Roundup: Bracing for bad numbers

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Because COVID numbers continue to climb, and more provinces are moving toward stricter measures to try and control the spread of the virus (but not too strict for most – they still have to think about businesses, natch), the prime minister took the opportunity yesterday to meet with the opposition leaders to brief them on the situation in advance of new federal modelling numbers being released this morning, which paint a dire picture of people don’t stay home and limit the number of people they come into contact with. Of course, Erin O’Toole took the opportunity to immediately come out of the meeting and slam the prime minister for the fact that a global pandemic is bad for the economy, while also apparently ordering Trudeau to step into areas of provincial jurisdiction with a “real plan to test, trace, and isolate those who are infected.” Seriously?

With regard to provincial measures, BC has finally made masks mandatory as part of their new series of restrictions, along with trying to restrict non-essential travel while the Quebec premier put forward a “moral contract” for the coming Christmas holidays, which extends the province’s lockdown measures and tries to build in a kind of buffer around Christmas as a way of trying to avoid telling people not to meet up with family at all. And we’re expecting Doug Ford to also announce more “tough” measures today, which one suspects still won’t actually be tough because his sympathies continue to lay with business owners.

And while infections continue to climb and hospital resources get increasingly stressed, we are going to have to watch out for how doctors and nurses are going to start burning out, presuming they don’t get infected themselves, which will make things even harder going forward (and made even worse in some provinces where the government is going to war with their doctors – looking at you, Alberta). Things are serious, and we need to be even more vigilant about this virus.

Good reads:

  • A former Supreme Court justice released his report on the harassment faced by women in the RCMP ranks, and concludes the culture needs a complete overhaul.
  • The government has tabled their climate change accountability legislation, which is the framework that makes their coming Net-Zero by 2050 plan legally binding.
  • The federal Privacy Commissioner has some suggested amendments to the new privacy legislation, particularly around the planned tribunal for fines.
  • Former federal interim Privacy Commissioner Chantal Bernier and former Ontario Privacy Commissioner Ann Cavoukian each assess the new privacy legislation.
  • Here is a look at the current abysmal state of what we’re feeding inmates in Canada.
  • Liberal MP James Maloney is being forced to apologise to the Commons because he was late in filing a Conflict of Interest disclosure with the Commissioner.
  • Former Conservative MP Kellie Leitch complains that people were so mean to her after she left politics that she had to move to Mississippi, and to learn from Trump.
  • If you’ve seen a story claiming that 800,000 people received CERB who were ineligible, here’s economist Dr. Lindsay Tedds to debunk this misinformation.
  • Heather Scoffield hears that reported COVID infections among Indigenous people may be underreported because those in urban settings may not be counted.
  • My column looks at what the next steps to the federal government invoking emergency powers would be, and why it’s more trouble than it’s worth.

Odds and ends:

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