An end-of-week note for you, dear Code 47 readers, that's a bit different than my norm. It's split into two — a light and a heavy. We'll start with the light. It's ... weird.

I don't pretend to know how anyone else's brain works, but it often feels like my conscious mind is just riding shotgun alongside the subconscious, which seems to largely run the show. It seems to work out most of the time! But every so often, completely out of the blue, a question pops fully formed to the forefront of my conscious mind, and if I can't figure out the answer, it drives me crazy. The important thing I can't stress enough is how random it is — the stuff just seems to come out of nowhere. Today, I was sitting in my car in the rain, waiting to complete a curbside pickup of some new faucets (more on that in a minute) at Home Depot. I was watching Star Trek clips on YouTube (because of course) and all of a sudden, zap. A fully formed question appeared in my mind:

"Who was the female black singer who had a big hit when she was very young, very young, and the song was then covered decades later by another woman and became a huge smash pop-chart-topping sensation all over again?"

And I'm sitting in my car, and I just sigh. Like whatever little peace and quiet I'd been enjoying was gone. If I didn't figure it out, it was going to haunt me.

I was already exchanging texts with my dad at this time, and he knows his music well. I sent him the above and he drew a blank. I thought about just asking the Twitter hivemind, but my curbside pickup was taking a while, so I had time to indulge in a little brain exercise. I had two instincts right away, but I also knew both were wrong. But they were in the ballpark. I kept thinking that the singer was nicknamed Little Miss Dynamite. But I also knew that that was wrong — that was Brenda Lee's nickname, and she's as white as I am. I had a very clear image in my mind of the singer, and she was black. I could picture her dancing! But even though I knew Little Miss Dynamite was Brenda Lee, that was stuck in my mind. I put it to the side and tried to think of what else I could come up with about the singer. Not much else bubbled up — I was absolutely certain that she was black, and was very young when she had her big hit. I also had a pretty strong sense that her success was either before the Civil Rights milestones of the 1960s, or perhaps during it. She had had mainstream success and popularity even with whites before that was commonplace, or at least when it was still relatively new.

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I was totally confident in that. Could I remember her name or the name of the song? No. 

I decided to focus on the song itself. I kept coming up with the chorus of "Hey Mickey" — you all know it. "Hey, Mickey, you're so fine, you're so fine you blow my mind, hey Mickey." Again, this felt like it was in the ballpark, but not quite right. I didn't think "Hey Mickey" was a cover of an earlier song (this was mostly wrong, actually, but I was still right enough for my purposes — I'll explain in a minute). I kept trying to come up with the chorus of the song I actually was thinking of, but "Hey Mickey" was now in my head. 

So that wasn't going to work.

My new faucets came out then, and I was off to my next errand — a stop at the grocery store. As I was pushing my cart around, I kept bouncing off the same walls. "Little Miss Dynamite" — but no, that's Brenda Lee. "Hey Mickey" — but not that, just somehow like it. I knew that the singer was a black woman, and that she'd been very young when she'd had her hit, and that it had been in the late Fifties or the very early Sixties. At the latest. 

I couldn't get anywhere.

I finished shopping, put everything into the trunk and began driving home. And I was almost there when I blurted out loud, "'The Loco-Motion'! Little Eva!" 

It had been there in my brain all along, I guess. It just took a while for my brain to call up the right files. But as soon as I did, it all fell together. Not Little Miss Dynamite, but Little Eva (Eva Boyd, photo, above). Little Eva was indeed a black woman, and indeed had a hit with "The Loco-Motion" in exactly the time period I was thinking — it was recorded in 1961, when she was only 17, and released a few months later, in 1962, when it topped the charts in the U.S. and Canada and hit No. 2 in the U.K. And yes, this was only a few years after the first time a black artist had chopped the U.S. charts — not unheard of for Little Eva, but new, as I'd felt. 

"The Loco-Motion" was then indeed covered by another woman decades later, specifically, Kylie Minogue, in 1987, when she herself was only 19. (It's been covered a bunch of other times, but that was the one I was thinking of.) The "Hey Mickey" thing was undoubtedly just my brain reaching for a female singer with a big, high-energy pop hit in the 80s — "Hey Mickey" was a few years earlier, and contrary to what I thought, was indeed a cover, but of a relatively little-known song from 1979, "Kitty," by British pop band Racey — American singer Toni Basil turned it into a hit with a modified cover in 1981.

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Anyway, to be honest, none of this had much of a point. This is just how my mind works. I have no idea whatsoever why I suddenly needed to recall the name of both Little Eva and "The Loco-Motion," but this ate about an hour of my afternoon. 

And that, friends, concludes the light portion of today's performance. I hope you enjoyed it. The heavy portion will be comparatively brief. 

As I mentioned above, this whole little musical history journey began when I was sitting in my car waiting for a curbside pickup off some faucets. The ones we had in the master bathroom were barely trickling out water and rather than bring a plumber in, at significant cost and pandemic-related hassle, I decided I could probably do it myself. (I was successful. This is not relevant to the point, but I wanted that on the record.) 

I'd ordered the faucets at dinner hour on Thursday. I'd limited my search for ones available at my local store, to minimize shipping delays. They were ready for pickup about 22 hours later. 

And recall what I did next — I went grocery shopping. Ever since the pandemic began, I now instinctively size up any supermarket I'm in to check for shortages — you all remember those first wild months when global supply chains were reeling and you just couldn't find certain things. Today, things looked good! Didn't notice anything out of place.

Stable supply chains. Effective real-time inventory management. These are things that we expect from our hardware stores and supermarkets. We usually get them. When we don't, we get angry.

We do not expect these things from government, and we should get angry about that. Examples have abounded this week. I wrote a column in the Post about a damning federal auditor-general report into management of PPE before the pandemic, and during the opening months. It wasn't good! Speaking of not good, Ontario has been stumbling about in a panic trying to get tens of thousands of AstraZeneca doses into pharmacies before they expire on Monday. I doubt they'll make it. 

We do not have the capacity in our government that we take completely for granted from our retailers. This is a problem. We should do something about this.

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Anyway, as per the new routine, check out this Twitter thread below for what I did this week. Click the tweet below and scroll down, or click this link.

Otherwise, have an amazing weekend. We'll talk again next week.

mgurney.responses@gmail.com
Twitter.com/MattGurney

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Just a short note for you as we head into this long weekend. I think it’s desperately needed by all of us. I know for most it will still not be exactly what we are used to or what you were hoping for. But there really is cause for optimism. I hope you are able to enjoy some of what’s coming up over the next three days, secure in the knowledge that there are better times ahead, and soon.

The rapidly improving situation actually led to a moment of awkwardness this week. Although the exact figures vary by source, sometime in the last few days, or sometime this weekend at the very latest, Canada has or will overtake the United States in terms of the percentage of its population that has received at least a single dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. The Americans are well ahead of us on second doses, but we will catch up fast when we begin to pivot to a second-dose phase sometime next month.

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After many months of hearing about how far behind we were, I obviously understand why this was received as good news by Canadians. It is good news. But it was pretty cringe to see Canadians celebrating our overtaking of the Americans. The Americans have all the supply of vaccine that they need. We are not overtaking them because of some incredible national accomplishment on our part. This is not a race to put a man on the vaccine moon or something. We are racing ahead of the Americans because the Americans are encountering significant issues with either outright anti-vax sentiment or at least vaccine hesitancy. I guess it’s worth celebrating that we have less of that here in Canada, but it just felt awkward to celebrate the Americans having a hard time convincing their population to take life-saving vaccines.

Vaccine hesitancy and anti-vax sentiment is going to be a serious issue as we try to exit this pandemic. Americans are going to die because of their comparatively low rates of uptake. Not all of those Americans will themselves be anti-vax or vaccine hesitant. The nature of these viruses is such that some of the people who die will be innocent victims of someone else’s anti-vax sentiment or vaccine hesitance. This is not something Canadians ought to feel good about. We’re winning the race because our competitor tripped and stumbled near the finish line, busting their ankle in the process. 

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Hey, I’m glad we’re crossing the line. A win's a win. I feel more optimistic than I have in months. But I’m worried about our friends to the south. I’m worried about all of us, because until this thing is crushed everywhere, it will remain a threat via new variants. Getting the Canadian population vaccinated is a huge accomplishment, and a necessary part of our national pandemic recovery. But cheering our success relative to anyone else’s left me feeling dirty. Consider again my comparison. You’ve won a race because your competitor tripped and fell at the finish line, and injured themselves as they did. You'd look kind of like a jackass jumping up and down with joy as he writhes in pain, wouldn't you?

That was too many Canadians this week.

Our vaccine performance is a cause for relief, and growing confidence. And certainly gratitude. When I got my initial shot of Pfizer, I had a lump in my throat. I was thinking of all that happened to make that possible, from the scientists to the production experts and technicians to the distribution networks right down to the lovely doctor injecting it into my left arm. But this isn't, or shouldn't be, a moment for celebration, especially if we’re celebrating how we’re performing compared to someone else. Much of the world remains unvaccinated due to a shortage of vaccines. Celebrating that would be like celebrating every good meal by delightfully reminding yourself that there are people starving to death today.

Most well-adjusted people would know better than to do that. It was surprising this week for me to see so many not realizing that the same general logic applies to those who either do not have, or refused to accept, COVID-19 vaccines.

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Sorry to be a bit sour, but I wanted to say that. Find below, as always, my thread of this week's work. Enjoy! (Remember to click on the tweet, or this link, and scroll down.)

And other than that, hey. Enjoy the long weekend. Happy Victoria Day! Talk to you all next week.

mgurney.responses@gmail.com
Twitter.com/MattGurney

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I’m not sure about the rest of you, but where I live, here in the centre of the universe, the arrival of actual spring weather took a while. It’s been cold until just the last few days. The forecast for the weeks ahead looks amazing, and thank God for that. We could all use some time outside.

I’m sorry I did not send an update last Friday. I was covering the testimony of Katie Telford, the PM's chief of staff, and after I filed my column a week ago, I just didn’t have any gas left in the tank. This week was still busy, and God knows there’s a ton happening in the news right now. I didn’t want to miss another week.

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I’m feeling optimistic. I haven’t been of late. I have found the third wave in Ontario more exhausting than the first two. I think I held it together pretty well the first few rounds with this damn virus, but the third wave, which we easily could’ve avoided, deeply frustrated me. I’m normally a bit of a Vulcan. I’m not big on human emotion. But I’ve had a seething, low-level anger for a month or two. We did not have to do as badly as we did. Ontario's third wave wasn't inevitable, at least not at this scale. This was a leadership failure. This failure is measured obviously in human lives and suffering, but also in economic damage and further disruption everything. We could’ve done better than this. We didn’t.

I have a few big-picture column ideas rattling around in my head, ways of wrapping all this up and putting a bit of a bow on it. (At least until the historians get to work on it.) I think it is very hard for us to look around at how we have handled this pandemic and conclude many good things about our governments. 

To be honest with you all, as I said two weeks ago, I’ve always assumed a degree of baseline incompetence among our government officials. I'm not a reflexive bureaucrat basher, but we don’t live in a country that excels at delivering basically anything on time or on budget. In general, I think in Canada, your government will do a reasonably good job delivering the services and projects it already oversees, basically due to institutional muscle memory, though probably at a bloated cost. 

I have absolutely no faith, generally speaking, in our ability to do anything new.

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This was the main theme of my note two weeks ago. So I won’t repeat it all here. I’ll repeat something else instead! Some of you might remember a few months ago when I wrote a column here about pistols for the military. It’s a small example of the dysfunction that I’m talking about — dysfunction not only of process and outcome, but also of outright concept. Our incompetence isn’t always accidental. We set out to do it!

What happened was that a few years ago, both the Canadian Armed Forces and the British military realized within a few months of each other that they both needed to replace their standard-issue sidearms. Both militaries concluded that they needed 25,000 of them. A standard sidearm is not a complicated piece of equipment! Basically any modern semi-automatic 9 mm pistol will do, and there’s a ton of options we could just pick off the shelf. The British pulled it off in two years, for $15 million. That’s how long it took them to go from, “Hey, we need 25,000 new pistols,” to issuing the new pistols to field units. 

In Canada, meanwhile, having decided that we also needed 25,000 new pistols, we set out a 10-year project timeline and budgeted for $50 million. Apparently, in Canada, we literally assume from the outset that we need to take five times as long and spend three times as much to do what the British did. Being slow and inefficient is actually baked into our process!

This is a small example, but I think it speaks to a very widespread problem in this country. We have very low expectations for our government, and our governments consistently meet those low expectations. Canadian politicians and government officials are not held to a high standard of performance during routine operations, and did not rise to the occasion during a crisis. I've made this point many times before, and I'm going to keep making it: competence does not scale up in proportion to the size of the challenge. If you are mediocre at handling small, routine tasks, you are generally not going to be good at handling big, novel ones. 

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I’m not ready to write these pieces yet. Because, like I said, I’m actually feeling optimistic. I think our vaccine campaign is going to go better than we think. In fact, it’s already going better than we think. I was recently vaccinated with the Pfizer vaccine at a clinic in Toronto that opened itself up to all comers because local needs were being met. You’re hearing more and more of this. There are more and more people who are eligible to get vaccinated in Ontario all the time, and there are still clinics that are able to take on even more people. In a Twitter thread on Friday, I laid out my rough mental math on this. I think we will complete the first-dose campaign in approximately 30 days, and be working on second doses through the summer. By the fall, so long as supply holds up (which is an assumption, but I hope not a reckless one), we will be able to get eligible children done and finally beat this pandemic.

That’s the optimism.

But the part where I’m not optimistic? All the stuff I referred to above. We have real problems in this country that we need to be focusing on fixing. But fixing the problems will require a degree of discipline and competency that I'm not sure we have. We might be too broken to fix ourselves. COVID-19 was a serious challenge, but it was actually a fairly low-risk virus. This is something that a more competent government response could have handled very effectively, and did, in other parts of the world. We can’t assume all future disasters will also be fairly low-impact, and we certainly can’t assume it will be true of the next pandemic. This was a test we could have passed. We flunked.

So I’m thinking a lot about that. There’s a few columns in that general realm that I'm mulling over now. I guess sooner or later I’ll get around to writing them. But in the meantime, it’s beautiful out, and I’m gonna go outside and have a beer. I hope you have a wonderful weekend.

Oh, wait, one more thing: two weeks ago I had sought your feedback on using a Twitter thread as my actual repository of my weekly work. I had a very positive reaction to that, but I was asked to make explicitly clear to those who do not use Twitter that in order to see the thread, you have to click the tweet above. Or this link here. That will take you to the thread, and you can scroll down. Thank you very much for all the feedback and the many kind words. It really does mean a lot to hear from you, even if I'm lousy at responding in a timely way.

mgurney.responses@gmail.com
Twitter.com/MattGurney

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Hello, Code 47 readers. It's tax day! Yay! Pay yer taxes!

I was thinking a bit about this, and not just because I hate sending the government money. I was thinking about value for money and how Canadians are going to perceive government performance when this is all over. Let's start with the good news: Canada remains an objectively good place to be. By any metric, we are safe, well-educated, healthy, prosperous and, generally, happy. All of these blessings land unevenly, of course. Many Canadians are none of those things! And there're obvious dividing lines in our society, along economic or racial lines, that matter here. I'm not denying that. But it's still objectively true that most of us are doing very well most of the time. You might not feel like that a lot of the time. I know that a lot of us don't feel like that lately. But even with all the pandemic's damage and danger, you're still basically living in the best possible moment of history ... with the possible exception of like 2019, before all this began.

I'm not here to lecture anyone. Some of you are carrying burdens I can only imagine. But in a historical sense, we are doing amazing, on every big-picture metric. It's not a denial of remaining challenges or an insult to the less fortunate to say so.

Like, seriously, when and where would you rather be living?

But yikes. As I get set to send Ottawa a lot of money, am I getting much value for it?

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In some ways, absolutely. Canada's relative awesomeness is not an accident. We rest on the accomplishments of prior generations and some of what we do today contributes directly to the common prosperity. A ton of stuff happens behind the scenes, every day, that contribute enormously to our way of life — really, make it possible. But in other ways, the pandemic has revealed just how incompetent and inept our governments have become meeting new challenges. It's like every last bit of bandwidth our governments have is used up just keeping the status quo running along, and if we ask it to do anything new, it's like hitting a computer with one process too many for its CPU. It just locks up.

Real-life example: I was watching today as the Ontario and federal governments continued bickering about the proper border controls we should have during what will probably be the last phase of this crisis. And what struck me was the sheer insanity of not having settled this a long time ago. I'm not even saying what I think the answer should have been. There's a lot of genuinely competing interests there. I have my opinion, you can have yours. But can we at least agree that what to do about the goddamn borders ought not to still be under active decision 14 frickin' months after this all began?  

Certain provinces have done better than others. It's tempting to point at them and go, ah ha, there's what we should have done. And I think this is in large part fair and true. But it's hard to make direct comparisons. Nova Scotia is not Ontario, and what worked in Nova Scotia wouldn't necessarily have worked here. Believe me, if I could have swapped in their leaders for ours, I would have. It would have been an upgrade for sure. But the right solution, and personalities, for one crisis, in one time and place, aren't necessarily the right solution for even that same crisis, at the same time, in a different place. I suspect we'll spend a long time arguing about this once it's all over, but I think that's more or less where I've landed. Most of us would have been better off trying to be more like the Atlantic, but that doesn't mean it would have recreated Atlantic-like successes everywhere. 

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But all that being said, there have been enormous basic failures, both in leadership and execution. You've all heard the joke about how someone new to government is shocked and dispirited to finally seize the levers of power, only to discover they're not connected to anything. You can push and pull the levers all day long. But they don't do anything. In Canada, both federally and in some of the provinces, we've been shockingly slow, again and again, to pull those levers. And sometimes, even after they're pulled, nothing happens.

I don't know if I have this thought through yet in a meaningful, useful way. This is a big, big idea that I'm starting at from different angles, trying to even conceive of its dimensions and scope. But if there is one problem we have — we have more, but if there is a meta-problem — I think it is that Canadian governments have lost the ability to execute new policy agendas. What we already have will generally work, more or less. But new things, or updates to old things? We routinely accept that failure is an option, or that even our successes will be late and overbudget — beyond acceptable real-world margins. (Life is always more complicated than theory.) There are things in my life that I just take for granted will work. If I get into my car and it doesn't start, that surprises me, even though I am intellectually aware that that's a possibility every time I try. But too often, with government, there is an entirely justified skepticism that it'll succeed at all, let alone as intended, and yet, we shrug, because, hey. It's Canada. Things are still good. How upset can I get about another program failure when I can just go fire up the barbecue and watch some hockey or something. 

A strange thought I keep having is that, as an individual, I'm more or less fine with this, because I can continue living a very comfortable life despite all the weirdness. But as a citizen of a country, I think we need there to be a real cost to failure, and we might only get angry enough to demand one after a failure so terrible it's not even fun to contemplate. 

But we have to contemplate it. Before the big failure would be better than after. But we all know what won't happen, right?

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For the recap this week, I thought I'd try something different. You can honestly tell me how you feel about it at the email below. Does just putting all my output into a Twitter thread I regularly update work as well? It would save a lot of time, and I'm wondering if you all think it still has value. Let me know.

And have a wonderful weekend. It's hard not to in Canada.

mgurney.responses@gmail.com
Twitter.com/MattGurney

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Code 47 readers, welcome to your weekend. It's great to have you here.

I was planning today to write a column on the value of finding new things to love in something you've long taken for granted. I had the column all sketched out in my head and everything. But I've actually written two extra columns than normal this week, and my brain is just fried. Besides, after a weird cold snap in Toronto that brought a ton of snow, it's finally nice again. And I'm going to go outside.

So no big column atop the recap this week. You'll have to suffice with this note on sympathy, even for those we really don’t like. 

As you'll see in the recap, a big, big theme for me this week was the astonishing political meltdown we saw in the Ontario government. It began a week ago today, continued through the weekend and only seems to have begun settling down in the last few days. It was an incredibly destructive few days for the Ford government, both to their political fortunes — we have our first polls confirming that — and also to public confidence in the government's handling of the pandemic. As the political crisis grew, Premier Doug Ford vanished from view, and when he finally emerged again a few days later, well, he didn't look good. This has led some to speculate as to his state of emotional health.

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On a gossipy level, I'm as interested in that as the next person. As a professional, my interest remains, but is more narrow — the only thing that matters to my analysis is whether he's capable of discharging his duties as chief executive in the province of Ontario. Right now, honestly, I don't think we can say with confidence one way or the other. This bears scrutiny, to put it mildly, but I'm not sure we'll ever really know his state of mind. This is not, to be clear, whether he’s any good at it. I’m wondering something more fundamental: in his current state, can he do any job, even a bad one? I don’t think it’s a stretch to imagine that some of the absolutely wild reversals of late are a sign that the stress of the crisis has simply overwhelmed his ability to effectively lead at all, even if you think where he’d be leading us was a bad place. This is a subtle distinction, I grant, but it’s an important one.

I don’t have the answer. But it’s something I’ll be thinking about.

But a related issue that cropped up was simply the issue of whether Ford deserves any sympathy. There were definitely expressions of support for Ford after his recent apology and crying jag. These positive expressions were then attacked by those insisting that Ford was either faking it, or simply hadn't earned any sympathy. Some of the attacks seemed, to me, to be a wildly disproportionate reaction to the “provocation” that brought them, and I write a lot of it off as frustrated and angry people punching down at someone who made an inelegant but well-intended tweet.

(And yes, I’m subtweeting the living shit out of some people here.)

But on the core issue, I’m pretty laid back. I honestly don't care if you feel bad for Ford or not. If you are moved to feel human sympathy for Ford, that's fine. If you can't stand the guy and want him to suffer for his sins, well, that's fine, too. It's a free province, as we were reminded on Saturday. I'm not going to tell anyone how to feel, beyond a very generic statement that I think erring on the side of kindness and generosity is usually better than doing the opposite.

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"This person hasn't earned my sympathy" is something we hear a lot, which is fair, I guess, if sympathy is something you think needs to be earned. It always makes me wonder how much sympathy these people would muster up for a total stranger, who's never had a chance to earn any. 

Then again, that checks out. Given how often we turn a blind eye to the suffering of others, whether right in front of us or around the world, those who say sympathy and pity must be earned are probably actually just very honestly channeling a shitty part of human nature we sometimes gloss over to so we can feel better about ourselves. 

Anyway, hey, you do you, people of Earth. My only real interest in the premier's emotional state lies in his ability to do the job he's been elected to do. But if you're one of the people who can't muster up any sympathy for a guy operating under what is objectively unbelievable pressure, despite being obviously manifestly unequipped to handle it (I mean, it’s Doug fucking Ford), that's fine. Honestly. It is. Just try to remember that the next time you find yourselves shocked that some outrage on the news is met with shrugs by people who can't muster any sympathy that hasn't been personally earned.

Because here’s the thing, folks. Even shitty people have bad things happen to them. Sometimes I can’t muster up any pity, but other times, I still find a way. Where you draw the line on sympathy is your call. But I tend to think we harden our hearts to our own misfortune. The objects of your scorn don't feel it a bit. Only you do.

OK, I wanted to get that off my chest. Onto the recap.

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As stated, this was a busy, busy week for me.

At the Post, I had the two usual videos, plus a double-bill of columns. 

The first video was on Ford's absolute train wreck of a weekend.

My first Post column of the week was, too. It went up on Monday. I noted that Ford's bungling was doing an awful lot of favours for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who is also screwing up the pandemic, but in a less publicly humiliating way than Ford. "The cruellest and most politically devastating thing Doug Ford could do to Justin Trudeau would simply be doing a passably decent job as premier of Ontario. Alas, that seems beyond him. And we’re all worse off for it." Read that here.

My first TVO.org column of the week, also published on Monday, was an attempt to recap the insane 72 hours that had just expired, and put them into some kind of context. "If there is any meta-theme to be pulled from all of this weekend’s complete bonkers insanity, it’s that Premier Doug Ford and his government can no longer even pretend to be in control," I wrote. "The curtain fell sometime between Friday and Saturday afternoons. ... This is a government that has been completely overtaken by events and has lost control — not only of the crisis, but of itself. It is flailing helplessly, and in such dramatic fashion that no one who’s paying even the slightest attention can have any doubt that this is so. It is pathetic and pitiable, and, because of the current danger, it is frightening." Read that here.

As the week wore on, the debacle in Ontario remained very much top of mind. My second Post column was again on that issue. As Ford remained out of sight, members of his government announced yet another reversal: "Wednesday featured a Ford-less eye-popping announcement that Ontario will indeed look at some form of paid sick leave, after an entire pandemic of steadfastly refusing to do exactly that. Members of the Ford government say their hand has been forced by a lack of enhanced federal aid in this week’s federal budget. As fig leaves go, it’s a pretty small and shrivelled one. The real explanation, of course, is that the government simply no longer has the political capital or credibility to resist many demands. That’s the danger in retreats, after all. Sometimes they turn into routs." Read that here.

The next day, Ford emerged from (literal) isolation, having been exposed to COVID-19 via a staffer, and had a press conference. It didn't go well. Afterward, for TVO.org, I tried to pull together some kind of coherent explanation for just how enormous the week had been for Ford, and what it means for his immediate future."In the current moment, there’s damn little Ford can do," I said. "All that can be done is being done by others. Ford, having delayed so long on taking any number of actions, now finds himself with little more he can do. His ability to alter the course of this nightmare has, at least for the moment, evaporated. It didn’t have to be this way, on so many levels. But Ford’s decisions brought him here, and the rest of us along with him. And now we wait for the vaccines — and hope the hospitals can hold on." Read that here.

Also on Thursday, I wondered why the federal government was yet again dragging its feet on closing the border to a possible frightening new COVID-19 variant causing huge trouble in India. I guess someone was listening; Canada closed its airspace to direct flights just hours after this video went online.

My last article of the week, a long read for The Line, took a step back from all of .... this ... and tried to take a big-picture view. Whether it's Trudeau dithering yet again to harden the airports or Ford apparently cracking under pressure, I began thinking about moments in history where other leaders have confronted disasters. Not all have performed well. Some buckled. But others were able to at least stay on top of the immediate crisis, something we simply haven't been able to do in Canada, with the obvious exception of the sparsely populated northern territories and Atlantic provinces. (I don't think the small populations are the sole explanation for their success, by the way ... but I think it's probably more of a contributor than some of the locals like admitting.) 

What I ended up coming up with was this: "A pandemic is a low-probability, high-impact event, but it's certainly one of the more likely planning scenarios that Canadian officials should train and prepare for. There should have been checklists and protocols, and people trained in their application, that should have been referred to in January, at the latest. Should we close airports? If not, what should we do there to make things safer? Do we have enough PPE? Do we have all our communication protocols worked out for different departments and jurisdictions? Even if the crisis had fizzled, this still would have been a worthy exercise. But when it finally hit Canada, it seemed like no one in authority, with a few very possible rare exceptions that largely prove the rule, had the slightest idea what they were supposed to be doing, the critical first steps that should have been taken immediately, or even what their ministries and agencies were (and were not!) capable of."

Check that out here, and subscribe! 

Alright, readers. That's all for this week. I'm going to go walk the dog and enjoy some air before Ford accidentally outlaws that, even if only for a few hours. Be well, be safe, have a wonderful weekend. And I'll talk to you all soon.

mgurney.responses@gmail.com
Twitter.com/MattGurney

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I wish I remembered where I read this. It was a book I was blowing through for a university paper; only one chapter was really of interest to me when I was trawling for footnotes but I stumbled upon an interesting section that talked about services and specialization in a modern economy. The author offered a simple explanation of service specialization that I've never forgotten. Imagine a village with 100 people, the author said. Now imagine what services are available there. There's probably a gas station, and maybe you can get a few services done to your car there, too. Basic repairs. Tire rotations. Oil changes. Things like that. There's probably also a convenience store, and the store might also have a place to send or receive mail, or maybe even to rent a movie. (Back when that was a thing we did.) You might have a coffee shop of some kind, maybe a diner. But that's marginal. You almost certainly don't have a school, full post office, bank branch or medical centre of any kind. Not in a village of 100 people.

When you itemize out all the services you can get, it's probably about five or maybe 10 — gas pumped, tires changed, oil changed, basic engine repairs, store clerk, movie rental, mail sent and received. Maybe someone to pour you a cup of coffee and get you a sandwich — but only maybe. The point isn't to be precise in our list or count, but just to contemplate the relationship between the population and the number and type of available services.

Now scale that village up 10 fold, the author said. Now it's a town of 1,000. The number of services explodes. You still have everything you did before. But now you've also got specialized shops, restaurants, a bank or two (and all the services they provide), probably a house of worship, medical services of various kinds (including eye care, dentistry, etc), personal-care services, better access to home and lawn care, various repair and maintenance service, technical services, a post office ... the list goes on. You also start to see competition and the efficiency that brings — our village of 100 would have a gas station and a convenience store (quite possibly at the same location!). But our town of 1,000 would have a few of each. You’d get more services, and start to see prices dropping for the commonly available offerings.

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You get the idea — the more you scale up a population, the more specialized services that are available and the more accessible they become. And this includes not just categories of service, but also increasing degrees of specialization. Our village of 100 probably has no full-time doctor. Our town of 1,000 probably has a family physician. But after we bump things up to 10,000, 100,000 and then a million people, we're getting not just doctors, but highly trained, specialized physicians, surgeons and diagnosticians. Our town of 1,000 has a dentist, but our city of a million has dental surgeons who've specialized in repairing specific kinds of trauma and injury. 

Anyway. I don't remember what book this was from. But I do remember this short section. I think about it a lot. We Canadians of 2021 are, for the most part, hyper-specialized. I've written columns about this before, including this one from 2019, which I'm going to quote liberally below:

Human history is, in one simplified viewing, the story of specialization. As our technology advanced, a smaller and smaller share of the labour pool was required just to keep everyone alive. Perhaps the easiest way to summarize this is to note that 150 years ago, even in the most advanced industrial countries, something close to 50 per cent of the population was directly engaged in agriculture — half the people tilled fields so the other half could eat. Today, in both Canada and the United States, it’s closer to two per cent — one person’s efforts feed 49 others. Those 49 can pursue any of the thousands of specialized jobs that allow our technological civilization to exist. ... Those 49 people are our artists and doctors and scientists and teachers. Human advancement depends on this — a civilization that’s scrambling to feed itself doesn’t build particle colliders or invent new neonatal surgeries and cancer-stopping wonderdrugs.

I stand by those remarks. But I've been pondering them of late with a different perspective. I've spent much of this week talking with doctors and medical experts in Ontario, where the third wave of COVID-19 is threatening to overwhelm the health-care system, with tragic results. And one recurring theme that comes up in these conversations is how this disaster is going to take place almost entirely out of public view. There won't be any general mobilizations or widespread damage. People are going to die, behind closed doors or tent flaps, and other people will be forever scarred by their inability to save those people. But for most of us — those who aren't sick, or highly specialized medical professionals — life is going to be something reasonably close to normal. 

It's become a cliche to note that the pandemic has not landed evenly on people. We usually mean that in terms of economic status, or racial identity (with an obvious massive overlap between those things). But your professional status matters, too. The small business owner has suffered more than I have. But I bet that small business-owner wouldn't trade their problems for those of an ICU nurse.

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Specialization is good. It's what lets us do almost everything we do. But it also creates problems, where there is tremendous suffering and danger — often avoidable! — that falls so perfectly and narrowly on a small number of people that for the rest of us, it's basically invisible. I know, on an intellectual level, what's happening right now in our hospitals. And it's terrifying. But at 7 p.m. last night, when the Leaf game came on, I shut out the disaster in our medical facilities to focus on the disaster of our offence against Winnipeg and shaky goaltending. And then I went to bed and slept soundly, knowing that a nice hot breakfast and a relaxing day were all I had scheduled for Friday.

There are probably other problems with specialization worth contemplating. I've written before about how our way of fighting modern wars is going to take a horrific toll on the shrinking cadre of professional soldiers we turn to to fight our battles, over and over, while the civilian population forgets there's a war at all. And in a more mundane consequence, I have wondered if our increasing professional specialization is causing a form of career path dependency for many of us, where we keep doing the same job over and over again not because we love it, not because it's stable or pays well, but because we literally don't know how to do anything else, and can't imagine doing anything else. Indeed, doing something else might not really ever have occurred at all.

I'd still rather live in a world with neurosurgeons and particle colliders than in a simpler era, before specialization really took off (and you'd probably have to go back to the dawn of civilization to really get ahead of that). But we should perhaps consider the consequences. In Ontario, people are struggling and dying, out of sight and out of mind. We shouldn't ignore that. But gosh, it's easy to.

This week was the delayed March Break holiday for Ontario school kids, so I took it (mostly) off. No radio and no videos. But writers gonna write, so I stayed busy on that front.

On Monday, at TVO.org, I took aim at the Ontario government’s completely flailing response to the crisis of the third wave. “There is something very wrong with our provincial leadership — either the elected leadership, the appointed public-health leaders, or both,” I said. “After the past few weeks of wildly fluctuating decisions and public statements, it’s difficult not to wonder whether the people in charge have any idea what the hell they’re doing.”

Read that here.

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Later in the week, I recounted a frustrating experience. I was shopping at a pharmacy when extra vaccine doses were offered to anyone who wanted one. I wanted one! But I fell outside the authorized range, due to incredibly remote risks of blood clots. '“Any vaccine carries risk, as does any medical procedure,” I said. “Life entails risks. Leaving the house to get your son some chips for the hockey game entails risks, particularly now. But given the deteriorating situation in Ontario, where we seem to be doing worse than the worst-case scenarios, getting doses into willing arms seems like the greater good. Give me a little legalese spiel and then have me sign a form. And then stick the damn needle in my arm — and into the arms of as many other willing people as possible. Time is not on our side here. This is an emergency, and we should act like it.”

That was also at TVO. Click here for that one.

Over at the Post, I started the week writing about the bizarre situation involving the Halifax International Security Forum. It’s hard to explain in a snappy recap, so I’m not going to try. Suffice it to say, it looks like, yet again, our federal government has been intimidated by Beijing. If you care about this issue, and you should definitely care about this issue, you should read the column. Please find it here.

I wrapped up the week with a reaction to the proposed new Conservative climate change plan that is, simultaneously, really, really weird and dumb, but also probably about the best the Tories can actually come up with. “O’Toole must deal with politics,” I noted. “So we get this convoluted kludge of a plan, where lower prices will produce worse results for the environment than the Liberal plan, at the expense of bigger government and less personal choice, and all so that O’Toole can tell voters that he’s doing something while assuring his own base that whatever this is, it’s not a tax.

“It doesn’t make any sense. But it might actually be about as good a policy as this iteration of the Conservative party — which has spent years demonizing a simple, clear-cut carbon tax but now finds itself needing to offer up something if it ever hopes to win — can possibly come up with.”

That column is here.

Thanks as always for reading, Code 47 readers. I hope you have a wonderful weekend. Stay safe.

mgurney.responses@gmail.com
Twitter.com/MattGurney

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I end this week, Code 47 readers, feeling grateful. It's been a weird week, but it's true. 

This weekend will mark the one-month mark of my parents and aunt getting vaccinated, as I discussed previously here. My 93-year-old grandmother, who has a comorbidity that would leave her a sitting duck for COVID-19, was vaccinated just days after that. We still need to get second doses arranged for everyone, but real-world data is showing that even the first dose, after a suitable time for immunity to build, is providing enormous protection from serious illness and death. As a third wave kicks Ontario squarely in the gonads, knowing they are safe(r) is a profound relief. Just yesterday, I was speaking with a friend who told me that both of her parents are finally vaccinated, and that she was sobbing. I wasn't quite so expressive as that, but I got the feeling. I really did. It is good news after a dark year.

I'm also grateful that Ontario is changing strategy re: its vaccine deployment. Essential workers, including teachers, in high-priority areas will be accelerated. That will include my wife. It's a bit of a quirk of geography, frankly, that makes that so, but I'll take it all the same. I am the kind of person who is pretty rational and ruthless in pondering unpleasant scenarios. I am a big believer in insurance and planning ahead, and that has to include thinking about what it would mean if she became seriously ill or died. But that doesn't mean these scenarios are nice to think about. I’ll sleep better once she is jabbed.

Being married to a teacher always meant contemplating some grim (though obviously unlikely) scenarios. That’s a weird quirk of modern life that I’m not sure people who aren’t related to a teacher fully grasp. Every report of a school shooting somewhere hits you in a strange place. Indeed, she's had to run drills with her students for locking down in case of a mass shooter — remember when "lock down" made us think of that instead of this? And that's never been fun to contemplate. But this pandemic hasn't been fun to live through as the spouse of a teacher, either. I do not like how it has felt almost every working day of late when she drives off to work in a confined environment with many people, and I settle in, mug of steaming tea at the ready, and begin another day of toil from my comfortable, isolated home office. I feels … unchivalrous, if that’s the right term.

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So knowing she should soon get vaccinated — details are still depressingly scant on exactly how and when that will be, but they have a few days to sort this out — is obviously a huge relief.

I’m also thankful to live in a city with an incredible children's hospital. Toronto's Sick Kids is much in the news right now because it is now accepting adult patients in need of critical care due to serious overcrowding in Toronto's ICUs as the third wave surges here. The fact that Sick Kids is taking adults ain't encouraging, especially since things will get worse for many weeks to come even if the newly announced restrictions begin to work immediately. It takes a long time to slow something like this down, and the next month's growth in case and hospital usage is mostly baked-in already, since both cases and hospitalizations are indicators that lag by weeks. The people going into hospital today were probably infected weeks ago.

But the news reports of the hospital’s new role brought to mind my two stories of experiences (both as an adult) with Sick Kids. It's an incredible institution and we are very lucky to have it. I wish everyone there, patient and staff, the best. (If you're interested in those two stories, see my Twitter thread, below.)

And one last thing: as noted in the afore-mentioned column, I was freaked out earlier this week at a near disastrous data loss. I got it all back. I’m very grateful to all of the people who wrote in helpfully with advice, recommendations and even just moral support. It meant a lot. And I was pleasantly surprised how few people were just doing that terribly irritating thing of proposing, in the most passive-aggressive ways possible, the blindingly obvious solutions that of course I’d already tried.

So, yes. A tough month ago, particularly for us in Ontario. But still a lot of blessings to count. I think doing so is good for the soul. Take a moment this weekend and count yours, too.

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I’m mostly taking next week off, readers. It’s Ontario’s delayed “March Break” and my wife and kids are both off. There won’t be much to do but I’ll still spend the days doing … whatever … with them. I may or may not put out a note on Friday. Sorry to be so wishy-washy. I’ll just have to see how the week goes.

But for now, here’s what I was up to this week.

First, let’s start with the column I’ve referenced twice already. Written just for Code 47 readers, it detailed a strange quirk of Apple’s Cloud. I have a folder of professionally and sentimentally valuable documents that I keep on my desktop. This folder has existed in some form or another on my desktop since I was in university, a depressing number of years ago. Nothing in the folder is vital, all of it is meaningful. I recently replaced an old computer with a shiny new version, and backed up my folder on Apple’s iCloud. I then deleted it from one of my computers.

And Apple, in its wisdom, concluded, well, if he’s deleting this Cloud-linked file off one computer, I guess he doesn’t want it! So they automatically deleted it from the Cloud, too. And then they also deleted it from an entirely separate computer that I’d also very carefully and deliberately put the folder.

It was obviously intended as a way of keeping a user’s experience smooth and seamless across multiple devices. But it actually completely perverted what I was intending to do — I was putting it on multiple devices and in the cloud to keep it safe, not delete it everywhere. I had a happy ending. I saved the folders thanks to a disk recovery app I dropped a hundred bucks on. But this is a really stupid design decision on Apple’s part. They should fix it. Now.

Read that column here.

Over at the National Post, on Monday, I published this video, where I noted that, as I’d previously warned, the provinces were going to need to update their vaccine game. As Ottawa speeds up vaccine procurement, the provinces will need to speed up their delivery.

My column in the Post this week was also about the pandemic. A day after my claim that Canadian governments can’t pivot, Doug Ford began trying to pivot Ontario. With case and hospitalization numbers surging, after weeks of only modest, incremental action, Ford put the province back under a real — sort of — form of lockdown. But in that typical Ford pattern we’ve seen too many times, he waited until it was too late to avoid a disaster before realizing there even was a disaster.

“The borders weren’t properly hardened,” I wrote, “the vaccines weren’t arriving in sufficient quantities to get ahead of a third wave, and this was all obvious weeks ago. It was obvious when Ford said the patios could open, and teased the imminent return of haircuts. It was obvious when he changed his mind on that and put the whole province back into the “shutdown” last week, but withheld a stay-at-home order. It was obvious earlier this week, when local public-health leaders closed schools in parts of Greater Toronto.

“But we waited? Why?”

Why indeed? Check that column out here.

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Later in the week, having not quite entirely vented my spleen at Ontario’s failure, I published this video.

Over at TVO.org, well, as you’d guess, the pandemic was on our minds.

I started the week interviewing Anthony Dale, head of the Ontario Hospital Association, about the movement of patients across, and out of, the Greater Toronto Area. “For the first time in this pandemic,” he told me, “I am seeing so much fear and worry about the trajectory. Community spread is clearly completely out of control. The new variants are cutting people down more easily. It looks like we’re seeing a kind of acceleration in the number of patients requiring admission to ICU. Every day, I wake up and I look at the Critical Care Services census, and I wonder to myself, is today the day we’ll level off? And it just keeps getting higher.”

It’s a grim read. But it’s worth checking out. Find it here.

Later in the week, I spoke to Dr. Zain Chagla, an infectious disease expert in Hamilton, who explained to me how the new variants differ from “COVID Classic” — but also how they don’t.

“More transmission in comparable environments and an overall worsening in outcomes are the big differences,” the good doctor explained. “Some of these variants seem to pose a reinfection risk — having experienced COVID last year doesn’t necessarily prevent infection from variants, though it might still provide some protection from serious illness. In Canada, this isn’t a huge issue, because we’re doing reasonably well at preventing infections. But in other countries, where it’s harder to prevent infections and where health-care and hygiene systems are more fragile, this is not good. These communities do not want to be dealing with large numbers of reinfections.”

It’s a fascinating interview. You can read that one here.

OK, folks. I’m off to begin my weekend. Thanks for everything. And count those blessings! (And backup your data!)

mgurney.responses@gmail.com
Twitter.com/MattGurney

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It probably won’t surprise you, as you read this Substack named after an incredibly obscure line of dialogue from a very early episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, to discover that I am a tech nerd. Always have been. And I make no apologies. I love technology. I’m a believer in technology. Technology has made my life better and simpler.

But bad design can fuck everything up and cause huge problems. That almost happened to me. Don't make my mistakes. And, to be blunt, don’t trust the tech companies. Even when they mean well, they can kill ya.

Spoiler: there is a happy ending to this story. But before I get to the details, and what I hope will be a cautionary lesson for you and hopefully a call to change for the tech companies, I do want to make a point of thanking both of the people at Apple technical support that I spoke to when dealing with this. They were completely professional and extremely understanding and sympathetic when some random furious Canadian called them up in near-tears. I was very, very upset, and they were very, very kind. I wanted to start with that.

OK, let’s get into this.

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When I was in the university, I adopted the strategy of home computing I still use now. I always have a desktop, that acts basically as my command computer, and I always have a laptop of much lower capability that I use as my computer-on-the-go for work or light pleasure (playing music, for example). My laptop is always what I can take with me without any real fear of losing it. It would be a hassle, but not fatal. My desktop is where the important stuff is. I even used to name my computers accordingly: the desktops I named after famous naval bases, and the laptops after famous ships. The laptop went out into the world to do the dangerous stuff, and the base was were the critical stuff was kept secure. (I fell out of this habit years ago, but you can probably see where the idea came from.)

On my desktop, I keep vital stuff organized in a folder that I first created probably about 18 years ago: “Matt's Stuff.” Anything important that I generate on either the desktop or laptop, I simply drag into Matt Stuff. Matt's Stuff is further subdivided into other folders. It is a rudimentary but efficient organizing system that allows me to keep files of either sentimental or professional value safe and organized. I used folders inside folders because, first of all, it’s simple and it works, but also because I started this folder so long ago I was still using Windows then — I’ve been a Mac man since my early 20s, but probably created the first Matt’s Stuff on a Windows 98 machine. (Maybe an early XP, but I’m not sure.)

My music and main photo archives exist within Apple’s usual ecosystem, and are backed up virtually. But Matt’s Stuff is where I’ve shoved random files that don’t exist organically inside Apple’s automatically backed-up software systems. Old photos of deceased loved ones? They have a folder. Important business documents I get by email? They have a folder, too. Many of the most important files I have also backed up using Apple‘s iCloud, and I’d create a manual backup on a big external storage drive too. And strangely, this is actually where the problem began. Steps I took to protect myself and my critical and sentimental information actually ended up almost ruining the whole thing.

Until fairly recently I was using an old and increasingly cranky iMac computer. It had been obviously beginning to fail for some time, overworked by newer apps that didn’t exist when I bought it almost 10 years ago. I kept putting off replacing it because I didn’t want to spend the money (yes, honey, I really did delay as long as possible, OK?). A few months ago, it failed on me big time in a way that really inconvenienced me in the middle of a workday, and I said enough is enough. There's a whole hell of a lot happening out there — gestures at state of human civilization — and I don't need tech issues further sapping my time and patience. But money? You know what? I have enough money to not sweat a new computer when I finally need one. Fed up of battling to keep my old computer alive, I just ordered a shiny new iMac — and a more powerful one, this time, too, so it will hopefully remain useable longer. When the new one arrived, I spent a few hours on my old computer gathering every possible document to create a completely updated Matt’s Stuff, very carefully checking to make sure it had everything I needed. For the move, I renamed it “Matt’s Stuff (Master),” so that I wouldn’t get it confused with any older, less up-to-date version. (I hope the term “master” doesn’t get me cancelled.)

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I’m usually pretty diligent about keeping Matt’s Stuff up-to-date, to be clear, but I wanted to make absolutely sure that it was so. Once it was, I created an ethernet local area network (LAN) to move Matt's Stuff (Master) off my old computer onto my laptop, which I was using as a temporary location for the information while I got my new computer set up. It was very important to me to make sure that Matt's Stuff was safe on the laptop, in case the old iMac failed entirely, as looked more and more likely. I also linked it to iCloud, so Matt's Stuff was safe there, too. It took me a few days, but once the new computer was set up to my liking, I moved all of Matt's Stuff (Master) off my laptop onto the new computer. To save storage space on the laptop, I then deleted Matt's Stuff (Master) off of it. Also, and this was a big mistake: I temporarily deleted my external copy of Matt’s Stuff (Master) so that I could use the full capacity of that storage to help migrate some other large files. This was a big mistake and entirely my fault.

But why should I have been worried? I had just meticulously moved all the updated folder contents onto the new computer, and it was backed up in the cloud. What could go wrong?

What went wrong is that Apple assumed it knew better than I did what I really wanted to do. When I deleted Matt's Stuff (Master) off of my laptop, which I was doing entirely to save space on the laptop, since those folders were linked to the cloud, it deleted them from the cloud, too. I wasn't asked if I wanted to do this, Apple just assumed that any file I didn't want on my small, overworked laptop I must obviously not want anywhere else. And sometime between last week and this morning, which is when I booted up my new iMac to get some work done, Apple, in its wisdom, decided that since I’d already deleted all these folders off of my laptop and the cloud, I guess I didn’t want them at all. And it had deleted them off my new iMac, too. I wasn't told this would happen. When I came down to begin my work day today, I noticed that Matt's Stuff (Master) was just gone. I had a terrible moment of shock — I felt like I’d been kicked right in the balls. iCloud? Gone? Laptop? Gone. New iMac? Gone. My external drive? I’d wiped it, thinking it would be temporary, just while I got everything moved around.

This. Is. Fucking. Insane. Sorry, but it is. The very steps I had taken to make sure this folder would remain secure actually resulted in its deletion, across multiple devices. Part of this was my fault, but I hadn’t counted on Apple going out of its way to kill my data. Hours on the phone with Apple’s tech support proved ineffective; since I had emptied my trash bins on all the computers after getting all the files migrated safely (or so I thought), my iCloud was purged, too, completely. Again, this isn’t an error — this is Apple deliberately doing what it assumed I wanted it to do. Once the documents were deleted in one location, Apple’s software helpfully went out and did a really good job deleting them everywhere. It was very efficient — too goddamned efficient! And the very nice and patient people there very apologetically explained that there wasn’t much they could do about it. Translation: there was nothing they could do except try to make me feel better.

What ended up saving me was a program called “Disk Drill." I spent about 100 bucks on it a few months ago when my older computer began to act up in various horrifying ways. I was able to use it to reconstruct Matt's Stuff out of a deleted folder that had not actually been fully purged yet, and I had to manually go through and find some files to add it back, so that I got it back to a full version of Matt’s Stuff (Master). I had to run it on both the old computer, which I hadn’t erased yet, thank God, and my external drive. But between the two of them, I was able to get my data back. All of it. I was amazed. It hadn't been my day up til that point.

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Folks, there's a lot going on in the world. My tech problems aren't the biggest story today. But as we live more and more with these devices, completely ridiculous design decisions that cause problems they're supposed to avoid become more and more inexcusable. I’m pretty good with technology, I imagine better than the overwhelming majority of people out there. I’m a nerd, and no one picks up on this stuff like a hobbyist. Remember what I said above — I cheerfully set up a LAN to get my files moved. I mean “cheerfully” literally — I felt giddy getting my hands digitally dirty. Is that sophisticated? In IT terms, no. But could most of you do that without help? Do most people know what a LAN even is, let alone how to set one up and how and why to use it? I'm guessing no. I am a well above-average computer user (in terms of my tech literacy) and this Apple design decision still completely blindsided me. Everything that happened here was the default option and there were no warning prompts, ever, that deleting data locally deleted it everywhere. 

This is 100% a flaw in how Apple has designed their system. I know what they are trying to do — they are trying to enable an efficient, seamless user experience across multiple devices. This makes sense, in an area when many of us have multiple computers (and yes, I'm counting that phone in your pocket as a computer — because that's what it is).  I’m sure Apple's system works well 99% of the time. But in this one specific instance, it actually ended up converting a deliberate and cautious effort to protect data into an automated process that actively and relentlessly deleted it in three separate locations.

Hey, I’m just glad I got the data back. And you better believe in my newfound paranoia that this data has never been more cautiously backed up in many places. Matt's Stuff has never been more secure, ladies and gents. But many — most? — people would not have the money to spend on a disk utility, the technical skill to use it or, frankly, the free time and patience to do so. I got very lucky here, because I had a lot of advantages a lot of people won’t have. 

And none of this was necessary. This would be an easily fixable thing for Apple and any other big tech company. A prompt making clear that a deletion request will delete it from the cloud and across all linked devices would have saved me a lot of stress and time. It would take Apple's coders maybe 45 seconds to write such a prompt. 

And there’s no excuse not to. I was recently thinking about whether I should write a column about computer storage and how radically it has changed. I remember my first computer that had a full gigabyte of onboard hard drive storage. It was an astonishing development — the word “gigabyte” was spoken off with awe and reverence. It wasn’t all that long later (maybe eight years?) that I went to Future Shop — remember Future Shop? — and bought a mini-hard drive that was a whopping twenty gigabytes of portable memory for $100, and that one 1/50th of what the computer with a full gig of storage had cost. It was astonishing.

Jump forward to today, and the external hard drive that will soon be the new home of a backup of Matt’s Stuff has literally 100 times the storage, and cost about half the money, as my old mobile drive. It’s actually more dramatic than that, as I haven’t bothered adjusting for inflation — the point is clear even so. Data storage has been astonishingly cheap and is getting cheaper all the time. The explosive growth in affordable data storage should make the default assumption of every tech giant skew toward data preservation, not deletion. The kind of system design that almost ruined my Monday is especially unforgivable precisely because it’s so unnecessary with today’s technology. They can fix this, easily. It wouldn’t even take them long and the costs would be negligible.

I hope they do. But in the meantime, please share this widely and help others avoid this mistake. 

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A note to regular readers: I missed Friday’s note and update. Sorry about that. I should have mentioned the previous Friday that I was taking the long weekend off, starting on Thursday of last week, but I honestly just forgot. We’ll be back to a normal schedule this week. I hope your long weekends were wonderful.

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Twitter.com/MattGurney

I hope you all had a wonderful week, Code 47 readers. This will be a brief note as I am racing a deadline but I wanted to get this out.

It was a gorgeous last few days in Toronto — unseasonable temperatures and lots of sunshine. (I accidentally typed "unreasonable" temperatures at first, and I guess that also applies.) Today was rainy and then clear and then rainy again, and as a guy who gets headaches when the weather shifts like that, I have to say that I wasn't digging it. But it still feels a lot more like late April than late March. And that is highly diggable.

A friend of mine lives in Los Angeles, and I told her once, I don't know if someone who lives in a climate that's pleasant all the time can fully comprehend how amazing it feels when the seasons change. That was years ago, and I stand by it. One of my closest friends married a woman from the southern U.S., and though she had visited Toronto many times, this was her first year living here, actually seeing fall become winter and then become spring. She can understand now, a little, the feeling of liberation.

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It's still early. We'll probably still get snow. The ice totally ruined my back lawn this year, and I'm not wild about having a puppy romping around what will be a mud pit for the next six weeks or so. (Especially because he has begun actively rolling in the mud, just because it's awesome, apparently.) But I did get the patio set out early (see above, and note the puppy lounging in the sun). It's like adding a whole living room to my house, and even if you have to wear a jacket, it's nice to have the space. Just yesterday, my daughter asked me why I was laying on the patio sofa before dinner, and didn't understand my answer: "Because I can."

Anyway, folks, I'm still battling this headache and I've got to finish up some work, so I'll wrap it up here. But if you can, get outside this weekend. Look around. Another winter in the books — probably the last winter where we have to worry much about COVID-19. Both the pandemic and winter will probably get a few more licks in. But the good times are almost here. You can smell them on the air.

Even when enjoying the fresh air and warm sun, I was able to get my usual work done. Over at the Post, I had a video commentary up on Friday morning examining the problem Conservative leader Erin O'Toole is going to face getting his party to a comfortable place on climate change.

https://www.youtube.com/watchv=tXOKQbVwAAs&list=PLUgqTrlOvAcqbOWvfhmLwV1Yt80fKjtww&index=3

Later in the week, I noted that, ahem, we still aren't exactly setting any speed records in terms of how rapidly we're able to respond to emerging developments during this pandemic. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIWX1rBi2w8&list=PLUgqTrlOvAcqbOWvfhmLwV1Yt80fKjtww&t=4s

My column for the Post this week tracked the latest developments in the sexual misconduct scandal rocking the top of the Canadian Armed Forces. Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan seems to have painted himself into a corner — he has sworn that he could not possibly have intervened when allegations were raised against Gen. (ret.) Jonathan Vance, up until recently Canada's top military officer. But he has also intervened, publicly, into an investigation into alleged misconduct among naval officers.

"Sajjan is right to insist on a proper investigation [into the navy matter]," I wrote, "and to let [acting military commander] Lt.-Gen. Eyre know that he’s watching. That doesn’t predetermine an outcome, but it ought to go a long way toward ensuring a thorough job. This is precisely what Sajjan could have done, and apparently didn’t do, with Vance. He should have. His failure to, while serving a self-styled feminist government, is both baffling and unforgivable. It’s no surprise that Sajjan changed his tune: the first one wasn’t sustainable. Alas, by acting on this newest Navy scandal, he’s showing that he was more than capable of doing the right thing with Vance, years ago. He didn’t. "

Check that column out here.

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Over at TVO.org, I was writing about reports I'd heard about people being vaccinated outside of the approved age ranges. It looks like the reports are true, but will only be possible when there is vaccine that will be wasted if not used immediately. Check it out — it's an interesting read, and we’ll hear more and more reports like it. I imagine some controversies will ensue. That column is here.

Later in the week, after Ontario brought down a budget, I wrote about what the pandemic has meant for Doug Ford: the man who came into office almost entire to balance the books now has no hope of doing so. So … what’s Doug Ford, if not a deficit hawk?

The column also contains a lot of muses about time travel, which is why I slugged it, much to my editor’s alarm, “Time Travel” when I filed it. The time travel musings are on topic, I assure you. Check that column out here.

Well, it’s raining again. I can feel it in my head. Ugh. But in any case, have a great weekend. Sometime in the next few days, I’m going to try and get a very spoilery review of the 2020 The Stand miniseries online for you good folks here, so that’s something to look forward to, if it’s your jam. Until then, be well, and please sign up and share widely.

mgurney.responses@gmail.com
Twitter.com/MattGurney

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I'm ripping myself off a bit here, cribbing liberally from a column already published at TVO.org, but there is a real danger in my line of work that your stories go obsolete or stale before they can be published. A column or news report has to go through a few steps before it gets from the writer to the audience and each of those steps is important in their own way, but they all impose costs in energy and money and, to my point here, time. At Code 47, this is obviously not as true — I don't have any editor here, and I proofread and publish everything myself. (Which is why typos slip through — I'm a notoriously lousy copy editor and I've given myself permission not to sweat it.) I can get stuff online here about as fast as I can write it, slap it into the Substack and click publish.

A week ago today, that still wasn't fast enough.

“Elder Canadians are being vaccinated in all provinces, and younger Canadians will be up soon," I wrote here on Friday. "I can't help but break this down into what it'll mean for my family, and I'm optimistic — I'd almost forgotten what that felt like! — that my in-laws will be safely vaccinated by next month and my parents, God willing, by the summer."

It was about 90 minutes after that went online that my dad texted me to report that he, my mother and my aunt had all booked their vaccination appointments at a local Shoppers Drug Mart. They got their jabs and are now patiently waiting while their bodies build up immunity. That’ll take about four weeks, after which, they will be largely protected from COVID-19’s most serious outcomes. Their lives will be back to something much, much more normal. Not all the way normal, but getting there.

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My folks and my aunt are in their early to mid 60s. Their vaccinations are a quirk of Ontario's policy choices. The Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines are approved for all adults in Canada; but AstraZeneca was initially only approved for adults under the age of 65. This wasn't because there was any particular concern for the over-65s, but because the data results for that age group were slower in coming and are still being reviewed. Different Canadian provinces handled this in their own way. Quebec decided just to use it for all adult age groups. Ontario, though, made a smart decision — they said, well, fine, if we can't use it for the over-65s, we'll use it for the 60-65s, who are just creeping into the high-risk age bracket. 

At least I think it's a smart decision. I have to confess that I am obviously biased. Of course I like the decision that got my parents and aunt vaccinated sooner than expected. I think that my support for the policy would remain even if they hadn't personally benefitted, but who really knows. The policy choice did certainly result in some absurdities — my father, a healthy man in his 60s, ended up getting vaccinated the day before his mother, a woman in her mid-90s with a pre-existing pulmonary condition. My in-laws are about a decade older than my parents, and are therefore at greater risk from COVID-19, but are still waiting for their appointments, which isn't ideal. No one would plan it this way, but real life never aligns precisely with the expectation. Indeed, the whole thing brought to mind the words of then-U.S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower. Referring back to his experience as the Supreme Allied Commander during the Second World War, Ike famously commented that "Plans are worthless, but planning is everything."

Some blink and look at me funny when I say that. Others nod in immediate understanding of what Ike was saying. This is an example of that. Ontario's plan has been rightly criticized. There is a lot about it that could have been done better, and I'm not at all convinced it's going as well as it should even now. But when presented with a sudden influx of newly approved AstraZeneca doses, doses the Ontario government had not accounted for when it had just updated its plan, they adapted, on the fly, and found a way to get the fast-expiring shots into arms. It probably wasn't the perfect way, but it was fast and it will make a difference. I'll take the win.

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The whole pandemic has been, in a lot of ways, a real-time case study of logistics under pressure. At the outset, there were shortages of critical supplies, like PPE, and then shortages of almost everything (except gas, weirdly). You couldn't buy bread or flour for weeks or months, and soup was wiped out for a long time, as were aluminum cans for any number of products. (Craft brewers across North America felt that pain sharply — they couldn’t can their product!) Now it's all about chemicals and agents most of us have never heard of, but all of which are essential to make vaccines, plus the bottles to store the vaccine in, and the syringes to do the injections. (Indeed, one act of genuine foresight early in the pandemic was the Canadian federal government's order of tens of millions of syringes — a rare moment of proactive action, as opposed to the panicky reaction we've been mostly presented with.)

Logistics isn't just about making stuff, though, and that's an important point. It's also about transporting the stuff you've made, keeping track of where it is through real-time inventory management, and getting it into the hands of properly trained and equipped professionals so it can be used, when and where needed, before it expires.

Making rapid use of the AstraZeneca vaccines Ontario had was a success story. The reportedly chaotic launch of the province's vaccination appointment booking system — rushed into service despite months of warning with staff who'd only gotten a few hours of training — is a story of failure. It's one-step backward and one-step forward microcosm of our entire pandemic response.

But hey. My parents and aunt got vaccinated. I'll take it.

I was busy this week. Too busy! But I got a lot done.

There were the usual videos at the National Post, including this one, where I wondered what the hell we were thinking partnering with China on the first phase of our vaccination campaign.

And this one, on Trudeau's gun control plans taking fire — ahem — from both left and right. (I let my mask slip for a second at 2:09 in that video, which you might enjoy.)

China was a topic I returned to later in the week, when I wrote a Post column on China's decision to try the two Michaels. This is actually a favour for Trudeau, I wrote. He's now run out of excuses for inaction. "If you’re looking for a reason to cut Trudeau and his government a break on their feeble China policies, this is it: we daren’t do anything to rock the boat while they have the two Michaels," I wrote. "That die is sadly cast. If there’s any route to getting those men back home, it runs through Washington, not Ottawa. The time has come for Canada to actually stand up for what it claims to believe in and take what modest steps it can against China." Check that column out here.

Also in the Post, I wrote a column covering the Kielburger's testimony for the House ethics committee on Monday. I cannot imagine any of you actually want to even think about that embarrassing spectacle again, let alone read a column recapping it, but if you really hate yourselves that much, I mean, sure. Click this link and suffer.

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Over at TVO.org, I was busy. On Monday, as noted above, I recapped my parents' (and aunt's!) successful vaccination, and said we'd better get busy planning a return to normal. "It is too soon to reopen Ontario fully," I wrote. "There is still a real danger of a third wave. But a gradual reopening, leading to a full one once it’s safe, is closer than many might realize, especially on the scale of government planning. This is going to happen. It’s going to happen soon. And after a long year of stumbling from one crisis to another, always reacting on the fly, it would be nice to at least get to work planning for the fun, cheerful part." Check that out here.

And this one, honestly, folks. I don't know if I can really describe this one in a way that'll do it justice. I had a chance to once again interview the University of Toronto Scarborough's Steve Joordens, and he never disappoints. Check out the interview. Just click the link. You won't regret it.

And, well, yeah. Ryan is right.

OK, folks, that's it for this week. Have a wonderful weekend.

mgurney.responses@gmail.com
Twitter.com/MattGurney

Well, welcome to Friday, Code 47 readers. Another week, another dollar, as it were. It was an interesting week for us here on the homefront. Due to a close contact with a COVID-19 case, my wife and kids had to isolate, despite negative tests. (Everyone's fine, but yeah.) So my wife, a teacher, had to teach remotely. And my kids couldn't go to school, and there is no ability for them to shift temporarily into an online stream while waiting to return to class. We found a way to make it work — their teachers were as helpful and understanding as they could be — but it ended up being something of another lost week for their educations.

I'm generally the opposite of whatever a tiger dad would be — education matters, but there's a lot more to being a kid, and growing up to be a decent human, than school. But there is obviously going to be a point beyond which the disruption to their education, especially during their early years, is going to start doing some real damage. I choose to remain hopeful. They are young, and they have many years of school left. I trust that there is time enough for them to catch up on what they've missed. Plus, let's be real. This pandemic is a global event, and there will be a drag on educations and economies everywhere. Not equal, of course. But this isn't something happening to just them, so their competitive advantage shouldn't be too badly eroded in adulthood. If that strikes you as a crass way of putting it, well, what else is education beyond preparation for life in the adult world?

So yeah. It was a weird week. We relaxed as much as possible, so I'm sure my barbarians would tell you it was an amazing week, but I did wince a bit at the thought of yet another blow to their learning. But it was still, on balance, a good week. Because there is hope that we won't have to deal with this too much longer.

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The vaccination program is gathering steam in Canada. Slowly, and not much steam yet. But we've seen photos and videos this week of adult Canadians lining up for their first shots. Elder Canadians are being vaccinated in all provinces, and younger Canadians will be up soon. I can't help but break this down into what it'll mean for my family, and I'm optimistic — I'd almost forgotten what that felt like! — that my in-laws will be safely vaccinated by next month and my parents, God willing, by the summer. They might have to wait a while to get that second shot, but with the first shots conferring a high degree of protection, things should start to look and feel more normal soon.

There's downside risk here. Mutations and variants will be a concern for a long time. We have just enough time to squeeze in a third wave. And I haven't been blown away by our competency at any part of this pandemic, so there's definitely a good chance we find some way to screw up in what ought to be the homestretch. 

But I'm a great believer in firepower. "Le feu tue," as French general Phillipe Pétain said during the First World War — firepower kills. (Pétain, ahem, later became known for ... uhh ... other stuff.) Even if we continue to generally bungle the pandemic response, once vaccines are arriving by the tens of millions, by sheer weight of numbers, we'll get vaccinated. It'll be sloppy and inelegant and wasteful, but it'll work. Eventually. 

It's been a weird year. The months ahead will also be weird. But that light down the tunnel is getting awfully bright ... and it's not as far down as it used to be.

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Let's recap the week.

There were my usual videos for the National Post.

The first was about Erin O'Toole's electoral prospects. Are they great? No. But are they as bad as the coverage would suggest? I don't think so. He still has a path to at least a partial victory, if his party lets him take it.

The second was also on federal politics. Jody Wilson-Raybould is writing a book. I don't think this will be as exciting as that might sound.

Also at the Post, I finally finished a column I'd actually been working on for some time. This one went through a few different versions before it finally saw daylight, but I think it was worth the wait. I wrote about the unrealistic expectations Canadians have of their country. We chronically underfund and neglect essential emergency capacities, but still just expect they'll be there waiting for us when needed. This is a big, big problem. COVID-19 was a huge wakeup call. We ignore it at our peril.

Read that here. 

There was some material I had to leave on the cutting room floor, as it were, to make that version of the column fit, so I took some of what I couldn't fit and took it to Twitter with a long, punchy thread. Please check it out.

Over at TVO, I was busy, as ever. Earlier in the week, I wrote about our plans to delay second doses of the vaccine, so that we can get first doses (with huge benefits) into the maximum number of people. It's a good plan, I said. I'm onboard with it. But we're going to need to give people clear and early guidance on what they can safely do (and what they should not do) in that interval between their first and second shots. In the absence of said guidance, people will start making up their own rules. That won't go well. Read that column here.

And on Thursday, I observed the one-year mark of the WHO's declaration that COVID-19 was indeed a global pandemic with a column where I recapped some other possible start dates for this bizarre year ... but also noted the end date is in sight, too. And both may end up involving Costco!

That's here.

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At The Line, I responded to some recent comments made by a prof at UCLA about how Substack — this very platform — is a threat to journalism. I think she actually made some fair points, but she was wildly off overall. She has this strange attitude that journalists somehow owe it to legacy media companies to put up with increasingly lousy pay and workplace conditions, and zero job security, and avoid taking any control over their own fates. To put it mildly, I don't think that's true ... and I further think it's kind of crazy to say so. 

"If for some, your best bet is sticking with a legacy company, well, by all means, please do so," I wrote, "as long as they can afford to keep you. For others, if that means striking out on your own, with a Substack or a podcast or something else, well, good luck to you. Make the best call you can for yourself, and not for what someone else thinks society needs you to do. It’s strange that this need be said, but colleagues: you don’t owe me or anyone else a life of stress, low wages and precarious employment."

Read that here, and if you haven't already, subscribe today. 

That's it for this week, team. Thanks for reading, and as always, please share widely. Take care of yourselves. We'll talk again soon.

mgurney.responses@gmail.com
Twitter.com/MattGurney

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It is a blessing in life to be easily entertained. I'm not precisely known for my sunny disposition, but that doesn't mean I can't find pleasure in the absurd. Over a year ago, in the Before Time when we still worked in person, in groups, in offices, I was sitting in a conference room at Postmedia Place in Toronto, waiting for a meeting to start, staring at a white board with random words written on it in huge capital letters, each circled many times. And I was trying to figure out what the hell the words meant. The terms were things like, "HEALTH CARE" AND "BACK TO SCHOOL" AND "TOURISM" AND "PARENTING." All perfectly normal, benign terms, but ... what the hell were they doing on the board?

The answer is banal: the conference room had been recently used by the marketing and sales teams, and they had been throwing words up on the board that they thought could be the centre of upcoming ad campaigns. It was all very normal, typical stuff. But my absurdist brain kicked in and I began wondering what an alien visitor to Earth, who could understand our language but knew little about our society, would make of the words on the board. Or what a future archeologist would conclude the occupants of the room had been discussing before a cataclysm struck and froze it in place for history.

This is perhaps why meetings aren't my thing — my mind tends to wander a bit.

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This came to mind this week when I saw that TorStar, the company that owns a series of media properties including the flagship Toronto Star and also the Hamilton Spectator, wants to open an online casino. That's a weird sentence to have written, but it's true: thanks to proposed provincial legislation that is broadening who can operate such ventures, the company is looking into establishing a gaming site to tap into the lucrative online gambling industry. If you're wondering why this brought to mind the random words on a white board, it's because both the words and TorStar's desire to open up a casino are products of the same massive problem: legacy media outlets are in deep, deep financial trouble.

The Line recently published a PSA that explains this in some detail; you should read it if this is an issue that interests you in the slightest. For our purposes here, suffice it to say that for most of the 20th century, and the early years of the 21st, most large, traditional media outlets were funded by advertising revenues. The newspapers (or magazines or TV shows or radio stations or whatever) drew in people's attention by offering them basically free news, opinion, lifestyle content, and the like, and advertisers paid huge money to place printed ads or broadcast commercials amid the content, so that the audience that came for the news (and the rest) were also exposed to the advertisers' messages. The emergence of the tech giants, largely Google and Facebook, destroyed this cozy, productive arrangement because the tech giants are better places for advertisers to put their money — the reach is larger and the demographic targeting spectacularly more detailed. The money migrated, fast, and the large media companies have been desperately trying to find a way to survive since.

Like I said, read The Line for a deeper dive on this, including the once-essential role of now-extinct classified pages, which I've totally glossed over here. But you get the big picture. So whether it's Postmedia ad people trying to think of very niche things to base campaigns around, or TorStar people trying to figure out an entirely new business that will presumably generate revenue that they can use to sustain their existing business, it's all the same thing: something has to pay for journalism, and in the absence of that revenue, what we get is deep layoffs, ever-smaller newsrooms and in many cases, newsrooms that are shuttered outright.

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Both strategies are perfectly valid. But both present real dangers. If a news outlet develops a real talent for drawing advertising for niche topics — HEALTH CARE and TOURISM and whatnot — that's great. But if all the revenue those stories bring in is devoured by the conventional newsroom operations, there's a danger that companies will one day decide, you know what? We have a great business here telling stories about these discrete key topics, and we think we can find some more discrete topics with advertiser interest ... so why are we funding this general newsroom? Ditto, if a media company gets really good at running an online casino, you can easily see a day coming when it decides to just be an online casino, shutter the newsroom and pocket the bucks. And then we'd be right back where we are: still missing a way to fund essential journalism, which our society desperately needs. 

To be clear, this isn't a criticism of either approach. Drawing in advertisers with targeted, responsive content is just good business. And as for the casino, media companies have long funded their operations using revenues from other businesses — TorStar itself benefited mightily from owning Harlequin, a book publishing company known for romantic thrillers, for many years. Indeed, putting a newsroom inside a larger money-making organization is basically exactly how network TV news works. CTV and Global, or NBC and CBS in the U.S., make their money by airing TV shows and selling the commercials that air during them. Some of that money is used to support their newsrooms (this is true at the national level and also for the local affiliates). A casino instead of a slate of prime-time dramas and comedies is mostly a distinction without a difference. 

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Oh, and for those who might sniff at the moral taint of using gambling revenue to fund journalism, just a reminder: in Ontario, booze, cannabis and tobacco are all regulated and taxed to fund every public service, and the province also runs its own gambling ops ... specifically so that it gets a generous piece of the action. 

Oh, and also, well ... 

Exactly. So I don't have any time or interest for moral arguments. I do have concerns, though. Newsrooms burn cash. A news-gathering organization is very, very expensive. There is no way around that. But choosing to run one out of the proceeds of a larger, cash-generating organization can still make sense for a lot of reasons. Owning a paper or news channel is prestigious (perhaps less so than before, but still). It buys political influence and capital. And there are, of course, simple true believers in the cause of journalism, who are OK seeing a share of the profits from their non-journalism business funnelled into news reporting.

But I still worry that in the absence of a thriving advertising market that allows journalist outlets to directly fund at least some of their work, there's a real danger that future business leaders will make the entirely justifiable and logical decision that, instead of running a profitable business to sustain a cash-burning one, it would be better to just ... run a profitable business.

The easy counterpoint to my argument is to note that it hasn't happened yet, and for the reasons noted above: owning a newsroom conveys real societal power. You are plugged into the power brokers, and even wield some power yourself. You get on the society circuit. You can champion causes near and dear to your heart. And you may indeed be a true believer in the importance of journalism. But I do worry that as the already horrifically grim advertising market gets even worse, and as new competitors to traditional media become more powerful and effective, the business case for traditional media shops existing within larger profitable enterprises will get worse and worse. I'm sure it won't go away, but any contraction is going to be painful, given the already lousy state of the media. We don't have much strategic depth left to absorb the hits of rich families or large companies deciding to cut their losses and get out.

That's what I worry we might have seen when Bell recently let go hundreds of journalists and shuttered entire newsrooms. Maybe I'm overreacting. Maybe it's just another bad day in an industry that's had a bunch of them. But I worry it might have been a precursor to an eventual decision by Bell to just focus on selling people internet, TV packages and cellphone plans, and screw these TV and radio stations. 

I hope not. But I worry. And I don't see any reason why, a few decades from now, the people running TorStar's gaming decision may not feel exactly the same way about the Star and Spec.

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On that cheerful note, let's round up my contributions to the media ... while we still have one.

For the National Post, I did two videos this week. The most recent is responding to the obviously worsening political scandal over allegations of misconduct aimed at senior — the most senior! — officers in the Canadian Armed Forces.

Earlier in the week, I was noting that improving news on the vaccine front — and it got better as the week went on — could mean trouble for the Conservatives. If their plan was for Trudeau to defeat himself by bungling the vaccine rollout, they may need a new plan.

Also in the Post this week, I wrote a column I think is important. And I don't think they're all important! A lot of daily media work is just "driving the bus," as someone smart once told me. You just get to your next destination (deadline) and then you do it again and again. But I would hope you'll take the time to read this week's Post column, on why Canada needs to either lower its expectations, or accept that we can't be half sovereign in matters of our own defence and security, and that very much includes on matters of public health. If the latter, we're going to need to spend some money. Noting the polite refusal of the Biden White House to share vaccine with Canada and Mexico before the U.S. campaign is complete (a decision I'm entirely OK with, as it's the only responsible decision Mr. Biden could make), I wrote, "It’s not that our overriding assumption underpinning so much of our national policy — the Americans will defend us! — is wrong, exactly. It’s just that that defence might not take the form we would like, or that we might have to wait for the help to come. And the wait could be painful."

Please read that column here.

Over at TVO.org, on Monday, I observed that the outlook on vaccine was improving for Canada. (As noted above, it improved more as the week went on.) Ontario needs to be damn ready so that we don't have them piling up in freezers, I wrote. It's time to get ready for the busy time to come. Please read that here.

I planned on writing more about vaccines for TVO.org to end the week, but an unfortunate, ahem, essay in the Globe and Mail took me down a different path. Instead, I wrote about a year of living during a pandemic, how we remember historical tragedies, and what we can — and should not! — draw from our past as we combat and analyze this very difficult last year for us all. Read that here.

And as always, you can hear me every weekday morning from 10-12 Eastern on SiriusXM's Canada Talks, channel 167. (Except today, which I took off to handle some family stuff.)

That's it for this week, folks. Thanks for this. Have a wonderful weekend and we'll talk again soon.

mgurney.responses@gmail.com
Twitter.com/MattGurney

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Hey folks, just a quick end-of-week note to mark our new publishing date, Friday, here at Code 47. As I noted in last week's (delayed) update, my original plan of publishing on Sundays was running into the reality that I'm fried on the weekends and need to recharge. Fridays are a low-ebb day for me, so here we are. 

I already had my say here at Code 47 earlier this week, so this will be a short one. I did want to note just one thing: there has been an ominous development in my home province of Ontario. After weeks of real, obvious progress on reducing COVID-19 case counts, that progress has stalled and reversed. We knew that was going to happen, but we didn't know when it was going to happen. And it probably happened too soon.

Ontario's second-wave decline seemed to hit resistance around the thousand-new-cases-a-day mark. There's probably three explanations for this: people were probably naughty and travelled over the holidays, and then made up for it by being extra vigilant after. That beneficial effect is now behind us. Also, of course, the province has begun to reopen, and that includes getting schools open again, even in hotspots like Toronto. So that'll help spread cases. And then, of course, there are the new, apparently more contagious variants — which seem to be getting more prevalent in Ontario. 

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Like I said, we knew the fall would stop. I'm just not sure it stopped having fallen far enough. It briefly dropped below a thousand a day, but now it's coming back up — and this is the rolling average, not just individual highs and lows that can be explained away as blips or data anomalies. Dr. Jennifer Kwan in Ontario has done incredible work taking the available information and consolidating it into easy to read Twitter threads, and, like, look at the frickin' curve. It's curving the wrong way.

Worse, take a look at the hospitalization numbers, especially for the intensive care units, which as I wrote at TVO.org, are really the only metric that matters. They were also dropping. Now they're flattening out.

This is bad. I looked back through Dr. Kwan's tweets to try and pin when the second wave in Ontario began. There's no obvious way to pick a specific day, but you can clearly see that a steady decline in cases had flattened out by the end of August, began to rise in early September and was sharply rising by mid-September. When that happened, Ontario had fewer than 20 COVID-19 patients in its ICUs. Today, it's about 300. We are potentially starting a third wave with the hospitals already near their maximum COVID-19 capacity.

We had good news on Friday — a new vaccine, AstraZeneca, has been approved for us in Canada. Millions of doses are expected soon — the first shipments imminently. Help is on the way. But we have just enough time for a third wave ... and in Ontario, at least, we might find a way to sneak it in before the vaccines let us crush COVID-19, hopefully for good.

Well, on that cheerful note, let's recap the week and get our weekends started — my weekend, at any rate!

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I did my usual videos at the National Post, of course.

And also this one.

In a column for the Post, I basically gave up on having anything new to say about Canada's horrific military procurement, and honestly just unburdened myself for a thousand words. "Canada. Cannot. Procure," I wrote. "That's it. That's the column." (That actually isn't the entire column).

Read that here.

I was busy at TVO.org, of course, too. 

I wrote about how we are finally starting to get to the point where at-home testing for COVID-19 is possible. My kids' school is part of a trial project that makes a lot of sense. Could have used it a few months ago, when I had to get them both swabbed after they came down with colds. Read that here.

And talk about good timing! On Thursday, I wrote about how some new vaccines were imminent, and Ontario better be ready to roll out more than just the Moderna and Pfizer doses we were officially expecting. And then on Friday, as noted above, one of them got approved. Read that here.

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Also from me this week, at The Line, I wrote about Prime Minister Justin Trudeau skipping out on the Conservatives' motion to find that China is committing genocide against the Uyghurs. "This prime minister, better than others," I wrote there, "must understand that he doesn't have the luxury of governing only for today. The political pressures and diplomatic complications of this moment will fade into the mists of history, and what will be remembered, not least by the Uyghurs, is the core moral issue — when a major Western country's Parliament was prepared to declare what was being done to them a genocide, the leader of that country, a self-styled progressive, feminist and champion of the vulnerable made a political call ... and skipped the vote."

Read the rest at The Line — and subscribe to it today. It's worth it, believe me. And supporting independent journalism is more important than ever. 

OK, well, there we go. Our first Friday edition of Code 47 is in the bank. Have a great weekend, dear readers. Until next time.

mgurney.responses@gmail.com
Twitter.com/MattGurney

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Good Monday morning, Code 47 readers. I apologize for missing last week's update and note. To be honest, the long weekend just got away from me. With our kids finally returning to school (in class) after that weekend, and with my teacher wife scrambling to get herself ready for a return to the classroom, the weekend was just kinda nutty, to be honest. 

In fact, I am thinking I might have to switch these to another day of the week — perhaps Friday. I'm finding that by the weekend I'm pretty burned out and the kids, even in this crazy time, still need to get out lest they tear the house down — tobogganing and walking the dog being the activities that tick the two essential boxes: using up kid energy and meeting the approval of Toronto Public Health. The fact that I'm sending this on Monday speaks to the point. By the time the kids were down to sleep yesterday, I was just wiped.

So, for now at least, consider Code 47's publishing date to now be every Friday. We'll see how that goes for a bit.

I don't have much to offer beyond this little update, but I did want to make a quick note. During this terrible pandemic we have spoken about heroes: medical professionals and essential workers. We have belatedly given some attention to categories of worker that most of us wouldn't have thought of before — those who keep our essential supply lines running, from truck drivers to the guys stocking the shelves. This is good! But I want to talk just for a moment about nurses. They don't get as much credit as they deserve.

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We live quite close to a busy Toronto street — just a short walk down from the intersection. I don't know why, but this intersection seems to be a disaster. There's nothing obviously dangerous about it. The only thing I can think of is that since it falls in about the middle of a rare stretch of flat, straight road through Toronto's urban maze, people get their speed up too high. Whatever the explanation, there are semi-frequent accidents in the intersection. Probably almost one a year since we moved in. The latest was just a few days ago.

I didn't see it, but I heard it. I was outside already, in boots and coat, thank God, getting something out of my wife's car, when there was a terrific bash and I heard screams. Well, shit, I thought. Again. The last time this had happened about a year ago, a badly injured man had needed my help and I was very aware in that moment how little training and skill I actually have. I had intended to do something about that but then, well, all this happened. [Gestures at state of human civilization.] Anyway, so, extremely mindful of my near-total uselessness, I ran up to the cars to help. One car had obviously taken the worst of it. The passengers of the other car were already out of their vehicle, shocked but alert, conscious and moving. The vehicle that was in worse shape was pretty badly off, and I'm sorry to say I heard screaming inside. And some of it was a child's screams.

Well, shit, I thought again.

The good news: the kid was OK. Terrified and shocked and battered a bit by the impact and the airbag, but OK. His mom was OK, too. His dad, alas, was a bit of a mess. I think he's going to be OK, as none of his injuries seemed, to my untrained eye, particularly dangerous. But he'd clearly hit his head and was obviously confused and disoriented, his nose was flattened and bleeding a lot, and he had a hell of a rip in his scalp, too, that was also merrily bleeding. Like I said, he was a mess.

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The last time this happened, I was basically alone with the injured guy — a few other people did run up but they were mostly unhelpful, as they were punching each other and trying to abduct a child or prevent said abduction. (Long story, trust me. It was a weird day.) This time, by fluke, there were a ton of people who came running. Most were gawking and taking pictures. One had the presence of mind to call 911 and also to loudly inform everyone that she had done so, so that there weren't a dozen calls all landing at once. So good. But one other witness, a middle-aged woman who'd been standing at the corner with a bag of groceries, waiting for the bus, just walked up to me, sighed heavily, and said, "I'm an ER nurse. I've got this."

And she did. I stepped back immediately and helped get the terrified kid and his mother out of the car (their doors were smashed shut). The nurse focused on the dad. Help arrived within about 10 minutes. But until it did, that nurse and her grocery bag had total command of the scene. She asked for help when needed, and got it, and when the injured father, in his disorientation, tried to get up and start moving, this woman, half his size, just shoved him back into his seat and held him there. I offered help. She just smiled and shook her head. She didn't have to say it. She's done that sort of thing many times before.

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Half the emergency vehicles in the city arrived a few moments after that, and since I actually hadn't witnessed the incident, I went home. But I wanted to note her professionalism and confidence and, most of all, her poise. Nurses are tough. I'm glad we have them. And I was really glad to have one this weekend.

OK, let's recap the week that was ... last week.

I had guns on my mind in the National Post, where I reacted, ahem, to the Liberals' new proposed federal language. The proposal is, to put it mildly, absolute bullshit. It's just crass politicking on a matter of genuine public import. The public should be furious. But they won't be. And the Liberals know it.

If you want to know why the Liberal proposal is bullshit, check out my Post column here.

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And this video, that followed up on the column:

And also this Twitter thread: 

Look, I had a lot to say, OK?

Also in the Post from me last week, I did this video on the coming challenge for the provinces once the feds procure enough supply of COVID-19 vaccine.

At TVO.org, I did a more Ontario-centric version of the above video, exploring the specific problems Ontario has already faced, but some of the early (very early!) signs that it is finally getting its act together. Read that here.

I also interviewed Prof. Emeritus Wayne Lewchuk of McMaster University, a labour expert, on the much-discussed paid sick days. I'm fine with the idea in theory, but had some pragmatic concerns about whether it'll work. Prof. Lewchuck told me I wasn't crazy. Some readers may quibble, but it was still nice to hear. Check that column out here.

Well, that's it for now — sorry again to be tardy. Back with you on Friday. Have a terrific week.

mgurney.responses@gmail.com
Twitter.com/MattGurney

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I've been thinking about hammers and dances lately. Not the literal tool and moving-to-music, but the essay half the free world seemed to read at the start of the pandemic. Remember it? It was published on Medium in March of last year, just as the bottom was falling out in North America. Author Tomas Pueyo recapped where we were with the novel coronavirus's spread, laid out what we knew about it, examined the various strategies we could have taken to combat it, and noted that a rapid, hard lockdown at the outset (the hammer) would buy time for a population to be educated and prepared for many months of mitigation measures that got life as back to normal as possible while keeping the viruses spread under control. That latter phase was what Pueyo called the dance. 

I read the essay at the time, and thought it was a disjointed mess, to be honest, in need of a good edit. It hasn't improved with age. But it was still useful and I agreed with the basic suggestion: swift and hard action at the very outset to crush the virus before it could spread widely, followed by a return to life something like normal for as long as possible. But when I read it almost a year ago, I remember thinking that it was probably ambitious to think that a single hammer blow would suffice. There needed to be a failure contingency for the dance phase. And that failure contingency was pretty clear: bring down the hammer again, hard and fast. And then resume dancing.

The essay sort of recognizes this, noting that governments in the dance phase could "tighten up when needed." I think that's harder than Pueyo realized, especially as COVID fatigue set in. Too many people are too tired of this all to play ball with half-measures. It's always too easy to cut yourself an excuse to bend a rule. Scale that up to a population of millions all giving themselves a break and you've got ... well, this. Over and over. Besides, if we've learned anything in the second wave in Canada, it's that gradually and incrementally trying to tighten up in specific places didn't really work. We tried limited, smarter lockdowns, and they failed, so we had to do another big, dumb one. I wrote about that in a Twitter thread not long ago.

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There's still a ton we don't know about this virus. It continually surprises us. It has since the beginning. Rereading Pueyo this weekend reminded me how grim things looked in the first wave, when it looked like this thing really did kill 3-4 per cent of those it infected. Even then we were smart enough to know that that was probably an overestimate, since some infections were going undetected (a lot were, as we know now, thank God). But when the essay was published, death tolls in the hundreds of thousands or millions seemed possible. Even likely. It's been bad, but it hasn't been that bad. (The U.S. is something of an outlier here, and if trends hold will cross the eye-watering mark of a half-million dead sometime this month.)

Still, overall, the initial worst-case scenarios didn’t come to pass. (I remember doing the math on what killing three per cent of three-quarters of Toronto’s population would mean, and not liking the answer.) That’s the good news. The bad news is that it's been bad enough, and worse than some people continue on insisting. COVID-19 seems to have achieved the incredible balance of being just deadly enough to irrationally alarm some people while also being not quite deadly enough to properly alarm everyone.

I've said it before, I'll say it again: this has been a tragic event, but by pandemic standards, we are very, very lucky. It could easily have been worse. I was expecting, and planned for, worse. But we haven't handled it well. Federal, provincial and municipal leadership has consistently fallen short; reacting too slowly even when they ultimately make the correct decision. And a critical mass of the public has continued to either underestimate the danger or simply to decide that they're willing to accept the risk it poses to them, and to hell with the broader community.

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There's probably a column or essay to be written about that issue alone — how different people have viewed COVID-19. For some, it's clearly a self-centred view. They considered their own circumstances, what that meant in terms of their personal risk, and acted accordingly. For most people, especially the young, that means COVID-19 is a minimal threat ... to them. Others among us viewed COVID differently from the outset, and understood that whatever the risk would be to us, if we are part of a transmission chain, we are also responsible for the fate of everyone further down the chain, and that will inevitably include some people who will not survive. That latter mindset is certainly my own. COVID-19 poses very limited risk to me, and those in my household (another 30-something adult in good health and two young children). But every outing out raises the chance that I unwittingly infect someone else with a virus I might not ever realize I have been infected with. And that person could die.

If you don't see it that way, if you see it only through the lens of the danger it poses to you, I grant that's rational. But I think it's also (at best) amoral, and I'm not sure I could ever explain why to someone who'd need it explained.

In any case, the situation in my hometown seems to be improving fairly rapidly, which is a pleasant surprise. The lockdown should be lifted by week after next, if the leaks can be believed. It can't come a moment too soon. I somehow talked myself into never trimming my beard during lockdown and I won't go back on that now, but man, this is itchy and I can't wait to hack it back to a proper, short length. Toronto's second application of the hammer has done its job, and now I guess we go back to the dance. 

But as our vaccine woes continue, there's a real chance that a third wave will come, possibly due to emerging variants who pose as-yet-unknown dangers. I'd like to believe that we have finally learned, and will react with vigour and speed when it does — a quick whack of the hammer to knock things back to a safe level, and then a return to the dance.

I don't believe that, alas. But I'd like to!

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OK, let's recap the week:

The big news for me, of course, is that I've started my new radio show on SiriusXM's channel 167 (Canada Talks). The Daily Edition is live every weekday morning from 10 a.m. until noon (Eastern time). Last week was a doozy as I was still doing the morning show, too, while my successor as host gets some technical issues sorted out. Moving the entire radio station to remote operations was a tremendous feat last year, but it has added some complications, which made the traditional real-time handover impossible. Two radio shows at a time is a lot! I'll be pleased this week to just have the one to worry about! I hope you can tune in. 

In the Post, I was writing about Canada's deal with Novavax, to make desperately needed doses here. It's good news! But it's not going to actually make a difference for many months. If I'm wrong about this, I wrote, if there is a better plan, Ottawa should share it. Now.

Read that here.

I had two videos in the Post this week, as well, and they were both, unsurprisingly, about vaccines. (That's going to be a common theme for many months, I suspect.)

Here's one from Tuesday:

And then, later in the week, here's Thursday's:

I was doing my usual columns at TVO.org, as well. 

On Monday, I was notably unimpressed with the non-announcement of anything in particular by Ontario Education Minister Stephen Lecce. Oh, that's a bit unfair — he made some spending announcements, sure, but kept us waiting two extra days for news on when the kids would be going back to school (Tuesday after next, for my two barbarians). It was a damn weird sight, and one that left Doug Ford basically backfilling for the announcement via a Twitter video later. I'm still not sure what they were thinking with that one.

Read that column here.

Later in the week, I took some time to write a column thanking the many experts who have volunteered their time and expertise to help the public (this writer very much included) understand the pandemic. I recapped how an expert had gently and politely told me, before I published anything, that my understanding of a pretty important issue was wildly inaccurate. "I was spared public embarrassment thanks to someone taking time out of their day, for free, to tell me how and why I was wrong," I noted. "Worse than to my own ego, of course, would have been the damage to our public discourse I'd have inflicted on an already fatigued, data-drunk population."

That column is here.

Folks, that's it for me. Enjoy the Super Bowl, if you plan to watch. And stay safe in any case.

mgurney.responses@gmail.com
Twitter.com/MattGurney

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Happy Sunday, Code 47 readers. I teased an announcement last week, and I can finally make it. But I want to make another point first. Consider this your value-add for the week.

So, wanna know a weird thing I find fascinating? I enjoy reading reports into disasters and incidents. The 9/11 Commission? The Challenger explosion reports? The Columbia Crew Survival Investigation Report? The U.S.-Canada Power System Outage Task Force report about the 2003 North America blackout? I gobble these things up. 

A friend of mine once commented that this was a very morbid habit of mine. I was surprised by that. There isn't usually anything graphic or particularly, well, morbid to be found in these reports. Discussion of death and injury is handled blandly and directly, but not colourfully. These reports aren't lurid — I mean, they're official reports, and they are, if anything, overly dry and technical. To be honest, I find this more sad. The technical descriptions of how a crew of astronauts died hits me harder than a depiction of their final moments in more colourful prose (or some other format) would.

No, the reason I read these reports is because I am fascinated not with disaster, per se, but with how human beings react to disaster. Most of these events can actually be broken down into very, very small increments, and understood in isolation. And with the benefit of hindsight, and the ability to zoom in on something that only would have taken milliseconds to unfold, we can understand the event, and ask what could have been done to avoid the tragedy.

Sometimes the answer is nothing. I spent some time this weekend reading about the loss of the Columbia in 2003, specifically, the crew survival report mentioned above. Columbia is an example of a disaster that couldn't have been realistically averted (at least not without making changes well before the mission ever launched). For those who don't recall the details, a small piece of insulation foam broke off the ship's external fuel tank as she was launching, and despite being small and light, this little bit of foam — it weighed less than two pounds! — hit the fast-moving ship with enough energy to blow a hole in the port-side wing. When the ship re-entered the Earth's atmosphere 16 days later, the superheated air caused by Columbia's contact with the atmosphere (compression, not friction, yes, nerds, I know) leaked into the ship through the hole. The wing broke apart, the ship spun out of control and the incredible forces of this event basically tore the shuttle into pieces. NASA only realized something was catastrophically wrong when the ship never appeared on the radar that tracks ships coming in to land in Florida, around the same time that local TV news in Texas began reporting that the streak of light that was shooting across the early morning sky had, in fact, become many streaking lights. And then bits of the ship, and the crew, began to land all over Texas.

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And it was all inevitable from the moment the foam hit the wing. There was no way to repair the damage. The ship didn't have enough fuel to make it to the space station as a safe harbour. And there was no realistic chance of launching another shuttle in time to mount a rescue — it would have been possible, if NASA had immediately realized there was a problem. But they didn't. They saw the foam piece hit, studied it, and concluded there was no danger.

It was a horrible tragedy. All seven aboard were lost. I remember it well. I was watching at home in Richmond Hill (I was back from university for the weekend) and I knew a young lady from Texas who was also home at her family's place that weekend. She was a photographer, and got pictures of little bits of metal and debris landing on her family's property. It was very sad ... but it was and is fascinating.

The Columbia crew survival report examined the accident in extreme detail, often down to the millisecond. There is understandably some uncertainty about the exact timing and sequence of the catastrophic events, but the general picture is clear. The report identified five separate events that would have been fatal to the crew, and the order they took place in. The first was the crew cabin depressurizing as the shuttle broke up. The second was the cabin module, which was still mostly intact, beginning to spin out of control, which would have bashed the crew from side to side with sufficient force to cause fatal injuries. The third was the breakup of the cabin. The fourth was the astronauts becoming exposed to the extreme conditions at very high altitude after the cabin broke up. The fifth and final, of course, was impact with the ground. 

The report concluded that the astronauts probably died at some point — and not necessarily all at the same point — during the first two events, and had certainly all died by the third. None of the seven were fully inside their pressure suits — some were missing gloves, for instance, and others hadn't lowered and locked their helmet visors. NASA could not determine how quickly the cabin depressurized, but those crew who were fully suited, and who would have only needed to lower and lock their helmet visors, did not do so. NASA concluded from this that the event was so sudden that the crew was incapacitated almost instantly. They would not have died instantly, but were almost certainly unconscious before they knew what was happening. Death would have been swift at this point, and NASA could only conclude that the physical trauma the astronauts experienced as the cabin began to spiral out of control would have been fatal to any who remained alive at that point. Any who remained alive, though fatally injured, died when the crew cabin disintegrated. 

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What the report looked at next was whether anything could have been done to save the crew. The first two events were likely survivable. If the crew had been fully in their suits, the cabin depressurization would not have killed or incapaciated them. The violent tumbling of the cabin would still have killed them, NASA concluded, but a differently designed helmet and restraint system could have rendered that survivable. The third event, the cabin breakup, was not survivable; and it was actually the restraints themselves that caused injuries to the crew, as they were torn from their seats. ("This event was not survivable by any means currently known to the investigative team," is how the report describes this phase of the disaster.) The fourth event was actually survivable, at least in theory — if the astronauts had somehow survived the disintegration of the crew cabin, and if they had been fully suited, the report concluded that survival was possible but not certain. A U.S. Air Force pilot had survived ejecting from a plane at a comparable altitude while wearing a pressure suit, so it was at least conceivable to survive a drop from that altitude and at high speed. The fifth fatal event, ground impact, would only have required a parachute to survive.

The bad news here is obvious: even if you could have solved four out of these five fatal problems, the fifth fatal problem was, as noted, fatal. The violence of the crew module's disintegration was simply not survivable by any known means. But NASA still learned a lot from this report, and thanks to it, future astronauts will be safer. It seems glib to say that, but it's true. Not everything learned from the loss of Columbia (or Challenger before it) could be applied to the shuttles, which had design limitations. But they'll make future ships and crews safer.

It occurs to me, and I suspect it's occurred to some of you while reading this, that we're living in a similar moment now. Columbia was destroyed in seconds and we've been living with COVID for a year. But the same general rules apply. We can already see some mistakes that we made, and some lessons that can be learned. Others will only become clear with the benefit of hindsight and thorough study. But this is something I think about a lot. A lot. We are living out the timeline of a future report very much like the one I just read this weekend about Columbia. We will discover, too late, what we could have done better, or sooner. Maybe it never would have been enough — maybe like that doomed shuttle, we could only realistically have stopped four of the five things that were gonna kill us. But maybe not. I sincerely hope that the lessons of the last year are learned, and remembered. Our suffering may be some future generation's salvation. 

It's nice to think so, anyway, isn't it?

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As promised, an announcement. I'm very pleased to report that I am, starting Monday, hosting a new show at SiriusXM. I'm staying on my current channel, Canada Talks (channel 167), but I'm shifting from an hour-long show at 7 a.m. Eastern time to a longer, two-hour show, from 10-12 a.m. eastern every weekday morning. SiriusXM has been a delightful place to work. It's been a genuine thrill to host an hour-long show there this last year and a bit, but I have missed having a second hour. Two hours is, to me, the perfect length of time for a radio show. Much longer than you feel like you're stretching, but any less and you feel like you're leaving material on the table that you'd like to get onto the air. I'm also very pleased that I'll be able to finally bring on some guests from western Canada — getting someone up at 4:30 Vancouver time to chat is a lot harder than getting someone up at 7:30 local time, so this will mean I'll be able to do a better job covering stories across the country. Since I stepped down as an editor at the Post last year, I've had the time, believe me, so I'm thrilled by this. This is all upside for me. I hope you'll be able to tune in — again, it's every weekday morning at 10 a.m. Eastern time, on Canada Talks, channel 167. 

It's going to be a bit of an odd launch this week, actually. My kids are still home for virtual schooling due to the lockdown in Toronto, so that'll be interesting. And for at least the next week, maybe two, I'll still be hosting the hour from 7 to 8, as we get the host who'll be replacing me up to speed and hammer out some technical bugs. (This was all a lot easier when we just used the studio downtown!) So yeah, it'll be a weird week for sure. But hey. At least, given the time we live in, there'll be a lot to talk about.

OK, now onto the recap.

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First, here at Code 47, I geeked out bigly and wrote a huge review of Star Trek: Picard's first season, and what it meant to me. A lot, is the easy way to say it. Check that out here.

Over at the National Post, I was busy! I had two columns and two videos this week.

The first video, from early in the week, was about Europe possibly putting a halt to our imports of critically needed vaccine.

And then later in the week, as the news firmed up and became more alarming, I did a video getting everyone updated. The news isn't great.

As for my columns at the Post, I agreed with Erin O'Toole, and said that Justin Trudeau should consult with the opposition, or basically anyone else than his advisors, when seeking a replacement for now-former governor-general Julie Payette. Whatever he was trying last time obviously didn't work out. Read that here.

Also, later in the week, I noted that Trudeau saying Canada will require a mandatory in-hotel quarantine for travellers entering Canada from abroad is a good idea. But it would have been a good idea months ago. What was the delay? Check that out here.

At TVO.org, I had my regular two columns. The first was one I'd wanted to write for a while, but hadn't really had the moment until a quiet Monday finally presented itself — I wrote about high-speed internet access in Ontario. If you live in a big city, or even a small down, you probably have it. If you live even slightly outside of one, though, you're likely cut off. In an era when everything is moving online, this is a major challenge. But thanks for technological changes — satellites in space! — we might be close to a solution. Read that here.

Later in the week, I unloaded on the Doug Ford government for continuing to struggle with vaccination. Some of the problems are absolutely out of Ontario's control. That's fair. But Ontario is struggling with even the stuff that's fully within its jurisdiction. If we are ever going to get out of this mess, we need to get people vaccinated. We can't afford to screw this up. But we're screwing this up.

Check that one out here.

Anyway, folks, as always, thanks for reading. Stay safe, stay happy. And tune into my new show if you can. 

mgurney.responses@gmail.com
Twitter.com/MattGurney

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I've held off writing my review of Star Trek: Picard's first season for two important, but unrelated, reasons. The first is that, with everything going on in the world, writing about a sci-fi show felt trivial. The second was almost the inverse of that: this show means so much to me that I honestly felt like I needed to give it some distance before I could fairly appraise it. The pandemic, alas, hasn’t gone anywhere, and probably won't for a while, so further delay seems silly. As for the second, I recently sat down and rewatched the entirety of the first season, and feel ready to actually offer some thoughts on it. 

But this will be more than that — it'll also function as a bit of a history of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and also my love letter to it.

And why I've said goodbye to it.

If you follow my writing at all, or my Twitter account, you'll know I'm an unabashed Trekkie. Normally I lean into it with a bit of mischievous delight, tongue slightly in cheek. I am well aware of how geeky my total passion and devotion to Trek is, and I wear that with pride, but also full awareness of the nerdery. I guess what I'm saying is, most of the time, I'm in on the joke. But, like, God, I really do love it. Sincerely. I'm actually not really a sci-fi fanatic in general. I do enjoy a lot of sci-fi, but there's a lot that's not my cup of tea or that I've never bothered sampling. I'm not a sci-fi guy who likes Trek the most. I'm a Trekkie who also likes some other sci-fi.

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A lot of Trek is garbage. A franchise this big isn't going to bat a thousand. Some of the movies are duds. I'd say two entire series are basically duds, too — Star Trek: Enterprise and Star Trek: Discovery have had the odd good moment, but overall, you can skip 'em unless you're a completist. But in its totality, since I've been just a little kid, Star Trek has been my thing. It's my pop culture comfort food, my idea of a grand adventure, and some of its characters have been role models all my life. If that sounds odd to you, all I can say is that while Trek can be bad, at times, it can also be very, very good. And the good has made my life better. It's probably made me better.

I was born in the early '80s, during the era of the original Star Trek movies. I was a kid when The Next Generation (TNG) was on the air. TNG was, to me, what the original series was to millions before me. After TNG, there was Star Trek: Deep Space 9 (DS9) and then Star Trek: Voyager (VOY). Then Enterprise, which, as I noted above, left me cold. But this era was an absolute feast of Star Trek, and while Trekkies continue to debate whether TNG or DS9 was the superior show, I don't think there's any debate that TNG was the culturally dominant one. It was a ratings juggernaut and hands-down the best known part of the franchise. The characters of Capt. Jean-Luc Picard and his operations officer, Lt. Commander Data, an android who aspires to become ever more like the humans in whose image he was created, were played by superb actors (Patrick Stewart and Brent Spiner, respectively). These two men, and the rest of a solid cast, were on the air together for seven television seasons and four films that followed. It was a golden age for Star Trek, and arguably, for television sci-fi. 

But it ended on a sour note.

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TNG's season seven-year run on television was a blowout success. The four movies were creatively mixed, as the TNG magic didn't translate well onto the big screen, but all performed well at the box office ... until the last one. Star Trek: Nemesis, released in 2002, was the final film in the TNG franchise, and was both creatively and commercially disappointing. It was intended from the start to bring TNG to a close — at the end of the film, much of the crew is dispersing after 15 years together, seeking out new adventures, and Data, poor Data, is dead, having sacrificed himself to save Capt. Picard's life. It wasn't a bad death, per se, but it was rushed, and coming as it was at the end of a lousy film, it left a bad taste in many a Trekkie's mouth.

This is the end? This is our last memory of Capt. Picard and Data? This is how a sweeping story we've been watching for 15 years wraps up? A show that had such incredible highs is going out on film this low? I felt robbed. I wasn't alone.

Time passed, and television changed. The streaming era arrived. Star Trek: Discovery premiered in 2017, and though I'd argue it was a creative failure, it was obviously a commercial success. Despite high production costs, the show has been repeatedly renewed, meaning it's making money. And though CBS hasn't disclosed much financial information or online viewership numbers, they've greenlit a series of other shows, clearly indicating that they believe there's money to be made here. While Star Trek may be struggling creatively, it’s obviously doing well financially.

Star Trek: Picard was one of those shows ordered after Discovery’s commercial success. Its announcement was a shock to Trekkies everywhere. It had been 18 years since we'd last seen Patrick Stewart in the role of Jean-Luc Picard, and he had said more than once that he felt he'd done all he wanted to as that character and did not intend to return. CBS was able to convince him to come back by offering him assurances that the character would be in a very different place than when we'd last seen him (a huge paycheque may also have played a part). 

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But gosh, did I ever have mixed feelings when I heard Picard was coming back.
On the one hand, there was intense excitement, bordering on joy. Like, holy shit — Capt. Picard was coming back! A very dear personal friend of mine was involved in the production, so I was delighted for them, as well, and confident in their vision. But on the other hand, I was very, very nervous. I was afraid that they'd ruin Picard somehow. That they'd do what the final film, Nemesis, had done — put a sour note at the end of what had been a wonderful journey. 

I had to do some self-examination as I pondered the return of Picard. We all get set in our ways as we age. We become more resistant to new things, and more defensive about the comfortable and familiar. I have no doubt this was responsible for some of my trepidation. Star Trek means a lot to me — TNG means a lot to me, in particular. It was the Star Trek of my childhood. It was the show I’d watch with my family, that I got my sister into, that I watched after school with my friends. Probably my best-ever Christmas was when I received a shocking amount of TNG toys, manufactured by Playmates — I still have most of them, and my kids enjoy them still. (My still-functional tricorder, with fresh batteries, is sitting within arm’s reach of where I write this, in fact … ditto my type-one phaser.)

Star Trek, particularly TNG, is tied in with many of my happiest, most valued early memories. I did not want those beautiful memories further wounded by a crass exploitation of beloved characters and stories.

Oh, God, please, I thought. Don’t ruin this for me.

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As the premiere date for Picard approached, I decided I wanted three things from the show. The first and most important was that I wanted it to honour the legacy of Jean-Luc Picard and Star Trek: The Next Generation, and also the devotion myself and millions of other fans had for both. Nemesis had been an insult, and I didn't want that again. The next thing I wanted, obviously, was for the show to be good on its own merits — I wanted to just tune in each week and enjoy it. And third, I mean, hey. I'm a Trek nerd. And I wanted some fan service! Play a few of those hits for me!

So Picard, really, is something I'd be judging on two entirely different levels: as a part of an existing Star Trek legacy, but also as a new addition to it. It's a new show, and must be judged on its own merits, but it's also a direct continuation of TNG, and must be judged on that basis, as well.

And my dear readers, something funny happened. I scored the show quite differently depending on which of those metrics we're looking at.

The good news: Star Trek: Picard absolutely honoured the legacy of Star Trek: The Next Generation and of Jean-Luc Picard in particular. Picard picks up 20 years after Nemesis, closely tracking with the real-life difference of 18 years. The characters and the universe have changed considerably during that time, and in believable ways. Picard is an instantly recognizable part of the Star Trek universe, in the best ways, but it has also allowed for growth and evolution. The show is not stagnant or stale. The United Federation of Planets, Earth, the Romulans, Starfleet — they're familiar, but different, changed by the passage of time and some of the turbulent, tragic events that occurred "off screen." Picard the man is particularly changed, and in ways that are sad. The years since we've seen him last have not been kind to the character. When Picard the show begins, Picard himself is old, bitter and sad, in failing health, long since retired from, and estranged from, Starfleet, to which he'd dedicated his life. He has grown reclusive, and remains deeply upset over the death of Data. He simply hasn't been able to move on.

This was a gut punch. I'd preferred to imagine Picard's post-Nemesis years being rich and rewarding ones. Picard presents a different story for the man than what I’d expected, but it's a believable, touching one, even if not what I'd hoped for. It fits with TNG, and Stewart nails it. 

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So yes, on my top priority, the show was everything I'd hoped for. Nothing that had come before is cheapened or abused by Picard. The writers clearly revere TNG as much as I do, and treated its legacy with all due respect and care. The show also does a terrific job setting up an interesting new era for Star Trek shows to continue to explore. There are rich storytelling opportunities to be found in the new setting of Picard, and I hope very much some of those stories get told. And the little fan service touches I wanted? I got them. I was delighted. They were respectful, sometimes even subtle. They didn't get in the way of the story, but they scratched my itch.

So far, so good.

But does the show work itself, as a show?

Yeah, overall, it does. But it had some major problems.

My wife is not a Star Trek fan, but to my surprise, offered to watch Picard. Perhaps she was curious because of my obvious excitement. Perhaps she just knew I'd be down in the basement with her or without her, so she might as well tag along on Star Trek night. And an interesting thing happened — we both ended up feeling very similarly about Picard. I brought in decades of uber-fan knowledge and huge emotional investment, and she came in with basically zero, zip, expectations. But we agreed very much in our final analysis: Picard has a strong start and then trips all over itself in the home stretch. 

The first season of Picard is 10 episodes long, and starts by getting us caught up with what has happened to Picard since we last saw him on the bridge of the Enterprise. He was promoted to admiral, fell out with Starfleet over a controversial decision, and retired in protest. He's been living quietly at his family's vineyard in France, staying out of history's way, when he is suddenly sucked into a situation he does not understand. What at first appears to be a murder — a tragic crime, but a simple one — is quickly revealed to be a deeper mystery, and one that has particular emotional resonance for Picard himself. The first few episodes of the season focus on this — Picard the man, his life and how he finally comes out of his depressed funk to be a hero again. And my wife and I both enjoyed these episodes a lot — a lot. Despite our different vantage points, it worked for us both. 

The mid-part of the season sees Picard leave Earth, in company with new characters, in search of clues to solve the growing mystery. And my wife and I enjoyed these episodes, too.

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But the back-end of the season, particularly the final two episodes, are just ... good Lord. They're a mess.

Something that Picard got right in the early episodes was that it kept things simple. It was a Star Trek show, yes, and unapologetically so. But it was an accessible one. There was a story that anyone could follow, and with Patrick Stewart at the centre of it all, how could it not be good? But the end of the season just became bloated with too many characters, too many plot lines all needing resolution, and it stumbles and falls badly. After the second-to-last episode, my wife told me with a shake of her head, "I have no idea what's happening anymore." She assumed that she'd gotten lost in some of the sci-fi twists and turns. But I didn't understand what was going on, either. I knew what a transwarp conduit is, and why you need chronometric shields when you're inside one. I know about the Borg hivemind and cloaking devices. So I could keep up with all that stuff. But the plot itself had become convoluted. Indeed, it wasn't until I recently rewatched it that I put some pieces of the puzzle together — oh, gosh, so that's why that character is there! And that's how that happened! And these were basic plot points I simply couldn’t track the first time.

Also, some genuinely good things they had going on — including a minor character brought back from TNG to nearly great effect — don't really ever fully pay off. They're squeezed in too hurriedly with other stuff. Good stuff got lost in the shuffle.

There's two things that could have been done to fix this. Another two episodes would have allowed for some of these problems to be smoothed out by simply not rushing them. I'm not sure if the problem was budgetary or concerns over burning out Patrick Stewart  — he's 80 years old, after all — but 10 episodes was what they had to work with, and they didn't quite stick the landing.

So the other thing they could have done is get out the red pen and just start mercilessly cutting things.

Going through it for the second time, knowing how bloated the ending got, I was watching with my editor's eye. And there are two entire characters — major ones! — I'd write out of the show entirely. Poof, gone. Whatever they did to advance the plot could be easily reassigned to other characters or simply written around. Some plot lines needed to be cut off way sooner — one antagonist character should have died two episodes before she did, and everyone would have been better off for it. A few other plot points could have been sacrificed so that other, better plot points could live and breathe more freely. 

Overall, I liked Picard as a show. I liked most of the actors. I liked most of the characters. I love the overall tone and setting! The story it told probably didn't quite live up to the promise of the early episodes, but it was still engaging. Its final-episodes stumbling was a drag, but not a fatal one. It was a good first season, if not a great one, and I'm excited to see what comes next.

But there's something very important that Picard did, and did well. It ended TNG. 

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I've mostly avoided spoilers above, out of respect for readers who may be deciding whether or not to try Picard out based on what I had to say. Consider yourself warned, there are massive spoilers below. Sorry. It's unavoidable.

Star Trek: Picard is, of course, about Jean-Luc Picard. But as the season began airing last year, I realized very quickly that Picard was actually about Data. Data haunts every episode. Brent Spiner reprises the role in some dream sequences, de-aged appropriately (if imperfectly) with the help of CGI. As noted above, Picard, when the series picks up, is unhappily retired and still tormented by grief at the loss of his friend. Data, after all, was supposed to be immortal — he could have lived forever, but sacrificed himself to give Picard, all too human, a few more years of flesh-and-blood existence. As Picard begins, the retired admiral is given a grim medical diagnosis. He hasn't long to live, and feels that he has wasted many of the years that Data's heroism bought him. This is a big part of what energizes him to go out into space once more, and do some good. He is trying to earn what Data sacrificed for him — he sacrificed his forever. 

This sense of guilt and duty animates Picard's whole journey in that first season. In the final episode, Picard dies, and his consciousness is uploaded into sophisticated computers by androids built in Data's image. The essence of Picard, stored in these computers while his body is treated (it's complicated!) meets the essence of Data. A fully conscious version of Data, built using a memory backup done shortly before his death, has existed for years, as program running inside a computer hidden from prying eyes. This gives the men a chance to speak, to say goodbye — something they never got in Nemesis. It's the emotional farewell that the two men never got to have in that disappointing film, where Data's death was rushed to advance the plot with only minutes to go before the end credits rolled.

For those who watched TNG, and loved it, this is what they were waiting for. This is what they never got in Nemesis. Two great actors, playing two rich characters, sit together by a fire and discuss their friendship and their love for each other. Picard's tortured conscience is eased by Data assuring him that he has never regretted giving his life for his captain. But Data has a request for Picard: once he is healed and his consciousness restored to his body, Data asks him to deactivate the computer holding his program.

After all, Data has only wanted to be human, and humans, in the end, die. Data cannot die in the computer holding his essence. He is timeless and forever, existing in a kind of benign quantum purgatory, and wishes to come closer to humanity by becoming mortal, and passing on to whatever is next. 

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After an emotional but dignified goodbye, Picard agrees, and powers down Data's computer. In the simulated world where their consciousnesses met, as Data dies, this time (we assume) for good, the essence of Picard, in his familiar old Starfleet captain’s uniform, sits with Data and holds his hand as Data’s world fades to black.

And as I watched that scene, I realized that it was over. TNG was over. It didn't end 19 years ago, with a crappy movie that bombed at the box office. It ended in 2020, when Lt. Commander Data, one of the finest characters in sci-fi history and a decent, gentle man, died a peaceful death with his friend and captain sitting lovingly at his side. 

Star Trek will continue. The character of Jean-Luc Picard will continue, for at least two more seasons. New shows will probably be set in that era, and I suspect we'll see more of the TNG cast reprise their roles. Maybe some from DS9 and more from VOY, too. And that'll be great.

But that'll be new. That'll be something else. Picard's second season can start telling those new stories, because season one had a job to do: it had to give Star Trek: The Next Generation, and Lt. Commander Data in particular, the ending they always deserved but never got. A character I loved, and a show, has been given a respectful send off, and they can be mourned without regrets. 

This was, I think, necessary. The issue of whether Picard was going to be a TNG reunion loomed large over the entire first season of the show. Some of those old characters do make appearances, and it felt good to see them again. But the show's writers were very careful to avoid falling into the reunion or relaunch trap. Picard is its own show — an imperfect one, as I've said, but it has done an honourable thing. It's given TNG a clean, loving and respectful ending — and that frees up the franchise to go in new directions.

I don't know what those directions will be. I hope for the best, but fear we might get more like Discovery — expensive, beautifully filmed shows with no heart and soul, no sense of purpose and, frankly, nothing in particular to say. But no matter what comes next, Star Trek: Picard did a beautiful thing. It ended TNG well. And I am more grateful for that than I could have imagined I'd be. It hurts to say goodbye, but at least now we had the chance to do so properly.

And now that TNG is truly over, given a loving and fitting sendoff, Star Trek can do what it has needed to do for almost two decades — move on. Boldly, if you will. But forward. 

Let's see what's out there.

mgurney.responses@gmail.com
Twitter.com/MattGurney

All images above are the property of CBS and are used here for review purposes only.

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Happy Sunday, Code 47 readers. My note today will be brief as I’m actually pretty busy today. That’s a weird thing to say during a pandemic when no one is supposed to be doing much of anything, but there’s just a bunch of little errands I need to tackle. I had actually wanted to write something very offbeat and playful, but I decided to be productive on the homefront instead. If any of you feel particularly robbed of my usual charm and eloquence (mileage varies on those descriptors), all I can say is that my house is clean and car vacuumed out. That’ll have to be our win for the day.

It was a busy week for me. A lot was going on. I had three columns in the Post, plus my usual video, and then the usual TVO fare. Plus a little something new I’ve been working on but can’t say anything about yet. Stay tuned!

My first column in the Post was about the future of the Conservative party in Canada, and was written after Erin O’Toole had said he was going to ask his caucus to eject MP Derek Sloan. “Erin O’Toole’s decision to eject Derek Sloan from the Conservative caucus, if successful, will leave the Conservative leader with a series of other decisions to make,” I noted. “His recent statement denouncing the far-right was welcome, but was all talk with no action. Blowing Sloan out an airlock is action — but will it stop there? How far does O’Toole think he should go? Does he dare go that far?”

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We’ll see, I guess. Time will tell. Find that column here.

My video for the Post was on the same topic, actually. Enjoy!

My next column was pegged to what was undoubtedly the biggest news story of the week — the inauguration of U.S president Joe Biden. But the column was more of a look back at the tenure of Donald Trump, a man I confess I will not miss. “Every presidency is a four- (or eight-) year commitment to be the person on the line when the phone rings in the dead of night, with only God knows what kind of bad news waiting on the other end,” I said. “A lot has gone wrong these last four years, but, for the most part, that phone didn’t ring. … Trump got some stuff right — history will recall his contributions to Middle East peace, for example, as a somewhat perplexing bright spot in his otherwise bleak legacy. But he wasn’t capable of rising to the demands of the office even before the pandemic, and never bothered trying during it.”

You can read that here.

Later in the week, I had to scramble to keep up with some breaking news — the sudden resignation of governor-general Julie Payette: “Whatever warm glow the prime minister might have been feeling after he was named the proud first recipient of a foreign-leader call from the Biden White House probably went up in smoke on Thursday afternoon when word emerged that Julie Payette, famed astronaut and Governor General, was resigning,” I said. “And not just to spend more time with her model of the solar system: Payette and her long-time friend and secretary, Assunta Di Lorenzo, are stepping down after an external report into allegations of a toxic workplace environment at Rideau Hall was completed.” 

Read that here.

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It was an interesting week in Ontario, as well, as we start to get some good news — early and fragile, but still — about the pandemic. That was the topic of my first column. “In an update from Toronto health officials, the province’s largest city indicated that the R(t) for COVID-19 in Toronto — the rate of growth — is just slightly higher than one,” I wrote. “That means that the pandemic is still spreading in the city, but only by a very little bit. No spread would be better, and contraction even better than that. But this was at least mildly encouraging. And that’s great! Mild encouragement is highly welcome. But the province has also opened our first field hospital and temporary morgues. And even if our numbers are indeed stabilizing, they’re stabilizing too damned high.”

Check that out here.

My second column was on a controversial, contentious part of the pandemic — the role, if any, that schools have played in spreading COVID-19. Parents understandably want schools open. But the science regarding spread among children remains frustratingly unclear. “The prevailing wisdom thus far has been that schools don’t drive transmission in a community, but reflect it: a community with high rates of transmission will see many cases in schools, but cases in schools won’t meaningfully drive spread in the community,” I explained in the column. “The Wall Street Journal, however, reported just last week that many European jurisdictions are examining their second-wave data and concluding that schools are indeed contributing to the spread. It’s deeply frustrating to be this far into the pandemic and still not have so basic a question answered.”

There’s big risk for governments here, I noted. And they’re at the mercy of evolving science. Not a situation I envy them.

That’s it for me this week, folks, but I’ll be back, I suspect with some news, in seven days. Take care and thanks for reading.

mgurney.responses@gmail.com
Twitter.com/MattGurney

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A few months ago, I wrote here about how strange it was to stand on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls, close enough to America to actually see Americans, and know I could not go there. My entire life, the United States has been an extension of my own country. I was Canadian, proudly so, but the U.S. was a friendly, fun place to visit. It's like those friendships that result in you just sort of being absorbed by another family, with full fridge-access privileges. A lot of Canadians feel that way about the U.S., which might explain why we're so sensitive to any perceived slight by our other family.

I've been thinking a lot about travel to the U.S. lately. Not in a whimsical, if-only way, but very pragmatically. Will it be possible to get a vaccine there sooner than in Canada?

It'll depend, of course. The U.S.'s own vaccination program isn't exactly batting a thousand. But Canada's isn't going great, either, and Pfizer has announced that it'll be limiting new shipments to Canada while it expands production capacity. This is only supposed to disrupt Canadian shipments for about a month, and Pfizer says the expanded capacity will let it make up the difference with faster shipments by the end of the first quarter. Maybe, but maybe not. And even if Canada sticks to the plan, guys like me — not high risk or high priority, but with a life I'd like to get back to living — are going to be waiting a long time for a shot or two. September is the target date, on paper, but it's not hard to imagine that sliding. Everything else has, thus far.

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So let's consider a few scenarios. The first is that Canada gets its act together on vaccines — the feds procure sufficient supply and the provinces figure out how to distribute it. In that scenario, no problem. We all just wait patiently like good Canadians and get our shots in appropriate sequence. Another scenario is that the incoming Biden administration isn't able to meaningfully improve the situation in the U.S., or at least not fast enough to matter for Canadians. In this scenario, too, we just sit and wait, for lack of a better option.

But consider a third scenario: the U.S. gets their vaccine situation under control, and Canada is still struggling, or lagging far behind. In this situation, vaccines are available in the U.S. for all who want them, but millions of Canadians are months away from getting theirs.

Some percentage of those Canadians are going to go south to get their shots. If it makes sense logistically, I'll happily go myself.

The logistics will matter. With three- or four-week separations between the two doses for Moderna and Pfizer, it might not really make sense. You'd spend so much time in quarantine after each trip, or you'd need the ability to just live in the U.S. for the month. That's doable, but for many Canadians, either plan would be a burden that's more hassle than it's worth. But with Johnson and Johnson apparently close to having their single-shot vaccine ready, and with early reports suggesting it's highly safe and effective, this could be a huge change. 

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I'm a two-hour drive from New York State. I'm four hours from Detroit by car. I'm a short flight from the entire continental United States. If there were single dose shots available and if I could book my appointment online, then fly down, get the shot and return home? A two-week quarantine in the comfort of my own home would be a price I'd happily pay. And I won't be alone.

If the U.S. gets better at vaccines and Canada doesn't, this will happen. There's unanswered questions, still, such as what restrictions will be put on Canadians entering the U.S., and whether Canadian health authorities will recognize American proof-of-vax paperwork. (I can't see any rational reason they wouldn't, but I could see a degree of spite factoring in.) And there'll be the societal and equity issues that come up. I can just imagine the collective horror in certain segments of the Canadian chattering classes as those of us who can afford to jet south for a shot and then fly home, to isolate in comfort in detached houses or even, God forbid, cottages.

As for my own feelings on the fairness of it all, I'd refer you back to something I wrote here a few months ago: privileged people enjoy their privileges, no matter what performative guilt they feel obliged to feign for the benefit of interviewers. If this becomes feasible, a whole bunch of Canadians who have all the right views on equity and social justice and inclusion will find ways to rationalize jetting south to get their jab. 

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I'm a capitalist at heart and I can already see how savvy American companies will play this, if they can secure vaccine. I can see whole travel packages popping up for purchase: flight from a major Canadian airport to a destination in the U.S., overnight stay in a hotel, a nurse coming to your suite to handle your injections, and then a flight back home to begin your 14 days of isolation. All accommodation, travel and meals included! 

Don't get me wrong. I'd just as soon get vaccinated at home and spare myself the expense and hassle of a trip. But if getting vaccinated in the U.S. becomes feasible months before I'll get vaccinated here? I'll go. Others will, too. And as awkward as our political leaders will find this conversation, they should start having it now. 

They won't. But they should. 

And now, time for the recap.

My weekly video at the Post was on election speculation. I'm not buying that one is likely, but hey.

Wrote a column for the Post on that same theme. Check that out here.

Also in the Post, my thoughts on Trump getting the boot from Twitter. It was warranted, I said. Even necessary. But it's going to make Twitter's life a lot more complicated as people, rightly and understandably, demand an even hand.

Read that here.

At TVO.org, where I'd been beating up on Premier Doug Ford for a while, I thought it was important to offer a limited defence — Ford has to own the mistakes he's made, I wrote, and that includes things he did not do, but should have. That being said, there's only so much any government can do to make people do the right thing. And that can get ugly in practice.

Read that here.

Later in the week, after the Ontario government announced new restrictions in Ontario, I wrote that only time will tell if the new measures work. That's a lousy summary; I promise the column is more interesting than that. Find out for yourself!

And as always, you can hear me each morning on Canada Talks, SiriusXM channel 167.

I expect to have some “personal news” announcements to make about my working life shortly — probably by the end of the month. So stay tuned for that. In the meantime, though, as always, thanks for reading. If you enjoyed it, please share widely, and sign up if you’re new. And, of course, take care and be well.

mgurney.responses@gmail.com
Twitter.com/MattGurney

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Happy 2021, Code 47 readers. It's been bonkers so far. It'll get more bonkers. Prepare yourselves.

I had prepared a column about the political violence in America that I wanted to include at the top of this week's recap. I can't send it out today, though, for two boring reasons that my fellow journalists will recognize as occupational hazards. The first is that a news development this weekend has materially changed what I was going to say, and I now need to rethink a part of my thesis. I think it mostly holds up! But adapting what I'd written to the current situation is going to be more involved than just deleting or rewriting a few sentences. The other reason is that someone else has published something very close to what I was planning to say, and frankly, they have more authority on the issue than I do. So I'm going to put that column into the reserve folder and hope that I'm able to use it here or elsewhere shortly. 

So we'll talk about "teacher's privilege" instead.

I am married to a teacher. My wife teaches French to elementary age students. I also have two children, both are in elementary school. (But not my wife's school — she teaches at a private school, my kids go to the local French Immersion public school.) Via my wife, I know many teachers. This is all to say that I know how hard many teachers work, and I also know how essential they are to a child's life. With Toronto under a form of lockdown due to the pandemic and elementary schools closed, I've had to turn myself into a full-time teaching assistant as my kids learn remotely via Zoom. Luckily, my schedule permits this, but for many parents, balancing work and newfound teaching duties is going to be a nightmare, if not outright impossible.

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Unsurprisingly, I saw my social media feeds fill up this week with odes to teachers. Parents are getting a taste for the first time since their own long-ago days as students just how hard it is to be a teacher, and how important it is that we have them. A commonly shared sentiment was, "Wow, these teachers are worth every penny!" 

That's nice! I hoped it warmed the hearts of educators everywhere. But this outpouring of support and affection made me wonder how long it'll be, once this pandemic finally blows over, before we find ourselves, yet again, having a debate over how much a teacher is "worth."

This has always been one of my favourite public-policy debates because it's fascinating, and complicated in a way that basically leaves everyone pissed off but also partially in the right. Teachers in Ontario are well paid. The salary grid for elementary teachers, in 2020, for example, would start from a low of $47,040 (minimal required qualifications, zero experience) to a high of $101,989 (fully qualified, ten years of experience or more). However! Since the Ontario College of Teachers requires at least a three-year degree from a post-secondary institution to qualify for a teaching certificate, most teachers will likely start in the A2 class for the purposes of determining their place on the collective bargaining agreement's salary grid. (It's probably more complicated than this in real life, and I'm not saying there aren't exceptions, but permit me a bit of rounding off for simplicity.) And that means a teacher starting in 2020, with zero experience, starts at a salary of $52,595.

Not bad in a province with an average income (for individuals between 25-54, which best approximates a teacher's working years) of $56,800. Starting just shy of the provincial average for your whole age group on your first day on the job ain't bad. A day-one teacher looks even better if you look at the median income for that age group — $45,600. (Both those figures are current to 2018, so are likely slightly higher now, but close enough.) A teacher with A2 qualifications will surpass the average salary of the 25-54 age group by their third year on the job. 

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I can sense teacher hackles rising already. Don’t shoot! I come in peace! I'm not about to make any sweeping argument that teachers are overpaid or demand crushing provincial austerity be inflicted on you all. My point above was simply to set out the key, objective facts: a teacher will not get rich in Ontario on their salary alone, but they are objectively well compensated, relative to the rest of the population. 

And wooo boy, does this ever set off some fights!

Public-sector compensation is a constant source of populist anger and conflict. Teachers are not quite in the public sector, in the sense that they don't work for the provincial public service, but that's a distinction without much difference here. In my years working in radio, and many more years listening to radio, I've found that fights over teacher compensation are particularly animated. Teachers get their backs up really quickly if anyone suggests they're overpaid, and many members of the public passionately insist that's exactly what they are.

And that's why I find this issue so fascinating. I actually don't have strong feelings on this, because ... I have no idea how to calculate someone's worth. I guess I default to pretty ruthless market capitalism for determining their wage: everything is worth what someone will pay for it. But that's too simple, of course. There are terrible people making great money and wonderful people out of work, particularly during the pandemic. Humans derive a ton of their sense of self-esteem and self-worth from their jobs and their economic status, so I get why people get fired up about how much money a person is paid. Truly.

But it still amuses me to see people get genuinely agitated because they think a teacher makes too much money (I assume because they make less), or a teacher who cannot understand why anyone would think they might make too much money. It's a completely pointless argument that we'll never stop having, and no one will ever learn anything from it or budge an inch. We're all trapped far too firmly in the confines of our own perspective.

And this might be where I do annoy teachers a little bit. As a group, I have typically found them to be wonderful, affable and, pardon me, somewhat clueless about how they can come across to non-teachers. I think every profession tends to get too involved in its own bullshit, lost in its particular inside baseball. But teachers might be unusually vulnerable to this because so much of their daily interaction is with children, so their adult interactions (many with fellow teachers!) are emotionally and intellectually weighted more highly than is optimal. The difference between teachers and other workers, in terms of the workplace echo chamber, is only a matter of degree, but in my experience, that degree is considerable.

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Let me tell a story to illustrate the point. Many, many years ago, I was at an end-of-school-year party with my wife, hosted by one of her colleagues. Spirits were high! And the common theme among the teachers was, woo hoo! Fuck yeah! Another year done, another summer is here! One of them in particular had had perhaps a bit too much to drink and was more vocal than the others in expressing her excitement at two months without work, without having to wake up early, without a boss, without bullshit, and so on and so on. She was hurling herself into two months to herself. And thank God, because she’d sure earned it!

I'm a people watcher. I find humans fascinating. And I tuned out what the tipsy teacher was saying and just watched everyone else. And you could spot anyone who was not a teacher by how carefully neutral their facial expressions became. I suspect mine was the same! No one was going to ruin the party by noting that that kind of time off is not normal. But a bunch of us were thinking it. The boasting that was so obviously odd to us non-teachers just washed over the teachers themselves, though. They weren't as exuberant (drunk), but they shared the sentiment. 

Yes, yes, it's just one party, one tipsy educator. And teachers will rush in to tell me, hey, Matt, we plan during our summers. We take courses. And we also work after hours during the school year with marking. So it all balances out, dammit. I've heard it all before, and my response has always been, sure, that’s all true, but ... you don't think I work after hours? You don't think I'm planning stuff on my holidays? Teacher exceptionalism is a blind spot many of them — their jobs probably are harder than many, but they’re already, as noted above, objectively well compensated for their labour.

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I don't begrudge teachers their good deal. But gosh, many of them run a danger to their own public standing by not realizing that they indeed have a good deal.

Not all! Many are clued in and very grateful for all they have. I remember one teacher in particular, a friend of a friend, saying something very smart that I've often reflected back on. This woman taught in a rural area of the province, and one that has in recent years suffered from a lot of economic problems — high unemployment, failing businesses, collapsing incomes. Ahead of one of the labour disputes between the province's teachers and government, she told me that she was mortified.

Obviously, she wanted the best deal possible. She was frank about that, and, I mean, hey. Of course she wanted the best possible deal. But she told me point blank that she was already making a lot more money than the parents of every student she was teaching that year, with one possible exception — she wasn't sure about one kid's dad. For every other student in that class, though, she was pulling in more money than their parents, and probably their households. Not to mention the benefits, the time off and, again, the pension.

"If we go on strike and these kids can't come to class," she told me, "those parents, who are making minimum wage, are going to have to scramble to find childcare so I can picket for a slightly higher raise than what I'm being offered on top of my already six-figure salary."

She was willing to fight for that slightly higher raise, but she knew how bad it could look. I'm not sure all her colleagues do.

Location plays a part. Earning $100,000 doesn't get you far in Toronto; in other places, it's a king's ransom. So yes, context matters. But so does humility, or at least a well-honed instinct for (political) self-preservation. 

So here we are, in a very strange moment in history, when a lot of parents would probably be happy to pay teachers double if that's what it took to get schools open. But this moment isn't going to last, and when COVID-19 is finally under control and the schools can open again, the economic damage of the pandemic, plus the enormous debts added by provinces, are going to make a teacher's salary, benefits, secure pension and summers off even more offside with the norm for much of the public. 

I like teachers. I value them. I married one! I already knew how hard they work, but I also know how well they're paid, and I know many people who work as hard for less. This moment of harmony and appreciation for our educators is wonderful and I hope it lasts. But I don't think it will.

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Anyway! Hope you enjoyed that. That was long enough already, so let's make the weekly recap snappy, eh?

In a column that already seems like it was written a million years ago, I wrote in the National Post about the outrage many Canadians felt after some of our politicians ignored advice to stay at home and jetted off for sun-filled holidays. "There’s no arguing with the public once they’ve made up their mind that someone, or a group of someones, have gone further than they’ll dare permit and must be punished," I said, "and no hope for any politician who dares try stand in the path of such waves of anger."

And then, also in the Post, there was my best effort at making some sense out of the absolutely insane attack upon the U.S. Capitol last week."Terror groups and foreign adversaries the world over must be astonished," I wrote. "That … that’s it? We could just march in and seize the capitol? As difficult as it is to accept that the U.S. lost control of the capitol, it’s harder still to believe that the local security forces just let it happen."

And there was my weekly video for the Post, on the slow pace of vaccinations in Ontario. Right now, that's a provincial problem. But it's about to become a federal one.

Speaking of unfolding disasters, both of my columns at TVO.org this week focused on a rapidly deteriorating COVID-19 situation in Ontario, which the government seems to have no plan for. The first was on Monday, the second on Friday, and, honestly? Not much changed in-between. I've often reflected on a snappy saying I heard once from a survivalist: "When seconds count, help is only minutes away." I hadn't realized that was actually our guiding principle of emergency planning in Ontario, though. 

Yikes. What can I say? Lots happening out there, folks, and little of it good.

But we’ll keep on keepin’ on here at Code 47, and I wish you all all the best. Until next time.

mgurney.responses@gmail.com
Twitter.com/MattGurney

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