COVID-19 from spreading to friends and families while also tugging at heartstrings: “Because my nan needs help with her cookies,” was the tagline on one, featuring a girl behind a cookie sheet laden with dough, while another showed a boy and his grandfather playing a video game, with the caption, “Because my pop needs to play Minecraft.” 

Bridger also points to the province’s culture. Its population is relatively small, and peer pressure, both online and within communities, is a strong factor in getting people to accept public health measures, including vaccinations, she believes. 

And it’s also due to the reputation of Dr. Fitzgerald, who has been the public face for the vaccination effort. She is so beloved that her office is stuffed with gifts sent to her by the public—stuffed toys, needlepoint and children’s artwork. “She is as close to a saint as is possible in our province right now,” says Bridger. “And I’m not exaggerating.

The post How did Newfoundland manage to vaccinate 75 per cent of 5-11-year-olds? appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Certain reflexes are learned from experience, which helps explain why lately I open emails from the Prime Minister’s Office in something approximating the way Jeremy Renner opened packages in The Hurt Locker. A wince, a clench, a glimpse through half-shut eyes: what fresh hell have we here?

Last night, reporters covering the federal government received a “readout”—the term of art for an artfully mealy-mouthed description of a conversation the Prime Minister is supposed to have had with somebody—in their inboxes. I will quote this readout in full:

Today, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau spoke with Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance Chrystia Freeland, Minister of Foreign Affairs Mélanie Joly, Minister of National Defence Anita Anand, Minister of International Development Harjit S. Sajjan, President of the Queen’s Privy Council for Canada and Minister of Emergency Preparedness Bill Blair, and Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Sean Fraser to discuss security concerns in Ukraine. They were joined by Chief of the Defence Staff General Wayne Eyre, Interim Clerk of the Privy Council Janice Charette, and other senior officials.

During the call, the Prime Minister and ministers discussed the latest developments in Ukraine. They condemned Russia’s military buildup in and around the country as well as Russia’s annexation and illegal occupation of Crimea. They underlined the need for Russia to de-escalate the situation and uphold its international commitments, and emphasized Canada’s commitment to continued coordination and engagement between allies and partners.

Minister Joly, who is currently in Ukraine, provided an update on her work with her Ukrainian counterparts in support of the country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity in the face of Russian aggression. She met yesterday in Kyiv with Ukraine’s Prime Minister, Denys Shmyhal, and Deputy Prime Minister for European and Euro-Atlantic Integration, Olga Stefanishyna, and met today with the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Minister Anand highlighted the role of the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) for military training and capacity building in Ukraine through Operation UNIFIER, which has trained more than 12,500 members of Ukraine’s Security Forces since the mission began in 2015. Approximately 200 CAF personnel are currently deployed to Ukraine under Operation UNIFIER. The minister noted she recently spoke with her Ukrainian counterpart.

Together, the Prime Minister and ministers raised the need to find a peaceful solution through dialogue. They reaffirmed Canada’s steadfast support for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine, and considered current and future assistance to Ukraine. Prime Minister Trudeau emphasized that any further military incursion into Ukraine would have serious consequences, including coordinated sanctions.

The Prime Minister and ministers agreed to continue closely monitoring the situation over the coming days and weeks.

For context, it’s worth remembering that Russia might invade Ukraine, again and for keeps, very soon; that this would constitute a large war in Europe, the sort of thing many people prefer to avoid; and that Canada’s interests in the whole matter are acknowledged, by the government’s all-powerful marketing department, to be so pressing that the latest Global Affairs Minister is currently in Ukraine.

LONG READ: The future of the Liberal Party—without Justin Trudeau

For further context, I should add that meetings or phone chats between prime ministers and their cabinet ministers are not normally transcribed and emailed to the gallery. In fact, government websites explain in great detail why they shouldn’t be. I checked, and we didn’t get a “readout” of discussions over the appropriateness of a criminal trial for SNC-Lavalin (“Minister Wilson-Raybould said that, actually, she has made her decision. The Prime Minister agreed to send a never-ending stream of aides and factotums to bug her over the coming days and weeks, and noted that this would not be deemed to constitute ‘pressure'”)  or about options for managing payment to volunteers (“Nobody finding the notion of payment for volunteer work paradoxical or having any questions about WE Charity, it was a short discussion”).

Readouts usually only describe discussions between the Prime Minister and other foreign leaders. Or provincial premiers. Or, sometimes, conversations with the opposition leader that haven’t actually happened. I’m belabouring these old embarrassments because my point here today is to emphasize the gap between the tone the PMO hopes to conjure and the effect it actually produces. On an ordinary day, that gap defines the scale of a farce. On serious days it approaches the tragic.

This is not, however, the first time we’ve been sent a readout of what would otherwise have been an internal cabinet-level discussion. For a while after the 2019 election we were getting them quite frequently, because the government’s all-powerful marketing department had come up with the notion of an “Incident Response Group”—the PM plus varying lists of ministers and officials—who would meet to sort out crises. There have been fewer of those lately, whether because “Incident Response Group” didn’t poll as well as hoped or because everything is now a crisis it’s hard to say.

Anyway, on the latest meeting I’ll leave it to readers to puzzle through the participant list—Bill Blair? Really?—and to guess at how closely the written narrative reflects any real conversation. I’ll add only a few things.

First, if the Prime Minister of Canada had anything to say about Ukraine yesterday, he could have been on the evening news on half an hour’s notice. The same with anyone on that call. This Prime Minister seems to underestimate how easy it is to tell when he has nothing to say. The part of the communiqué where the Minister of National Defence apparently reads aloud the page in her briefing book listing troop levels in Eastern Europe is perhaps less impressive than it’s meant to be. The interesting questions are not answered or even acknowledged. If 140,000 Russians roll across the border, do the Canadians fight or come home? If overwhelmed would they be reinforced? Call us when you have answers. Or, come to think of it, never mind; we may find out soon anyway.

Second, and more broadly, everyone knows the real questions here. Should Ukraine be in NATO or, pending membership, defended by NATO with military force as though it already were? Should the pro-Western half of Ukraine, which lately includes its national government, receive lethal arms from NATO countries so it can participate in its own defence?

These are hard questions. They’re made harder by the news that the United States president, who alone could plan for a military rebuttal to a Ukraine invasion, has already called the likely invader to tell him he needn’t worry about anything worse than a salty banking invoice.

Let me upset some of my colleagues by saying this is probably the correct call. NATO is meaningless, and worse than useless, if it can’t guard its perimeter. So its members must be coherent democracies that joined the alliance of their own will and are willing to contribute to it. Defining “NATO” as “any country Vladimir Putin feels like threatening” is bad policy. This helps explain, incidentally, why Estonia and Latvia didn’t join NATO until 2004: because for the first 40-odd years of NATO’s existence they were constitutionally part of the Soviet Union, and then it took a decade and a half to get their democratic acts together. It will take Ukraine far longer, if ever. A country doesn’t need to be perfect to be in NATO—Hungary still is, for goodness’ sake—but it needs to not be a basket case.

Shipping lethal weapons is a matter of lesser consequence (though Russia could still construe it as an act of war, so, careful what you wish for), but as a practical matter almost anything that gets sent into a combat theatre is soon taken or sold and becomes fairly evenly distributed among all combatants. Not really a magic solution, then.

Short version: if Ukraine is invaded it’s substantially on its own, because Joe Biden already said so and because we need to be able to defend Latvia. I know it’s fantasy to imagine any Canadian government, especially this one, answering the hard questions as bluntly. But by the way, if you recognize the name Dominique de Villepin, it’s because once upon a time a cabinet minister from a non-superpower was willing to give blunt answers to hard questions in a crisis. In the meantime, any government activity on the Ukraine file should be understood as what it obviously is: a marketing exercise. I don’t know who’s going to break it to the PMO that the product being marketed (fecklessness) isn’t what they hoped it was (determination).

These little missives from the pit of my despair are sometimes taken as partisan broadsides, so please understand that I can’t imagine Erin O’Toole handling this hot potato with any greater agility. I concentrate on the government only because it’s the government. I do wish the view were better.

One last thing. I’m not writing this down to be sassy or to score points. I honestly wonder. When she was a journalist, Chrystia Freeland sometimes used to speak to serious people. What does she think she’s doing now?

The post This just in: The PM has been phoning cabinet ministers appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Mahnaz Alizadeh has been cleared by a Brazilian court and Reza Sahami, a Canadian-Iranian who has been living in Vancouver, has been convicted of human trafficking and sentenced to three and a half years in prison.

Alizehdah’s shocking story of fleeing Iran and becoming trapped in a human smuggling operation in an effort to reach Canada was the cover story of the Maclean’s September, 2021 edition. Her effort to reach Canada ended with her  stranded in a Brazilian prison.

The Brazilian court decision confirms Alizadeh’s version of events, as told to Maclean’s. Alizadeh, an Iranian woman who risked prison in Iran by helping make a documentary about human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh, paid Sahami US$12,000 to help her get to Canada, thinking that she would enter on a tourist visa.

Instead, once she flew to Ecuador, after he had her money, he gave her a fake passport and convinced her to use it to travel to Brazil, where they were both arrested and charged with human smuggling, along with six other Iranians.

Although she was a real political refugee, somehow Brazilian police and prosecutors came to believe she was working with Sahami as a smuggler, which she denied. Alizadeh ended up spending 49 days in a prison in the jungle town of Rio Branco, until Brazilian journalists and lawyers learned of her fate and managed to get her out of prison.

Sahami, who has homes in Vancouver and Tehran, and has repeatedly been investigated for suspicion of human smuggling but never charged, until now. He denied that he had anything to do with the business, telling Maclean’s earlier this year the whole thing was made up.

“Think about it,” he said, laughing. “If they know I’m the biggest smuggler and they can’t do anything, what does it suggest to you? Either I am not, or they don’t know s–t. Which one?”

A federal judge, Jair Facundes, concluded on Nov. 1 that Sahami was guilty, as Alizadeh had alleged, and sentenced him to three and half years in prison. He is now appealing that decision.

“Considering the social context and the work carried out by Mahnaz in Iran, the accused could not be required to have a different pattern of guilt regarding the use of a false document,” said Judge Jair Facundes in his verdict, adding that Alizadeh “aimed to flee to a safe place, seeking your freedom.”

The judge found that Alizadeh did co-operate with Sahami but that she was not criminally responsible since she “could not act otherwise, under penalty of jeopardizing her freedom and perhaps her own survival.”

It is not clear where Sahami is now. When he spoke to Maclean’s earlier this year, he said he was in Vancouver. Court documents in Brazil show that he had been investigated by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement—but not charged or convicted—in 2009 for suspected human smuggling involving the movement of Iranians through the Dominican Republic, in 2010 for a scheme to acquire stolen Iranian passports in Thailand, and in 2013 for smuggling Iranian and Afghan migrants through Venezuela and Mexico.

In several interviews earlier this year he denied ever working as a smuggler.

Alizadeh has left Brazil and is safe in another country, which she does not want revealed for fear of revenge. In an email, she said the verdict came as a huge relief after a terribly difficult time.

“It’s been two days that I have received my acquittal, and the world has become more beautiful for me with a sense of security and justice in it,” she said. “I have gotten back my identity again. I owe this great feeling to all those lovely people who helped me during my ordeal.”

She credited Brazilian journalist Fabiano Maisonnave and a group of Brazilian female lawyers who took on her case on a pro bono basis for helping her get justice.

The post Mahnaz Alizadeh, betrayed by human smugglers, is vindicated appeared first on Macleans.ca.

If you’re a Canadian who remembers your childhood swim lessons, odds are that memory bank includes Red Cross swim badges. In recent years, kids received ovals with bilingual text (Swim Natation); colour badges were the rage in the 1980s and 1990s; the more old-school crowd got simple “junior” or “senior” cross badges, or ones with the agency’s mascot, Walter Safety.

Perhaps yours were sewn onto your swimsuit or a special towel. Rishona Hyman still has hers in a keepsake box, the eight colour levels strung together in sequence—yellow-orange-red-maroon, and on up. This spring, she’ll hang them in her office, a sentimental nod to an era about to end.

The Canadian Red Cross announced in early January that it is shuttering its swim and lifeguard training programs by December. It’s a major retrenchment for an agency that’s been synonymous with water safety since 1946, when it branched into aquatic day camps and lessons throughout Canada to curb the 1,000 drowning deaths recorded each year. (The number is now below 500, though the country’s population has tripled since then.)

READ: The pandemic has proven that kids are not as resilient as we think

This leaves about 1,700 municipalities, camps and other groups nationwide looking for a new aquatic courses to adopt, along with new kids’ report cards and a new badge or sticker system. Hyman has run Aqua Essence Swim Academy in Winnipeg for 20 years, teaching Red Cross program in hotel pools, private backyards and city facilities with available time blocks. After the surprise announcement hit the inboxes of her and other swimming providers on Jan. 11, they used terms like “blindsided” and “picking my jaw up off the ground,” Hyman says. “Wow, the aquatic world has just changed forever in the moment you read that email.”

Red Cross is abandoning the swim program for a depressingly 2020s-defining reason: they’re shifting to focus on the myriad humanitarian needs the agency handles, from COVID response to the growing number of natural disasters brought on by climate change, as well as its federally funded efforts to combat opioid-related deaths. Nobody at the Canadian Red Cross was made available to comment to Maclean’s, but CEO Conrad Sauvé said in a statement that “the relative humanitarian need for water safety training has been surpassed by demands in other areas in which we are well positioned to make a difference.” (The agency will continue swim programs in Indigenous communities, and maintain its first aid programs Canada-wide.)

For months before this decision was publicized, the not-for-profit worked quietly with Lifesaving Society Canada—the country’s big player for lifeguard training—to offer all Red Cross swim providers an easy transition program to Lifesaving’s own instruction program, Swim for Life; it launched in 2002 as a competitor of sorts to Red Cross swimming courses. Instead of Red Cross’ starfish, duck and sea turtle levels, Lifesaving has “parent and tot” classes. The two organizations’ courses for older children roughly correspond (Red Cross Swim Kids 6 is equal to Swim for Life Swimmer 4 or 5 levels), and an online re-accreditation program will be offered to the tens of thousands of Red Cross instructors who will need new credentials.

The two programs have slight differences in approaches—only Red Cross teaches side stroke, Hyman notes. But most parents and swimmers likely won’t notice much beyond cosmetic touches, like Swim for Life’s round blue or green badges. “It’s not an area where people shop around a lot,” says Barbara Byers, the Lifesaving Society’s public education director.

The YMCA has its own swim lesson system, as do City of Toronto pools, and there are several smaller program offerings that aquatic centres can choose from. But some an astounding 40 million Canadians have taken Red Cross swim classes over the last 76 years, making this a nostalgia-tinged change for many parents and swimmers.

“People were very comfortable with Red Cross. It’s just what you did—Red Cross swimming lessons,” says Hyman, who will bring in a different badge system and a curriculum of her own design when she opens her academy’s new pool in late spring.

Ryan Cochrane remembers the Red Cross courses he took as a kid at Gordon Head Recreation Centre in Saanich, B.C., learning the front crawl he’d later refine to win two Olympic medals in freestyle. Competitive swimming wasn’t on his or his parents’ mind then; it was just about getting him comfortable in the water.

“I realize in retrospect how competitive I was, even at that age, because you wanted to get those badges as fast as you could,” he recalls. Before he’d rack up trophies and medals, Cochrane would race his twin brother Devon to fill up their bulletin board with more of those colourful embroidered squares.

While Cochrane is wistful about the news of the Red Cross’ retreat from swimming—”so well run, a staple for decades”—he understands the decision.“The world’s changed in the last 20 or 30 years when I did the classes,” he says. “The world needs support in other realms.”

The post Red Cross swimming lessons have been a rite of passage for 76 years. They’ll soon be history. appeared first on Macleans.ca.

“I think it’s reasonable for the majority who are vaccinated to feel some emotion of resentment or to feel moral disapprobation toward the unvaccinated,” says Arthur Schafer, a bioethics professor at the University of Manitoba. 

Those are strong words for an ethicist, and a measure, surely, of the point we’ve reached in this pandemic: the hospitalizations of so many unvaccinated mean pain for others, including having medical procedures such as cancer or heart surgeries cancelled or postponed. Around 500,000 surgeries were delayed in just the first 15 months of the pandemic in Canada, according to the Canadian Institute for Health Information.

Now, as hospitals around the world are again being overwhelmed by patients, many of whom aren’t unvaccinated, governments across this country and abroad are tightening the rules for those who remain unvaccinated. 

French President Emmanuel Macron recently proposed new measures against the unvaxxed, including restricting their ability to travel by public means and barring them from communal venues such as restaurants, theatres and arenas. “When some make from their freedom…a motto, not only do they put others’ lives at risk, but they are also curtailing others’ freedom,” Macron said. “That I cannot accept.” And in Quebec, the unvaxxed now can’t enter liquor and cannabis stores. 

The question is when those restrictions cross ethical lines, and even become counterproductive. 

For bioethicists, who have grappled with a steady stream of moral dilemmas during this pandemic, there is a big difference between rules that restrict access to non-essential venues, and the imposition of taxes. “I think vaccine mandates—restrictions on who has access to restaurants, gyms, concerts, sporting events, liquor stores, bingo halls—are all justifiable,” says Schafer.  They protect the health-care system, those who work in those places and other patrons, he says. 

Kerry Bowman, a bioethics professor at the University of Toronto, agrees that such restrictions are, in principle, fine during a pandemic, though he’d like to see consistent operational definitions of what is and isn’t governed by such rules (such as buying alcohol, which now requires vaccine proof in Quebec but not in Ontario). 

More controversial is a new trend for governments to impose a tax, fee or levy on those who are unvaccinated by choice  (as opposed to those who have very real and rare medical reasons why they can’t be vaccinated and are exempt from such levies). This week, Quebec Premier François Legault said his government was considering such a plan, though the exact mechanism and amount aren’t clear. 

As of now, at least three countries have either announced or are implementing plans to essentially tax the voluntarily unvaccinated. 

• Singapore: Those who are unvaccinated by choice were required to pay their own hospital bills, as of Dec. 8. The government estimates such people could be charged a median price of US$25,000 if they end up in the ICU, reports the Straits Times. 
• Austria: The country is making vaccinations compulsory for residents for a year starting in February. Those who flout the law may be fined up to 3,600 euros every three months. 
• Greece: Its compulsory vaccination program for those 60 and older goes into effect this month, and carries a monthly fine of 100 euros for those who remain unvaxxed.

However, to many experts, such governmental decisions cross a bioethical red line. “In Canada, people are allowed to make any kind of medical decision they choose, as long as it’s informed,” says U of T’s Bowman. “The line we are crossing is, ‘We don’t like the decisions you’re making.’” To him, such fees are essentially punitive, putting pressure on people to do something that curtails basic human autonomy: “It’s an ethical horror show that will do tremendous damage to our society.” 

“Good ethics should be grounded in good science,” Bowman continues, pointing out that Quebecers who get a first dose today won’t be fully vaccinated for six to nine months, based on the timing intervals for getting three doses. By then, the dangers of Omicron will likely have passed. 

Schafer notes that many of those who haven’t got immunized are likely members of marginalized communities, who have historical reasons to distrust the health-care system. “I think that making it an offence punishable by a special tax or fine, or however you dress it up, will be counterproductive,” he says. “Many will see it as unfair.”

Both Schafer and Bowman are alarmed by any consideration that those who are unvaccinated shouldn’t receive the same medical care as those who are. “We distribute health care according to need, and refuse to turn doctors and hospitals into moral judges,” says Schafer. What’s next, the experts ask, when it comes to making such decisions: “Did you have a glass of wine with dinner last night? Do you really need that 10 extra pounds?” asks Bowman. “There is no bottom to this.

“Us-and-them thinking brings out the worst of humankind. It’s not something you want to see.”

The post Quebec isn’t the only one targeting the unvaxxed. But is it moral? appeared first on Macleans.ca.

On Sunday, Dr. Theresa Tam, Canada’s chief public health officer, quietly arrived at the “Jabapalooza” vaccine clinic in her Ottawa neighbourhood to get her third dose. Noticeably, she was wearing a white respirator mask in the indoor public space, something she emphasized the next day as she swapped her old Twitter profile photo featuring her in a surgical mask for one taken at that community-run clinic. She tweeted: “If you’re like me there is so much to do in a day that you haven’t updated your profile pic in some time, but in real life you’ve upped your mask game and practice #COVIDWise 24/7 because #omicron.” 

Tam is one of a growing number of health care professionals who are using their social media profile pictures to send a message that N95-quality respirator masks have become an essential part of personal protection against COVID-19 for everyone, not only for those working in high-risk settings such as hospitals. Even the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is considering updating its own mask guidance to recommend the public wear N95-quality masks, the Washington Post reports. 

The upshot: People need to improve their mask game—surgical and cloth masks just aren’t up for the battle with an airborne nemesis such as Omicron. 

RELATED: Experts are hopeful the Omicron wave will be short, but fear for health care capacity continues

The problem with surgical and cloth masks is that the filtering and fit aren’t as good as N95-equivalents. “It’s easier for the aerosol to move through,” says Marina Freire-Gormaly, an expert in aerosol transmission in the department of mechanical engineering at York University. “And there’s a problem in getting a seal around the mask.” The federal government’s online comparison between respirators and surgical masks says that while surgical masks are a barrier to splashes, droplets and spit, they are not designed to seal tight against the face and do not effectively filter small particles from the air.

In contrast, when wearing a N95-type respirator, a user breathes through the fabric of the mask itself, without air escaping through gaps around the edges, such as near the nose or under the chin. The tight-fitting respirators, with their layers of synthetic material, are tested to ensure they filter aerosols to a specific standard (N95s filter 95 per cent of aerosol droplets 0.3 microns in diameter, explains the Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety). 

N95-like respirators include N95 (United States), KN95 (China), KF94 (South Korea), FFP2 or FFP3 (Europe) and PFE95 (Canada). People shouldn’t use respirators that include valves, which allow users to potentially breathe out infectious aerosols, Freire-Gormaly explains. 

RELATED: Chronic exhaustion, derailed lives and no way out. This is long COVID.

Freire-Gormaly and others suggest trying a few styles to find one that fits your face. “They may feel uncomfortable at first, but will become normal,” she says. If your mask of choice has ear loops rather than straps (which go around the head and tend to offer a tighter fit), consider buying an “ear saver” that attaches to the mask’s loops and goes behind the head, taking pressure off the ears. (I bought my ear saver at a dollar store for $1.50 and have worn my KN95 for up to five hours at a time without discomfort.)

Though N95-like masks cost more than surgical ones, experts say they can be used for up to around 40 hours, which is much longer than indicated on the packaging, as long as they stay in good shape. Since any virus on the surface of a mask won’t survive after three days, Dr. Peter Tsai, who invented the spun material in N95 masks, devised a simple system which he wrote about in The Journal of Emergency Medicine: he uses three or four masks in rotation over the same number of days, hanging each in a dry area until needed again. 

Freire-Gormaly has been wearing a KN95 mask in indoor public venues since the start of the pandemic 22 months ago. “Science was demonstrating that aerosols were the way COVID was spreading,” she says. The masks offer “extra peace of mind,” she says, and mean she can go into public spaces such as grocery stores and not “feel extra anxiety when someone sneezes or coughs.” 

Freire-Gormaly’s research team is currently examining how particles and aerosols move around the room, depending on how people breathe and cough and how the HVAC system is set up. Using simulations involving an infected “index patient,” they measure the risks of exposure to others. The experiments mimic life without masks, because “eventually, we’re going to take our masks off,” she says. And that means needing to know how to better design spaces that minimize the risk of transmission. Until then, the respirators stay on.  

The post It’s time to switch to an N95 mask in the battle against Omicron appeared first on Macleans.ca.

This week, Bearskin Lake First Nation, a remote community in Northern Ontario of about 400 people, was struck hard by COVID-19. Some 187 people tested positive and more than 200 residents were now in quarantine due to exposure risk, including health care professionals, essential workers and community leaders. Ottawa has offered $483,000 to help, but locals say money isn’t enough. What good is cash if you can’t leave the house? What they need are deliveries—and that’s where Bearskin Lake’s neighbours stepped in. Seven trucks packed with firewood drove more than 100 km from Muskrat Dam First Nation; fundraising drives in Sandy Lake, Pikangikum and Kenora collected $100,000 to buy and ship food and supplies; Wapekeka First Nation residents chartered a plane to deliver more essential goods; and, most photogenically, more than two dozen people from Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug, 70 km east and inaccessible by road, linked together into a “Ski-Doo train” to ride through -40 C windchill to deliver what food, diapers and firewood they could manage. Riders wore moose hides underneath parkas, beaver hats with snow pants, and even draped garbage bags over themselves to block the wind. After arriving at Bearskin Lake, they dropped off their loads, turned around and headed home. The whole trip took seven hours. It’s hard to imagine most Canadians going through such extreme lengths to help others so far away; then again, it’s hard to imagine so badly needing to.

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Dr. Andrew Morris isn’t surprised by the surge in COVID cases across the country, up from an average of 2,500 a day a month ago to 4,100 on Dec. 13. “I’ve been saying for a long, long time that we would be getting into this situation,” says the Toronto-based infectious disease specialist, “and there is no plausible situation where we will not have the same experience as Europe.” 

Morris, who is medical director of the Sinai Health System-University Health Network Antimicrobial Stewardship Program, is referring to soaring case counts on the continent a few months ago. In Canada, he says, “we’ve been fooling ourselves to think we could avoid this, and it’s been put on steroids because of Omicron.” 

READ: With the Omicron variant on the rise, should you attend your work Christmas party?

The gloom surrounding our pandemic situation has deepened in recent days. On Friday, Dec. 10, Dr. Theresa Tam, Canada’s chief public health officer, released new pandemic modelling, which forecasts around 7,500 cases a day by January, even if our transmission levels remain static. If transmission increases by as little as 15 per cent, or if the new Omicron variant is established, that same modelling projects more than 12,000 cases a day before New Year’s. 

Omicron is definitely expanding quickly in Canada. On Dec. 12, Ontario’s Science Table estimated that the variant’s share of new cases in the province was 20 per cent, and that its case count was doubling every three days. The next day, that share had jumped to 30.8 per cent and its effective reproduction number (Rt) had climbed from 3.32 to 4.01 (meaning every infected person infects four others); in contrast, Delta’s Rt is 1.09. The rate of exponential growth is so quick that Omicron should overtake Delta as the most prevalent variant in a day or two, according to Dr. Peter Jüni, head of the Science Table. 

As researchers learn more about the high transmissibility of Omicron, and as early data comes in on how vaccines are handling the newest variant of interest, the need to speed up third doses is becoming clearer. To Morris, being “fully vaccinated” now means having three doses of COVID-19 vaccines, plus 14 days.

Yet, the overall third-dose rollouts have been painfully slow: only seven per cent of Canada’s total population have received third doses, as of Dec. 13.

Percentage of total population with three doses of COVID-19 vaccine

B.C.: 11%
Alberta.: 11
Saskatchewan: 10
Manitoba: n/a
Ontario: 8
Quebec: 5
New Brunswick: 8
Nova Scotia: 4
P.E.I.: 5
Newfoundland: n/a
Yukon: 21
Nunavut: 29
Nunavut: n/a
CANADA: 7

Source: COVID-19 Tracker Canada (data as of Dec. 13); Statistics Canada

Morris cites two big mistakes by Canadian governments in the past two months: minimizing the benefits of third dose; and what he calls a “silly strategy” of delaying rollouts of third doses until they saw evidence in this country of waning immunity from two doses of vaccine, even though there was evidence from around the world that such waning would hit us. 

“Those errors have led us to where we are today,” he says. “There was zero benefit to waiting; now they have zero capacity to roll out immunizations.” Indeed, as demand soars, public health units are reporting that all available vaccine appointments have been booked until the New Year, though they are trying to open more slots.

“The public is tired, they want to get on and enjoy life,” explains Morris. “The real problem is that the government doesn’t know what to do. They don’t know how far to push the public, especially when they see that the health-care system capacity isn’t changing much.” Because hospitalizations and ICU admissions always lag rising case counts, Morris warns, governments might not act until it’s too late. (After a surge of COVID hospital admissions forced Kingston, Ont., to airlift ICU patients to other cities, it capped private gatherings at five people on Dec. 14. At the same time, indoor restaurant dining can continue, at least until 10 p.m. each evening.) 

“If you’re only worried about your personal risk, there’s no reason why you can’t gather if you’re well protected,” says Morris, adding that “the ring of protection of the vaccines” should mean fewer cases of severe COVID, even as Omicron becomes more prevalent. He thinks that most people fully vaccinated with three doses probably won’t have symptoms, or will experience mild ones, if they contract COVID-19, while those with two doses will likely have a mild form of the disease. 

“I’m fairly certain that people who, for whatever reason, are not being vaccinated will get COVID,” he states. “The question that we have now is: are they all going to get it at once because of Omicron, and will that be accelerated by [holiday] parties? Or will it be slower so our health care system won’t totally get walloped?” In addition, if governments don’t push out boosters “incredibly aggressively” and inform everyone of how they are going to slow transmission, he thinks it’s possible that pretty much everyone could get infected. 

“The problem is that if we start seeing substantial numbers of outbreaks, or even faster-than-necessary spread of Omicron, this could end up putting a massive strain on the health-care system.” In the past five weeks, we’ve averaged a Rt value substantially higher than what was experienced last December, when the third wave crashed down on most of Canada, causing hospitals to be overburdened and prompting government lockdowns, explains Morris. 

Now, the health care system is even more fragile, and he is more pessimistic than he’s ever been during this pandemic. When asked to describe Canada’s future, he uses two words:  “Pretty ugly.” 

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In 2016, at age 12, Autumn Peltier came face-to-face with Justin Trudeau and, in front of hundreds of people in a conference hall in Gatineau, Que., she challenged his environmental record, extracting a promise from the Prime Minister that he would “protect the water.”

Peltier, who turns 18 next year, has since emerged as a powerful voice in the climate movement, appearing on the international stage next to the likes of Greta Thunberg and, at home, continuing to keep the pressure on Trudeau. She is also the chief water commissioner for Anishinabek Nation in Ontario. I spoke with her about her ongoing frustrations, and what she expects to see happen in what will be a critical year in environmentalism.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

You’ve spoken before about attending a ceremony at Serpent River First Nation when you were eight, and noticing signage about toxic water, and how that led you to become interested in water activism. Can you tell me more about what inspired you?

I was raised in a traditional lifestyle, being taught my ways, my teachings, who I was as an Indigenous person, an Indigenous woman. The ceremony was the eye-opener for the work that I do. And my Auntie Josephine [Mandamin] was too: before she passed away two years ago, she told me to keep on doing the work. Carrying on her legacy is one of the most important things to me.

Your aunt was a well-known activist, known as “Grandmother Water Walker.” What’s the best advice she ever gave you?

It’s actually what she told me the day before she passed away. And it was, “People are going to try to stop you, but you just have to keep on doing the work and keep on loving the water.” And she was right. It was her saying that that helped me realize that I can’t let people get to me.

RELATED: Jody Wilson-Raybould on Ottawa’s power problem 

What kinds of things are people doing?

I get a lot of negative comments, negative feedback. It’s a lot more than I thought I would get, because the work that I do is for a good reason, and you wouldn’t generally think that people would be against this or try to bring me down. Like, “She’s just a kid, what can she do?” Or “Why does what she says matter?”

Young people bring up your name as someone they admire. How does it feel to know that you’re a role model to so many of your peers, and to younger kids too?

I speak to a lot of little kids in Grade 1 and kindergarten. They’ll come up to me and say, “I look up to you, I’m so proud of you,” and just hearing a little person say that is honestly so inspiring to me. I look at it as I’m a mentor to all these little kids. What kind of mentor would I be if I was to give up and let people get to me? So I have to be strong and show them this is how you do it.

RELATED: Mark Messier on leadership, trust and magic mushrooms 

What kinds of questions do they have for you?

I get questions like, “Are you Moana?” Or “Do you have magic powers to heal the water?” [laughs]

(Photograph by Blair Gable)

With an adult audience, especially with people in power, do you feel like they brush you off because of your age?

I do already feel looked down upon. Being a young person, and being a young Indigenous female, I do feel a lot of intimidation, especially at big meetings where there are big politicians and it’s a room full of all these big white men. It’s really intimidating.

Have you talked to other young activists about how to deal with that pressure?

I think where I experienced that the most was probably the World Economic Forum, because all the youth were put into a group. And we all spent every day together and would actually talk about, ‘Okay, well, I’m kind of uncomfortable here.’ We all have the same mindset when it comes to how we deal with it. It’s just remembering why we’re doing what we’re doing, and always ignoring the negative comments.

RELATED: Jagmeet Singh on relentless optimism and what’s next for the NDP 

When it comes to remembering why you’re doing this, what are the things you think about?

My ancestors survived racism, oppression and residential schools. You still see how resilient and strong a lot of Indigenous people are. Our culture is still here. We’re all still here. My ancestors survived and I will be an ancestor one day. I just need to be one of those strong ancestors too in my head.

I want to ask you about when you confronted Prime Minister Justin Trudeau five years ago at an Assembly of First Nations event. Do you think people were surprised to hear a 12-year-old calling him out like that?

Actually, nobody expected that, even my mom. That day, I was told not to say anything to him. I was told to just walk up, give him the gift and then walk away. You don’t say anything.

That was my opportunity to say something to the literal Prime Minister of Canada. Like, who gets the chance to actually share their thoughts with him? So I took the opportunity. I gave him a piece of my mind.

Who was it that was telling you not to talk to him?

It was the people that were organizing the event that day.

RELATED: Murray Sinclair on reconciliation, anger, unmarked graves and a headline for this story 

Do you feel like your message got through to him?

I don’t know if it was that message, but I’m sure he’s aware of my work. Because even at the World Economic Forum, the headlines for the European magazines and newspapers were that I called out the Canadian federal government. So that work was definitely recognized and noticed.

He made a big promise to me, which was: “I will protect the water.” I was 12 at the time, I am 17 years old now, and I’m still holding him accountable to that promise.

At 12, Peltier challenged the PM at an Assembly of First Nations event (Courtesy of Stephanie Peltier)

Do you believe that he cares about that?

I feel like he could care more. I know [his government] did make a commitment to resolve all boil water advisories in Canada by March of 2021, and of course that didn’t happen. To promise to resolve a big issue like that within a certain amount of time and [not do it], and there are still communities that can’t drink their water after over 25 years, how are we supposed to trust the government? How are we supposed to believe him? I feel he pretends to care.

Is there something he could do right now, today, to give you more confidence that he does care?

I think instead of making promises or just speaking about it, taking action and actually doing something. And address the issue instead of travelling all over the world.

What did you think, by the way, about his trip to Tofino on the first National Day for Truth and Reconciliation?

It was pretty disappointing. How are you going to be the Prime Minister of Canada and be taking a vacation on a day like that? And you claim to care about these types of things? It was very upsetting.

Tell me a bit more about what you’re paying attention to right now, the problems that are not being addressed but should be.

I mainly focus on boil water advisories in First Nations communities, or lack of clean drinking water, and that’s, I guess, really my main worry right now. We’re in a pandemic and we’re told that we need to wash our hands and sanitize, but some communities don’t have access to those simple things. How is a community that has no clean running water supposed to wash their hands every day? How are they supposed to do simple sanitizing? That’s what doesn’t make sense.

Do you think that if the government would just put more money and attention toward boil water advisories they would be a thing of the past? Is it a matter of political will?

That’s always their excuse, that they don’t have the funding or the resources to do that. But just think about how fast it would be resolved and fixed if there was to be a drinking water issue in an area like Toronto or Ottawa, how fast they would call that a state of emergency and how fast they would fix that.

But a First Nations community of 200, 300, 400 people can go without clean drinking water for over 30 years, where they literally have to bathe their babies in bottled water, cook and clean with bottled water, wash themselves with bottled water.

The pandemic did teach us how quickly money and resources can be mobilized when there’s an emergency. That must be frustrating to think about.

Yeah, it is.

Some words to live by

Autumn Peltier wants you to be mindful of how much water you use, and to support First Nations with their advocacy. She also wants you to read and listen. Here are her suggestions: (Click through this gallery)

We Are Water Protectors, a children's book by Carole Lindstrom

Water Walker by Joanne Robertson, a children’s book inspired by Peltier’s aunt, Josephine Mandamin

Whose Water Is It, Anyway?: Taking Water Protection into Public Hands and Boiling Point, both by Maude Barlow

“Water,” an episode from CBC’s podcast The Secret Life of Canada, along with The Secret Life of Water teaching guide

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Looking ahead to the year 2022, what do you want to see happen?

No more broken promises. More communication, more working together and collaborating and listening and letting people have a say, not just politicians and people in big power. Less discrimination. More cultural sensitivity. And, of course, ending boil water advisories, or at least minimizing them, or finding a solution for it.

On discrimination and cultural sensitivity, what do you think would be a sign that things are getting better?

I guess when I stop hearing stereotypes, it will have gotten better. It’s crazy to think that even in Ottawa, where diversity is so common and there are so many different people, different colours, different races, it’s crazy to think that people are still using stereotypes in 2021.

You’re disappointed in the Prime Minister, but do you feel like politicians from other parties have anything better to offer?

I think my only hope with other politicians is just my opinion being heard more. I have really good support in the NDP. The [Ontario MPP] for Algoma-Manitoulin, his name’s Michael Mantha and he’s one of my biggest supporters.

You’ve talked in the past about going into politics and trying to become one of the decision-makers, like the minister of environment. But we’ve seen Indigenous women recently leaving the federal Parliament—people like NDP MP Mumilaaq Qaqqaq—saying that it’s a toxic place and that it’s really difficult to get anything done. Has that affected the way you think about your own future?

I know that it is a pretty toxic field. Seeing Mumilaaq talk about her experience, it kind of makes me scared of going into it. That’s why I might focus my career path more toward Indigenous politics. I don’t know.

But you still see politics as the best way to get things done?

I do. Because you know the people that I’m trying to get the attention of right now are politicians and people in power. Because they’re the people that make change.

What would have to change for you to feel less intimidated about trying to get elected?

No matter where you go, you’re going to be discriminated against. That’s what I face, that’s what I experience. Even just going to school you get stereotyped.

What kinds of things have you experienced at school?

When I first moved to Ottawa about three years ago, they would ask me, “What’s your ethnicity? Where are you from?” And I would get negative comments like, “Okay, well, are your parents drug addicts? Are your parents alcoholics? Are you poor? Do you live in a tepee?” It’s just, like, no.

Do you think those stereotypes are getting less common?

Honestly, I don’t really have hope for it changing too much, and it’s something that I’m okay with dealing with for the rest of my life if I have to. Because I know several Indigenous people who are doctors, lawyers, successful politicians—and even my grandma, she’s a professor at the University of Alberta. I know that not all Indigenous people, not all First Nations people are drug addicts or alcoholics and it’s a stereotype because of intergenerational trauma from residential schools. People don’t understand why some people are on those paths.

You’ve said before that you worry you’ll get to be 70 or 80 years old and will have spent your life advocating for change, but that nothing will have been done. Are you still worried about that?

Although I have seen change within the years that I have been advocating, it is not as much as I would like to see. And it’s not a lot. It’s something, but it’s not a lot. And it kind of makes me lose hope thinking about whether anything will have changed by the time I’m 70 or 80. It’s scary, but that’s how I look at it.

This interview appears in print in the January 2022 issue of Maclean’s magazine. Subscribe to the monthly print magazine here.

The post Autumn Peltier on youth activism, challenging Trudeau, and a future in politics appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Not up, not running: The plan to test all non-American travellers to Canada for COVID-19 has prompted confusion among passengers and airport operators alike, CBC reports. Few details are available about the federal response to the Omicron variant.

Health Minister Jean-Yves Duclos said Wednesday the new arrival testing program will take effect immediately. “That is starting today,” the minister told reporters. But there are no signs today that the program is actually up and running.

“One concern is just when this goes into effect … something even Air Canada and WestJet appear not to know,” Cameron Turner, a traveller from Victoria, B.C., asked CBC News. “Another concern is just where travellers are expected to self isolate while waiting for their test results.”

And on Thursday, the president of the Canadian Airports Council said he’s still not sure how the program will work.

Snowbird tests: Joe Biden announced a new testing regime on Thursday that will require all inbound travellers, including Canadians, to get tested no later than 24 hours before their departure, CP reports. That may complicate travel plans for snowbirds.

Unknown: Omicron’s impact on the world remains a mystery, the BBC reports, because although cases in South Africa are surging, it is weeks too soon to know what that will do to hospitalization rates.

Boost or share? As medical experts call on rich countries to share vaccine, Western countries considering doling out boosters at home, because of studies that indicate the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines might begin to wane after six months, Global reports. More than 10 million Canadians will reach that deadline by the new year

Tories were right: Speaker Anthony Rota ruled Thursday that the board of internal economy — the all-party committee that manages the parliamentary precinct — overstepped its authority by mandating vaccines on the Hill, CP reports.

Rota sided Thursday with the Conservatives in concluding that the all-party board of internal economy did not have the authority to impose a vaccine mandate. He said only the House itself can make a decision to restrict access to the chamber and other parliamentary buildings. However, Rota’s ruling changes nothing for MPs or anyone else wanting access to the precinct. Last week, Liberals and New Democrats joined forces to approve a motion to resume hybrid sittings, which also specified that anyone entering the precinct must be fully immunized against COVID-19 or have a valid medical exemption.

Lab compromise: The Liberals offered a compromise Thursday to end a stand off over secret documents related to the firing of two scientists at Canada’s high security infectious disease laboratory, the Globe reports.

Government House Leader Mark Holland told the House of Commons late Thursday that the federal cabinet is now prepared to turn over all the documents to a special committee of MPs from the Liberals, Conservatives, Bloc Québécois and New Democrats. Any dispute about whether to make public records would be decided by a panel of three former senior judges.

Federal opposition parties have fought for records that could shed light on why Ottawa expelled and then fired two scientists from Canada’s National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg.

Financial reckoning coming: The Liberals are asking Parliament to approve billions in new spending during a four-week sitting but have yet to release a financial accounting of how it spent more than $600-billion last year during Canada’s pandemic response, the Globe reports.

Former parliamentary budget officer Kevin Page, who is now president and chief executive officer of the Institute of Fiscal Studies and Democracy at the University of Ottawa, said he doesn’t see a reason why the government appears to be waiting to release key information, such as the public accounts and a fall fiscal update. “They should be at the front end [of the current four-week sitting],” he said in an interview, adding that committees should also be sitting to review spending requests. “That is the standard practice and a good practice and I’m not really sure there’s any reason not to have that. I’m sure that the work is done on the public accounts and there’s no reason not to table it. Finance [Canada] has had plenty of time.”

Update coming: Chrystia Freeland will release a financial update on Dec. 14, CBC reports.

Battle of wits: Speaking of Freeland, Aaron Wherry has an interesting column at CBC reviewing the parliamentary back and forth between her and Pierre Poilievre, and suggesting it could be just the beginning of a long battle of wits.

If O’Toole were to lose his tenuous grip on the Conservative leadership, attention would quickly focus on Poilievre — either as a potential candidate or as a potentially influential figure in deciding who leads the party next. Whenever Trudeau decides to step aside, Freeland will be foremost in the pool of possible successors.

O’Toole unpopular: In L’actualité, polling expert Philippe J. Fournier has an article (translation) on Erin O’Toole’s polling numbers, which are bad and getting worse.

Among his party voters, 70% say they still have a positive impression of him, a lower proportion than for Trudeau and Singh among their respective voters, but higher than the same measure by Abacus last spring (it was then 62%). However, we note that the Conservative leader scores anemic with voters in other parties: only between 8% and 13% of New Democrats, Bloc, Liberals and Green voters view O’Toole favourably.

Monarchy unpopular: A new poll, taken in the wake of Barbados becoming a republic, shows a majority of Canadians are in favour of cutting ties with the British monarchy, but it would not be easy, Global reports. There would be complicated implications for treaty relationships with Indigenous peoples, and also the constitutional amending formula makes a such change next to impossible.

Livestock deaths: Hundreds of thousands of livestock perished in floodwaters in British Columbia, Bloomberg reports.

— Stephen Maher

The post New COVID-19 travel measures cause confusion; and Freeland will give a budget update appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Surprise move: Conservative justice critic Rob Moore moved Wednesday that a Liberal bill banning conversion therapy be adopted unanimously, which it was, which will ban the practice of trying to change someone’s sexual orientation, CP reports. It was a surprise to see the Conservatives suddenly support the bill, because socially conservative Tory MPs had spoken against the bill, in a milder previous incarnation. The passage of the motion led to non-partisan hugging and dancing in the House.

Praise for O’Toole: The Globe’s John Ibbitson writes that it was a great day, and praises Erin O’Toole for handling it “beautifully.”

I suspect MP Michelle Rempel Garner, who has fought to advance LGBTQ rights within the party for years, and MPs Eric Duncan and Melissa Lantsman, who are gay, must have had some interesting conversations with their colleagues. They appear to have convinced the social conservatives within the caucus that they had already registered their opposition to the bill when they voted against its predecessor last spring, and that any further opposition would only typecast the party as intolerant.

See you in court: Elsewhere in the Globe, Robyn Urback writes, though, that the provisions of the bill that ban the therapy for adults likely violates the Charter.

Proponents of an outright ban will argue that it should not be legal to help people injure themselves. But in Canada it is legal for homeopaths, for example, to prescribe nosodes – which are essentially vials of water, infused with hope and dogma – in lieu of vaccines for illnesses such as whooping cough, measles and mumps. Health Canada even actually approves and regulates these “treatments,” though the agency has said that none are approved as alternatives to real vaccines. And there is real harm being done in these cases: Canadians are essentially being scammed into believing certain homeopathic remedies will protect them from a variety of illnesses, and as a result they leave themselves (and often, their children) vulnerable to infection. Yet the practice of offering, advertising and/or financially profiting from homeopathy has not been criminalized, even though it could cause lifelong, irreparable damage to those who voluntarily seek its service.

Test wait: Travellers arriving in Canada from outside the United States can expect to isolate for up to three days as they wait for COVID-19 test results, the Globe reports. The government announced the new testing regime on Tuesday in an effort to slow the spread of the Omicron variant.

More boosters: The Globe also reports that Ontario and Alberta are planning to expand eligibility for third-dose COVID-19 booster shots.

We can do better: In the Star, Bruce Arthur writes that the booster change is “lightning fast,” and urges the province to do more, faster.

Hopefully the news on Omicron will be positive, but this pandemic remains a societal challenge, every day, and a personal one, too. A powerful public information campaign on boosters would be welcome. A more durable infrastructure on vaccine passports, mandates and delivery may be a must. We can do better to protect people.

Ban panned: Theresa Tam is defending Canada’s decision to ban travellers from some African countries but many experts aren’t buying it, Global News reports.

Same battle: In Le Journal de Montréal, Emmanuelle Latraverse writes that the battle against COVID bears a resemblance to the battle against climate change (translation).

In either case, the same phenomena are at work: scientific consensuses sacrificed on the altar of partisan politics and disinformation, not to mention the failures of an international community increasingly withdrawn into herself. Think of anti-vaxxers, those skeptics of science who ruin our lives with insults and stubbornness. They are a bit like the oil lobby against the climate.

Slow track: The Conservatives and NDP won’t agree to fast-track legislation to extend pandemic supports, insisting on a review by the House’s finance committee, CBC reports.

“The government is proposing new expenditures without accountability,” Conservative finance critic Pierre Poilievre told reporters Wednesday. “We’re setting conditions in order to get our support for this bill. These conditions must be met or we will oppose it.”

The Conservatives say they want to see four conditions met before they’ll support the bill: an independent investigation into reports that organized crime received pandemic supports; a complete study of the bill at the finance committee — with Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland appearing for four hours of questioning; amendments preventing people who could take jobs from taking benefits; and amendments to prevent prisoners and criminals from accessing benefits. The NDP also want to see Bill C-2 go before the finance committee. NDP House Leader Peter Julian told CBC news that his party will not support the bill in its current form and wants specific amendments to address their concerns.

Clerk scrutinized: The CPC  called for a parliamentary committee to probe claims of political bias made against Charles Robert, the clerk of the House of Commons, while Roberts was in the chamber, CBC reports. CBC News has reported three senior managers went on sick leave and left their jobs over concerns about Robert.

To seek compensation: Canadian telecom companies spent more than $700 million on Huawei equipment while the Liberal government delayed a decision on banning the company, Global News reports. With a rejection imminent, Global News has confirmed that the companies have asked the federal government for “compensation” if they have to replace Huawei equipment.

Tough Green: Interim Green Leader Amita Kuttner tells CP they will be ready to get tough on party members who “have been at each other’s throats.”

The astrophysicist, who identifies as nonbinary and transgender, said Wednesday they want to “listen and love” to “heal” the party, which has been riven by infighting and accusations of racism and antisemitism. But, if that does not stop a minority of Greens, Kuttner said they would “absolutely” be prepared to take tough disciplinary action under the party’s code of conduct.

COVID boondoggle: Ontario’s auditor general has found that businesses that weren’t eligible for pandemic relief programs received more than $200 million in provincial supports,  CBC reports.

Deer with COVID: The National Centre for Foreign Animal Disease has detected COVID-19 in three apparently healthy Quebec deer, CTV reports.

Well deserved: Congrats to health columnist André Picard, who was awarded the 2021 Sandford Fleming Medal for excellence in science communication by the Royal Canadian Institute for Science on Wednesday!

Welcome to Ottawa: David Cohen, the new United States ambassador to Canada, has reported for duty.

— Stephen Maher

The post A united House of Commons passes a Liberal bill banning conversion therapy appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Omicron measures: Canada announced Tuesday that air travellers from all countries except the United States will need to take COVID-19 tests when arriving in Canada, CBC reports, as the world braces for the Omicron variant.

The tests will be required of all travellers, regardless of their vaccination status, Health Minister Jean-Yves Duclos said today. The requirement will also apply to Canadian citizens and permanent residents. Incoming travellers will have to self-isolate until they receive results of the test. Duclos said the new testing requirement will go into effect “as quickly and as much as possible over the next few days.”

The government also added Egypt, Malawi and Nigeria to its restricted list. Travellers from 10 countries will have to quarantine in designated facilities.

The world is waiting for scientists to figure out how effective vaccines are against Omicron. Dr. Isaac Bogoch, an expert at Toronto General Hospital, said we will have to wait to find out, but he thinks available vaccines will still prove useful in the fight against COVID-19: “It would be extremely unusual for a variant to emerge that completely erases the protective immunity of vaccines. It might chip away at some of the effectiveness but it would be extremely unusual that our vaccines, and or vaccine programs, are now rendered useless.”

May do more: Justin Trudeau told reporters the government may have to do more, Global reports.

Patience: In Maclean’s, Patricia Treble lays out what we know so far—not that much—about Omicron.

Omicron entered our lexicon at exactly 12 p.m. Eastern Time on Nov. 26, according to Google Trends, which recorded a massive spike in online searches. Since then, searches have only increased as people scour the web for news on the newest variant of concern. So new is the variant, however, that researchers are scrambling to unravel its secrets—likely for few weeks but possibly more—and pleading for patience.

Bans questioned: Even as Canada tightened travel restrictions, news was breaking that the variant had already spread to Europe before South Africa raised the alarm, raising questions about the fairness and efficacy of restrictions on African nations, the Globe‘s Geoffrey York reports from South Africa.

Over 60s stay home: The World Health Organization has urged those over 60 not to travel because of the increased risk posed by the variant, the New York Post reports.

Vaccines for poor countries: Opposition politicians and medical groups are urging the Liberals to support a global initiative to temporarily waive intellectual property restrictions on COVID-19 vaccines, CTV reports. The government says it will discuss the issue with the World Trade Organization.

Same spiel: The situation reminds Isabelle Hachey, writing in La Presse (translation), of the fight over AIDS drugs for Africa, and points out that Big Pharma can be expected to do whatever it can to prevent losing out on income.

The 168 member states of the WTO should take the opportunity to try to reach a consensus on the temporary lifting of patents protecting vaccines. So far, they have failed to come to an agreement. One can imagine that Big Pharma is doing everything to discourage them. The sums at stake are pharaonic. If we go by the past, it may be a long time before the member states come to an agreement. Millions of Africans died of AIDS before the WTO adopted the Doha agreement in November 2001, after years of intense activism.

Challenging times: In the Star, Susan Delacourt writes that the variant presents a challenge for the political class, because polling shows Canadians are anxious and depressed because of the pandemic.

But all signs are pointing already to a large, looming morale crisis, which politicians are going to have to struggle to contain in the days and weeks ahead. Just when Canadians were starting to plan holiday gatherings and winter trips to sunnier climes—and a long-awaited return to normal — the threat looms again of more lockdowns and renewed travel restrictions. So what does the political class have left in its arsenal — after nearly two years of this pandemic — to head off what could be the biggest wave yet of COVID-19 fatigue?

No jab? No travel: Unvaccinated travellers over the age of 12 can no longer board a plane or passenger train in Canada, CP reports. A grace period ended Tuesday.

Finished fight: In Maclean’s, your correspondent takes the temperature of the anti-carbon tax foes, who once looked like they might win, and concludes that the fight seems to have gone out of the main players, having lost in court and in several elections.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford, who won support from grassroots Ontario Tories by opposing a carbon tax, was happy to fight too. Manitoba’s Brian Pallister, who had a carbon tax plan of his own, joined in after Trudeau stood next to him and used him as an example of a co-operative premier. Behind the scenes, Stephen Harper was cheering the premiers on. “Let the other guys do a carbon tax, because we can all win the next federal and provincial elections on that issue alone,” he said in speeches. It did not seem far-fetched: in 2008, the Liberals lost an election built around Stéphane Dion’s Green Shift (a mix of carbon taxes and tax cuts). Today, Pallister is gone, Kenney is setting new records for unpopularity, Ford is no longer talking much about the carbon tax he once loved to attack and Moe is complaining. “They’re complaining but complying,” says Tim Gray, executive director of Environmental Defence, about the carbon tax.

Make it work: In the Post, Tasha Kheiriddin ponders the pandemic hybrid Parliament and concludes that it might be fine.

Virtual participation might even enhance productivity in certain contexts, such as committees, which could continue sitting even when Parliament is not. The ability to hear witnesses remotely could expand connection between legislators who would otherwise not be able to present themselves in person. The reality is that, with the work-from-home revolution, some form of hybrid Parliament is probably here to stay. We had better make it work.

— Stephen Maher

The post Canada announces new travel restrictions as the world braces for Omicron appeared first on Macleans.ca.

More cases in Canada: Two people in Ontario and one in Quebec have been infected with the Omicron variant of COVID-19, CBC reports, in addition to the two Ottawa cases announced on Sunday. Patricia Treble, writing for Maclean’s, has a roundup of what we know now. Cases are being detected daily around the world, CNN reports.

High risk: The World Health Organization warned Monday that the variant poses a “high infection risk,” the BBC reports: “Omicron has an unprecedented number of spike mutations, some of which are concerning for their potential impact on the trajectory of the pandemic,” the WHO said.

Alarm bells: In the Globe, André Picard explains that it is too soon to know whether Omicron is more dangerous than earlier variants.

Despite its ominous moniker – Omicron, the 15th letter of the Greek alphabet, sounds like the name of a bad guy in a superhero movie – it’s not a given that the newest variant will be dramatically worse than previous ones, nor that it will displace Delta, the now-dominant variant. The reason Omicron has scientists worried is its “Frankenstein mix” of mutations. Viruses mutate, but usually do so fairly slowly. The new variant has set off alarm bells because it has 32 mutations on its spike protein alone. The spike protein is what coronaviruses use to enter human cells, so that raises fears (at least theoretically) that Omicron could spread more easily and circumvent immune protections, both those from infection and vaccination. But none of this is clear yet.

Reluctant Ontario: In the Star, Bruce Arthur argues that Doug Ford’s government should ponder the uncertainty and get more serious.

Israel moved hard on ventilation, contact tracing, boosters, and border restrictions, because Israel knows an emergency when it sees one. If Omicron is a real leap — and many virologists say its 25 to 30 mutations are at least hypothetically suited to potential immunity evasion, transmission and virulence — then the rules of the game will change. Some would likely stay the same, too. This government has set certain boundaries at this point which will influence the vulnerability to whatever Omicron or any other variant might be. It’s a broken record at this point, but this government has been truly reluctant to push vaccination from the premier on down. The result is about 1.4 million unvaccinated Ontarians over the age of 12, including some 350,000 over the age of 50. Every one is a walking alarm bell.

Why only Africa? The Globe has an opinion piece from U of T prof Ambarish Chandra, who argues that our travel restrictions are poorly thought out.

The speed with which the latest travel bans have been imposed on southern African countries suggests yet again that Canada is quick to impose harsh measures on the developing world but reluctant to do so with wealthy, Western countries. Multiple reports suggest that the Omicron variant was already present in Belgium and the Netherlands at the time these bans were imposed, but there is no discussion of extending measures to those countries.

Not vaccine apartheid: In the Post, Rupa Subramanya argues that vaccine hesitancy and logistical problems, not access to vaccines, are behind slow uptake in the global south.

There is no doubt that the purchasing power of rich countries makes it easier for them to procure vaccines, yet it is not true that poorer countries don’t have access to vaccines, as they can purchase them at concessional rates from the pharmaceutical companies, or draw from the World Health Organization’s COVAX facility. Rather than a lack of access, much of the disparity in vaccination rates in the developing world results from logistical problems and vaccine hesitancy, sometimes coupled with outright COVID-19 denial.

Conversion therapy ban: The Liberals tabled a bill Monday to ban conversion therapy, and not just for children, the Star reports.

The bill goes beyond the government’s previous attempt at a ban on conversion therapy. Bill C-4 would make it a crime to make anyone undergo conversion therapy, regardless if they consent. That was a key demand from survivors and advocates, who said the government’s previous attempt at a ban, Bill C-6, still allowed for conversion therapy to be provided to adults who consented. Advocates have said a person cannot consent to what amounts to fraud and torture.

Minister, CDS to apologize: Defence Minister Anita Anand, deputy minister Jody Thomas, and Chief of the Defence Staff Gen. Wayne Eyre will apologize to victims of military sexual misconduct on Dec. 13, CTV reports.

“As part of our efforts to restore relationships with those harmed, we will offer a public apology to all current and former members of the Defence Team who have been affected by sexual assault and sexual misconduct, including harassment, and discrimination, “ the release states.

A prop bike? Conservative MP Ed Fast accused Steven Guilbeault of using a bicycle as a prop during a session of hybrid Parliament on Monday, CTV reports.

Fast raised a point of order following question period, arguing that Minister Steven Guilbeault hung the bike behind him to “make a statement about his environmental cred.” “Mr. Speaker, the point is, there’s a rule that you cannot do indirectly what you cannot do directly. What the minister has done is blatantly use a prop because he’s now doing it from the safety of some other office,” Fast said.

Guilbeault responded on Twitter: “The bike has been there long before we started doing virtual Parliament. In fact, it has also been there for months as I was taking questions as heritage minister. Strange that after almost a year, it’s become an issue,” he said.

In a related story, the deputy speaker warned MPs appearing from home to keep their garb professional, CP reports, but he didn’t say anything about bikes.

Tech tax: The Liberal government intends to proceed with plans to implement a digital services tax targeting tech giants, the Post reports. Critics in the business community think the government should wait for an international agreement before acting.

Nomination survey: Some Conservatives think a membership survey is laying the groundwork so that Erin O’Toole can centralize the nomination process, the Hill Times reports.

Confront dissidents! Also in the Hill Times, former CPC MP Tom Lukiwski argues that O’Toole should call a leadership review so that he can silence internal critics.

Still fighting: Green Party officials are still engaged in a damaging internal feud, CBC reports.

Syrup to flow: The people behind Quebec’s strategic reserve of maple syrup said Monday they will release 50 million pounds of maple syrup–worth about $150 million–onto the market by February, responding to rising international demand, CP reports.

— Stephen Maher

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Omicron entered our lexicon at exactly 12 p.m. Eastern Time on Nov. 26, according to Google Trends, which recorded a massive spike in online searches. Since then, searches have only increased as people scour the web for news on the newest variant of concern. 

So new is the variant, however, that researchers are scrambling to unravel its secrets—likely for few weeks but possibly more—and pleading for patience. “We know that getting a rapid understanding of disease severity with Omicron (particularly in vaccinated individuals and re-infections) is absolutely critical, but it’s just too early for reliable data,” cautioned Dr. Richard Lessells, an infectious diseases specialist at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa. 

So, as more cases are detected around the world, including in Canada, no one is sure how Omicron will stack up against the current COVID-19 variant heavyweight, Delta, or how it will affect the vaccines currently approved for use. Still, there are some things that we do know: 

RELATED: The team of scientists guarding Canada against COVID variants—’the known unknown’

What is Omicron?

First, a bit of background: Viruses regularly mutate, it’s in their nature. So while experts have identified many mutations or evolutions of the original SARS-CoV-2 virus, only a few rise to the level of being labelled variants of concern. Perhaps the two most famous are Alpha and Delta, which were the causes of Canada’s second and third waves in the winter and spring of 2020-21. (The Pango Network tracks their lineages; or instance, Alpha—a.k.a. B.1.1.7—comes from the B.1.1. Lineage, sandwiched between B.1.1.5 and B.1.1.8, neither of which amounted to much.) 

The researchers in South Africa were concerned about Omicron because of its specific mutations, and because of a rapid rise in cases in the region. Dr. Tulio de Oliveira, director of the Centre for Epidemic Response & Innovation (CERI) in Stellenbosch, told a press conference that “this variant did surprise us.” In particular, they had found more than 30 mutations on the spike protein of the coronavirus. 

That spike protein is important, not only because that’s how the SARS-CoV-2 virus latches onto healthy cells in the body but also because the current crop of vaccines take aim at that same spike protein by using harmless versions of it to generate an immune response in people.

READ: COVID vaccines for children are here. How well have we protected the kids so far? 

Experts are concerned that the mutations in Omicron’s spike protein may mean that vaccines are less effective, or that people who have already recovered from COVID-19 could be susceptible to this new variant. At the same time, researchers caution against thinking we’re returning to March 2020. For one, they don’t believe that Omicron will completely evade the vaccines. Moreover, there are now many more treatments for COVID. And vaccine makers are already pouring over data to see how they may need to tweak the make-up of the COVID-19 vaccines. 

The other concern is how transmissible Omicron could be. From this virus’s perspective, transmissibility equals success. The Gamma variant was perceived as a dangerous brute until it was effectively swept aside by the far more transmissible Delta. 

Who found it?

According to local reports, the new variant was discovered by Dr. Sikhulile Moyo, a Zimbabwean-born scientist working at the Botswana Harvard H.I.V. Reference Laboratory. He was doing genomic sequencing on positive COVID-19 test samples and noticed that several had scores of mutations not previously seen. At around the same time in neighbouring South Africa, researchers were discovering the same mutations in test samples from a cluster of cases in Gauteng. 

READ: What to do as we walk into the pandemic’s fifth wave 

South Africa reported the new variant, B.1.1.529, on Nov. 26 and asked for an emergency meeting of the World Health Organization. On Nov. 26, the WHO named it Omicron and classified it as a variant of interest.

Right now, researchers, especially those in southern Africa, are sharing information with colleagues around the world. On Nov. 29, Dr. de Oliviera stated that South Africa’s Centre for Epidemic Response & Innovation had uploaded all its raw sequencing data for Omicron to the U.S. National Center for Biotechnology Information website. (Things are moving so quickly that Twitter is a de facto notification system.) 

What does this mean for the world?

Well, no one is sure right now. It takes time to examine new variants and determine their threat level. 

At the same time, the virus will continue to mutate. It can be slowed and possibly stopped by vaccines but only if the entire world is vaccinated. And right now, much of Africa is still waiting for doses to arrive, while other areas are fighting disinformation that is slowing immunization efforts. In sub-Saharan African, the vaccine leader is South Africa, with just 25 per cent of its people fully vaccinated, followed by Botswana at 20 per cent, according to Our World in Data. 

READ: The roadblock to full pandemic recovery: ‘Pockets’ of unvaccinated Canadians 

What does that mean for Canada? 

Canada is still quite vulnerable: 22 per cent of our entire population is unvaccinated, according to Health Canada. And, as we saw this summer during large outbreaks in Alberta and Saskatchewan, the viruses can easily circulate in areas where vaccination rates are low. Plus, when case counts rise, so do hospitalizations, which means that overstretched health-care systems have to postpone other non-emergency surgeries and treatments.  

Why are countries so quickly finding cases of Omicron? 

Researchers in South Africa figured out how to quickly identify Omicron through a standard PCR nasal swab test. As the World Health Organization explained in its technical briefing document on the variant: “Several labs have indicated that for one widely used PCR test, one of the three target genes is not detected (called S gene dropout or S gene target failure) and this test can therefore be used as marker for this variant, pending sequencing confirmation.”

Public health authorities around the world now had a way to quickly scan positive COVID tests for the new variant, even while waiting for full confirmation through genomic sequencing, which takes around 10 days. And sure enough, they started reporting cases. 

READ: Will this flu season be worse than usual?

Some countries like Israel and Japan are closing their borders. Should Canada?

One can’t help but be concerned by the possible dangers of Omicron, which is why many governments, including Canada, quickly piled on extra public health requirements on travellers. On Nov. 26, when no cases had been detected in Canada, Ottawa put new testing measures in place for Canadians and residents who had been in southern Africa, while banning nationals who had recently been in those nations. Two days later, two probable cases were found within our borders.

As more specific testing is done, more cases are being found around the world, including throughout Europe and Australia, which aren’t on Ottawa’s travel restriction list. By Nov. 29, there were at least 184 confirmed and 1,305 probable cases around the world, according to a tracker from Newsnodes.com. 

As Canada and the world discovered with Delta,once there is community spread, border restrictions rapidly lose their value. 

Why is it called Omicron?

Well, B.1.1.529 is a mouthful. On June 1, the World Health Organization adopted a more user-friendly naming system based on the letters of the Greek alphabet for the general public. While the next unused letter after Mu (a variant identified in Colombia in the summer) was Nu, both it and the next letter, Xi, were deemed too confusing (many pronounced Nu as “New,” which implies its something different, while Xi is a very common surname). So, the WHO went to the next option: Omicron. 

The post Omicron: Here’s what we know so far about the latest variant of concern appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Worrying news: On Sunday, Ontario announced that the Omicron COVID-19 variant was detected in Ottawa in two patients who recently travelled to Nigeria. CBC has a story. These cases will likely be just the first.

In a statement released Sunday, federal Health Minister Jean-Yves Duclos said the confirmation of two omicron cases is a signal that the country’s monitoring system is working but to expect more cases of the variant. “As the monitoring and testing continues with provinces and territories, it is expected that other cases of this variant will be found in Canada,” Duclos said.

Bans disputed: On Friday, Canada imposed travel restrictions on foreign nationals who had visited southern Africa. WHO has complained about the bans, calling them unscientific and unhelpful, and some Canadian experts agree, Global reports.

Not racist: In the Toronto Sun, Lorrie Goldstein reminds readers that travel bans were once considered racist.

Not Ottawa’s fault: Don’t blame inflation on stimulus spending, former Bank of Canada governor Stephen Poloz told CTV Sunday: “In fact, what the stimulus did was to keep the economy from going into a deep hole in which we would have experienced persistent deflation.” (Video)

Inflation has reached 4.7 per cent, according to the latest numbers released by Statistics Canada in October. The Bank of Canada expects it to peak at the end of this year and start to decline in the latter half of 2022.

Culture change: New Chief of the Defence Staff Wayne Eyre promised to change the culture of the Canadian Forces, to get rid of the idea that it’s an “old boys’ club,” he told CTV on Sunday, the Globe reports.

General Eyre said there are many aspects of military culture he wants to keep – such as protecting others and service above self – but he wants to address the “exclusionary aspects” and bring in the values of inclusion as the “face of Canada is changing.” “So if we want to be able to attract and retain the best talent from all segments of Canadian society, we have to embrace that value of inclusion,” he said on the television program. Gen. Eyre said that over the next few weeks, the Canadian Armed Forces will be announcing a number of initiatives in greater detail around culture change, support for survivors of misconduct, and the complaint reporting system.

Not only women: In an interview on Global, Eyre pointed out that more than 40 per cent of the nearly 19,000 claims submitted by survivors and victims of military sexual misconduct are from men.

ICYMI: In the Globe on Saturday, Andrew Coyne has a persusasive column arguing that a patchwork of policies aimed at reducing emissions is dramatically more costly than simply raising the carbon tax.

Relying on carbon pricing alone to hit our target, the Trudeau government says in the 2016 Framework, “would require a very high price.” Very high, compared with what? Compared with the current price, undoubtedly. But compared to alternative measures? What the government really means is that the price would be visible to the public and therefore politically toxic. Whereas the cost of subsidies and regulations, though higher – and though the public just as surely pays for them – is invisible.

Not as efficient: In the Star on Saturday, Robin Sears writes that, in comparison with Germany, where a businesslike new coalition government has just released “a 177-page set of specific policy pledges, with detailed agendas and time frames,” Canada’s government takes a “dilatory approach to governing by legislation.”

ICYMI: Ryan Reynolds received a Governor General’s Performing Arts Award, and got a musical tribute from Steven Page, Global reports.

— Stephen Maher

The post The COVID-19 variant Omicron is in Ottawa; and WHO disputes travel restrictions appeared first on Macleans.ca.

No bueno: Good morning. The U.S. is doubling its tariff on Canadian softwood lumber, despite efforts at the recent Three Amigos summit to lobby against the proposed change. Though figuring this out is a “top priority” for Liberals, per trade minister Mary Ng at yesterday’s Question Period, the government is taking heat. 

Can I get a Q? Can I get a P? We’re two very noisy QPs into the pre-holiday sitting (during yesterday’s, Speaker Rota had to chide MPs after hearing something “not very parliamentary”). Aside from the softwood lumber issue, Conservatives have clearly identified cost-of-living woes as their main line of attack. Aaron Wherry, at CBC, has a column that tries to poke holes in their argument that inflation is Justin Trudeau’s fault. And in case you missed it, our Jason Markusoff has a detailed explainer on what exactly is going on—and why the problem will get worse in 2022. 

Global economic trends have a way of mocking predictions. But on inflation, we’re down to choosing between illness and cure, and nothing in the past points to a pleasing outcome. We either pay more in the future to borrow money and service our public debt, or we pay more to do just about anything else. Something’s going to give in 2022, and perhaps for years to come.

Missed opportunities: A scathing new report from the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development, Jerry DeMarco, gives Canada poor grades on its climate change mitigation efforts. Read it here. Per DeMarco, in a statement to media:

Canada was once a leader in the fight against climate change. However, after a series of missed opportunities, it has become the worst performer of all G7 nations since the landmark Paris Agreement on climate change was adopted in 2015. We can’t continue to go from failure to failure; we need action and results, not just more targets and plans.

Worth it? Erin O’Toole’s team spent more than $1 million in party funds to set up the hotel-based broadcast studio from which he did much electioneering, per reporting from Alex Boutilier over at Global News. The kicker, of course: this year’s pandemic-era campaign tour cost a couple of million less than in 2019. Pretty modest next to the $600 million election figure the party is still bandying about in new ads that promise O’Toole is now ready to win against PMJT (despite, of course, his very recent loss). 

That’s Gen., not Jane: General Wayne Eyre is taking over as Chief of the Defence Staff after nine months of doing the gig in an interim capacity—despite his predecessor trying to hang on to the role. Sez new minister Anita Anand in a tweet: “General Eyre and I will continue to work together to build a military where all members feel safe, protected, and respected, wherever they are, whatever they are doing.” Internal culture change was the lead theme of her recent speech at the Halifax International Security Forum, where Canada was asked to up its military game farther afield—something being actively considered, reports the Globe and Mail, as Russian military buildup continues at the Ukrainian border. 

In other job news: Congratulations to Dr. Amita Kuttner, who is the new interim leader of a beleaguered federal Green Party looking to start fresh after the departure of Annamie Paul. Kuttner, 30, is the first nonbinary person, and the first person of east-Asian descent, to lead a national party, per the Greens. They are also an astrophysicist with an expertise in black holes. Maybe that, uh, puts them in a good position to stop the party from slipping into one?

Oh hey! It’s Friday! Press play on a new mainstay in the podcast fray (or is it more of a melee?). “Eh sayers” debuted yesterday. We pray they slay. Okay. Okaaaay. That’s enough rhyming for now. (And for actual poetry, see Maclean’s for takes on the year ahead from poet laureates across the country.) The pod is from Statistics Canada and promises “the stories behind the numbers.” Episode one digs into disability statistics and discusses activity limitations and COVID-19. Happy listening!

—Marie-Danielle Smith

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Next Up? The Globe and Mail notes that a new Chrystia Freeland biography in the works “will feed into a growing perception” that the finance minister will gun for the top job whenever Justin Trudeau steps aside. Myriad unnamed sources cite other possible cues in the form of Freeland’s greater responsiveness to backbenchers and a letter she wrote scolding the CEO of Air Canada for crowing that he’d lived in Montreal 14 years without managing to learn French. Other leadership possibilities trotted out include Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly, Innovation Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne and, of course, Mark Carney.

Kids without enough: A new report from the national coalition Campaign 2000 warns that the battle against child poverty in Canada stalled during the pandemic, and the poverty rate of Canadian kids is likely to be even worse now than the latest available tax data shows. As of 2019, 1.3 million Canadian children, or 17.7 percent, were living below the poverty line. “That’s a pretty significant number of kids who are suffering from the harms and the effects of missing meals, not having the right kinds of clothes and parents working really long hours,” Leila Sarangi, the Campaign 2000 national director, told CBC news. Progress on child poverty was one of the big accomplishments of the Trudeau government’s first term, with Statistics Canada estimating that the Canada Child Benefit lifted 278,000 kids above the poverty line in the first full year of the program. But Campaign 2000 is calling on the government to significantly increase the CCB, warning that at the current pace, it will take 54 years to raise all Canadian kids above that bar. 

Help wanted: Following through on one of their Throne Speech priorities, the Liberals introduced a bill in the House of Commons on Wednesday that would target specific industries and workers with more precise financial support coming out of the pandemic. The hard-hit tourism and hospitality sectors will get a boost if this measure goes through, and it is one of four pieces of legislation the government hopes to pass in a hurry, before MPs head out on their winter break in mid-December.

Enough is enough: British Columbians have barely caught their breath from the flooding that devastated their homes, infrastructure and lives, and now more severe weather is predicted over the next several days that could make things even worse. Up to 80 mm of rain was forecast for certain areas, along with high winds, snow and fluctuating temperatures that have officials worried about river levels and further flooding. Some highways remain closed, clean water supplies have been interrupted and residents have been warned against non-essential travel as the province braces for more punishing conditions.

Thumbs Down: Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole, unsurprisingly, was not a fan of the government’s Throne Speech delivered on Tuesday. In a “fiery speech” to caucus on Wednesday morning, O’Toole vowed to fight what he portrayed as Trudeau’s assault on prosperity, national unity and the oil and gas industry. O’Toole accused the Liberals of being in cahoots with NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh on a left-wing coalition, and, in keeping with Tory messaging over the last few months, took aim at inflation and the rising cost of living, which he and his MPs have blamed on Trudeau’s pandemic spending.

“What is Justin Trudeau’s response? Instead of standing up for Canadians, we have a prime minister who always puts his own needs ahead of yours,” he said, as CBC reported.

Cost of isolation: A new analysis from the parliamentary budget officer estimates the cost of keeping federal prisoners away from the general population in “structured intervention units” that are supposed to mitigate some of the worst effects of solitary confinement. The PBO says that with the 15 units that already exist, the annual cost of operation will be $42 million in five years, but with up to 32 units needed, the price tag could rise to $91 million a year. 

In other PBO news, former PBO Kevin Page, now CEO of the Institute of Fiscal Studies and Democracy at the University of Ottawa, talked to Power & Politics about the factors driving inflation in Canada. In his estimation, high energy costs driven by supply and demand issues, low housing stock and heightened demand as a result of the fiscal supports pumped into the economy during the pandemic are what’s behind Canada’s inflation rate, which is “on the high side” among G7 nations but dwarfed by that of the U.S. Page is sanguine about the potential for things to smooth out if the government winds down pandemic supports soon in order to avoid over-stimulating the economy. “The market is going to have to adjust from a 100-year shock from the pandemic,” he said. 

—Shannon Proudfoot

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Tuesday’s Speech from the Throne was intended to lay out the Trudeau government’s plan to, as the Liberals like to say in their public communications, “keep moving Canada forward.” But at least one constituency following the speech felt a distinct lack of progress by the time the Governor General wrapped up her address.

Academics, researchers and community advocates worried by swelling rates of food insecurity and the rising cost of living were watching closely, hoping the government would promise substantive moves to help the one in seven Canadians now struggling to access sufficient amounts of nutritious food. Their hopes had risen after last year’s Throne Speech, which signalled support to address surging rates of food insecurity, strengthening local food supply chains, supporting farmers in building resilience against climate change and protecting Canadian and migrant workers who play an indispensable role in the food system. 

But as the list of this year’s commitments and aspirations unfurled, disappointment set in. There was no direct mention of food insecurity; the labour shortage in the agriculture and agri-food industry; the impacts of climate change on Canada’s food supply or financial assistance for millions of employed Canadians who fall below the poverty line. 

The speech did commit for the Canada Child Benefit (CCB) monthly payment amount to be adjusted for inflation, claiming it had “already helped lift hundreds of thousands of children out of poverty.” But research from PROOF, an interdisciplinary research group examining food insecurity in Canada, had previously found that the monthly amount for the CCB was not sufficient in bringing hundreds of thousands of households out of food insecurity, the root cause of which is poverty.

“I’m dismayed by the continued rhetoric around the CCB being an effective poverty reduction tool,” said Valerie Tarasuk, who leads the PROOF research team tracking rates of food insecurity. “There are debates surrounding how many people really got moved out of poverty as a result of this the benefit, but there’s no debate about the fact that we still have a horrific problem of food insecurity and families of children.” 

The speech also committed to “combatting hate and racism with a renewed Anti-Racism strategy”—and it is true that food insecurity is an issue that differs across racial lines. Recent research conducted by PROOF and FoodShare Toronto found that Black, Indigenous, and racialized communities are more likely to be food insecure than white Canadians. 

“When we’re thinking about how we approach solutions [to food insecurity], we not only have to think about income,” said Melana Roberts, a board member at Food Secure Canada. “We also have to think along racial equity lines and understand how an anti-racism approach is a critical piece in building healthier, more sustainable communities, which were key priorities in the Throne Speech.”

Still, without evidence-based income policy solutions, the “food insecurity crisis” is only going to get worse, Roberts said. “We’re not going to see the significant benefits in the commitments around disaggregated race-based data, commitments around an Indigenous-led approach to mental health interventions, or the benefits of investment in housing unless we also see an anti-racism and a decolonization lens across the board.”  

The Throne Speech was heavily sprinkled with calls to action—action on reconciliation, action on collective health and well-being, action on climate change, action on rising prices and action on systemic racism. But advocates have heard many of those calls before.

“Action would look like creating new political frameworks that would support regenerative food systems or agriculture,” said Dawn Morrison, founder and curator of the Working Group on Indigenous Food Sovereignty, who thought the speech fell short in addressing the depth of social justice issues that lie at the heart of climate action and reconciliation.

Morrison says viewing climate change through the lens of food is vital, “because drivers of climate change exist in the food system.”

“We need a new framework for thinking of the food system beyond the settler-colonial narrative of just agriculture,”  Morrison added. “Of course, agriculture feeds a lot of people. But the model of agriculture that dominates is having serious impacts on the climate and was designed to favour the top one per cent of the corporations who control the food system.”

Nathan Sing writes about food security and hunger issues in Canada. His one-year position at Maclean’s is funded by the Maple Leaf Centre for Action on Food Security, in partnership with Community Food Centres Canada. Email tips and suggestions to nathan.sing@macleans.ca.

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Land acknowledgements, once a good-faith effort to start a dialogue about Indigenous history, have come under heavy fire since going mainstream. They’ve been criticized for being ineffectual, superficial and essentially a list of names read off a piece of paper. But no one could lob those critiques at Inuk Governor General Mary Simon’s land acknowledgement, which flew in the face of its more casual counterparts. “This land acknowledgement is not a symbolic declaration,” she began. “It is our true history.” She then urged MPs to learn about their own communities’ Indigenous communities, segueing into the hundreds of unmarked children’s graves, which in turn segued into reconciliation, before addressing climate change, the pandemic, housing and other issues ripped from the recent election campaign. As has been pointed out in this publication, there are no new promises to be found, no revelations that diverge from the Liberal platform. But it’s easy to be cynical of the speech, the promises, the land acknowledgments. The governor general has always been a symbolic role. Simon’s appointment was a symbolic victory. And her land acknowledgment, like all land acknowledgments, is a symbolic bit of prose—yet also one worth our attention.

READ: Mary Simon, at the moment she’s needed most
RELATED: Five takeaways from a very cautious 2021 Throne Speech

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The gang’s all back: Gone was the large Zoom screen and swaths of empty seats. The first day of Parliament’s 44^th session featured a basically full house of MPs for the first time since mid-March 2020. Members and observers alike seemed happy to be back. All wore masks, and while the seating order isn’t ideal for social distancing, it cannot possibly be any worse than the classrooms millions of Canadian children have sat in for months.

The sea of returning and rookie MPs was most conspicuous in the Conservative benches, after much speculation that Parliamentary rules on COVID vaccination proof would keep some MPs out. Virtually all Conservatives were in attendance, and save for Richard Lehoux (who tested positive) the few others were away for travel or other non-COVID reasons. Aides announced that all of Erin O’Toole’s MPs were either vaccinated or had medical exemptions, though it remained unclear how many were in each camp.

This gave Government House Leader Mark Holland room to pour more salt on this Conservative wound; he noted that the odds that multiple MPs would qualify for medical exemptions is statistically “extraordinarily low,” given that only 1 in 20,000 would normally have legitimate medical reasons to not get immunized. Candice Bergen, deputy Conservative leader, said the Liberal was “disparaging the House of Commons officials and medical experts tasked with overseeing the vaccination verification process,” CTV News reported.

Duly reelected and redragged: After an election that changed so little in the House of Commons, it stood to reason that the Speakers’ election would deliver a status-quo result as well. Anthony Rota, the sixth-term Liberal MP for Nipissing–Timiskaming, was reelected in the secret preferential ballot against six MPs from various parties. It will be his second term occupying Commons’ biggest, greenest chair—and a residence known as The Farm in the Gatineau Hills—after first getting the post after the 2019 election, when he beat the incumbent Geoff Regan. After he was ceremonially dragged through the Commons by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Opposition Leader (he feigned going limp a few times, he sprinkled his victory speech not only with comfortable French and English, but also Italian and Ojibwa.

It will remain a mystery how the other Speaker candidates fared in their peers’ voting. Among them, Conservative MP Joël Godin and New Democrat MP Carol Hughes were unsuccessful in 2019.

Simon says: While the House of Commons had most of the fun ceremonial proceedings on Monday, the pomp and ornate hats shift Tuesday to the Senate chambers, where Gov.-Gen. Mary Simon will deliver her first throne speech at 1 p.m. This is not one with particularly high expectations around it, given the fact the Liberals’ agenda was already laid out by the party election platform. Government House Leader Mark Holland already laid out much of the Liberals’ immediate legislative priorities—bills on conversion therapy, extended pandemic benefits, 10-day paid sick leave and protecting health workers from harassment, all to be passed by the time the House calls it a calendar year on Dec. 22.

Speculation about what’s in the vice-regal address is fairly low-key—many attempts at French by Simon? Hastily added lines about the flooding disaster in B.C.?—but it’s now abundantly safe to say this will not be the Commonwealth’s worst major political speech of the week. Take a bow (and don’t fall on your face in so doing), U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson. From The Guardian:

Boris Johnson has been criticised by senior business leaders and Conservative MPs for a “rambling” speech to top industry figures that saw him extensively praise Peppa Pig World, compare himself to Moses and imitate the noise of an accelerating car…

He said that “the true driver of growth is not the government”, but the private sector, whose energy and originality the prime minister praised. To illustrate this, he explained: “Yesterday I went, as we all must, to Peppa Pig World. Hands up if you’ve been to Peppa Pig World! “I loved it. Peppa Pig World is very much my kind of place. It has very safe streets, discipline in schools, heavy emphasis on new mass transit systems. Even if they’re a bit stereotypical about Daddy Pig.”

Johnson also imitated the sound of an accelerating car with grunts that the official Downing Street release transcribed as “arum arum aaaaaaaaag”.

Manitoba also has a throne speech Tuesday, the governmental reset by newly minted Premier Heather Stefanson, sworn in two weeks ago to replace Tory Brian Pallister. And don’tcha know, vaccination rules are also causing stress in the legislative chambers over in Winnipeg.

Build back or bust: The landslides and floods in British Columbia have soundly discredited the false dichotomies: the greens versus the bean counters, safety of the planet versus Canadians’ pocketbooks, writes Rick Smith of the Canadian Institute for Climate Choices. This climate disaster has been an economic disaster to supply chains and businesses. Smith observes in Maclean’s:

It’s clear from looking at the washed-out highways and rail lines in B.C. that we need a huge investment in climate-resilient infrastructure. B.C.’s current crisis shows that such investment is the most cost-effective way to protect the services that people and businesses depend on. Canada already has an infrastructure deficit, with governments, utilities, businesses and homeowners already struggling to keep what already exists in good condition; we need to ensure that this deficit is addressed with future-fit, low-carbon infrastructure that builds for the climate of today and tomorrow.

Speaking of climate change, Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault delivered his own report from COP26 in Canada’s National Observer. It was his 19^th climate summit; the previous ones he attended as a climate activist. You’ll be no doubt shocked to hear how proud he is of what Canada’s doing now. While he insists this isn’t time for victory laps, it does appear time for back-patting: “Amid the ups and downs of summit diplomacy, one thing stood out that I wasn’t fully prepared for in Glasgow. Inside those negotiating rooms, and behind the closed doors of my bilateral meetings, I heard a genuine appreciation and respect for the constructive role Canada is playing in the climate fight.”

Far, far, from inside the corridors of environmental decision-making, David Suzuki raised the spectre of violent destruction by activists  if politicians don’t act. “We’re in deep, deep doo-doo,” the legendary environmentalist told an Extinction Rebellion protest on Vancouver Island this weekend. “This what we’re come to, the next stage after this, there are going to be pipelines blown up if our leaders don’t pay attention to what’s going on.”

Suzuki later said he doesn’t support bombing pipelines—“of course not,” he told National Post’s Tyler Dawson—but did say few other options remain for those who feel government isn’t moving rapidly enough. Alberta Premier Jason Kenney was quick to condemn Suzuki’s remark as “dangerous,” and Environment Minister Jason Nixon blasted him for preaching ecoterrorism. More neutrally, B.C. Public Safety Minister Mike Farnworth said “statements like that are not helpful,” particularly during so much displacement due to this natural (though climate-change-induced) catastrophe.

Journalists out of jail: It’s unseemly for journalists to spend three nights in jail for doing their jobs, but at least photojournalist Amber Bracken and Michael Toledano don’t get more, at least for now. On Monday, a B.C. judge released them both on bail after their arrests Friday in an RCMP raid along with 13 others while they were chronicling protests of the Coastal GasLink natural gas pipeline that would run through unceded Wet’suwet’en territory. They were released on conditions, including an order to abide by the pipeline company’s injunction limiting access to the pipeline construction site. The journalists remain charged, with Bracken’s hearing set for February.

—Jason Markusoff

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The Liberals are threatening a showdown today as Parliament sits for the first time since the election amid uncertainty about the vaccine status of CPC MPs, Joan Bryden reports for CP. The issue is coming to a head because Beauce MP Richard Lehoux tested positive for COVID-19 after attending a caucus meeting with his colleagues, an unknown number of whom are not vaccinated. Government House Leader Mark Holland wants the House to verify medical exemptions issued to Tories, while Erin O’Toole is preparing to challenge a mandate on the Hill.

O’Toole has said his party intends to challenge a rule imposed by the board of internal economy, the all-party governing body of the House of Commons, requiring anyone entering the Commons precinct to be fully vaccinated. Given the Conservatives’ mixed views on vaccination, Holland suggested the party can’t be trusted to police its MPs who claim a medical exemption. “I’m deeply uncomfortable with their circumstance,” Holland said in an interview Sunday.

Wheeling, dealing: Holland told the Globe that he is seeking to cut deals with other parties to get the government’s agenda through the House.

One of the Liberals’ top legislative priorities is to obtain approval for an October government announcement that scaled back pandemic wage and rent supports for businesses while extending the duration of the benefits for the hardest hit companies. The government also announced at the time that it was ending the Canada Recovery Benefit pandemic-relief program … Holland told The Globe and Mail he’s continuing to talk with other parties to find agreement on how the new Parliament will function. Mr. Holland is seeking a long-term deal on practical issues, such as continuing to allow “hybrid” meetings, in which MPs can participate either in person or remotely via video link. He is also seeking to determine what parts of the government’s policy agenda other parties may support.

Affordability: MPs would be wise to focus their efforts on the rising cost of living, according to a new poll from Ipsos, which found concerns about rising prices outranks issues like the COVID-19 pandemic, health care and housing as Canadians’ top concern, Global reports.“They’re really focused on what’s going on in their own homes and what’s happening in their own lives, particularly relative to their own personal prosperity,” said Ipsos CEO Darrell Bricker.

Speaker first: MPs will elect a Speaker today, CBC reports, and listen to Mary Simon read the Throne speech tomorrow.

Kenney upbeat: Jason Kenney is feeling confident after a weekend UCP convention, where he received little resistance, CP reports.

Jean on the scene: The Globe‘s Kelly Cryderman reports that although Kenney was not confronted directly, not everyone is united behind him.

Despite the lack of open defiance, divisions in the UCP, and potential challenges to Mr. Kenney’s leadership, were still a key feature of the convention. In conversations on the sidelines, some members and MLAs maintained the Premier lacks introspection on issues of trust, and they criticized his leadership style, which they described as top-down. At least two potential leadership challengers roamed the convention halls at the in-person gathering at a casino hotel on Calgary’s western city limits.

Former Wildrose party leader Brian Jean, a consummate political rival to Mr. Kenney who lost the UCP leadership contest to him in 2017, is seeking the party’s nomination in Fort McMurray-Lac La Biche. He made no bones about his intention to some day seek the leadership of the party. “If the Premier takes this party forward into the next election, we’re going to lose. There’s going to be an overwhelming NDP majority,” he told reporters.

Garneau to stay on: Former astronaut, foreign affairs minister (and leadership rival to Justin Trudeau) Marc Garneau intends to serve out his term as MP, and not, as rumoured, become the ambassador to Paris, La Presse reports (translation).

According to information obtained by La Presse, Mr. Garneau was keen to set the record straight about his political future while Liberal strategists began to speculate on possible Liberal candidates who could run for votes in the constituency of Mr. Garneau, considered a Liberal stronghold, if the latter obtained a diplomatic appointment. The name of former President of the Liberal Party of Canada Anna Gainey was mentioned in particular.

Locked up reporters: The Canadian Association of Journalists is calling for the release of two journalists—Amber Bracken and Michael Toledano—who the Mounties arrested at a weekend B.C. pipeline protest, the Globe reports.

“They were doing their job,” said Brent Jolly, the president of the CAJ. “That’s the real coldness of this whole situation. People are there to serve the public – that’s what journalists do – to be the public’s eye and ears, and this is how they’re treated.”

Jabs for kids: The first batch of COVID-19 vaccines for children five to 11 landed in a Hamilton airport on Sunday, CP reports.

Health Canada announced Friday that it had approved a modified version of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for use in that demographic, and Ottawa immediately promised some shots would be on Canadian soil 48 hours later.

Tests waived: CBC reports that B.C. border community residents will be allowed to cross the border to the U.S. and return without requiring a COVID-19 test or quarantining because of the floods, the feds said Sunday.

In the Globe, Robyn Urbank writes that Canadians should resist the temptation to go to ride roughshod over individual rights in the effort to get everyone vaccinated.

— Stephen Maher

The post Tories under pressure as MP tests positive for COVID-19 appeared first on Macleans.ca.

At least the handshakes went well: When Joe Biden, Justin Trudeau and Mexican counterpart Andrés Manuel López Obrador entered the White House’s East Room for their much-hyped trilateral confab, the three masked hombres sat as far apart from each other as the long table would allow. And it does not appear that Trudeau nudged much closer to getting the U.S. President to inject compromise into Congress legislation that includes an electric vehicle tax credit that could freeze out Canadian-made cars and trucks.

Biden, before his earlier one-on-one with Trudeau, was non-committal on what’s suddenly become the top bilateral issue for Canada, one that could wallop its auto sector. “The answer is: I don’t know,” Biden said, when asked about neighbourly exemptions. “And I don’t know what we’re going to be dealing with, quite frankly, when it comes out of legislation.”

It was the first policy topic Trudeau brought up in the one-on-one, the Toronto Star’s Washington-based Edward Keenan writes:

Meanwhile, over in Congress, the House of Representatives was pushing toward a vote on the Build Back Better economic package—including the Buy American policy—possibly late Thursday night. There appeared a good chance that while Trudeau was still in town making the case against it, the House was going to vote in favour of it. So, maybe not a smashing success story for the Canadian delegation. But then, no one expected success on that file in the form of any kind of decision or announcement in Canada’s favour. The best anyone was hoping for was to keep talking about it as the bill makes its way through the political process. And there’s plenty of process left.

The meeting of the leaders from the old NAFTA zone lasted close to three hours. Their joint statement glided past irritants like trade and (on the U.S.-Mexico border) migration, and was predictably thick with terms like “reiterated” and “commit to launch efforts to enhance cooperation” on matters like climate change, trade and the pandemic.

In a break with tradition, there was no three-headed news conference, leaving Trudeau to hop a few blocks down Pennsylvania Avenue to speak with reporters at the Canadian Embassy. Asked repeatedly about what progress he made on the tax credit issue, Trudeau replied the Americans are “very aware of Canada’s position on this… and the threats it poses to over 50 years of integrated auto-making in our two countries.” The Globe’s Adrian Morrow observed: “Translation: he raised repeatedly, but the Americans aren’t budging.”

Feds go west: Speaking of Team Canada, that’s a term Defense Minister Anita Anand used when talking up the federal response to the catastrophic flooding in British Columbia. Anand was joined at a briefing Thursday by Emergency Preparedness Minister Bill Blair, Transportation Minister Omar Alghabra and Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson, along with Gen. Wayne Eyre, acting Chief of Defence Staff. (Notable absence, given the devastation to Fraser Valley farms: Agriculture Minister Marie-Claude Bibeau, but this was already a personnel-heavy news conference.)

Much of it was platitudinal in these early stages of a (gulp) long crisis to rebuild from, an all-hands-on-deck sort of show, an emphasis on getting people to safety for now—and some clear linkage with climate change, adaptation and rebuilding with resiliency from Wilkinson, the former environment minister. Anand and Eyre had the most concrete messages to send, with 120 pairs of Canadian Armed Forces boots on the ground now in Abbottsford, 350 more ready for deployment from Edmonton for immediate response. “If needed, we have thousands more members on standby ready to help the province,” Anand said.

Logistical support, human support and financial support—British Columbia will need it from Canada. Asked Thursday about any early price tag, Public Safety Minister Mike Farnworth could only say: “It’s going to be an awful lot.”

Biden offered his thoughts during Trudeau’s visit: “I know we are both keeping our minds close to the families affected by the storms flooding the British Columbia area in the Pacific northwest.” It’s likely B.C. will lean on the Americans for more than thoughts, given how many supply chains were severed—Premier John Horgan is already suggested they’ll need support from U.S. fuel reserves, Global News reports.

Kid, this won’t hurt a bit: The news Canadian parents and their kin have awaited for months finally lands today at 10 a.m. ET, when Health Canada officials announce regulatory approval for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for children aged 5 and up. (Don’t expect a cameo by the Prime Minister; his itinerary says his flight from Washington will still be airborne when briefing begins.)

Canada has expected 2.9 million of Pfizer’s kid-sized doses of the mRNA shot to arrive “shortly” after this approval—a first dose for every child eligible, the Toronto Star’s Alex Boyd explains.

From there, provincial governments will rush to set up and announce their own vaccination approaches. A few provinces have offered parents the chance to “pre-register” their kids, but that mostly amounts to signing up for be notified promptly when there’s something to actually register for.

In the United States, which green-lighted the juvenile Pfizer vaccine on Nov. 2, has vaccinated nearly 10 per cent of its newly eligible children in the first two weeks of that country’s COVID immunization program.

Kenney’s dysfunctional family gathering: After the year Jason Kenney’s had, one imagines Alberta’s premier wishes a weekend spent with his United Conservative Party faithful would be a pleasant refuge from all his other challenges. Not so, not at all.

The UCP holds its first in-person annual convention since 2019 this weekend at a casino hotel on Tsuu T’ina Nation, just outside of Calgary. The grassroots are restive, arguing he doesn’t listen much, and more than 20 constituency associations want a fast-tracked and broader leadership review by March. (One’s currently scheduled for April.) There’ve been leaks all over UCP-land pointing to the various ways Kenney’s team will try to tilt the convention votes and motions in his favour—a corporate executive enlisting employees to sign up and rock the convention floor, as Calgary Herald’s Don Braid reports, or the premier’s office telling legislature staffers how to vote to downplay policy motions that don’t jive with Kenney’s agenda, as CBC Calgary’s Elise von Scheel chronicles.

A motion designed to derail an early leadership review gets debated Friday night, and Kenney will shake off the hospitality suite Saturday morning to deliver a pre-lunch address to the delegate’s ballroom. He’ll almost certainly survive this weekend, whether his tacticians prevail or whether the unhappy members do. But it’s hard to see how he emerges stronger, Maclean’s writes in its scene-setter.

—Jason Markusoff

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Officials in Abbotsford, B.C. predicted the worst on Tuesday night, as a month’s worth of rain gushed over parts of the province in just days. Floodwater from the Nooksack River on the U.S. side of the border had poured onto Sumas Prairie, the rich agricultural land reclaimed from what was once known Sumas Lake. A vital pumping station was in danger, they warned, and if it failed, waters from the Fraser River would pour onto Sumas Prairie, too—an even greater catastrophe. 

On Wednesday evening, officials announced the community had narrowly escaped that scenario, after hundreds of volunteers and city workers built a makeshift dam of sandbags around the pumping station, easing the strain on it. 

Still, the area has been devastated, its dairy farms, egg farms and greenhouses swamped. Farmers were forced to abandon their farms, leaving thousands of animals left to drown. 

It was part of a horrific weekend for B.C., which is now under a state of emergency due to the so-called “atmospheric river” that dumped unprecedented amounts of precipitation through much of the province. In an extreme weather event many are linking to climate change, entire communities were evacuated; homes and vehicles were submerged; landslides washed out roads and highways; raging rivers destabilized bridges.

Lenore Newman, the director of the Food and Agriculture Institute at the University of the Fraser Valley, has long warned of the dire effects climate change has on food security and production. The floods in B.C., she says, are partly a consequence of inaction.

Nathan Sing spoke to Newman about the reverberations of the floods on B.C.’s food supply, the history of this key piece of farmland and the long-term implications of political inertia toward climate change. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

When you saw the reports on Tuesday night that the Fraser River could flood Sumas Prairie and the surrounding areas would flood, what went through your mind? 

That was the worst-case scenario, and I’m very glad it didn’t come. I was teaching in Abbotsford when the storm hit on Monday, and we had to close the university because the water came up really quickly. Right then, I knew there was going to be trouble, because the Nooksack River was incredibly high. When the Nooksack breaks its banks, the only place for the water to go is across the border into Sumas Prairie region where the Sumas Lake used to be, and because it is an old lake bed you’ve got to pump the water out to keep it dry. I expected there’d be some flooding, but the scale of it is much more extreme than I originally thought. 

How ruinous is this flood and its reverberations for the people who live in the area?

It’s heartbreaking. I have a number of students and friends who farm in the evacuated region who are off the grid. But farmers are tough, and I really do think most of them will bounce back and hopefully they will have a lot of government support and disaster relief. But farmers care about their animals and there’s a lot of animal loss today. Many of these farmers have also just gone through the heat dome months ago, and we can’t keep having disaster after disaster. We have to start hardening our infrastructure and our farmscape against climate change. If we have two or three states of emergency every year, we can’t weather that long term. The emotional and economic toll is too big. 

Abbotsford is Canada’s most economically productive farming community, with 1,400 farms located within the Sumas Prairie. What immediate impacts could the floods have on the food supply in B.C. and the rest of Canada? 

The main impact is to animal agriculture, but hopefully any shortages or price changes will be temporary. The bigger problem for the food supply chain is the loss of the roads and rail. Eastern and Central Canada are probably not going to notice this as much, but in Western Canada there will be shortages of some goods that are getting hung up here at the [Port of Vancouver] that can’t find a way around until we get at least one road open. This is a bit of a wake up call to how fragile our supply chain is, and that fragility cascades right back across Western Canada. Anything that comes off a ship here has to go on to the road or rail to get across the mountains and there’s only a few routes. Right now they’re all closed.

What food products were most affected by the flood, and how much of this food goes beyond B.C.? 

There has been a pretty massive impact to chicken and egg production. Most of the impacted supply would have stayed within the province. And while B.C. normally doesn’t get eggs, dairy, and milk from other provinces, they will during this crisis because that’s how the supply chain system works. There are other small-scale farms, but it’s the offseason right now. There’s reasons you don’t want your vegetable farm to flood, because floodwater is dirty and it’s really not what you want to talk your crops, but it will dry out. 

Grocery store shelves across B.C. are bare. Is this another case of irrational panic buying, or should individuals in certain areas be worried about food scarcity? 

It’s not entirely irrational, it’s just a bit selfish. We’re going to have trouble getting supplies to these towns for a little while, so running out and buying some things makes individual sense; the problem is then everyone does it. We need everyone not to hoard because this is all temporary, and panic buying everything only makes the problem worse.

Grocery story shelves were emptying quickly in Abbotsford after the flood. (Photo: Beverley Field)

Are cataclysmic events like this something that farmers and experts like yourself in the area foresaw? 

I didn’t expect for a disaster to hit now, and so fast. Farmers are resilient, and they expect the odd cataclysm because nature does that. The problem is the cataclysms, because of climate change, are coming too frequently.  Some can’t take the emotional toll of having a couple of them—and the thought there might be more—in the same year. 

The floodwater on the Sumas Prairie is coming from the U.S. side of the border, having overwhelmed whatever protections there are along the Nooksack River in Washington State. Do authorities in the two countries communicate with each other about these dangers and conditions of the infrastructure? 

There is a lot of coordination across the border to try and protect shared resources. Still though, the Nooksack is a river that floods, and it’s long been thought that we need to do a little more on our side to be able to handle it. There are a few weak points in the local system, where there’s dikes that aren’t quite up to snuff, so we’re not well protected from external threats. The Nooksack River broke its banks in Washington State, so that’s not in our control. But we’ve long known we need to improve our defences against that floodwater because the water doesn’t know the borders. It just comes at us and doesn’t stop.

Can you describe the area and the agricultural operations in the areas affected by the flood? 

The Sumas Prairie was originally a very shallow lake [with the same name] that was drained in the early part of the 20th century to create about 100 sq. km. of farmland. The Nooksack River diverted water into the Sumas Lake—the Fraser River sometimes backed up into this lake as well. So there’s a very elaborate series of dikes and a major pumping station to keep this all dry. The land is mostly used for animal fodder and for grass, it’s very good for that. It’s also excellent soil—you can grow anything there—but there is a lot of animal agriculture. Most of the animal agriculture infrastructure is raised above the lake, which is basically at sea level. 

During this flood, a lot of infrastructure, technology, and machinery was exposed to water. Most tragically, a lot of animals found themselves on shrinking islands of land. There has been mass animal death because there was no way to get them out. We had a lot of farmers put their own lives at risk to try and save their their animals, but the water came up too fast. that speed of rise really caught everyone by surprise. It goes to show how intense the rain was and how unusual it was—we’re talking about 200 or 300 millimetres in a couple of days—and all of that south of the border then came our way. 

A 2013 report from the City of Abbotsford claimed that if the Barrowtown pump station were to fail, it would “significantly impact food producers and food processing companies, and cause job losses which typically takes 5-10 years to recover.” The state of the pump no longer remains critical, but what would happen if it were to fail? 

Yeah, we dodged a bullet. There are four large pumps there, and on an average day one pump is plenty to keep the Sumas Prairie dry. During the flooding, even with all four running, we were losing ground. If the Barrowtown pump station failed—and it came pretty close—the Fraser River would be high enough that it would backfill the original lake. So we would have a lake where lake used to be, and there would have been very little we could do about that other than stand and watch it happen. We probably saw about a third of the original Sumas Lake suddenly returned, which it’s pretty damaging, but it’s not as catastrophic as it could have been. 

What are the next steps to ensure this doesn’t happen again?

We need help from the feds. We need funding for infrastructure repair to immediately begin the infrastructure improvements that we’ve long known we needed to do—strengthening dikes and flood control. We have plans that have slowly been rolled out, but we need to get on it. We’re going to need help with recovering our highways and assessing whether we need more links with the rest of Canada, because it’s very lonely out here right now. We’re on an island, basically, surrounded by ruin. And if it rains hard in the next few days that’s a problem for us, but it looks like it will be dry enough. All of this has to be a budget priority.

There is a political intertia that characterizes responses to climate change, even though disastrous natural events continue to occur. What will happen if the response to the global climate crisis remains reactive without many proactive solutions? 

If we all don’t do anything about climate change—which tends to be the case, despite having lots of fancy meetings—eventually the disruption to infrastructure will break our civilization. It will simply be catastrophic, and more than we can handle. We need to figure out how to pull carbon down out of the air, and at least not be putting any more in. We also have to adapt for the inevitable problems that we’ve baked in by totally dithering for 30 years. Certain things, like sea level rise, we cannot control. Some low lying nations will just disappear. We’re going to lose parts of our landscape that are too close to the ocean. We’re just going to have to live with that. We could have prevented that 20 years ago. We can’t now. Now what we need to do is make sure we don’t make it worse. 

How can the food system be made more resilient against climate effects? 

Anything we can produce indoors and locally, we should, especially in places like B.C., where we have lots of renewable energy that is carbon neutral. We can shorten the food supply chain by producing food locally; doing so is much more land efficient and it allows us to return some land to natural systems. We need to eat less meat or produce protein in different ways; we can’t keep clearing forest to turn it over to animal agriculture. Regenerative agriculture is also a good way to go where supply chains would allow the land to actually be a carbon sink again. Agriculture is one of the only areas where you can actually flip it carbon positive, because 40 per cent of the Earth’s land surface is used to produce food, either through field crop or through grazing.

Nathan Sing writes about food security and hunger issues in Canada. His one-year position at Maclean’s is funded by the Maple Leaf Centre for Action on Food Security, in partnership with Community Food Centres Canada. Email tips and suggestions to nathan.sing@macleans.ca.

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Folks were quick to draw comparisons when now-former Conservative Senator Denise Batters publicly declared her petition to depose Erin O’Toole as party leader. Why, it’s open dissent in the ranks, just like the United Conservative Party unrest plaguing Jason Kenney! If you couldn’t see me flailing my hands in disagreement from Calgary, rest of Canada, let me shoot down this for-now facile comparison. For one, the internal strife Kenney faces runs much deeper, broader and has lingered for nearly a year now (about as long as his governing crew has trailed the NDP in Alberta polls).

The bigger difference, though, is that O’Toole has lieutenants leaping to his side. Melissa Lantsman’s “hard no.” Michelle Rempel Garner saying the “Liberals are popping Champagne.” Bob Zimmer: “an unnecessary distraction.” In his many months of turmoil, Kenney has had precious few cheerleaders, though the rural backbencher who called him “the leader God raised up for these times” now has business cards that call him “Minister.”

READ: Jason Kenney is sinking. How it all went wrong for him.

So when United Conservatives hold their annual convention this weekend at a casino hotel on Tsuu T’ina Nation, the novel utterances won’t be coming from Kenney’s detractors,  like the 20-some constituency associations that demanded a fast-tracked leadership review, or the latest caucus member to publicly air grievances. Like the mating call of a strutting sage grouse, rare sounds will be heard in this Alberta habitat: calls in defence of Jason Kenney. A minister’s warble; a lobbyist’s crow; a campus keener’s chirp; a pamphleteer’s… cuckoo?

How full-throated these trills will be, or how ritualistic they will sound, are open questions. If genuine Kenney loyalists exist, after this many disastrously managed COVID waves and a tanker-load of other problems, now is certainly their time to speak out. We’ll hear from the many UCPers who want Kenney to quit as leader, pronto; perhaps new voices from caucus will join  that chorus, giving the party and public  a truer picture of whether that crowd is pervasive or, as the premier insists, just a disillusioned minority.

More important, though, will be the ones in the middle of the United Conservative base—those who believed in Kenney when he descended from federal Parliament to run Rachel Notley’s NDP out of office, but have found him disappointing as premier. These members are either pragmatically quiet about wanting him gone, or are anxiously hoping he’ll change his ways and become that leader they thought he would be.

Jack Redekop finds himself in that camp, somewhat to his surprise. He’d been a firm Kenneyite before—for a while, he was president of Kenney’s federal Conservative riding association in Calgary, and was an early backer on his provincial leadership bid. This week, Redekop was among the 22 UCP riding presidents who publicly demanded the leadership review now scheduled for next April—a date already advanced once due to internal pressure—be held by March at the latest. The riding presidents also want the vote to be made an all-members, grassroots referendum, not simply an AGM vote among delegates who trek to an Edmonton hotel and shell out convention fees. Those 22 constituencies amount to one-quarter of Alberta ridings, the threshold requiring their wishes be carried out, under rules drafted when Kenney helped birth the United Conservatives in 2017. Now that this grassroots-friendly rule isn’t so friendly to the leader, a party staffer will try during the convention to raise that threshold. To Redekop, that’s the sort of top-down crap that got Kenney into this trouble. “They screw around with this and the party’s dead,” Redekop tells Maclean’s in an interview.

READ: What Jason Kenney’s ‘mission accomplished’ moment has reaped for Alberta

But Redekop doesn’t want others to call him a dissident. Some of the constituency leaders surely want Kenney’s head, many of them rural opponents to COVID restrictions and the vaccine-passport system Alberta eventually imposed. But Redekop counts among those who still think Kenney can regain Albertans’ trust, and even victory in the 2023 election. He can, that is, if he comes out at this convention as contrite for having fallen short on his “grassroots guarantee” to his followers, and seeks to overhaul his approach to governing, with more consultation and listening to United Conservatives and Albertans. “How do you develop a team and a caucus that totally does a 180 in whatever their departments are, [that] becomes completely consultative before they bring in legislation?” he says. “He has to surround himself with a group, ministers and caucus that are totally responsive to listening to Albertans and what they’re saying. Jason has to give very specific direction, and some of those ministers probably need to be changed.”

That’s a mighty big ask, especially of a premier who tends to be stubbornly confident in the rightness of his decisions. Change up his staff, his cabinet and the way he’s led Alberta for the last 2½ years. Yet Redekop believes it’s more simple than it sounds, as long as Kenney remembers and takes seriously the grassroots-y rhetoric that he wooed so many Alberta conservatives with in the first place.

PAUL WELLS: Erin O’Toole, unresponsive

This hope for a radically reinvented Jason Kenney points to one of the premier’s most catastrophic problems in his five years of dabbling in the woolly world of Alberta politics. He got United Conservatives to engage in a tonne of magical thinking. He got his base to believe, among other things, that a wonky referendum on a wonky issue—equalization—would somehow bring the Ottawa Liberals to their knees and rejig federalism in Alberta’s favour. That an inquiry into foreign funding of environmental groups and a well-funded energy war room would humble greenies and give the petro-province an upper hand in the Climate Wars. That by leaning hard on personal responsibility and libertarianism, Alberta could weather the COVID storm and get churning on economic recovery. And that this savvy Ottawa operator under Stephen Harper genuinely wanted to know what Duane and Jane in Two Hills believed should be encoded in legislation, even if that blue pickup truck he toured the province in was an obvious bit of prairie cosplay.

It’s all fizzled—his anti-Ottawa push, his “fight back” antics for the oil patch, his pandemic approach and, in what may ultimately be the fatal self-blow, his proper care and feeding of the grassroots. Now, even as Kenney nears his political deathbed, there are those who believe he can magically become the leader he claimed to be.

Kenney’s leadership will probably survive this weekend’s convention. There’s no measure that can fell him or trigger an immediate review, and his team will no doubt scheme to gain the upper hand over those meddlesome constituencies. People will say mean things about Kenney; others will say pleasant things. But it’s hard to see how he emerges from all of this stronger.

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¡Buenos días! It’s the moment we’ve all been waiting for. Today, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau meets with American President Joe Biden and Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador at the Three Amigos Summit in Washington, D.C. After the requisite small talk (and light cajoling over sports, surely) is out of the way, there are big policy questions on the agenda.

…But, who are we kidding. We are mainly watching out for an awkward family photo.

Last-minute warning: Trudeau spent Wednesday on Capitol Hill and raised concerns with Democrats on an electric vehicle tax credit that’s included in a massive bill they’re trying to push through the House of Representatives “any day now,” reports Alexander Panetta for CBC. (It’s a file on which Ontario has been missing in action, while its trade rep post in D.C. sits empty.)

The PM warned lawmakers about a potential “real negative impact” to American trading partners, since the tax credit would eventually apply only to U.S.-manufactured vehicles, Panetta reports: “The prime minister argued that the tax credit plan flies in the face of decades of continental integration of the auto sector, from the signing of the 1965 Auto Pact to the new North American trade deal.”

By the way, quick international trips like the PM’s (lasting less than 72 hours) will no longer require Canadians to produce a negative COVID-19 test upon return, the government is expected to announce Friday (hat tip to CBC). Cue a chorus of colourful commentary on the arbitrariness of the three-day rule.

Look over there! With everyone atitter about how weak Erin O’Toole looked or didn’t look at his caucus meeting after the ouster of Senator Denise Batters and her choice words Wednesday morning, his party decided to blast political inboxes on a wide variety of other topics. There was, naturally, a plea that the PM stand up for Canadian interests at the Three Amigos Summit. (It’s a good thing they suggested this; there’s just so much to say about the sports.) There was also a screed on inflation, a statement on the ongoing disaster in B.C. and a demand that Liberals scrap Bill C-10. It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s a distraction from Conservative existentialism!

…Meanwhile: Amid the flurry of missives came a different sort of press release. Presumably in response to a plethora of media requests, the office of Senate Conservative leader Don Plett sent a one-liner to all Hill journos in the middle of Wednesday afternoon asking them to “please note” a tweet Plett had posted the night before. (The tweet acknowledged O’Toole’s decision to kick Batters out of caucus, and affirmed Plett’s support of the leader.) … And over at Global News, Alex Boutilier has the scooplet that Canada Proud’s Jeff Ballingall is back in action as an “election readiness” adviser to O’Toole.

Child care is for everybody: So argues our Shannon Proudfoot in a fresh clapback to the commentariat as it chews on a newly-inked Alberta-Canada child care deal. (Ontario, the biggest holdout, is still working on it.)

“It is bizarre and immensely counter-productive that even in conversations intended to be progressive, childcare is often presented in an offhanded way as a boutique women’s issue,” she writes. “You know, a little something for the ladies, in case they want to sell Tupperware to earn pin money while Junior is at his playgroup. This messaging only reinforces the idea that children are the natural domain and default responsibility of their mothers—which is presumably not what the architects of this national childcare plan are after.”

And so is the carbon tax? Manitoba’s new premier, Heather Stefanson, is dropping the province’s court fight against the federal carbon tax and getting ready to negotiate. Reports CP: she’s looking for “a more collaborative approach” with Ottawa… that is, if she gets to keep her job.

—Marie-Danielle Smith

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So, as I was flipping through the day’s news to write up this newsletter, I read my colleague Paul Wells’s column about how Erin O’Toole has gone extremely to ground, even with an attempted public knifing in the offing by Senator Denise Batters, who has publicly petitioned for a leadership review. Paul traces the similarities between 2021 and 2019 for the Conservatives: a mixed-bag election result giving rise to a dump-the-leader instinct, a muddy idea of who the replacement should be, radio silence from the man himself.

Two things can pull together a frayed party, Paul writes, and one of them is the political power currently not afforded the No. 2 party in the House of Commons. So that leaves only option B. “In the absence of a crisis, or indeed much of anything else, a party is left alone with the voices in its head,” he writes.

You’ve Got Mail: And then just as I was thinking about how to write up that column, a new missive arrived in my inbox: “Statement from Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole.” Well, you don’t say. “Senator Denise Batters has been removed from the Conservative National Caucus,” it began. Ooooh. “As the Leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, I will not tolerate an individual discrediting and showing a clear lack of respect towards the efforts of the entire Conservative caucus, who are holding the corrupt and disastrous Trudeau government to account,” O’Toole said.

And in case the broader message wasn’t entirely clear, Dan Robertson, O’Toole’s chief of strategy, tweeted a few minutes later, “Do not underestimate @erinotoole.”

Look, I’m not saying official Ottawa definitely reads Maclean’s, but… <raises eyebrow, taps finger on side of nose>

You Also Have Mail: Okay, wait, I am trying to write this thing in some coherent thematic order but things just keep happening, so let’s just do this live-blog style. So then half an hour after O’Toole issued his statement about giving Batters the boot, she returned fire with a tweet that read, “Tonight, Erin O’Toole tried to silence me for giving our #CPC members a voice. I will not be silenced by a leader so weak that he fired me VIA VOICEMAIL. Most importantly, he cannot suppress the will of our Conservative Party members! Sign the petition: membersvote.ca.”

I think it’s safe to assume there will be much more on this fracas in the news tomorrow, so stay tuned for updates. <Glances back and forth to see what else is incoming> We good? Okay, onward to things that are not the Conservative party gnawing furiously on each other’s legs…

Just Tri Me: Meanwhile, over at the red team, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says that in his one-on-one meeting with President Joe Biden at the White House later this week during the revived “Three Amigos” trilateral summit, he will press Biden on his Buy American policy and emphasize the importance to both countries of continental trade and interconnected supply chains.

Biden’s protectionist stance, popular with trade unions and Democrats in Congress, is focused on the auto sector and infrastructure projects, and many business and industry leaders in Canada have sounded the alarm on its impact and limitations. “Since the election of Mr. Biden, we have talked about our concerns with respect to Buy American, which poses a particular challenge not only for companies and workers here in Canada, but also in the United States, because of the integration of our supply chains and our economies in general,” Trudeau said.

Team Canuck: To that end, Canadian Press reports that the trilateral meetings in Washington between Canadian, American and Mexican leaders will feature a “Team Canada” approach like the one that shepherded through the fractious NAFTA negotiations during the reign of that shouty tangerine fellow you don’t hear much about anymore. New Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly will join Trudeau, along with Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland, International Trade Minister Mary Ng and Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino.

Get the shot or get out: An Angus Reid poll found that a majority of Canadians support people losing their jobs if they won’t get vaccinated. “Almost 70 per cent of respondents supported the idea of firing on-board airline employees, school teachers, police officers, paramedics, firefighters and medical professionals if they did not get COVID-19 shots,” Global News reports. Smaller majorities supported restaurant employees (64 per cent), construction workers (55 per cent) and small business employees (53 per cent) being turfed for refusing to be vaccinated.

—Shannon Proudfoot

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The sun could not have been a more welcome sight for British Columbians as it broke through grey clouds Tuesday morning, following historically heavy rainfall that blew past 24-hour records in Abbotsford, Chilliwack and Hope. Thousands in the province spent the weekend waiting for the deluge to end. The rain caused mudslides, trapping motorists on highways; it forced all 7,000 residents of Merritt to evacuate after flooding the city’s water treatment plant; and it drowned cars, like the one above, on roads, highways and driveways. The reason, experts say, is an unusually heavy “atmospheric river,” which typically carries water vapour north from the mid-latitudes to the Arctic. While many believe the floods have to do with climate change—a warmer atmosphere carries more water, the logic goes—it’s still too early to say so conclusively. But if record-breaking floods continue to follow record-breaking wildfires for years to come, British Columbians who ignore or deny the reality of climate change may find it ever-harder to do so.

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Determined internal opponents moved against both Erin O’Toole and Jason Kenney on Monday, putting both politicians’ continued leadership in doubt.

Global’s Alex Boutilier reports that an anti-O’Toole petition launched Monday by Sen. Denise Batters is not a standalone gesture, but will be part of a “campaign that includes MPs and senators, as well as current and former party officials.”

“This is part of multi-step campaign. This will unfold over the next three months, really over the next six months,” said one Conservative MP, who agreed to speak to Global News on the condition they not be named. A second source corroborated the MP’s account. Both sources said Conservative activists are expected to publicly endorse the petition in the near future.

The anonymous MP said “significant number of caucus members as well as both past and current riding presidents, and riding officials across the country as well as former national councillors,” have signed on to the attempt to get rid of the leader.

Kenney challenged: Meanwhile, in Alberta, at least 22 UCP riding associations have passed a motion demanding an early leadership review for Kenney, the Globe reports.

The dissatisfied local executives argued in a letter to UCP president Ryan Becker that because at least one quarter of associations passed the motion, they cleared the threshold necessary for the party to respond to their demands. The motion calls for a special general meeting, where members could vote in the leadership review remotely. Alberta Premier Jason Kenney quelled a caucus uprising in September by agreeing to a leadership review in April; that vote will take place at an earlier-than-expected annual meeting, meaning members must be present to cast a ballot.

“We are asking – even demanding – that it be one member, one vote. Not just people who can appear at the meeting,” Samantha Steinke, the constituency association president for Central Peace-Notley, told reporters.

Child care deal: On the same day that a significant chunk of his party launched a leadership challenge, Kenney appeared with Justin Trudeau for an announcement of a child-care deal, the Edmonton Journal reports.

Good day for JT: In the Star, Susan Delacourt ponders the events of the day and notes that Trudeau is looking good, at least compared to O’Toole and Kenney, who, she reminds us, are allies.

Just days before the election in September, Kenney emerged with the reintroduction of strict COVID-19 protocols in Alberta, to stem a surge caused by easing up too soon in the summer. Within minutes, Trudeau’s Liberals were delightedly reissuing a video clip of O’Toole praising Kenney’s COVID-19 management. O’Toole promptly went to ground, stopped doing media interviews, and the rest, as they say, is history. So for good or ill, these two Conservative leaders’ fates do seem to rise and fall in tandem, and Monday was another instalment in the saga — on the downward slope. It does raise the question, though, of what has soured Conservatives on two politicians once deemed saviours of the party, in their own ways and together.

Doomed: In the Hill Times, Michael Harris is writing off O’Toole.

That is the deep failure of Erin O’Toole’s leadership. It is one thing to go down fighting the good fight for your beliefs. You pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and await the next fray. You still have your beliefs intact. It is a very different thing to unilaterally exchange core Conservative positions for a more progressive agenda, as O’Toole did in the last election, all because you believe it is the secret sauce for winning. That leaves the base confused. If you lose, as the CPC did, the confusion eventually turns to anger. At the heart of the anger is the suspicion that it was because you abandoned conservative values that you lost.

Doing well: In the Star, Jamie Watts assesses O’Toole’s handling of caucus antivax eruption and is impressed.

Staring down this dilemma, O’Toole acted with a controlled, calm authority that once again demonstrated his mastery of his role. It speaks volumes that most of his response played out behind the scenes, with the leader stepping in publicly just enough to make his views known. No grandstanding, just a firm and sincere condemnation of vaccine skepticism and an even firmer signal that it has no place in his shadow cabinet. What’s more, the response was both clever and wise enough to avoid affording any further oxygen to his potential leadership challengers.

Partisan clerk? The Conservatives and the NDP are calling on the Liberal government to release email and text messages between the party and Commons Clerk Charles Robert, who is accused of acting as a Liberal partisan, CBC reports.

CBC News reported last week that Robert is facing claims that he made partisan comments and shared confidential information with the Liberals that could have given the party a strategic advantage over the opposition in the House. The Conservatives’ deputy leader, Candice Bergen, called the allegations “deeply concerning.”

Harper fund: Stephen Harper is teaming up US businessman Courtney R. Mather to launch an investment fund, Bloomberg reports.

Vision One plans to bet on undervalued mid-sized public companies and to try to create value through governance improvements and other changes, said the person. The firm will focus on companies with market values of US$2 billion to US$10 billion, especially in the industrial and consumer sectors, the person said. Mather and Harper didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

Mather worked at billionaire Carl Icahn’s firm between 2014 and 2020 and served on boards of companies including Caesars Entertainment Inc., Freeport-McMoRan Inc., Newell Brands Inc. and Cheniere Energy Inc., his LinkedIn profile shows. He previously spent 13 years at Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

Icahn was an advisor to Donald Trump until he resigned amid a high-profile New Yorker investigation.
— Stephen Maher

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