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?
It's almost as though a deadly pandemic is a *bad* development that leaves things *worse* than they were before! https://t.co/HhTGfOSfSG
— Stephen Gordon (@stephenfgordon) November 19, 2020
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.