Difficult Times

Chrystia Freeland delivers her economic update today. Chantal Hebert writes that, for Freeland, today is an inflection point:

Monday’s long-awaited federal fiscal update will be Chrystia Freeland’s first major solo performance as finance minister. She will need to make it count as it may also be her next-to-last in this Parliament.

By all indications, the update won’t bring the curtain down on Justin Trudeau’s minority government, but it will be a dress rehearsal for a spring budget that could well lead to a general election.

The conventional wisdom is that we'll have a spring election. The Conservatives, under Erin O'Toole, are already chomping at the bit. They talk about Canada being at the end of the line for vaccines. And, with protests against public health guidance growing across the country, this could very well be our winter of discontent.

Freeland's job is to help navigate the country through this winter:

Whether the next federal campaign comes over the first half of 2021 or later, the Liberals’ re-election to government will depend in no small part on Freeland’s performance as finance minister.

To secure a mandate to shepherd Canada out of the field of relative fiscal and economic ruins left behind by the pandemic, Trudeau will need his finance minister to complement rather than replicate his political branding.

To define what would constitute success on Monday is in itself a challenge.

As they struggle with the uncertainties brought about by the pandemic, most voters are not (yet?) inclined to prosecute the government for the massive and still-mounting deficit Freeland will present them with next week.

But nor are most Canadians — notwithstanding the vocal lobbies that have been looking to the pandemic for momentum to advance their agendas — craving a major experiment in social engineering.

While the fiscal update will lead to much debate as to whether Freeland has succeeded at striking a magic balance between fiscal rectitude and policy activism, the core message many voters will be looking for next week may be whether hers is a steady hand at the wheel.

These are difficult times -- for Freeland and the country.

Image: South China Morning Post

The Final Nail

"Give me liberty or give me death!" That line was Patrick Henry's claim to fame. If you live in Jason Kenney's Alberta, those seem to be your two options. Don Lenihan and Andrew Balfour write:

Joe Biden didn’t win the US election; Donald Trump defeated himself – and he did it by denying the truth about the pandemic. Jason Kenney’s decision to become “the voice of liberty” as the virus rampages through Alberta seems to us strangely similar. Indeed, the premier’s rants are starting to sound like the caricatured Alberta conservative, “Joe Albertan.”

Albertans don't like those choices:

The latest Environics poll has Rachel Notley’s NDP leading Kenney’s Conservatives 47 to 40 per cent. A Leger survey last week found a mere 37 per cent of Albertans were satisfied with the premier’s measures to fight the pandemic. To get clearer on what Kenney is thinking and why he is talking this way, let’s roll back the tape on his response to the pandemic.

Kenney has been the most strident Conservative voice in Canada. And, as COVID numbers rose in the province, he continued to echo Patrick Henry:

A steep rise in COVID cases was under way by mid-October, and by early November, the numbers were surging. Even conservative premiers knuckled under and began imposing hard measures on their provinces – except for Kenney, who talked about defeating the virus, but failed to act.

On November 6, new measures were finally announced, but the premier stoutly resisted any use of mandatory measures. The emphasis was firmly on “personal responsibility.” Why?

A lockdown, Kenney said, “constitutes a massive invasion of the exercise of people’s fundamental rights and a massive impact on not only their personal liberties but their ability to put food on the table to sustain themselves financially.”

The premier was heading down a different path. Instead, he called on Albertans to continue “to lead the way as the freest province in the country…”

On November 12, 70 physicians from across the province sent a letter to the premier calling for “strong and decisive mandatory measures,” perhaps along the lines of a “circuit breaker” lockdown.

Kenney replied by doubling down on liberty “We’ve seen other jurisdictions implement sweeping lockdowns, indiscriminately violating people’s rights and destroying livelihoods. Nobody wants that to happen here in Alberta,” he declared.

But over the next two days, it was the virus that showed who was really in control. Each day, the province surged past 1,500 cases – overtaking even Ontario, which has more than three times the population of Alberta and was itself surging out of control.

On November 23, 341 physicians sent yet another letter to the premier, pleading for a lockdown and warning that the rise in cases would soon overload the health-care system.

Indeed, as the virus devoured medical resources and infected thousands of Albertans, Kenney not only persisted with the Cold War rhetoric but, ironically, ranted about how he was resisting “political pressure” and “ideological approaches” from those who were trying to undermine liberty and damage people’s lives and livelihoods.”

It was, frankly, bizarre.

Bizarre is too polite a word. In Ontario, we are in the same boat as Albertans. The pandemic should put the final nail in the coffin of neo-liberalism. We'll see if that happens.

Image: fcit.usf.edu

A Different World

Joe Biden will replace the Trump Clown Show with competent professionals. But, Tony Burman writes, the world has changed a great deal since the advent of Trump -- for several reasons:

1.The United States Is Much Weaker

The damage inflicted on the United States by the Trump presidency is virtually incalculable. By the time he leaves office in January, more than 400,000 Americans will be dead from the pandemic. The economy is in shambles and the key democratic institutions — such as the legal system, news media and public service — have been savaged. The country is also horribly polarized, with the majority of Republicans believing Trump’s nonsense that the election was stolen from him. That is the America over which a new President Biden will preside.

2. It's Not the Same World

Since 2016, the American reputation in the world has declined dramatically. Rather than being seen as “the shining city on the hill” — as Ronald Reagan once described it — the U.S. is now viewed by many as a failed state. In many parts of the world, the dictators of China and Russia — Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin — are now “more trusted” than the U.S. president. Even the fabled U.S. medical system is now viewed by many with disbelief as its horrific pandemic death toll climbs.

3. Europe Is Divided

There are divisions in Europe about how close an embrace there should be to the Americans now. France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, is pushing for European “strategic autonomy” that would be more independent in military and industrial terms. Germany, in contrast, wants to resume the close relations of the past. The question is how trustworthy the United States is anymore.

4. The Problems Are Tougher to Solve

The U.S. will rejoin the Paris climate treaty, the World Health Organization and UNESCO and it will revive the nuclear agreement with Iran. But it will take considerable resolve to solve other issues. There is the need for the U.S. to end its role in the Saudi-led war in Yemen, to make sense of the farcical Trump approach to North and South Korea, and to deal with Russia. And the list goes on.

5. China Is A Force to Be Reckoned With

There is no country that has benefited more from the disastrous Trump years than China. Although the U.S. president and his acolytes were bellicose in their anti-China rhetoric, their actions accomplished nothing — except to strengthen China’s position. By weakening western alliances, abandoning America’s traditional allies in Asia and withdrawing the U.S. from any effective global engagement, Trump allowed the Chinese government to increase its power abroad and smother human rights and democracy in its own country. China, therefore, is far more of a dangerous rival to the U.S. than it was when Trump took over.

Throughout his life, Donald Trump has been a wrecking ball. During the last four years, he has set out to wreak havoc on the world. Rebuilding from the rubble he has left behind will not be easy.

Image: slate.com

No Easy Task

David Brooks has an interesting column in this morning's New York Times. Brooks seeks to explain why so many people are open to believing conspiracy theories:

We live in a country in epistemological crisis, in which much of the Republican Party has become detached from reality. Moreover, this is not just an American problem. All around the world, rising right-wing populist parties are floating on oceans of misinformation and falsehood. What is going on?

My analysis begins with a remarkable essay that Jonathan Rauch wrote for National Affairs in 2018 called “The Constitution of Knowledge.” Rauch pointed out that every society has an epistemic regime, a marketplace of ideas where people collectively hammer out what’s real. In democratic, nontheocratic societies, this regime is a decentralized ecosystem of academics, clergy members, teachers, journalists and others who disagree about a lot but agree on a shared system of rules for weighing evidence and building knowledge.

Over the past decades the information age has created a lot more people who make their living working with ideas, who are professional members of this epistemic process. The information economy has increasingly rewarded them with money and status. It has increasingly concentrated them in ever more prosperous metro areas.

While these cities have been prospering, places where fewer people have college degrees have been spiraling down: flatter incomes, decimated families, dissolved communities. In 1972, people without college degrees were nearly as happy as those with college degrees. Now those without a degree are far more unhappy about their lives.

And it's those without a degree who are easy prey for conspiracy theorists:

People in this precarious state are going to demand stories that will both explain their distrust back to them and also enclose them within a safe community of believers. The evangelists of distrust, from Donald Trump to Alex Jones to the followers of QAnon, rose up to give them those stories and provide that community. Paradoxically, conspiracy theories have become the most effective community bonding mechanisms of the 21st century.

For those awash in anxiety and alienation, who feel that everything is spinning out of control, conspiracy theories are extremely effective emotional tools. For those in low status groups, they provide a sense of superiority: I possess important information most people do not have. For those who feel powerless, they provide agency: I have the power to reject “experts” and expose hidden cabals. As Cass Sunstein of Harvard Law School points out, they provide liberation: If I imagine my foes are completely malevolent, then I can use any tactic I want.

It's that divide that haunts our politics these days. And bridging that divide will be no easy task.

Image: the conversation.com

A Criminal Then And Now

Yesterday, Donald Trump pardoned Mike Flynn. During Robert Mueller's inquiry and Trump's impeachment, Trump signaled to his associates that, if they refused to cooperate, he'd take care of them. Trump got William Barr to take care of Roger Stone. Now Trump has taken care of Mike Flynn.

Flynn's pardon is only the first of several pardons which Trump will issue before he leaves office. His last act may be to pardon himself -- which would be a violation of the core legal principle that a man cannot be a judge in his own case.

But principle has never guided Trump's decisions. He has always made decisions based upon self-interest -- his own self-interest.

Mr. Biden's attorney general will have his hands full. And Trump will leave office as he entered it -- a criminal.

Image: You Tube

A Myth Buster

For nearly fifty years now, we have been buying the myth that the private sector can do anything better than the government. The pandemic has exposed that myth for the lie it is. What has been happening in our long term care homes is the most painful example of that lie. Linda McQuaig writes:

Privatization has become a kind of economic dogma in recent years, with business commentators and politicians routinely asserting that the private sector is more efficient and always does things better -- an assertion that is rarely accompanied by any evidence.

In fact, the crucial difference separating the private and public sectors is that the private sector is focused on profit-making. Indeed, this is the only real purpose of a business enterprise.

So, regardless of what industry spokespeople say, a private company in the nursing home business is focused on maximizing profits, as its board of directors demands.

What has happened in Ontario starkly illustrates the primacy of profit over care:

Certainly, Ontario's three big private nursing home chains, which receive government funding under the same formula as not-for-profit homes, have been good at maximizing profits.

Over the past decade, the three chains paid out $1.5 billion in dividends to shareholders and $138 million in executive pay, according to the Star investigation.

The chains insist these payouts come out of profits they earn selling private services to residents in these and other retirement homes, which are not funded by government.

In fact, it's hard to know exactly what's going on, since the government is notoriously lax in its regulations and oversight of the industry -- as the pandemic vividly illustrates.

This laxness appears to be traceable back to Mike Harris, the former Conservative premier whose government removed minimum staffing levels for nursing homes in the late 1990s and encouraged the involvement of private businesses.

Long term care homes have been kind to Harris:

After retiring from politics in 2002, Harris has profited handsomely from the lucrative private nursing home industry he helped create, serving as chairman of Chartwell Retirement Residences, one of the three big chains. (His annual salary for this part-time position is $229,500, and he has $4.4 million in Chartwell holdings.)

Over the past decade, Chartwell paid its executives $47.3 million and distributed $798 million to shareholders.

Meanwhile, in the 28 nursing homes Chartwell owns or operates in Ontario, the COVID-19 infection rate has been 47 per cent higher and the fatality rate 68 per cent higher than the provincial average, according to the Star investigation.

COVID has been a myth buster. After the pandemic, the old myths won't sell.

Image: torontocitynews.ca

If He Can't Live In the House

The Biden transition has now officially begun. Still, last night, Donald Trump tweeted that he would "never concede." What he will do, Paul Krugman writes, is trash the nation on his way out the back door. That is clearly evident in Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin's decision to take back money in government aid programs which has not yet been spent:

For a few weeks in March and April, as investors panicked over the pandemic, America teetered on the edge of a major financial crisis. But the Fed, backstopped by the Treasury, stepped up with new programs offering to buy assets like corporate bonds and municipal debt. In the end, not much of the money was used — but the assurance that the money was there if needed stabilized the markets, and the crisis faded away.

Maybe the new coronavirus surge won’t provoke a second financial crisis — after all, we now know that a vaccine is on the way. But the risk of crisis hasn’t gone away, and it’s just foolish to take away the tools we might need to fight such a crisis.

Mnuchin’s claim that the money is no longer needed makes no sense, and it’s not clear whether his successor will be easily able to undo his actions. Given everything else that’s happening, it’s hard to see Mnuchin’s move as anything but an act of vandalism, an attempt to increase the odds of disaster under Trump’s successor.

Trump's motivation is clear. He intends to punish the clear majority of voters who didn't cast their votes for him. If he can't live in the house, he intends to burn it down -- and Steve Mnuchin is setting the fire.

Image: the trentonline.com

Leadership And The Common Good

In the midst of a pandemic, Robin Sears writes, we are losing trust in our governments. There are ominous signs on the horizon which we must change:

The transgressions of the pandemic flouters’ partying, mask refusal and resentment at any forced changes in their private lives stems from one place: their declared mistrust of government.

Trust is breached when mistakes are ignored or denied by those accountable. So, how many apologies have we heard from the owners of some appalling long-term care facilities? Not an apology from a hapless LTC home manager — real apologies from the chairs and CEOs of the big chains. Perhaps starting with Mike Harris, the chair of Chartwell Retirement Residences, a firm who put out a stunningly insensitive self-congratulatory news release in May, with no hint of apology, and apparently none since.

Perhaps the best index of Canadians’ mistrust is this: the large number who say they will not take any vaccines. Although the number is coming down, it is still nearly one in three among us. This is seriously dangerous territory. If vaccines are forcibly mandated or restrictions are imposed on the freedoms of those who refuse, we risk serious civil unrest. If vaccination is not required, we will hit wave after COVID wave.

We should ensure that trusted senior physicians, faith leaders and academics also have effective platforms as vaccination advocates, not just politicians or public health officials.

This was never going to be easy. Our attention spans and our patience has, over the years gotten shorter. On the other hand, we're better than the naysayers claim. And trust works both ways:

Our leaders need to trust Canadians to be willing to endure tougher and tighter restrictions now. There appears to be a division developing between those provinces moving quickly with tough measures, such as B.C., Manitoba and Nunavut, and those that are not. Premier Ford appears to have returned to his early pandemic form — serious, empathetic, and persuasive — in announcing tough new measures on Friday.

Nearly every other government is either hesitating to impose broad and painful restrictions, or proposing completely unrealistic measures, such as Quebec’s complete quarantine one week before and one week after Christmas. It seems certain to fail. New Democrats and Greens have wisely demanded Ottawa and the provinces offer financial assistance to families in near lockdown.

We can get through this -- with the right leadership -- and with a commitment to the common good.

Image: health.sunnybrook.ca

Trump And His Bootlickers

Donald Trump refuses to admit that he lost the election. His refusal shows itself every day in so many ways. Richard Wolffe suggests that we count the ways:

1. The Founding Myth Of Election Night

"This is a fraud on the American public," he said. “This is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election. We did win this election. So our goal now is to ensure the integrity for the good of this nation. This is a very big moment. This is a major fraud in our nation. We want the law to be used in a proper manner. So we’ll be going to the US supreme court. We want all voting to stop.” 

2. Spineless Senators

Marco Rubio could see this coming. He warned us to be prepared. Sadly he couldn’t warn himself to do anything about it.

But that’s the Florida senator – and Trump’s Republican party – for you.

The Oklahoma senator James Lankford likes to think of himself as a smart, independent conservative with a deep concern for the nation’s security.

So when he appeared on Oklahoma radio a couple of weeks ago, it seemed pretty safe to insist that the president-elect, Joe Biden, should get intelligence briefings by the end of the week – some 10 days after the election. Otherwise, the mighty Lankford would intervene to protect America.

But Trump stood firm:

Faced with this insurmountable opponent, Lankford collapsed. He said he was in “no hurry” to help the transition, but also insisted that he did intervene – to no discernible effect.

3. Everything Rudi Guiliani does:

There are times when this former US attorney is astonishingly incompetent. There are other times when he is just bizarrely incoherent. As the Biden team’s Bob Bauer likes to point out, Giuliani and company are not just losing cases, they are losing lawyers.

At the landscaping joint last week, Giuliani was arguing about poll watching. So what if his leading witness was a sex offender and perennial candidate in a different state?

This week, he was arguing about a global conspiracy involving a couple of dead socialists, a live philanthropist and some voting software. The effort caused his hair dye, or possibly mascara, to dribble down his cheeks. It was pretty emotional.

Beyond the cosmetics, the challenge comes in the place they call the courts, where things like facts and details matter. Including whether you know the difference between Michigan and Minnesota, when you file affidavits that purport to prove voter fraud.

4. Everything Lindsey Graham does:

This much we know: Lindsey Graham of South Carolina called Georgia’s secretary of state to talk about throwing out ballots in the closely-contested state that he has nothing to do with. The state official – a Republican, who has received death threats for defending democracy – said he was stunned by the effort to throw out legally cast votes.

Lindsey Graham is a former military lawyer who currently chairs the Senate judiciary committee. He is also the Olympic gold medalist in the 100-meter walk of shame.

There's more -- but you get the idea. Clearly, it's time to haul Trump off to the funny farm -- along with the bootlickers who do his bidding.

Image: facebook.com

For Quite Awhile

Yesterday, Doug Ford imposed lockdowns in Toronto and Peel -- the suburbs west of Toronto. It took him a long time to get there. Bruce Arthur writes:

This has been a goldfish government, swimming from day to day, changing strategies on the fly while trying to keep businesses open and preserve votes in 2022. Four days ago, chief medical officer Dr. David Williams said almost every region in Ontario could be in the least restrictive green zone by Christmas. A week ago Ford changed the province’s framework but didn’t include defining a lockdown, and a week before that the same breathtakingly unscientific framework upended the entire strategy that Ontario had purported to employ.

This time, the government took and delivered medicine. It’s one step toward controlling the virus.

In Ontario, we're still caught between a rock and a hard place:

The lockdowns “probably will have some meaningful effect,” says Dr. Isaac Bogoch, an infectious diseases specialist at the University of Toronto. “I don’t think we should expect miracles. Maybe it’ll slow the rates down, maybe we’ll start to plateau.

“But we’re at the point now where we need rates to slow down, we need to plateau, because our health-care system’s getting pinched. So as much as this stinks, it is the right move, purely because Scarborough’s (hospitals) are getting hit, Brampton’s getting hit, Mississauga’s filling up, Humber’s filling up. They had to do something.”

It isn't easy. Until the virus is under control, the economy will suffer -- which means that workers will need more government support:

Indeed, without paid sick leave, Peel, home to so many essential workers, won’t be helped enough. The federal government has just passed stronger business supports, but federal paid sick leave isn’t enough. Fix that, and offer isolation facilities for those in congregate living situations, and you fix a lot.

“If we don’t address those factors, while this will bring things down in the short term, it will not necessarily address the risk and the outcomes that the most vulnerable in our community have been facing,” said Dr. Lawrence Loh, Peel’s medical officer of health.

Indeed. And if we don’t truly try to tackle the virus, what are we sacrificing in lockdown life for?

“For me the biggest question is what’s the end game here?” says epidemiologist and modeller Dr. Ashleigh Tuite of the University of Toronto, who sits on the province’s volunteer science table. “It was pretty clear that stronger measures were needed, and the current approach isn’t working. I don’t think that there were a lot of other options in terms of what you do next.

No, this isn't easy. And it's going to be like this for quite awhile.

Image: wisdomquotes.com

Our Own Morons

Erin O'Toole is trying to put a softer face on the Conservative Party, assuming that strategy will build a big tent party. But, Bob Hepburn writes, he's casting himself as Canada's Donald Trump:

Some analysts suggest O’Toole is shifting the party so far to the left that at times he sounds like U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders or that he’s trying to steal traditional NDP voters.

In truth, though, what O’Toole is doing is fashioning himself as Canada’s Donald Trump — but without the bombast, lies, bigotry and polarization that mark Trump’s presidency.

Indeed, O’Toole is openly stealing pages straight from Trump’s 2020 election strategy playbook.

Like Trump, O'Toole seeks to divide Canadians:

In doing so he is trying to duplicate Trump’s successful strategy of building a polarizing populist coalition of traditional Republicans and disaffected voters, reaching out to people who were furious with “cancel culture” and “the radical left,” revved up by “grievance politics” and fed up with “elites” who they believe don’t give a damn about them, their families, their jobs or their very existence.

O'Toole's Trumpist strategy is evident in several ways:

First, O’Toole’s leadership campaign slogan of “Take Back Canada” is an echo of Trump’s slogan of “Make America Great Again.” Catchy? For sure! But one can easily ask, “Take back from what — or whom?”

Second, O’Toole is pushing a “Canada First” economic strategy, with hints of trade tariffs on imports and action against companies that move jobs out of the country. Asked recently how this differs from Trump’s “America First” strategy, the Tory leader replied: “It’s not different at all.”

Third, Trump made huge headway in reaching disaffected voters by demonizing elites. That’s exactly what O’Toole has started to do with attacks on “elites” in business, politics and the media, although the truth is the Conservatives are the party of business “elites” and many media “elites.”

Fourth, like Trump, O’Toole has openly courted social conservatives with such moves as signalling a willingness to allow his MPs to reopen moral issues, such as abortion. Some pundits dismiss the political influence of social conservatives, but they remain a powerful force, well organized and well financed.

Fifth, O’Toole has adopted Trump’s get-tough approach to China, bashing it for cybertheft, human rights violations and aggressive trade stands. O’Toole doesn’t refer to COVID-19 as the “China virus” as Trump does, but he does echo the U.S. president when he alleges there is “no greater threat to Canada’s interest than the rise of China.”

Sixth, again like Trump, O’Toole is vigorously courting union workers, saying in a recent speech there is “too much power in the hands of corporate and financial elites who have been only too happy to outsources jobs abroad.” He’s also reaching out to suburban voters, saying in the same speech that “middle class Canada has been betrayed by the elites, on every level: political elites, financial elites, cultural elites.”

You'd think that after four years of Trumpian chaos, Canadian Conservatives would be wise enough to not repeat The Moron-in-Chief's mistakes. Apparently, we have our own morons.

Image: financialpost.com

Republicans and Trump

Most Republicans are sticking with Donald Trump. That's bad news. But, E.J. Dionne writes, you can see the reason they have made that choice by looking at the election results:

In 2020, Trump voters came out in droves and thus boosted down-ballot Republicans. Trump won over 10 million more votes in 2020 than in 2016 — exit polls suggest that 6.5 million of his ballots came from first-time voters — which means he brought new supporters into the electorate who were important to this year’s House GOP victories.

As one Democratic strategist noted, “2018 was a wave year because our people showed up and theirs didn’t. 2020 was like a reversion to the mean because both sides showed up and right now we’re feeling the whiplash because no public or private data saw it coming.”

And, behind Trump's increased voter turnout, there is a disturbing undercurrent:

Given Trump’s intemperate and often wild ranting in the campaign’s final weeks and the growing public role in GOP politics of QAnon conspiracists, the Proud Boys and other previously marginal extremist groups, these voters may well be more radical than the party as a whole. This means that Republicans looking to the future may be more focused on keeping such Trump loyalists in the electorate than on backing away from his abuses.

If Dionne is right, the United States is in for a lot of trouble:

Trump’s bitterest harvest could thus be a Republican Party with absolutely no interest in a more moderate course and every reason to keep its supporters angry and on edge. Ignoring reality and denying Trump’s defeat are part of that effort.

The Republican Party is now the party of Trump and of Fantasy. And it's beginning to look like it will stay that way.

Image: theorion.com

Create A Diversion

A recent study provides a stark picture of what Neo-liberalism has cost Americans. Robert Reich writes:

According to a recent Rand study, if America's distribution of income had remained the same as it was in the three decades following World War II, the bottom 90 percent would now be $47 trillion richer.

A low-income American earning $35,000 this year would be earning $61,000. A college-educated worker now earning $72,000 would be earning $120,000. Overall, the grotesque surge in inequality that began 40 years ago is costing the median American worker $42,000 per year.

The upward redistribution of $47 trillion wasn't due to natural forces. It was contrived. As wealth accumulated at the top, so did political power to siphon off even more wealth and shaft everyone else.

Monopolies expanded because antitrust laws were neutered. Labor unions shriveled because corporations were allowed to bust unions. Wall Street was permitted to gamble with other peoples' money and was bailed out when its bets soured even as millions lost their homes and savings. Taxes on the top were cut, tax loopholes widened.

When COVID-19 hit, Big Tech cornered the market, the rich traded on inside information and the Treasury and the Fed bailed out big corporations but let small businesses go under. Since March, billionaire wealth has soared, while most Americans have become poorer.

How could the oligarchy get away with this in a democracy where the bottom 90 percent have the votes? Because the bottom 90 percent are bitterly divided.

That in, a nutshell, is what these last forty years have been about. Set the vast majority at each other's throats, then rob the bank. If you want to rob a bank, you have to create a diversion.

Image: pymnts.com

A Dark Future

Paul Krugman writes that the American response to the coronavirus does not bode well for the future. If Americans can't deal with COVID, how will they deal with climate change?

Awful as the pandemic outlook is, however, what worries me more is what our failed response says about prospects for dealing with a much bigger issue, one that poses an existential threat to civilization: climate change.

As many people have noted, climate change is an inherently difficult problem to tackle — not economically, but politically.

Right-wingers always claim that taking climate seriously would doom the economy, but the truth is that at this point the economics of climate action look remarkably benign. Spectacular progress in renewable energy technology makes it fairly easy to see how the economy can wean itself from fossil fuels. A recent analysis by the International Monetary Fund suggests that a “green infrastructure push” would, if anything, lead to faster economic growth over the next few decades.

But climate action remains very difficult politically given (a) the power of special interests and (b) the indirect link between costs and benefits.

The cost and the benefit of wearing a mask should be a no brainer. But millions of people still don't get it. What do we do when the costs and benefits aren't immediately apparent? The concept of pay now or pay more later seems to have disappeared:

Consider, for example, the problem posed by methane leaks from fracking wells. Better enforcement to limit these leaks would have huge benefits — but the benefits would be widely distributed across time and space. How do you get people in Texas to accept even a small rise in costs now when the payoff includes, say, a reduced probability of destructive storms a decade from now and half the world away?

After all, the consequences of irresponsible behavior during a pandemic are vastly more obvious and immediate than the costs of climate inaction. Gather a bunch of unmasked people indoors — say, in the Trump White House — and you’re likely to see a spike in infections just a few weeks later. This spike will take place in your own neighborhood, quite possibly affecting people you know.

Still, millions of people simply refuse to connect the dots. We face a very dark winter. But we face a much darker future.

Image: grist.org

Rowing In The Same Direction

COVID numbers are surging across Canada. But some countries have beaten COVID. Andrew Nikiforuk writes:

Taiwan, a nation of 24 million, moved quickly with testing, tracing, masks and other interventions to quash the virus. Because it acted rapidly, it didn’t require lockdowns.

After imposing a severe lockdown, New Zealand decided to take advantage of plummeting case rates and aimed for elimination. When the virus reappeared in August due to a mysterious family cluster, the country quickly restored zero transmission with a targeted lockdown and mandatory masks. Within three weeks, New Zealanders were again living with fewer restrictions than most Canadians.

Inspired by New Zealand’s success, Australia went for zero transmission too. When a major outbreak erupted in the state of Victoria in August — 700 cases a day mostly in Melbourne — the nation kept the virus contained. Within 110 days, it achieved zero transmission with a disciplined lockdown that included a night curfew. (Yes, suicides and mental health issues did go up during that lockdown.)

And, in Canada, the Maritimes have done much better than other parts of the country in the fight against the virus. Why? Because all of these jurisdictions adopted a "Go For Zero" strategy:

Starting with a national commitment, it would apply the measures that work. Tight border controls and effective quarantines; rigorous test, trace and isolate protocols with quarantine hotels; schools with proper risk measures including fewer students in a room; mandatory masking; engaged citizens.

The key is that it has to be a national strategy -- and, in Canada, health is a provincial responsibility. Despite that, we almost applied such a strategy:

For a brief window of time, much of Canada stood well poised to get to zero. Last summer the provinces of B.C., Manitoba and Saskatchewan, representing 23 per cent of Canada’s territory and 20 per cent of its population, nearly achieved no COVID spread.

But these provinces didn’t go the extra distance. And because Canada lacks a national policy mandating Go for Zero measures, each province — except for Atlantic Canada and the North, felt pressure to emulate others who were coasting. Now we are reaping the results.

But it would be a mistake to ignore how close those three provinces came to proving Go for Zero could work.

Vancouver Island, for instance, has so low a transmission rate it could have become another New Zealand had it seized the moment.

As is always the case, it's really difficult to get all of us to row in the same direction.

Image: brockvillerowingclub.com

Whither Trumpism?

Donald Trump is headed for the exit. But the movement he spawned isn't, Robin Sears writes -- unless Trump refuses to leave the stage:

Political movements and their parties rarely die; they merely go into hibernation for a while.

This rebound is eminently possible for Trumpism, if the GOP codifies its policies and prejudices into a socially acceptable discourse. Americans in every generation have struggled with immigration. Anger at free trade and globalization has a broad and deep resonance in the American electorate. Contempt for all governments has often been widespread in American history. America First isolationism also has deep roots, with the GOP almost successfully blocking American participation in both world wars, the Marshall Plan, the United Nations and the Bretton Woods agreements that created the global economic infrastructure of the post-war years. Trump is merely a cruder version of a long line of conservative champions of these views.

Those positions have defined The Ugly American around the world. Trump was the Ugly American personified. 

And television magnified that personification. That's why there's talk of Trump starting his own TV network. It would renew his potency and keep him in the public eye. However, if Trump TV was the only network to cover his outrages, the man and his lunacy would fade. 

But Trumpism without Trump would garner lots of supporters:

A Trumpist GOP, without Trump, has another enormous advantage. They have access to hundreds of millions of dollars of support from rich right-wing American PACs, foundations and billionaires. The Koch brothers created and funded the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute, think tanks that provided the policy underpinnings to the Reagan revolution. A new generation of politically engaged billionaires from both Wall Street and Silicon Valley will back a new America First GOP agenda with generous support.

So much depends on what Trump does when he's out of office. But whichever path he chooses, his curse will not go away.

Image: pinterest

Restaurants Have Clout

Restaurants have been lobbying hard to stay open during the pandemic. Alan Freeman writes:

Could the inability to order pizza in an indoor restaurant be the most dire result of a pandemic that has infected 52.4 million people worldwide and killed more than 10,750 Canadians?

Airlines are on the brink. Hotels are near empty. Cinemas and theatres are shuttered. Convention halls abandoned. Yet nobody seems to have much sympathy for the airlines, and nobody appears to care that it may be many months until they can see a blockbuster movie in a theatre.

Yet politicians of all stripes have been bending over backward to please the restaurant industry. Last month, before shutting down restaurants in the face of surging cases, Ontario Premier Doug Ford was clearly pained by the idea. “These are people who have put their lives in these small restaurants,” he said. “I have to see evidence before I take someone’s livelihood away from them and shut their lives down.”

Restaurant work isn't easy. I spent a summer earning my tuition in an A + W in Montreal. The people who work in the industry have a tough row to hoe. But the restaurant lobby wants to open its doors rather than ask for government assistance -- despite clear evidence that restaurants are central to community spread of the virus:

Restaurants are perfect homes for the coronavirus. Dr. Theresa Tam warns us all to avoid the three Cs: closed spaces, crowded spaces and close contact. Bingo. Restaurants are champions on every score. Furthermore, you can’t wear a mask when eating, even though it’s the most effective barrier to the virus around.

We’re all being told to stay home and reduce our interactions with people outside our immediate household, which has forced authorities to provide the most absurd advice in order to justify the continued opening of restaurants.

Dr. Bonnie Henry, the head of public health in British Columbia, has reacted to a spike in cases in the Vancouver area by telling people to avoid social gatherings with “anyone outside their immediate households, inside or outside.” But in the next breath, she says that visiting your local restaurant is perfectly okay, provided you bring only members of your immediate family and a maximum of six people sit at each table.

Increasingly, the dangers of restaurants in the middle of a galloping pandemic are apparent. Research published this week in the science journal Nature found that restaurants, cafés, gyms, and other crowded indoor venues accounted for eight in 10 new coronavirus infections in the first months of the U.S. pandemic.

"Restaurants were by far the riskiest places, about four times riskier than gyms and coffee shops, followed by hotels," Jure Leskovec, a computer scientist at Stanford University and one of the study’s authors, told the New York Times.

This is do or die time for restaurants. They need direct government support. And there is still take out. But opening restaurant doors will only make matters worse.

Image: irvingoil.com

No Half Measures

When it comes to COVID, Tom Walkom writes, half measures won't work:

Either we are fighting the COVID-19 pandemic, or we are not.

There can be no half measures.

Eileen de Villa, Toronto’s medical officer of health, made essentially the same point Tuesday when she ordered the city’s restaurants and bars to continue banning indoor dining for another 28 days.

Yes, the ban was hard on Toronto’s eateries, she said. But evidence showed it was having an effect on the spread of the virus. Why give it up now?

That's the hard lesson behind this ugly situation:

Too often, politicians ignore this. Take, for instance, Toronto’s misguided effort to encourage winter patio dining.

This is based on the fact that the virus is less likely to spread out-of-doors. That in turn leads to the reasonable conclusion that in the warmer seasons patio dining can be safer than in-house dining.

And if it is safe to eat outside in warm weather, shouldn’t it be equally safe when temperatures are cool — particularly if the patios are enclosed and heated?

The short answer is no. If patios are enclosed and heated, they are no longer outside. Put simply, outdoor patios can work in winter only if they are, to all intents and purposes, indoors.

More to the point, an emphasis on encouraging Torontonians to engage in more patio dining contradicts one of de Villa’s central recommendations: to reduce as much as possible all contact with those outside one’s immediate household. As de Villa writes: “That means limiting in-person activities outside the home to essential activities only.”

Businesses need direct government support to stay afloat. In Ontario's budget, there are sweeping plans for tax cuts -- the usual conservative strategy for economic health. But that strategy gets things backward. Non-existent businesses cannot take advantage of government tax cuts.

Projections suggest that there will be 6.000  new cases a day in Ontario by mid-December. We're getting it wrong.

The virus comes first. The economy comes second. We can't split the difference.

A Crisis Of Relevancy

Now that Donald Trump has been served his eviction notice, Brexit Britain finds itself in a lonely place. Afua Hirsch writes:

After the election of Donald Trump in 2016, an American friend compared the nativist populism of the United States with the state of Brexit Britain. “You think it’s bad that Britain voted to leave the EU,” he told me. “America has voted to leave itself.”

Following the American example, Boris Johnson's government took a similarly outrageous turn:

Under cover of the past four years of regression, the British government has been running riot. However badly our leaders behaved, though, they knew there was a larger, more powerful democracy behaving even worse. Conservative attacks on the independence of the judiciary, for example, may represent an unprecedented assault on our constitution. But for Trump, lashing out personally at individual judges on Twitter became routine.

The British government’s relaxed attitude about violating international law has prompted the condemnation of nearly all living former prime ministers. But Trump led the way in tearing up international agreements and withdrawing from multilateral organisations.

And, just as Trump stoked long-simmering racial divisions, Johnson did the same:

In Britain we have had to endure an equalities minister who suggests anti-racism reading materials are illegal in school, a foreign minister who derided Black Lives Matter as a Game of Thrones spoof, and Boris Johnson himself, as ready to insult black children in Africa as he was the black president in the White House. Vice-president-elect Kamala Harris is said to “hate” Johnson for claiming Obama held a grudge against Britain because of his “part-Kenyan” heritage. The prime minister’s comments have not aged well.

The Kenya reference was not accidental. Much of Johnson’s political strategy rests on foundations of imperial pride and colonial nostalgia. That was compatible with the “special relationship” when the American president was, like him, similarly smitten by an imagined great white past. Lamenting the decline of this relationship has become a national pastime in Britain – traditionally at just such moments as this, when a change of guard in the White House threatens the status quo. What is clear is that, insofar as the special relationship does exist, it’s rooted in “shared cultural values”. This phrase, whenever deployed by Britain, is almost always code for: “We colonised you once, and how well you’ve done from it.”

Tories pumped with pride from this same history – gloriously bragging in song that “Britons never shall be slaves” – are unlikely to find its seductive power holds much sway within the incoming US administration. The government ignored British ethnic minorities when we offered the truth of our own lineages to counter this propaganda. Ignoring the president and vice-president of America is slightly harder to pull off.

That leaves Johnson looking particularly fragile and exposed. This week one of his predecessors, John Major – no stranger to strained relations with America when he was in office – warned that “complacency and nostalgia are the route to national decline”. Britain needed a reality check, Major cautioned. “We are no longer an irreplaceable bridge between Europe and America. We are now less relevant to them both.”

Both the United States and Britain now face a crisis of relevancy. Mr. Johnson would be wise to rethink his whole project.

Image: businessinsider.com

Remembrance Day 2020

Today's ceremony at the cenotaph in our town will be different. It'll be scaled back. There will be fewer people -- all wearing masks. And it will be shorter than usual. COVID has changed everything.

Nonetheless, we need to remember, in a world with far too many demagogues, that we should never repeat the folly which this day finally brought to an end.

Image: Bay Ward Bulletin