Defenestrate Them All: Canadian Politics 2021

Yeah, the title being "Long Wait" and the scale going up to "10 years", as though readers won't equate the two.

I guess it's misleading in the sense that it seems to imply it will actually take Canada 10 years to vaccinate 75% of the population, but it says pretty clearly that it is about "current vaccination rates" and that is what is actually being compared and it is just showing the numbers in a way that is easier to process (i.e. at the current rate, this is how long it will take to achieve herd immunity). I guess the title being "Long Wait" is irresponsible.

Walking in the woods is the only thing keeping me sane. There is a definite change in the air these past few days, and even though it’s still cold, the sun is that little bit stronger, the birds are active, and you can feel the season changing. It’s a definite mood booster.

I’m kind of at a loss with seemingly everyone (not u peeps) complaining about every single thing. Most of them all contracting each other too. I mean, I’m not happy we’re behind on vaccines either, but I’ll still be surprised if we don’t get them soon. Not really sure what it is Trudeau should have done differently. Without existing capacities (that are being brought back? but it will take time), making deals seems the best gamble - and was he supposed to have locked us in bigger or sooner on vaccines that didn’t exist yet? Putting more eggs in one basket might have been faster IF we got lucky, but that would have been a huge risk. Diversifying and yeah maybe being further back because of it, is probably still the most reliable strategy. I guess we’ll see. Just having a hard time with all the anger all the time.

contracting should be contradicting

The criticisms on lack of transparency have some validity of course, but in practice, in an environment where information just tends to get weaponized instead of being used constructively, it’s gonna happen.

Yeah, I'm not sure if the current govt made some kind of foreseeable error here or if we're just unlucky.

Maybe it’s just tied up in being such a resource driven economy where we are usually prosperous enough that our super reliance on finished things being imported usually runs silent, but a global emergency where all of our suppliers at once are forced to look after their own needs, or the needs of more “persuasive” powers first, exposes our vulnerability. It was always a gamble. Since we didn’t proactively think it worth compromising a bit of prosperity to be prepared, having patience may just be our lot.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/443061/number-of-deaths-in-canada/

So now that it’s February, I was expecting to see this in the news but didn’t, so was poking about for the Canadian mortality stats of last year. If you look at the graph view, it’s pretty surprising that on paper, it looks like a fairly average year. The death rate is actually only very slightly out of line with the normal increase. It’s true w covid, there are detriments beyond deaths, but still. in context it looks like we did pretty well? Exact numbers on excess deaths are also available from stats can up until October or so, and it looks like it was really only in April and May that we had any extra death numbers in the hundreds. Have to assume that also spikes post Xmas, but couldn’t find stats on that yet.

I haven't seen anything for Canada overall, but for Quebec, mortality rate is up 10% for 2020:

https://www.cp24.com/news/number-of-deaths-jumped-10-per-cent-in-quebec-in-2020-due-to-covid-19-agency-reports-1.5286166

normally, the rate from year to year is around 2%, so this is a big jump

Imagine if we hadn't gone into lockdown, enforced face masks & physical distancing, etc.

Yeah, here’s the equivalent chart for Quebec only

https://www.statista.com/statistics/568022/number-of-deaths-in-quebec-canada/

It’s listing about 2k less deaths than that cp24 link, but it may be incomplete. Definitely does show a larger deviation than Canada as a whole.

NEW --> The U.S. is on pace to vaccinate 75% of its population against Covid-19 this year, while Canada would need almost a decade to reach that coverage level, according to Bloomberg’s Covid-19 Vaccine Trackerhttps://t.co/jxLYwJTJiW @TimLoh @business pic.twitter.com/31IL38tnyy
— David S. Joachim (@davidjoachim) February 4, 2021
I mean, obviously the pace of vaccination is going to increase a lot throughout the year, but we are lagging far behind many countries

― silverfish, Thursday, February 4, 2021 9:22 AM (six hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Man, that chart is some irresponsible reporting.
― jmm

Can you expand on this? That was always a big topic when teaching data to kids--to be careful of misleading graphs--so I'm interested in this. Is it the scale you're talking about?

― clemenza, Thursday, February 4, 2021 10:53 AM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

they made a chart a few weeks ago showing the same thing for the US using a linear extrapolation of vaccination rates at the time. linear extrapolation based on current vaccination makes no sense. if you look at the supply and contracts, it has been clear for months that canada would be slow to start up due to the timing of big contracts, and actually it had been a little bit faster than anticipated until the last week. hopefully the slow downs in moderna and pfizer are temporary (so far they mostly have to do with pauses in production to scale up capacity at plants, which should be good for long term supply). also we have a big purchase of astrazeneca coming up in april that would make mass vaccination of the general population this spring/summer feasible, but we haven’t approved that vaccine yet fsr

the province (BC) says im (late 30s healthy person) likely to be vacc'd in september, which seems realistic?

you’re in August iirc. that timetable is assuming we never get or approve the AstraZeneca vaccine though. it’s purely based on Moderna and Pfizer

it would be extremely annoying if americans get summer 2020 return to normal and we don’t lol

otfm tbh

2021* lol

honestly last summer in bc was p chill

...even though it’s still cold, the sun is that little bit stronger, the birds are active, and you can feel the season changing. It’s a definite mood booster.

Makes all the difference in the world, the sun. It's colder than ever right now, and I know there's still two more months of winter minimum, but walking after 5:00, with an extra hour of light, has been much more enjoyable for me.

after writing that post I went for a walk and I might actually have gotten a mild sunburn lol

this guy: https://www.vice.com/en/article/dy8edm/celina-caeasar-chavannes-justin-trudeau-fake

We're now at sub-1000 new cases per day in Quebec, and ICU data is increasingly more encouraging as well. Looks like re-opening schools didn't have as catastrophic an effect as I'd initially thought, and I'm very happy to be proven wrong on this count. Hopefully the vaccination campaign will pick up some steam in the coming weeks.

Non-essential stores, hair salons and the like are all back in business. CEGEPs and universities will also be welcoming students and staff on campus again, so I'm very curious to see whether this'll pan out.

All of that happens here on the 16th for most of the province, and on the 22nd for Toronto/Peel/York. As I posted on one of the general COVID threads last night, I'm not optimistic (and I usually am, more or less). It's these variants that give me pause. I have to think they're more prevalent than we know right now, so my guess is that they're outracing the vaccinations, and that'll be clear in a few weeks. Ontario is almost back under 1,000 cases today, so I don't know. There three stories going on at once--dropping cases, vaccinations, variants--and they're not in sync.

Alberta has taken an unusually structured approach to reopening, as opposed to their usual freewheeling (flailing), in that there are specific targets that must be achieved before the next phase is “unlocked”.

But true to form, instead of structuring the reopening based on likelihood of transmission, they have seemingly structured it based on.... I dunno

Phase 1: restaurants and bars, kids’ sports, gyms

Phase 2: hotels, conference centres, banquet halls

Phase 3: adult sports, casinos, churches, movie theatres & auditoria, social gatherings

Phase 4: concerts & festivals, funerals, sporting events, trade shows, weddings, and lifting of work-from-home mandate.

Having gone to a few movies this past summer, I'd move those up the list. I don't think I went to one, out of about a dozen, where there were more than 5-10 people in the theatre; for half, there was me plus one other person or couple. (Sounds counterintuitive, I know--it's safe because everybody thinks it's dangerous.)

I would change almost everything about this plan. But I’m not in charge, and one of the best things I’ve done for my mental health during this pandemic has been absolving myself of the self-imposed responsibility to become an expert in infectious disease & public policy and come up with a BETTER PLAN that I have no ability to influence or implement.

Well said

In Huron-Perth, we start in the orange zone on Tuesday. Meaning I can sit in and drink coffee. Meaning I can read books again. (The two are close to inseparable for me.)

I pray this is it. Please. Please.

Newfoundland back in the covid game! What'd we miss? Do i wear two masks now?

ay fuck it's UK covid plus

The South African variant made it all the way to Abitibi-Témiscamingue, so yeah... nowhere is safe.

Just got to refresh on safeguards. We had mandatory masks indoors and that but...yup

https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/variants-lifting-restrictions-second-opinion-1.5912760

A third lockdown would be so dispiriting. Not lifting this one for another two months would be too. No answer.

Took my book over to Tim Hortons tonight, expecting I'd be able to sit in--we reopened in orange, one active case. Still takeout only, with seemingly no sit-in imminent. I was surprised.

It was so nice to be able to go to a bookstore this afternoon. This lockdown was tough.

Oooooof: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/quebec-campus-free-speech-academic-freedom-legault-1.5917113

Grateful to this piece for alerting me to this though:

But, he said, the main threats to academic freedom involve corporations trying to suppress research, and beyond that, the way the government allots funding to universities in the province.

Because their funding is based on the number of students enrolled, he said, administrators are afraid of siding against students when disputes with faculty arise.

The groundwork for this system, he pointed out, was laid by Legault himself. As education minister in the late 1990s, he made university funding contingent on meeting certain performance indicators.

Good catch, yeah.

We'll have to see what they actually do but, tentatively, I tend to agree with Portugais that the problems Legault mentions are real but are far from the only, or the biggest, threats to academic freedom. (Incidentally, the one time I had a serious run-in wrt academic freedom and was required to accommodate a censorious student - at U0tt4wa no less - it was due to a complaint from a conservative Christian student. Cancel culture is not limited to radicals on one side of the aisle.) I'm not sure this is widely accepted btw:

It's widely accepted that scholars should be able to debate ideas without fear of repercussion from the powerful, or the popular.

Perhaps there's a necessary discussion to be had about threats to academic freedom in Canada. But as you and Portugais say, the scope goes beyond PC-gone-mad narratives and centring the n-word at the heart of the complaint is at best a strategic mistake, to put it mildly.

We especially can't have that conversation via this government, who tried to ban stores from saying "bonjour-hi" (and while they didn't pass a law, IME there has been a noticeable chilling effect on its use), passed Bill 21, perpetuates and seeks to expand the literal policing of language use, and currently will issue me a hefty fine if I walk outside after 8pm. Notably this govt more or less refuses to admit the mere presence of racism in Quebecois society. It's absurd or at best naive to take seriously the idea that the CAQ cares about academic freedom in any material sense, or they might have mentioned it before "academic freedom" became reduced to "having the right to articulate the n-word rather than use a common euphemism."

Also it's galling that they're accusing students of importing ideologies from the US, when this calculated distraction is directly copied from conservatives in US, ROCanadian, UK, and French culture war campaigns, right down to adopting the exact tactic of accusing people of importing foreign ideas. Which, hilariously, forms a kind of circle, since American conservatives have made Marcuse and Adorno the poster children of bad student ideology. I can't have a conversation about academic freedom when the other side (not you ofc Sund4r, I mean Legault) is blatantly insulting my intelligence.

How did Legault feel about Michael Potter, incidentally?: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.macleans.ca/news/canada/why-andrew-potter-lost-his-dream-job-at-mcgill/amp/

xp
I mean, am I just paranoid for assuming this is where Legault would like to end up?

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/18/world/europe/france-universities-culture-wars.html

Stepping up its attacks on social science theories that it says threaten France, the French government announced this week that it would launch an investigation into academic research that it says feeds “Islamo-leftist’’ tendencies that “corrupt society.’’

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/quebec-premier-lashes-out-at-maclean-s-for-suggesting-province-is-in-state-of-serious-dysfunction-1.4034456

The head of the Coalition Avenir Québec, François Legault, called Potter's piece a "rag" based on "shortcuts."

Or JJ McCullough xps: https://www.ctvnews.ca/mobile/canada/quebec-legislature-votes-to-condemn-article-that-bashed-province-as-racist-1.3276962

well remembered, the hypocrisy is suffocating

Very much agree with you, rob, there is every reason to be suspicious of this government's motives.

I don't find talk of 'language policing' useful, however. Bill 101 exists for a reason, and I wish anglophones would fully understand the privilege of being a native speaker of an international lingua franca. Francophones are far likelier to learn English than the opposite – because English means cultural and economic power – and this results in alienating scenarios such as my wife, a native French speaker with a limited command of English, having to bumble her way through conversations with anglophones who have never made the slightest effort to accommodate her. In Quebec. So it's important to note that the 'language policing' has a history and it's there to ensure that this tiny redoubt of French speakers is able to maintain its difference on an overwhelmingly anglophone continent.

The fact that French almost never makes its way onto this thread is also quite telling, but so it goes.

Point well taken, pomenitul, and ftr I'm not against Bill 101, and I do try to be humble about being an immigrant to this country and culture (not always successfully of course). To make my point with hopefully more grace: I would like to think that in the QC context, nuanced sensitivity about the politics and cultural implications of language would be heightened and suitably complex, not reduced to "free speech" platitudes that are applied with suspicious selectivity.

The fact that French almost never makes its way onto this thread is also quite telling, but so it goes.

ah but you see we have a separate province for such things ;)

I would like to think that in the QC context, nuanced sensitivity about the politics and cultural implications of language would be heightened and suitably complex, not reduced to "free speech" platitudes that are applied with suspicious selectivity.

Alas, papa Legault – whose vocabulary is about as limited as Trump's btw – is incapable of complex discourse. The fact that he's bound to walk the next election is nightmarish and I can only take comfort in knowing that the majority of Montrealers didn't vote for this shit.

And lol, it's true, ILX enacted the separatist dream when the province itself could not.

One more thing: the panic around 'bonjour-hi' was utterly moronic and, I think, yet another way of winning non-Montrealers' hearts, as though it were necessary to begin with.

the bonjour-hi thing really bummed me out (I used to mention the phrase to Americans as an example of how Montreal could be a welcoming and courteous place), but then we got the gift of "bonjour-ho" so maybe it's a wash?