A quick recap after a very busy week
Trump, Biden, Payette, Sloan, O'Toole and COVID. Lots goin' on!
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?”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.
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