‘Significant’ penalty: Francois Legault announced Tuesday that unvaxxed Quebecers will have to pay a “significant” financial penalty if they persist in not getting jabbed, CP reports.
About 10 per cent of adult Quebecers aren’t vaccinated, but they represent about half of all patients in intensive care, Legault said, adding that the unvaccinated should be forced to pay for the extra burden they are placing on the health-care system. “I think right now it’s a question of fairness for the 90 per cent of the population who made some sacrifices,” Legault said. “I think we owe them this kind of measure.”
A warning: The penalty could pose a problem for the vaccine hesitant and those who face systemic barriers, said Black Health Alliance executive director Paul Bailey: “We know that can further undermine public trust in governments or just the confidence in the vaccine, period.” CP has the story.
Time to act: In a vigorous column, Tasha Kheiriddin, in the Post, argues that the unvaccinated must be deterred from harming others.
It’s like saying “wear your seatbelt, but if you don’t, that’s OK.” Well guess what — it’s not. If you get in an accident, it will cost up to three times more to treat you in hospital than if you were buckled up. Sound familiar? The reality is that we restrict plenty of behaviours where we judge the harm to others, including economic harm, outweighs the limits to individual liberty. We don’t allow people to smoke in workplaces or public buildings. We forbid drinking and driving. And we mandate vaccination for contagious diseases such as measles if children are to attend public school.
Wrong tone: In the Globe, Gary Masonwrites that Erin O’Toole is out of step with Canadian mood when he sticks up for the unvaxxed, and is likely doing it only to fend off a challenge from the right.
It’s doubtful Mr. O’Toole actually believes what he is saying – he just has little choice but to say it. He has his job to worry about and that job is leading a fractious caucus that includes a strident wing of freedom fighters who believe Canadians should not have their rights and liberties “trampled on” by government, regardless of circumstance. Even if that causes a crisis in our health care system.
Mulcair agrees:Writing for CTV, Tom Mulcair makes a similar point, saying that Trudeau, who is emulating Emmanuel Macron’s tough approach to the unvaxxed, is on the right side of public opinion, unlike O’Toole.
There’s nothing more important for a political leader than the public’s perception of you. It’s not something you get to change with a black T-shirt. If people feel that you’re irresponsible, that their protection is not your number one concern, that sticks. O’Toole is not irresponsible. He’s just playing a reckless game and he’ll wind up paying a huge price for it in terms of his own credibility.
Not so fast:Don Martin, also writing for CTV, has a different view, arguing that the privacy implications alone make the Quebec proposal untenable, and with any luck, Omicron will herald the end of the worst of the pandemic.
It’s one thing to mandate vaccinations in teaching or transportation occupations which interact with the public, but a lot more different and more difficult to confront an unvaccinated home-office worker or force a mentally ill person to face a hearing on why they shouldn’t be fined. Above all else, the current number of Omicron variant cases clearly points to this month as a viral supernova event, one that is now flaring into a medical monstrosity before it will likely collapse into a sniffling cinder by summer.
Lockdown support: A new Leger polls finds a slim majority of Canadians support the latest round of lockdowns, CP reports. Fifty-six per cent of respondents agreed governments are making the right decisions. Another 31 per cent said they did not believe Omicron poses a serious health risk.
Adieu, Dr. Arruda: La Presse has two thoughtful columns on yesterday’s resignation of Dr. Horacio Arruda, one from Isabelle Hachey (translation), one from Patrick Lagacé (translation). Both of them think it was maybe a good idea for him to move on.
Mounties get black eye: The federal court ruled Tuesday that RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki violated her obligation under the law by taking too long to respond to investigations into claims of Mountie misconduct, CBC reports.
The Federal Court case started back in early 2014, when the B.C. Civil Liberties Association (BCCLA) lodged a complaint with the CRCC — the watchdog agency tasked with reviewing public complaints against the RCMP — alleging Mounties were spying on Indigenous and environmental protesters opposed to the Northern Gateway pipeline project. The CRCC’s findings, which pointed to gaps in the RCMP’s surveillance policies, were released only in late 2020. The Federal Court case pivoted to look at what’s meant by the part of the RCMP Act that says the commissioner must respond to CRCC reports “as soon as feasible.”
CSIS warns MPs: CSIS is warning individual MPs and senators about influence operations being carried out by China and other adversarial states, the Globereports.
Conservative foreign affairs critic Michael Chong said CSIS officials warned him in a briefing about subversive and coercive foreign interference operations that take place on Canadian soil, including efforts to influence MPs. “It certainly was in reference to China,” he said. However, the MP noted the officials also discussed threats from Iran after he raised concerns. They also told him to be aware of how China uses proxies or business lobbyists.
PHAC probed: Canada’s privacy watchdog is probing federal officials’ use of “de-identified” cellphone location data after the revelation raised concerns with privacy advocates and opposition politicians, who have forced an emergency Commons committee meeting on the issue, Global reports.
Not transparent: PHAC might have avoided the problem if the agency had disclosed what it was up to, writesCampbell Clark in the Globe.
Payette keeps snowflake:Julie Payette won’t lose her appointment to the Order of Canada, CBC reports. An advisory council chaired by Supreme Court Chief Justice Richard Wagner “has concluded that there are insufficient grounds to proceed further at this time.”
Awash in COVID: Omicron has overwhelmed Canada, CTV reports, causing more new cases in 40 days than during the entire first year of the pandemic.
And while the much more infectious Omicron variant appears to cause less severe disease than previous variants of concern, like Delta, the sheer number of infections is still driving up hospitalizations and intensive care admissions, straining already fragile health care systems in many jurisdictions. Hospitalization numbers are nearing or reaching record highs in Ontario, Quebec, and New Brunswick.
But the comparison is likely conservative, with actual infections during the latest wave widely believed to be significantly higher due to factors including difficulty in booking PCR tests in some regions over the holidays, and changes in testing eligibility in provinces like Ontario after the new year. Wastewater data from different parts of the country also indicate that the actual number is much higher.
Do not visit: Canada is so full of COVID that the CDC is advising Americans not to visit, Reuters reports. The CDC has about 80 destinations worldwide on its do-not-travel list.
Arruda out: Quebec public health director Dr. Horacio Arruda resigned on Monday, citing a loss of public confidence in his judgment, CTV reports.
In Arruda’s letter of resignation, obtained by CTV News, he cited recent criticisms of his work but didn’t specify what exactly he was referring to. “The recent remarks made on the credibility of our opinions and on our scientific rigour undoubtedly cause a certain erosion in the adhesion of the population,” he wrote, meaning people’s willingness to follow public health rules. “In this context, I consider it appropriate to offer you the possibility of replacing me before the end of my term of office.”
Back to school: Ontario schoolchildren will be back in their classrooms next Monday, the Starreports. Doug Ford’s office confirmed Monday night that “as planned and previously announced, students will return to in-person learning” on Jan. 17.
N.S. ERs overwhelmed: A Nova Scotia ER doctor says the situation there has never been as bad as it is now.
Patients with serious conditions that require emergency intervention — people at Level 3 of the Canadian triage and acuity scale — were waiting in excess of eight hours to be seen on Monday, he said. That five-level system is used by emergency room doctors in Canada to evaluate the seriousness of patients’ conditions. The Canadian standard for a Level 3 patient to be seen is “within 30 minutes, 90 per cent of the time,” he said.
Omicron exit: In the Toronto Sun, Brian Lilley talks to former Ontario chief medical officer Dr. Richard Schabas, who thinks infection has likely peaked in that province.
Long haul: In Maclean’s,Christina Frangou has an interesting feature on COVID long-haulers, people who are stuck dealing with prolonged illness and even disability.
Conservative estimates suggest that about 10 per cent of Canadians who contract COVID-19 will suffer prolonged symptoms. Some reports put the number closer to one in three. About 1.7 million Canadians have recovered from COVID-19 so far, which means there could be anywhere from 170,000 to half a million people in this country with lingering health issues from the virus. An unknown number are struggling to return to their basic activities of life. “You can be a marathon runner who can’t walk a block,” says Dr. Angela Cheung, a clinician-researcher at University Health Network and a professor of medicine at the University of Toronto who is studying long COVID. “That is scary for many patients.”
Tests and pills: Premiers pressed Justin Trudeau to distribute more rapid antigen tests and hurry the approval of antiviral pills during a call on Monday, Global reports.
Committees! Opposition MPs are pushing for early recalls of two committees to examine the federal government’s current COVID-19 response efforts and use of Canadians’ cell data to inform public health measures, CTV reports. Conservative, Bloc and NDP MPs are requesting Health Minister Jean-Yves Duclos and senior officials to answer questions about surge support to provinces and other pandemic management questions.
MPs also want a meeting of the ethics committee to discuss the Public Health Agency of Canada’s plan to continue using anonymized cellphone location data of Canadians to track travel patterns during the pandemic, the Post reports.
Try booze and weed: In the Star, Susan Delacourt has a thoughtful column pegged on Quebec’s recent imposition of a vaccine mandate for booze and weed purchases. She points out that while people debate the best message for politicians to use to encourage vaccination, it likely doesn’t matter too much what they say about it.
Before anyone gets too focused on what politicians should or shouldn’t be saying to increase vaccination rates, we might remember that their influence on the persuasion front is extremely limited. Even among the general public, very few people would leap out of their chairs to make a vaccination appointment because a politician said to do so. Among the vaccine hesitant, political lectures count for less than nothing: distrust of government goes hand in hand with distrust of what’s in the needle, as any glance at social media would tell you.
Deal with Taiwan: Canada will pursue a foreign investment protection agreement with Taiwan amid its ongoing tension with mainland China, CP reports. The announcement got positive reviews.
Economic fears: Canadians told pollster Angus Reid Institute they are worried about the economic impact of a diplomatic boycott of the 2022 Winter Games in Beijing, CTV reports.
Offered to help:Mélanie Joly offered Canada’s help to the United States imposing deterrence measures against Russia—which could include sanctions—to head off a crisis in Ukraine, CBC News reports.
Mexico deadliest: Mexico tops the list of countries with the highest number of Canadians murdered abroad since 2016, CTV reports. Twenty-five Canadians have been murdered in Mexico since 2016. The U.S. is second (22), followed by Jamaica (17), Philippines (13) and Burkina Faso (10).
Sprawl!The Globe’sJohn Ibbitsonwrites that there’s a simple solution to the housing crisis: let cities sprawl.
Party continues: Canadian partygoers from a controversial Sunwing flight are still stuck in Cancun, the Vancouver Sun reports. “What better way to teach them a lesson,” Jimmy Fallon joked on Saturday.
CBC’s Alexander Panetta has an interesting deep dive into the differences between health systems in Canada and the United States as both countries struggle to deal with the pandemic. We tend to think Canada’s lower ICU capacity has posed challenges, but the data shows some states are facing bigger challenges than Canadian provinces. On the whole, it’s not clear that the American system is faring better.
This pandemic has revealed different deficiencies in each country. In Canada, it’s the mostly public system with fewer hospital beds per capita than the U.S., and far fewer than some European countries, along with many fewer nurses. In the U.S., it’s the mostly private system that costs way more than Canada’s, leaves approximately 10 per cent of the population uninsured, and yields a lower life expectancy and more premature deaths.
On thing that’s clear in both countries: health workers, particularly nurses, have been pushed to the brink.
Funding shortfall: Also at CBC, Aaron Wherry has a good analysis of the policy debate to come. It seems clear we don’t have the hospital capacity we should have.
Frances Woolley, an economist at Carleton University, predicted that COVID-19 would expose the fragility of the system back in March 2020. As Woolley wrote, Canada has the second-lowest number of acute care beds per capita among nations in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and nearly all of those beds tend to be filled. While the total number of acute care beds has declined broadly across advanced economies over the last 50 years as a result of changes in technology and care, the especially low number in Canada can be traced to “a failure of funding levels to keep up with population growth,” Woolley argued.
The best role for the federal government going forward, though, is up for debate. Some favour increased transfers, some want a greater role for private delivery and some propose an expansion of federal support for pharmacare and long-term care.
Doctor shortage: At the Vancouver Sun, Daphne Branham has another interesting column about the bureaucratic barriers that prevent internationally trained doctors from seeing patients in Canada even though we have a shortage of physicians.
Better masks: The Globe has a good story about N95 masks, which offer better protection from infection than the masks most Canadians have been wearing throughout the pandemic. Although they are better, they cost more, which may be why not all provinces are embracing them.
Too far:Robyn Urback, in the Globe, has a column arguing that it would be wrong to deny health care to unvaccinated COVID patients.
No referendum: Philippe J. Fournier, Maclean’s resident polling expert, takes a close look at a poll on regional resentment. It finds that Albertan separatism continues to poll better than Quebec separatism, which would seem to pour cold water on a theory that some have about Francois Legault’s political plans.
This data should help put to rest persistent online rumours that François Legault may secretly be preparing a third referendum on Quebec independence. Although polling has shown that Legault may be the most appreciated premier in the past decades in Quebec, his popularity and nationalist attitude has not translated into additional support for sovereignty.
Can fight:Maj.-Gen. Dany Fortin will be able to continue a legal fight to have himself reinstated as the head of Canada’s vaccine rollout task force will go ahead, CBC reports.
The government, represented by the attorney general, had sought to cut short Fortin’s appeal, arguing it was “moot” — that the role he once held no longer exists. The Federal Court of Canada ruled in October of last year that Fortin should use the military grievance process to make his case, but his legal team appealed the ruling later that month. Fortin’s legal team has argued that the military grievance process is the wrong venue because of how long it takes for cases to be resolved. CBC News reported last month that some military members have waited almost a decade to have the defence department process their grievances.
Fortin was removed as head of the vaccine task force in May 2021, and days later military police referred an investigation around sexual assault allegations to the Quebec prosecution service. He was formally charged in August with one count of sexual assault that relates to an alleged incident in 1988. Fortin maintains he is innocent.
China strategy: Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Jolytold Global Sunday that she is working on a new China strategy, which will be unveiled in the weeks and months ahead: “There’s a growing influence of China in the world and every single country needs to take a decision as to what their relationship will be with China. That is why I was given the mandate to develop a strategy, which is called an Indo-Pacific strategy, because we need to see, yes, China, but also the region as a whole.”
Ukraine strategy: In an interview with CTV, Joly did not rule out the possibility of Canada sending weapons to Ukraine as Russia amasses troops threatening its neighbour: “The most important thing right now is really to work with Ukrainians to deal with their security threats. That’s what we’ll be doing.”
Arizona ally: Canada may find an ally in Arizona in its fight with the Joe Biden government over protectionist auto policies, CP reports.
Jabs for SAQ:The New York Daily News has taken note of the spike in first dose vaccinations after Quebec announced that only the vaxed will be able to shop at provincial liquor and weed stores.
Ratioed: Manitoba cabinet minister Jon Reyes has taken an online drubbing after he tweeted a picture of his wife shovelling snow, CBC reports.
From a strictly political point of view, the pandemic may have acted as a political stress test for provincial-federal relations in Canada. In the past year and a half, we have witnessed a number of bumps in the road between provinces and the feds. To name but a few from an exhaustive list pertaining to the pandemic: While health care is a provincial jurisdiction, it was the federal government that negotiated with pharmaceutical giants for the procurement (and distribution) of vaccines, and although provinces are in charge of elder care, the federal Liberals campaigned on implementing national standards just last fall. Such is politics in a decentralized federation like Canada.
Just before the Holiday break, the Vancouver-based polling firm Research Co. took the pulse of Canadians on their satisfaction with provincial and federal leaders, as well as an interesting measure of provincial resentment throughout the country.
Let us begin with the Prime Minister. To the statement: “My province would be better off with a different Prime Minister in Ottawa”, half of the poll respondents (49 per cent) agreed, while 36 per cent disagreed. Unsurprisingly, majorities in the western provinces agreed that a change in the PMO would be beneficial for their respective provinces. Only in Quebec and Atlantic Canada did more respondents disagreed (and barely so).
Now let’s dive into numbers for the premiers. To the statement: “My province would be better off with a different premier in charge”, results show half of respondents (51 per cent) agreed, and one third disagreed. Majorities in conservative-led provinces of Ontario and throughout the prairies believe their provinces would benefit from a change of premier, with the highest proportion of 73 per cent in Alberta. Only 17 per cent of Alberta respondents disagreed.
Even Quebec Premier François Legault scored lower than in other recent polls on provincial satisfaction: 48 per cent of Quebecers agree that Quebec would be better off with a change of premier. Considering this Research Co. poll was in the field in mid-December, just as COVID-19 infections and hospitalizations were sharply trending upwards, it is not implausible that the pandemic may have begun to take a toll on Legault’s stellar popularity from the past three years. Two weeks prior, the latest Léger tracker had measured an approval rating of 70 per cent for Legault’s handling of the pandemic.
As for British Columbia Premier John Horgan, he once again finds himself among the country’s most appreciated premiers. Only 35 per cent of B.C. respondents agree that a change would be beneficial, while close to half (47per cent) disagreed.
Finally, one question in particular caught my attention in this Research Co.’s survey: “Agree or disagree? My province would be better off as its own country.” Across Canada, 25 per cent of respondents agreed, while 65 per cent disagreed. Breaking the results down by region of the country, we find that the proportion of respondents who believe their province would be better off as a country jumps to 38 per cent in Alberta and 30 per cent in Quebec (see full tables here).
Naturally, we must be careful with regional subsamples, as their uncertainty is higher than with the full sample. Nonetheless, we note that nearly one-third of Quebec respondents believe that the province would be better off as a separate country, which is consistent with the most recent figures on Quebec sovereignty (since Quebec sovereignty has not been on the radar much in the past years, polls on the topic have been less frequent).
Nevertheless, if we dive into the Quebec results in more detail, we find that only 16 per cent of Quebec respondents “strongly agree” with this statement, with another 14 per cent saying they “moderately agree”.
This data should help put to rest persistent online rumours that François Legault may secretly be preparing a third referendum on Quebec independence. Although polling has shown that Legault may be the most appreciated premier in the past decades in Quebec, his popularity and nationalist attitude has not translated into additional support for sovereignty.
As for Alberta, 16 per cent of respondents “strongly agree” that the province would fare batter on it own, while another 22 per cent “moderately agree”. According to Research Co. CEO Mario Canseco: “Separatist sentiment in Alberta is currently near the levels observed in December 2019 (40 per cent)”.
Resentment towards Ottawa has undoubtedly grown in Alberta since Trudeau and the Liberals won power in 2015. However, let us recall that the pro-Western independence Maverick Party took a measly 1 per cent of the Alberta vote in last fall’s federal election, while provincially the Wildrose Independence Party has been polling between 5 and 15 per cent for most of 2021 (WIP’s very best poll was 20 per cent of voting intention province-wide, as measured by an Angus Reid survey in June 2021).
Regional resentment and separatism will always be something to watch in this country, such is the reality of living a vast, diverse and multinational state. Interestingly though, available data thus far shows that the pandemic has not significantly moved the needle on those resentments.
We can’t know yet if Omicron will hit Canada like it hit South Africa, with a wave that falls as quickly as it rose, so Canadian health officials are bracing for a tough slog, writesPatricia Treble in Maclean’s.
The big concern is our health care system. Though 82 per cent of Canadians have at least one dose of vaccine, that leaves nearly one-fifth of the population unvaccinated. And with unprecedented numbers of COVID-19 infections—including a big spike in cases among seniors—that means the number of people eventually needing hospitalization could overwhelm the system.
Treble also lists the things you can do to reduce the risk, to yourself and the system. At the top of the list: get a respirator and avoid indoor crowds.
Under pressure: Omicron is wreaking havoc in Canadian hospitals, the Postreports, but they were already struggling with staffing problems.
Even large, urban hospitals and medical systems have been strained by lack of staff. While news about staffing shortages due to COVID-19 infections among health-care workers and burnout have become commonplace during the pandemic, officials are raising the alarm again amid record numbers of cases due to the highly transmissible Omicron variant.
Not working: In the Globe, Robyn Urback writes that Canadians need to recognize that our health care system is not up to the job and make changes.
This pandemic should prompt Canadians to reckon with the reality that our health care system isn’t working. Indeed, when a province of millions is brought to a virtual standstill by the prospect of a few hundred additional people in acute care beds, that fact is undeniable.
Open the system: In the Vancouver Sun, Daphne Bramhampoints out that an “estimated 5,000 internationally educated doctors are here and eager to work, but are unable to leap the licensing barriers,” which seems absurd when the system is breaking down. But, Bramham writes, the system allows “Canada’s medical profession to operate like a closed-shop union.”
Backing the unvaxxed:Erin O’toolespoke up for the unvaccinated on Thursday, CP reports: “There is going to be as much as 15 per cent of the population that is not vaccinated. In some cases, you will have to try and find reasonable accommodations between keeping people safe and people not losing their job, losing their home, not being able to provide for their kids. I don’t think that position is irrational when people’s lives are on the line.”
Meeting urged: O’Toole called for an emergency meeting of the House of Commons Health Committee to examine the federal response to the pandemic, CTV reports. O’Toole blames Justin Trudeau for lockdowns: “In a population that is now largely fully vaccinated, in fact the action and inaction by the Trudeau government is normalizing lockdowns and restrictions as the primary tool to fight the latest COVID-19 variant.”
Endorses settlement: O’Toole also endorsed the Liberals’ negotiated $40-billion agreement in principle that Ottawa negotiated on First Nations child welfare, the Globereports.
Opener borders sought: The travel industry wants Ottawa to ease travel restrictions, as other countries are doing, the Globereports.
Hawkish adviser: The Globe has a story about Trudeau’s new national security adviser, Jody Thomas, who is seen as a China hawk, having spoken frankly about the threat posed by that country at a security conference last year.
Fêtards in trouble: The Quebec influencers who set off a media circus when they shared videos of their crazy flight to Cancun are in trouble. Some of them have lost their jobs, Le Journal de Montréalreports (translation). The organizer of the flying circus has attacked the airlines, Global reports. The sorry saga continues to make headlines around the world.
Singh a dad:Jagmeet Singhannounced Thursday that he and his wife, Gurkiran Kaur, welcomed a baby girl into the world on Monday, CP reports: “Our powerful little baby girl is basically my birthday present for life.”
“When kids don’t go to school, they don’t sleep,” writes Shannon Proudfoot of Maclean’s in an eloquent and heartfelt lament for lost school days. “They have too much energy that hasn’t been used, and a deep, under-the-surface sort of surly sadness that comes of being isolated.”
A somewhat chewed up Proudfoot, who makes a good argument that the powers that be are too quick to cancel school, takes us through a day of the ridiculous reality of “virtual learning.”
So how do you do this? How do you do this and do your job? How do you do this and feel like you are even remotely giving your kids what they need? How do you do it and feel like you are giving your job and your adult, outside-the-house self anything close to what it demands? How do you do this while hearing that nothing is more important than our kids, but knowing that at no point will a decision be made that upholds that bromide? How do you do it while countless medical officers of health state plainly that schools do not drive transmission and they are essential?
Wynne speaks: Kathleen Wynne sat down with Paul Wells, of Maclean’s, for a long, revealing interview, discussing her struggles in politics. She is frank about what she sees as mistakes, and philosophical on the subject of her loss to Doug Ford, who she spoke up for after he encouraged people to enjoy their March break as the pandemic was gathering force. She observes that COVID has been good for Ford.
Ford was — and I want you to take this in the right way — COVID has been very good for Premier Ford. Because before COVID, he really had no agenda. He didn’t know what he was doing. That’s my opinion, having watched him in the legislature and having watched his policy. He came in to tear down what we had put in place, and he did that for the first couple of years. And then before COVID hit, there were real conversations among those of us on the other side of the aisle: ‘What are they going to do now? We don’t know what they believe in. We don’t know what they want to do.’ So what COVID did was it focused him. You know, it gave him a reason to stand in front of the people of Ontario.
Angry at unvaxxed: Justin Trudeau said Wednesday Canadians are “angry” with the unvaccinated, CTV reports: “People are seeing cancer treatments and elective surgeries put off because beds are filled with people who chose not to get vaccinated; they’re frustrated. When people see that we’re in lockdowns, or serious public health restrictions right now because [of] the risk posed to all of us by unvaccinated people, people get angry.”
A slap in the face: Trudeau took aim at the Quebec reality TV stars and influencers who partied on a charter flight to Cancun, Global reports: “It’s a slap in the face to see people putting themselves, putting their fellow citizens, putting airline workers at risk by being completely irresponsible.”
The saga of the misbehaving influencers landed with force in Quebec, where the government has imposed a curfew and other restrictions that have the public in no mood for airborne shenanigans. Hugo Dumont, in La Presse, has a breezy column on the sorry story (translation). Le Journal de Montréal has the lowdown about a would-be pilot captured on video vaping.
Blameless PM: CTV’s Don Martinwrites that in his presser Wednesday, Trudeau took pains to blame the premiers for Omicron woes, without acknowledging the funding gap that has the provinces struggling.
That’s why today’s announcement of rapid tests by the millions shouldn’t let the feds deflect all the blame in coping with COVID. They remain the shortchanging partner in funding a health care system with a comparatively low number of intensive care beds compared to other G7 countries.
In the Globe, Campbell Clarkwrites that the Prime Minister’s pandemic pep talks are wearing thin.
That warning has been heard so regularly in this pandemic that it will serve as a reminder that Canadian primary health systems, in jurisdictions from coast to coast, are stretched too thin. That’s inevitably the case now, when the Omicron variant has spiked cases and kept infected hospital staff from working, but it’s also clear the system was strained before the pandemic and didn’t have excess capacity for critical care. Provincial premiers, who are responsible for health care, will find voters will expect them to do something about that for the future. And Mr. Trudeau, who just ran an election campaign full or proposals for health care services that aren’t in his jurisdiction, can’t expect to escape those pressures, either.
American danger: In the Globe, Andrew Coyne makes a convincing argument that American democracy is under serious threat from an unhinged GOP base, and warns that this will be an existential challenge for Canada.
If we can no longer count on sharing a border with a stable, democratic, and peaceful partner, then all of the other assumptions on which the Canadian nation-state is based are in doubt.
Failed escape attempt:Vice has an in-depth report on what appears to have been an incompetent border-crossing attempt by far-right hater Kevin J. Johnston, who apparently had to be rescued by the border guards he meant to avoid.
Among the small number of Ontario Liberals who knew Kathleen Wynne would be speaking to Maclean’s, there was considerable nervousness. Wynne was Ontario’s premier for six years, the first woman and first openly gay premier. She won re-election handily in 2014, but in 2018 the party suffered its worst defeat since Confederation. Why talk now, with a new election coming in June? We told her: Because your opponents will run against your record anyway. So you might as well talk. She spoke with Maclean’s senior writer Paul Wells in Toronto. This version of the interview is considerably longer and more detailed than the version we’re publishing in print, but in both cases questions and answers have been edited for length and clarity.
Q: This is the first election year since before 2003 where you’re not involved. What’s that like for you?
A: That is bittersweet. It’s hard. You know? I went canvassing with the new candidate in Don Valley West and I was saying to Jane, as I was driving into the city, it’s surreal that I’m going now to knock on doors that I’ve knocked on so many times. I just know I’m going to see people who I’ve worked with, who have supported me. And to not be talking about the work we’re going to continue to do is really hard. I love the job, you know? And I love that part of it, being a local MPP. I love the engagement with people on their issues.
In some ways it’s a relief. We’ve got a good candidate and I’m happy to be working for her. But it is a very strange feeling, not to be engaged in what’s coming, and not to have any direct influence on what’s going to come next. That’s very strange.
Q: Are there things you don’t have to worry about that you’re not going to miss?
I won’t miss the vitriol — being directed right at me, but [also] at people I care about and people who I believe in. At least, when I’m not a member, I won’t have the obligation to be there and listen to it. Whether you’re sitting in government or not, and now I’ve sat in both, there’s vitriol that flies back and forth. It can wear you down.
Q: These last three and a half years have been the first time that you sat in opposition. Were there surprises about being on the opposition side?
A: Well, I mean, we’re not only in opposition. We’re the third party.
Q: So you’re not even the fun opposition.
A: We’re not even the fun opposition. We don’t even have the resources to be a functional opposition, you know? I think the freedom of being this tiny little rump and doing whatever we could to poke at the government and to make our voices heard — I mean, there’s been some freedom in that and that hasn’t been all bad. It’s been pretty much all bad but there’s been a sliver of — this is kind of taking me back to my activist days, you know.
Yes, this is the first time I’ve sat in opposition. But the time that I spent in the legislature before I was an MPP, Paul, a lot of the time I was on the verge of getting kicked out. Because I was so aggressively opposing what Mike Harris was doing. In fact, security people recognized me when I arrived at Queen’s Park as a member. But they thought it was because I’d been around as a member. ‘Oh, yeah, you’ve been here for years.’ Yeah, you’ve been kicking me out for years.
Q: After the 2018 defeat, was serving out your full term, until 2022, always the plan?
A: Right after the election there were a lot of people, including people related to me, who said, ‘Just get the hell out. How can you keep going down there?’ But I was elected in a sweep that went the other way. I just felt strongly that I needed to stay there. Obviously, I did not want to be the catalyst to a by-election. That felt like an unnecessary hassle for the party. And if I could be at the legislature and do no harm, that felt to me like the most responsible path.
(Photograph by Wade Hudson)
Q: If you ran for re-election, would you hold Don Valley West?
A: I believe so. I think I would do better than last time. We didn’t win with a lot of margin — a couple hundred votes. So I actually think I would do much better this time.
Q: How come?
A: Because I think there are a lot of people who were mad in my riding who voted NDP. That still didn’t get them a progressive voice. The NDP still wasn’t able to to beat me. And they ended up with a Conservative government.
So I think they would come back to us in a riding like mine. And certainly, if you look at the polling numbers, Toronto is looking very Liberal right now.
Q: Liberals and New Democrats in this province still, and kind of probably always will, have unfinished business between each other. Sometimes it seems that the acrimony is fiercer between those two than between, say, Liberals and Conservatives.
A: It’s visceral. I think we are close enough in terms of our philosophies that we regularly eat each other’s lunch and I think that is really hard to stomach on both sides. You know, when Andrea Horwath brought out her platform in 2014 we were way to the left of her. She had, you know, a page on education. We had a full-blown education strategy.
So I think the Ontario NDP and the Liberals have done a dance over the years as to who is going to be the progressive voice. We’ve definitely carved out the centre-left. The NDP, for whatever reason, has not chosen to go far left. They’ve stayed in the centre with us. That’s made it really hard to impossible for them to be elected. But it hurts us. Obviously it hurt us in the last election. Enormously.
Q: Are you surprised that Andrea Horwath seems set to run again as NDP leader and that the NDP seems content to let her run as leader again?
A: Yeah, I didn’t think she’d run in another election. This will be her fourth. I think it must have been a personally hard road for her. I believe if they were going to win an election, it would have been the last one. But you’ll have to talk to them about their perspective. That’s from the outside. I’m not a pundit, I don’t have projections. I don’t know where we’re going [in the next election].
Ford was — and I want you to take this in the right way — COVID has been very good for Premier Ford. Because before COVID, he really had no agenda. He didn’t know what he was doing. That’s my opinion, having watched him in the legislature and having watched his policy. He came in to tear down what we had put in place, and he did that for the first couple of years.
And then before COVID hit, there were real conversations among those of us on the other side of the aisle: ‘What are they going to do now? We don’t know what they believe in. We don’t know what they want to do.’ So what COVID did was it focused him. You know, it gave him a reason to stand in front of the people of Ontario.
I’ll just tell you a quick anecdote. He called me after a radio show that I had done with Jerry Agar in March of 2020, like the day after it became clear that this was going to be an issue. He had said to people at the beginning of March break, ‘Go away, have a good time.’ Jerry Agar asked me what I thought about that. And I decided I was going to give him benefit of the doubt, because it was such a serious thing that he was dealing with. I said, ‘You know, I think that the premier was speaking from the bottom of his heart. He was genuine. He was trying to give people support and he wants people to be happy.’ But I said, ‘You can’t freelance. You just can’t freelance in situation like that. You have to be very careful about what you say.’
And he called me afterwards. He said, ‘Thank you for that because I was trying to be genuine.’ He asked me if I had any advice and I said, ‘Now you need to be at the podium every day with your minister of health and you need to be telling people what is going on.’ He didn’t do it because I said that’s what he needed to do. But because he did that for the first year, people see him differently than they ever would. So I don’t know where the election’s going to go, but for sure the Doug Ford that emerged during COVID, because he could read the teleprompter, because he seemed to have a relatively even hand — even though there have been enormous mistakes — he’s better off than he was before.
Q: Stay with that call for a second. Stipulating that everybody involved is operating in good faith, those calls must be the weirdest things to actually sit through. He spent 2018 trying to take your face off. And then he’s honestly calling to thank you and asking for advice. That must be surreal.
A: It is. And for my part, I’m trying not to be defensive and angry. I’m digging for my best self. It’s just, like, ‘Be kind. Be kind to this person.’ Because you know he’s at sea. I remember even during the ice storm that we had at Christmas 2013. I’d been in the premier’s chair for a few months. You just do your best. There’s nobody who can tell you exactly what to do. You make mistakes. And if you can talk to somebody who’s been in the position that you’ve been in, you want them to be genuine. That’s what I was trying to.
Q: Earlier, you talked about getting elected to the legislature after having gotten kicked out of it a few times. Once you get into a governing caucus is it hard to put that activist genie back in the bottle? Governing, almost from the get-go, is going to be a series of compromises. Was that hard for you?
A: I was a back-bencher for three years. I wasn’t in cabinet right away, which was a blessing for me because it gave me an opportunity to acclimate to the culture of the place. And honestly, I tried not to lose the activist impulse, the desire and the need to speak out when I thought something was going wrong, and to try to keep us as a group on track.
But what I understood, because I love a team and I understand a team, is that that activist person would be in the caucus. If I were going to rant, I would rant in the caucus. And I tried not to rant early and I tried not to rant often.
Q: Almost any government that lasts a while comes to office and they say, quite reasonably, ‘Everything’s broken. We’re here to fix it.’ But over time you you develop ownership over the processes, over the results, and it’s hard to escape the instinct after a while to say, ‘Everything’s fine.’ And instead of defending change you’re explaining why things can’t change. Is that something you feel while it’s happening?
A: It’s government-itis, right? I think it creeps up on you. I don’t think you’re really conscious of it when it’s happening. I think when we got into situations like defending what had happened around the decisions around the gas plants you realize, holy mackerel. How did this happen? How did we get here? Which parts of this were we not paying attention to?
My taking on the role as leader gave us an opportunity to reset a bit. Although I was always adamant with my team that I was not going to pull out the howitzers and try to distance myself from everything that we had done. I’d been a minister in four ministries. If you’ve sat at the cabinet table for six or seven years, you can’t disavow everything that has been done.
It is a real challenge. I don’t know what the solution is, except continuing to pay attention to people on the outside of government and really listen to what they’re saying. We did that some of the time. On some files, we did not.
Q: Where would you score yourself lower on the listening?
A: Well, I score myself very low on the electricity price. I believed that the investments that we had made in the electricity sector were important. The first bill I ever spoke to in the House, before I made my maiden speech, was Bill 100 which was the beginning of the transformation of the electricity system. We were going to make big changes in terms of the the supply mix and greening the grid and investing in the grid. I think it’s 50 billion dollars that we invested in upgrading the grid. I believed in that.
But I remember sitting beside Gerry Phillips [Dalton McGuinty’s minister of energy at the time] in many meetings and and he would say, ‘We’re piling up a lot of debt here. Electricity prices are going to have to go up. How are we going to pay for this?’ I heard it. But as a member of caucus and cabinet, I don’t think I took it seriously enough.
Then when I was premier, obviously the fact that I made the decision to sell off part of Hydro One fed into that — the conflation of those issues. It was absolutely a huge factor in my downfall.
Q: How do you read the backlash to the Hydro One sale? What was Ontario saying to you about that?
A: Well, I think the NDP capitalized really well on it. And what they helped the people of Ontario say is, ‘By selling Hydro One you have made our electricity prices go up.’ Which actually wasn’t true. It was all that other stuff that I was talking about. But that’s what people believed.
I also think that people of Ontario were saying, ‘You’re selling off this precious resource that we’ll never get back,’ because I believe they understood the sell-off to be Niagara Falls. I believe they thought I was selling off generation [capacity] and I wasn’t. I was selling off transmission that had already been separated from generation. It was already partly private. But nobody cared about that. I really think the NDP were able to say, ‘Look, these are Liberals who privatize and they’re privatizing your hydro.’
Q: My own sense is that in the last years of the Liberal government, there was a sense of getting further and further away from hard tradeoffs. So the Hydro One sale felt like, ‘I need to improve my front porch so I’m going to sell the garage.’ And Ontarians were like, ‘We’re not ahead in this exchange.’ Then you put real effort into getting to zero deficit —and in your last budget, suddenly the deficit’s huge again.
A: Yeah, I know. I grappled with that call. The whole time I was premier we were working hard to balance the budget. We were holding healthcare costs down. If I had to do it again, given what I know about COVID, I probably wouldn’t do that. And people believed that I was a flaky left-winger, so I felt like I had to let people know that I actually am a fiscally responsible politician. Because I am in my personal life. I don’t live beyond my means. I’m not a wealthy person, I never have been. And I believe that we should pay as we go, to the greatest extent possible. But I also believe that human beings need what they need. And if as government we can provide supports then we should be doing that.
I still think about that 2018 budget. Had we stuck with balance and maybe just done one big thing — had we just done long-term care or if we’d just done pharmacare, you know, had we chosen one thing — would that have helped in terms of our electoral chances? Maybe. Or would we not have gone down as badly as we did? Maybe. Who knows?
Somebody who was very close to the McGuinty team, I had lunch with them after the fact, and he said, “We shouldn’t have won in ’11. We certainly shouldn’t have won in ’14. And you were never going to win ’18.” And I kind of believe that we were on that trajectory.
So I made a decision that I would be very clear in ’18 about what I thought we needed. And honestly, everything in that budget has been demonstrably needed. And COVID has exacerbated the need for those things. But there’s nothing that we put in that budget — whether it was the labor laws and sick days, and making sure people could piece together a full-time job and not have to go to a million different places, particularly PSWs, or whether it was childcare. Now, we didn’t have a federal government who was chipping in [on child care] at that point, but I perceived that putting it in our budget, like with pharmacare, was going to push the federal government. And I think it did. So I made a decision that the 2018 budget was going to point in the direction that I really believed the province needed to go. And I regret it politically, but I do not regret it in terms of substance and policy.
Q: The trajectory that your McGuinty associate described — 2011 was rough, 2014 you should have lost, 2018, you were always going to lose — are your federal Liberal cousins on any kind of similar trajectory?
A: Oh my God, you’re not gonna drag me into that. You know how hard I campaigned for Trudeau in ’15. I put a lot on the line to get him elected and I’m thrilled he’s there. And, you know, I think his government’s done an enormous amount of good. And I actually don’t think they’re on that trajectory. I actually think they can get reelected. Remember, they’ve only been in office, what? Six years? By the time 2018 came around, we’d been in office for 15 years. It’s a very different scenario. So, I don’t think they’re on that trajectory.
I just said I wasn’t going to weigh in, but now I have.
Q: Why were people so angry at you at the end?
A: Yeah. I will go to my grave not knowing fully the answer to that question. I mean, they were angry at an old government. They felt that we’d been there a long time. They were still angry about things that had happened under the previous government. [Our campaign director] David Herle will tell you that we heard more about gas plants in 2018 than we did in 2014. So there were some touchstone issues that could be dragged up and they were symbolic of scandal. But I don’t know, Paul.
I still think that there was an element of, “This woman just bugs us. We gave her a shot, and I’m not supposed to be homophobic or misogynist, so I either didn’t vote or I didn’t yell at my wife for voting for her, and I just sat on my hands or whatever in 2014. But goddamn, this time I’m gonna tell her what I think of her.”
We’ll never know where misogyny and homophobia played into that.
Wynne arrives to speak at the Bloomberg Economic Summit in Toronto, May 13, 2014. (Galit Rodan/Bloomberg/Getty Images)
Q: Steve Paikin interviewed you and I was a little surprised. The fact that you were a woman leader, you were inclined to attribute a pretty small fraction of your loss to that. But I guess in a political context, any drag is unwelcome drag.
A: I just don’t know how to quantify it. That’s the thing. It doesn’t show in the polls because nobody’s going to say, “I hate her because she’s a woman and I hate her because she’s a lesbian.” That’s not how Ontarians view themselves. We believe we are open. We believe that we’re inclusive.
And I will never blame the people of Ontario for not voting for me because they were homophobic or misogynist. I just, I just don’t believe that’s the case. If I had been a new premier in 2014, I would have had a much better chance, and then we wouldn’t even be talking about the female fact, you know.
So it’s complicated. Stuff adds up. It’s cumulative, for sure.
What I’m reading
Among the best books she’s read in recent months, Kathleen Wynne counts two novels by Richard Wagamese and a non-fiction work by two Toronto doctors. Also on her list: some bedtime reading. (Click through this gallery)
Starlight, by Richard Wagamese (novelist, poet and journalist from Wabaseemoong Independent Nations in northwestern Ontario)
As well as Medicine Walk, by Richard Wagamese
Damaged: Childhood Trauma, Adult Illness and the Need for a Health Care Revolution by Robert Maunder and Jonathan Hunter (psychiatrists at Mount Sinai Hospital, Toronto)
“None of these is light reading, and I can often be found with a mystery novel just before I sleep. Right now I am reading one by Ann Cleeves, The Moth Catcher, part of the Vera Stanhope series.”
Q: Whatever else happens now, at some level, you’re free. What do you do now?
A: Well, I’m teaching a public-policy course at U of T and I will be doing that for the next two years. I love the young people, I love the questions, I love their openness and I feel like it’s important.
You know, I’m a pretty optimistic person. I really believe in the the ability of human beings to be good. I think we are good. I think life is hard on people and it makes them do bad things, but I think people are good. And I think we can solve our problems by supporting each other.
I feel with young people right now, there’s a real danger of hopelessness and pessimism. The world’s a freaked-out mess, you know. It really is. And I want to be somebody who’s been through a lot, and has been kicked, and I really want to say to young people, ‘We cannot give up. We have to keep trying.’
I’m going through the files in my office because the provincial archive wants everything. And so I need to pull out the things that I want to make copies of, and have close to me, as I go through whatever time I’ve got left on the planet.
And I look at the reports we did — whether it’s women in sports, or it was the sexual assault and violence policy we brought in, the work we did with Indigenous women — we really invested in things that hadn’t been invested in before, and we really listened to voices that had been silenced. And I know for sure that part of that is because I was a woman. And a woman in leadership can make a big difference.
And because I lost in 2018, that’s kind of my political identity now: I wrecked the Liberal Party of Ontario and I lost so badly. But that was not my work. My work wasn’t about getting reelected. My work was about doing the things I believed in and staying true to why I’d gone into politics in the first place.
So, I’m not making excuses. But where I am at in my life right now is, I need to talk about those things. I need to talk about why those things are important. Because we sure as hell haven’t gotten them all right. We’ve taken steps backwards. And we’d better listen to the people who know what kids need. And what old people need. And the people who are holding our society together, the caregivers. We’d better listen to what they’re saying because otherwise we’re going to continue to screw it up.
This article appears in print in the February 2022 issue of Maclean’s magazine. Subscribe to the monthly print magazine here.
Compensation, reform: Ottawa announced Tuesday it has agreed to compensate First Nations children harmed by its underfunding of child welfare, providing $20 billion for compensation and $20 billion on reforming the system over five years, CP reports.
First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada executive director Cindy Blackstock said Tuesday that the agreement in principle is an important first step, but noted it is non-binding.
“These are simply words on paper,” she said at a separate news conference. “We need to commit ourselves to keeping watch on the government of Canada and holding it accountable until it lands some of these things.”
The Child and Family Caring Society, along with the Assembly of First Nations, brought forward the initial 2007 human rights complaint that set off the 14-year battle over Ottawa’s handling of child welfare for First Nations children. Blackstock credited increased public pressure for the arrival of the agreements in principle, especially in light of First Nations uncovering what are believed to be unmarked graves of children forced to attend former residential schools.
Inaction on NORAD:Glen VanHerck, commander of NORAD, came to Ottawa recently to discuss the grim new realities of continental defence with Anita Anand and Gen. Wayne Eyre. Paul Wells, in Maclean’s, writes that Canada is not responding appropriately to the threats VanHerck outlined.
But not deciding is a decision: when the Americans make command decisions on missile defence, they do it without their Canadian counterparts present, and NORAD stops being NORAD for the duration of the conversation. To the extent that the Americans need to ensure their continental defence in the absence of our half of the continent, they’ll simply proceed without us. At some point that becomes embarrassing. This is the kind of decision Justin Trudeau hates to make. He’d get no credit from his voter base for making North America more secure against threats many voters don’t believe exist, in concert with an ally many don’t think is worthy.
Milk victory! Both sides have claimed victory in a trade dispute between Canada and the United States over dairy imports, CP reports.
At the heart of the dispute is how Canada has distributed its tariff-rate quotas, or TRQs — the quantities of certain dairy products like milks, cheeses, powders, yogurt and even ice cream — that can be imported at lower duty levels under the terms of the USMCA, which Ottawa prefers to call CUSMA. U.S. trade officials and dairy industry advocates say a large share of those quotas have been allocated to processors rather than producers, effectively denying U.S. farmers their fair share of the supply-managed Canadian market.
Off sick: 200 city of Edmonton employees are off work after testing positive for COVID-19, including 51 firefighters who are a part of an outbreak, CBC reports.
No vacation: Overworked Quebec nurses are being told to cancel their vacations to keep the health-care network afloat, CTV reports. “This is my eighth shift in a row,” said ER nurse Joanne Scullion. “I need a day off. I can’t work tomorrow, physically or mentally, I’ll make a mistake.”
Crunch coming: B.C. health officials warned Tuesday that businesses could soon be dealing with major staffing shortages due to Omicron, CTV reports. “We need to anticipate that as many as a third of your workforce at any one time may become ill with COVID-19,”Dr. Bonnie Henry said. “We need to adapt businesses so we can operate at these reduced numbers.”
Deadly delay:Tasha Kheiriddin, writing in the Post, criticizes Doug Ford for acting too slowly to tackle Omicron, imposing half measures in December.
But a 50 per cent reduction in capacity didn’t translate to cutting contacts by 50 per cent. A true circuit breaker would have gone even further than what the province is doing now. It would have meant completely shutting down all businesses representing an increased risk of transmission and telling people not to celebrate the holidays with anyone other than members of their household. Why did Ford not bite the bullet before Christmas? The only answer, in this election year, is politics.
Divisive? Also in the Post, John Ivisonis worried about the lack of moderation creeping into public life, pointing to election campaign comments in which Justin Trudeau said anti-vaccine protesters did not believe in science and were often misogynistic and racist.
Still missing it: In the Star, Susan Delacourt has a charming and nostalgic column on the days when the Blackberry swept into Ottawa, occasioned by the news that the operating system is no more.
Cotler speaks out: Former justice minister Irwin Cotler, now Canada’s special envoy on combatting anti-Semitism, has sharply criticized as “discriminatory” Quebec’s law banning religious symbols at work, CP reports. “It does not so much separate religion and state as it authorizes state interference with religion,” Cotler said.
Extremist locked up: Former Calgary mayoral candidate Kevin J. Johnston was arrested after failing to show up to a Toronto courthouse to begin serving a jail sentence, CBC reports.
[Calgary police] said Johnston was arrested by the U.S. border patrol agency early Tuesday while attempting to cross the Saskatchewan-Montana border on foot. “He is being held in the town Plentywood, Montana, while we work to have him returned to Canada,” the statement from Calgary Police Service (CPS) spokesperson Brittany Klassen said. Johnston had been wanted in Ontario and Alberta after failing to show up for jail sentences in both provinces.
A good year for bosses: Canada’s 100 top-paid CEOs had a stellar year in 2020, CBC reports.
The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) report examined the 100 highest-paid CEOs at publicly traded Canadian-based companies for 2020. It found that their average annual compensation totalled $10.9 million — $95,000 more than their average pay in prepandemic 2019.
“While [2020] was really a pretty bad year for most Canadians, particularly lower paid working Canadians, many of whom lost their jobs … it wasn’t at all a bad year for CEOs,” said David Macdonald, report author and senior economist with the CCPA, a think-tank that studies economic inequity.
Insurrection by Trump supporters, false flag operation by anti-Trump forces or a protest with a few difficult moments? American debate over how to characterize—and deal with—the violent invasion of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, only intensified as its first anniversary approached. In most mainstream commentary, including from journalists Mark Bowden and Matthew Teague in their newly released book, The Steal: The Attempt to Overturn the 2020 Election and the People Who Stopped It, and in the forthcoming American Resistance: The Inside Story of How the Deep State Saved the Nation by political scientist David Rothkopf, Trump emerges as an aberration and the country’s political institutions as reassuringly resilient.
One foreign observer who begs to differ is Canadian Stephen Marche, author of The Next Civil War: Dispatches From the American Future (Simon & Schuster, Jan. 4). In his sombre and convincing blend of reporting and well-grounded prediction—call it plausible projection—Marche argues that Trump and the insurrection itself are essentially symbolic, far more effect than cause in the winter of American discontent. The U.S., he believes, is spiralling into disaster, its political and legal systems polarized, paralyzed and rejected as illegitimate by millions of citizens. The time and place of the next Fort Sumter—site of the opening salvo of the (first) U.S. Civil War—is impossible to predict, Marche writes, but that such an event will happen is a near certainty. Unless, of course, he adds in an interview, it already has: “I think January 6 might just have been the new Fort Sumter.”
Stephen Marche’s ‘The Next Civil War’ imagines what the fall of America might look like.
If not, The Next Civil War offers other likely scenarios. Perhaps the igniting moment will be a bloody clash between right-wing militia and U.S. armed forces near a rural bridge closed by the feds and forcibly reopened by a local sheriff who denies Washington’s authority. Or a presidential assassination, after which both killer and victim are turned into martyrs by their side’s media ecosystems. Or a massive, climate-change-induced storm on the East Coast that creates a destabilizing surge of refugees. Or a “dirty” bomb exploding at the U.S. Capitol, dispersing radioactive material and sparking panic.
The first result, says Marche, would be widespread violence; the second, government repression. The United States, founded in revolution and historically prone to harsh retaliation against enemies domestic and foreign, is not likely to respond with measures aimed at reducing tensions, but with an “oversized” reaction. “It would be violent. It would be controlling. It would be vengeful,” Marche writes. More violence would follow until the cycle ended not with victory for any side, but with exhaustion, and the de facto end of the United States as it is.
It’s a future seen more clearly by those outside the country, says Marche. “A few on-the-ground American reporters who know what I’ve been writing have said to me, ‘You’re not worried enough, it’s all accelerating faster than you say.’ But millions of Americans, including major political commentators, really, really believe in their institutions, despite what they see in front of them.”
Among outside observers, there are none better situated or more (rightly) fixated on America’s future than Canadians, Marche says. English Canada was largely founded by refugees from the American Revolution, while Confederation itself arose in alarmed response to the Civil War. America’s current inward focus and corresponding withdrawal from the world will affect every country on the globe, but none more than ours. “We are a small, vulnerable country, more or less a client state of the U.S. at this point,” Marche says. “It involves our entire economy, our entire security structure and an international order we believe in.”
Then there is our peculiar relationship, both as nations and as individual border crossers. “We’re Horatio to their Hamlet,” Marche says, “a close and sympathetic and mostly irrelevant witness.” He doesn’t think a European could have written his book, “because it would just be too snobby.” But, he says, “Canadians get what’s great about America, because we’re close enough that we know them. We have basically a kinship relationship to them.”
Marche’s final and most arresting dispatch—peaceful dissolution—opens with the words, “One way or another, the United States is coming to an end.” Its divisions are too intractable, its constitutional structure too archaic, its proclivity for violence too entrenched for any other outcome. That makes the prospect of peaceful dissolution among America’s “best-case scenarios.”
It would be no easy task, Marche points out. Peaceful separation requires goodwill, which dissipates like mist in the face of mass violence. There really is no time to waste. “I do think Americans need to sit down and seriously consider how their political union can be either renewed or abandoned, because those are the choices at this moment,” Marche says. He may be wrong that the renewal option is next to hopeless, but if he isn’t, he’s surely right that the sooner America begins to carve itself up, the better for its citizens. And for us.
This article appears in print in the February 2022 issue of Maclean’s magazine with the headline, “So long, neighbour.” Subscribe to the monthly print magazine here.
A tsunami of new cases: Doug Ford imposed new restrictions Monday to come to grips with a wave of omicron infections, delaying the return of students to schools by two weeks, the Globereports.
Premier Doug Ford, in a press conference Monday, said that 1 per cent of people infected with the Omicron variant will need hospital care. New daily hospital admissions have reached “triple digits” in Ontario, he said. Given Omicron’s rapid spread, the government said it had to take action to slow the spread in order to protect the health-care system and the economy. The province reported 1,232 people hospitalized with COVID-19, with a total of 13,578 new COVID-19 cases on Monday. “We face a tsunami of new cases in the coming days and weeks,” Mr. Ford said. “Virtually everyone in this province will know someone who has been exposed to this virus. Now, we are bracing for impact.”
Frustrated: The news did not go over well with frustrated Ontarians, the Starreports.
Educators and families in Ontario are scrambling after the province’s 11th-hour decision to shut schools to in-person learning and move students online for two weeks, as COVID-19 cases continue to surge. The sudden pivot, which starts Wednesday when classes resume after the winter break, has frustrated many and amplified calls for the province to do more to ensure schools reopen safely.
Bad for kids: In Postmedia papers, Dr. Jennifer Grantwrites thatit is all a mistake.
It is almost impossible to enumerate the harms associated with closing schools, and many will only be discovered years from now in economic and social harms that will take generations to recover.
‘Most people will acquire it’ Newfoundland is also dealing with rising case counts, the Globereports.
During a press briefing Monday, the province’s chief medical officer of health said active case counts have jumped from 30 to nearly 3,000 in about two weeks, overwhelming public health’s capacity for case investigation. “Identifying every case and contact, that is no longer possible, and our objective right now is to slow the inevitable spread,” Dr. Janice Fitzgerald told reporters in St. John’s. “The reality of this virus is that it is so infectious, most people will acquire it.”
The American virus: In Maclean’s, your correspondent investigates social media COVID-19 misinformation that is making it much harder to end the pandemic — and leading victims of the infodemic to early graves — and finds the roots of most of our problems in the fever swamps south of the border.
While we are fighting the coronavirus, we are also fighting an American virus—misinformation—which is mostly spread through American social media platforms that have dissolved the old bureaucratic borders against the dark side of American political culture. It’s a virus as dangerous as the one that causes COVID-19.
Do something:Maclean’s also has an editorial on the subject, calling for politicians to get a grip on the problem.
While our media landscape shifted dramatically over the last few decades, creating new pathways for malicious actors and hucksters to mislead the public, legislators sat on their hands. Canada’s policy-makers need to make it easier to monitor toxic misinformation, seek voluntary compliance from the big platforms, regulate where necessary and empower public health communicators to push back harder and faster at dangerous lies.
Families win: An Ontario court has awarded $107 million to the families of six people who died when Iran shot down a civilian airplane over Tehran almost two years ago, CBC reports. In May, an Ontario court ruled that the plane was shot down in an act of terrorism.
[Lawyer Mark] Arnold has said that his team will look to seize Iranian assets in Canada and abroad. He said Iran has oil tankers in other countries and his team will be looking to seize whatever it can to pay what the families are owed.
F35 or Gripen-E? CBCs’s Murray Brewster has an in-depth look at the choice to be made this year between U.S. and Swedish fighters for Canada’s military.
The decision this year “will be a fork-in-the-road moment,” said an expert in defence and military affairs. “If we buy the F-35, we would be more intricately embedding ourselves in an American military alliance, which we have been a part of for decades, but acquiring that particular aircraft would take that relationship up a couple of notches in a couple of different ways,” said David Perry, a senior analyst and vice-president of the Canadian Global Affairs Institute based in Ottawa. If the Swedish aircraft is chosen, it would be the first time in almost half a century that Canadians have flown something other than an American-designed warplane.
Desirable coasts: A CBC poll on where Canadians might feel comfortable living finds that British Columbia (65 per cent) and Atlantic Canada (63 per cent) are at the top of the list.
Disgraced prince: In Maclean’sPatricia Trebleponders the fate of Prince Andrew, which seems to be going from bad to worse.
Whatever the final results of this week’s legal proceedings, the damage to “Prince Andrew, Duke of York, a/k/a Andrew Albert Christian Edward, in his personal capacity,” as he’s identified in the American legal filings, is incalculable. It’s been more than two years since the interview he gave BBC about his relationship with Epstein boomeranged on the prince, forcing him to stop undertaking any official engagements on behalf of his mother. The pressure is only intensifying with every new revelation, including photos from Maxwell’s trial of her and Epstein enjoying themselves as guests of Andrew on the Queen’s private estate of Balmoral.
Impotent: The arrest of Cantonese Canadian pop star DeniseHo in Hong Kong — along with six journalists — is a reminder of how little Canada can do to influence China, writesDaphne Bramham in the Vancouver Sun.
Maybe we’ve learned something from it. If we have, the big take-away should be how impotent Canada is to exert any influence over China’s decisions. Long gone are the days of Canada’s boast that its global influence exceeds its middle-power status. And, the notion that somehow with an estimated 300,000 Canadians living in Hong Kong, Canada might have any influence over the future of the former British colony is naïve.
