It looks like we’re going to end the week on yet more talk about COVID vaccines, because that’s all we can talk about anymore. The news yesterday was that Canada has upped its orders for the Moderna vaccine (which we are near the front of the line for), which is also significant because these ones, while also a two-dose vaccine, don’t need the same ultra-cold chain that the Pfizer one does, so that will make distribution much easier. As well, the federal government offered some further refinement of the priority advice, to say that residents and staff of long-term care facilities should get the first doses, as well as Canadians over the age of 80, followed by healthcare and personal support workers in contact with patients, followed by Indigenous communities (who are especially susceptible to the virus given the living conditions in many of those communities).

On a similar vein, here is a further exploration of the delays to the National Research Council’s planned vaccine production facility, including the fact that even when this is completed, it’s not built to manufacture mRNA vaccines so again, it won’t help with the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines – but perhaps it can with the AstraZeneca vaccine if it gets approval.

Meanwhile, the Commons ethics committee hauled former MP Frank Baylis before them to answer questions about his company being subcontracted to help build ventilators, and lo, he had perfectly reasonable explanations for all of the things the opposition parties deemed suspicious, and the actual contractor for the ventilators is a Conservative donor, and didn’t even know that Baylis was a former MP when he contacted the company because they had the kind of clean room he needed to assemble the ventilators. But this whole affair has been a ridiculous witch hunt from the start, full of lies and disinformation because they could make the facts line up in a way that looked damning even though they aren’t. But this is the game we’re playing, where truth is the first casualty to cheap point-scoring.

Good reads:

• Justin Trudeau is shrugging off the Indian High Commissioner’s rebuke for his support of farmers’ right to protest in that country.
• The federal COVID Alert app had a problem where it wasn’t tracking some cases for about two weeks last month, so that’s unsettling.
• The Chief of the Mi’kmaq nation in the Nova Scotia fishery dispute is blasting the bureaucrats who drafted the memorandum of understanding they are negotiating.
• Economist Andrew Leach gives a reckoning of the cold, hard economic truth facing Alberta and its oil patch, and why tough choices are going to need to be made now.
• Jen Gerson wonders that if we are really in a wartime mindset from this pandemic, where the sense of volunteerism and unifying is.
• Colby Cosh mounts a fairly thoughtful defence of Alberta in light of their worsening pandemic figures, and of the attacks being levelled against them for it.
• My weekend column counts up the number of times that Erin O’Toole has mischaracterized, bent the truth, or outright lied in the past two weeks.

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