Huh. It turns out running the hospital system beyond capacity for decades was a bad idea!
The entirely predictable thing has happened, and people are going to die. Plus, a recap of the week that was.
Welcome, Code 47 readers. My update blast to you will be short and sweet today, simply because I don't have a lot of time! With Toronto going into a modified lockdown again tomorrow, while we are OK for essential supplies — the life-sustaining necessities — my wife and I realized that there's a very good chance this lockdown lasts past Christmas. If that's the case, well, we are always diligent about helping out Santa. We're just helping him out a bit earlier than normal this year. Christmas won't be exactly normal for us this season but we want the kids to at least be confident that, plague or not, Santa will still get through.
Anyway, for my readers in Toronto and the surrounding areas, obviously, good luck. Indeed, good luck to us all. COVID-19's second wave seems set to be worse than the first, and this time, it's hitting the whole country. I was particularly saddened to hear about outbreaks in the territories, where there are very real limits on health-care capacity. Mind you, we're not exactly brimming with capacity anywhere. That's why we're building field hospitals in the goddamned national capital.
If there is anything that has made me angry about this pandemic — not sad or anxious or afraid, but angry — it's that we left ourselves horrifically vulnerable to it. Regular, long-time readers of mine might remember my having written, in 2019, about my son's brief and torturous trip through the Canadian health-care system. Being a typically rambunctious four-year-old boy, he'd broken his collarbone and had the misfortune of being taken by some idiot (me) to a small rural hospital that was completely overloaded by a combination of a staffing crunch over a long weekend and a few ill-timed heart attacks. (Ill-timed for me, I mean — I can't imagine there's ever a good time for the poor bastard having the coronary.)
This was an issue I'd already been paying attention to. My son's experience just put a laser-focus on it: we had allowed our health-care system to deteriorate for years. This debate comes loaded with a lot of pre-chewed opinions based on your ideology. Those on the left will insist the answer is higher taxes on corporations and The Rich to funnel that money into health care, those on the right will say we just need a more efficient, partially privatized system. I'm very much in the latter camp on this one, but I'm also a realist. There's no way we're going to get the kind of system we want and very obviously need just by waving our libertarian magic wands at it and shouting, "GREATER COMPETITION BREEDS EFFICIENCY!" Even if we overhaul the system entirely, have no illusions. You'll pay more to get more.
But we're already paying more. We're paying in lives and lockdowns. I'd rather pay in money, but maybe that's just me.
It was a busy week for me, including here at Code 47. I wrote about Substack, the website that hosts this very newsletter. It's getting a lot of attention right now as a potential new model for journalism. I think there's some truth in that. A model that connects paying news consumers directly with trusted sources of news — well, almost directly, Substack does take a cut — probably is the future, at least in the medium term. But as I argued here, I think there are some real obstacles to Substack becoming the new model — including the fact that the more successful one becomes here, the more tempting it'll be to go fully solo and cut Substack out of the loop.
But is there a place for Substack? I think so. It'll be a place for people with modest followings to make a modest living, and that's a good thing! We need something like that! It may help keep journalists in journalism while the economics of the industry gets sorted out.
But is this the future? Sure, in the same way Myspace was the future, once.
Anyway, check out my column here.
Also from me, in the National Post, I rolled my eyes a bit at Trudeau cabinet minister Marym Monsef's mute-button gaffe. In the middle of a parliamentary debate — on a tax on the wealthy, of all things — Monsef, who was participating virtually, began chatting to someone off-camera, trying to remember how much money she makes. Her remarks were picked up and broadcast to the entire free world. And, alas, she wasn't even close. She underestimated her salary by almost $20,000.
"I have no qualms with paying our elected officials well," I said in the Post, "even if, as in this particular case, one can fairly wonder if we’re getting value for money. [The issue is] Monsef serving a party that claims to be entirely focused on the economic prosperity and security of Canadians, particularly the middle class (and those working hard to join it!), while not knowing her own salary to within the nearest $20,000. As Zi-Ann Lum noted in HuffPost Canada, Monsef is pulling in, in salary alone, more than four times the median wage in her riding of Peterborough—Kawartha. She blew her guesstimate of her own salary by what one of her constituents, earning the median, would earn in four months."
"In the meantime," I continued, "while Monsef searches for the perfect mathematical formula to calculate her monthly budget, the only serious thought I’d ask Canadians to keep in mind is that the pandemic, the economic fallout from it and all the various other crises popping up around the world have stretched the capacity of our federal government to the very limit. We are running an institution that normally operates at a pace that could be charitably deemed 'languid,' at speeds that probably aren’t long sustainable. This very much includes the executive, where a cabinet increasingly short on genuine talents is responsible for steering our country through a variety of overlapping emergencies. The problem here isn’t that Monsef doesn’t know how much she makes or how a mute button works. It’s not even how much money she makes. It’s that she holds real power in a government dealing with the greatest crisis this country has faced since Hitler’s Panzers held dominion from Brest to the outskirts of Moscow."
Another Liberal cabinet minister also caught my eye this week. The Conservatives introduced a motion in the House, asking for firm, tangible commitments from the Liberals on toughening up on an increasingly bellicose China. In response, Foreign Affairs Minister François-Philippe Champagne ... well, I'll just quote from the column.
"Champagne, responding for the government, said many of the right things. He noted the continued captivity of the two Michaels, China’s oppressive behaviour at home and abroad and said that promoting and protecting human rights is a fundamental priority for Canada. Trade diversification — code for making us less economically dependent on China — is important, too, he said.
"Then he added this: 'We are aware that China is, and will remain, an important commercial partner for Canada. China is also a significant source of tourists and students to Canada, and brings economic and enriching social benefits across our nation.'
"So there you have it. The position of our Liberal government, laid out in absolutely perfect concision: sure, they’re warehousing religious minorities in concentration camps and crushing freedom underfoot in Hong Kong, and yeah, they’re holding our citizens hostage and threatening our economy, but gosh, have you seen the spin-offs these tourists generate?"
That column is here.
And the latest installment of the Basement Tapes is here for your pleasure, as well.
I was busy, as usual, at TVO.org, too. In a nice change of pace from 2020's relentless pace of bad news, I noted there does seem to be one thing that's going right in Ontario — our supply of PPE seems to be holding out, for now.
"If the second wave is as bad as feared," I wrote, "we may again find our system overwhelmed with cases and short on supplies. But, for now, there is at least some cause for optimism — if nothing else, the supplies of PPE are in better shape than they were the first time. It's a low bar, I grant, which is especially galling considering how much boasting there had been pre-pandemic about how Ontario's experience with SARS had left us well prepared to deal with whatever came next, which turned out to be ... SARS-2.
"But even the low bars have proved a challenge this year. So it's good to note that, thus far, we've cleared this one. I'll keep my fingers crossed that I don't come to rue this column a month down the line."
Also at TVO, I noted the reaching of a grim milestone — Ontario not only hit the first red line for a dangerously threatened health-care system this week, we hit it much earlier than we had expected to. "Late last month," I reported, "public-health modelling had shown that we would hit that first red line within the next 30 days only in the worst-case scenario. A week ago, when things had worsened, the new update was that we’d hit 150 ICU beds by the end of next week. We hit 150 COVID-19 patients in ICU as of [Thursday] morning. Or near to it — there is some conflict between the data sources, with Critical Care Ontario saying 150 on the nose, and the government providing the slightly lower figure of 146. Even if the latter, lower figure is the accurate one, that’s still a one-day increase of 19. It’s hard to imagine any scenario in which the 150 figure isn’t reached in a matter of hours, if it hasn’t been already.
"Either way, we’ve achieved the worst-case scenario, with a full week to spare. This is, to put it mildly, decidedly suboptimal."
"Decidedly suboptimal" is how WASP's say "this is terrible fucking news," for the record.
That's it for this week, team. Thanks for reading, as always. I think you'll be seeing a bit more at Code 47, now that I have the time to invest in it. I hope you enjoy reading as much as I'm enjoying writing.
Take care, and mind the lockdown.
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