Roundup: Enter Omicron

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If it all feels like a little bit of history repeating, the World Health Organization declared a new variant of concern, B.1.1.529, designated Omicron, yesterday, and in the lead-up to that decision, there was a lot of the same kinds of usual behaviours from the usual suspects. The variant was detected in South Africa (where there is apparently good surveillance), and has been spotted in seven southern African countries thus far. Conservatives demanded travel advisories and wailed that the border needed to be closed – never mind that there are no direct flights between Canada and South Africa – and gave some revisionist history about their demanding the borders be closed with the original COVID outbreak (when they demanded the borders be closed to China, whereas the vast majority Canada’s infections came by way of Europe and the United States).

But by mid-afternoon, the government did lay out new restrictions, but we’ll see how much of it is effective, or how much of it is pandemic theatre.

This is happening at a time where COVID cases have been ticking back upward across much of the country, prompting fears of a fifth wave being on the horizon as people get lazy with public health measures and start taking masks off indoors, or the like, while those who refuse to get vaccinated remain petri dishes for new variants to emerge or for it to enter into new animal reservoirs where it can mutate yet again. Essentially the way out of this remains getting vaccinated and keeping up good public health measures – most especially masking because we know that this is airborne – and maybe we can keep this fifth wave blunted and the Omicron variant largely tamed. But people are idiots, so things could get a lot worse once more.

Good reads:

  • Justin Trudeau spent the day meeting with the mayor of Montreal, then heading to BC to tour some of the flood zones, and announce a committee to guide rebuilding.
  • The government rolled ten paid sick days for federally regulated workers along with the crackdown on harassing healthcare workers into a single bill (which is bad).
  • Jonathan Wilkinson says a pandemic programme to help oils and gas companies cut their methane emissions will be reconsidered after it didn’t perform as intended.
  • A recent NSIRA report says that CSIS skirted the law in a “limited number of cases” relating to protecting the 2019 election from foreign threats.
  • A Charter challenge has been launched against CERB and its successor programmes, saying that they discriminated against the disabled.
  • The murder rate ticked upward in 2020, in part because of the mass shooting in Nova Scotia and an increase in murders in Calgary and Edmonton.
  • After more than a week, no other Conservatives have tested positive for COVID after Richard Lehoux did.
  • Adnan Khan zeroes in on the foreign policy mentions in the Speech from the Throne, and hopes for a revitalization that hasn’t happened in nearly half a century.
  • Jen Gerson rails against Supply Management (for good reason).
  • Heather Scoffield laments the mixed messages on inflation, particularly from the Conservatives, and the lack of serious debate on the subject.
  • My weekend column advises the government to better communicate about the causes of inflation rather than let the Conservatives fill the gap with misinformation.

Odds and ends:

For something a little different, for Xtra I interviewed the writer of the Star Wars: Doctor Aphra comics, Alyssa Wong, on writing the queer Star Wars.

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2 thoughts on “Roundup: Enter Omicron”

  1. O’Toole is deceiving the Canadian people….of course that’s what he does……by blaming Trudeau as the cause of inflation. Hopefully folks will recognize this but I’m not sure. The Cons got lots of votes in the last election based upon lies.

    • Singh helps him by lying about jurisdictional responsibilities. The media refuses to challenge either of them because their corporate ownership wants the cons to win (if necessary, by the NDP splitting the vote).

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