"Our fragile, tiny hospital system remains a real vulnerability that we will really need to start addressing at some point." C'mon guys. If this government survives the pandemic, it will be business as usual. Maybe a promise to examine the system but don't hold your breath on a major systemic change.
Good comment. When I hear politicians coming on the television to tell us that we need to protect the healthcare system with lockdowns (or whatever we're calling them now) at the two year plus mark of this pandemic all I hear is "I didn't plan well enough for this and now I am making this your problem to avoid exposing my mismanagement." We have the lowest bed/adult ratio among developed nations. It is high time Canadians learn the real state of their precious public healthcare system.
It is not a funding issue. It is a model and competence issue. We have to quit fooling ourselves that we have or need a single tier healthcare system. Why do we outspend everyone but the US yet have nearly the fewest number of beds, doctors, nurses, ICU beds, MRI machines etc of all the countries with universal healthcare? Why is the current system so sacrosanct when it is so "fragile" and inefficient? Why do those on the left rail against supplementing public healthcare with private healthcare? Why two years into a pandemic do we still have a shortage of ICU beds?
Because quite frankly it is a battlefield in the Canadian class war. Having a single tier system means that the "rich" don't get to skip the line in front of the peasants. That the "rich" just leave for better care is best ignored.
The CBC FU post I find particularly depressing. I get the defeating feeling, it will only entrench the haters and supporters of the current state of the CBC. By chance, I happened to listen to the Peter Mansbridge interview on The Agenda this AM and was hoping against the odds, Paiken would raise the question in a more direct way about "WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH THE CBC!?!?!"... Mansbridge was way too diplomatic and Paiken too soft. Clearly he had some misgivings about the state there. Something has to drastically change for the CBC and a bunch of one offs fleeing to substack isnt gonna be a sustainable move going forward. I like The Line so far and its direction for opinion journalism, but its gonna be a while before you two can hire someone to do indepth reporting that only orgs the size of the G&M can do not to mention cover actual local issues.
hehe, I for sure dont expect them to grow to cover local school board decisions :) But hoping there will be something better to inform the schmoes like me whats going on in my neighbourhood without having to get too far into the weeds. There is only so much time in the day. In my region, we have an OKish local paper (Torstar property) that still has a reasonable amount of "old school" journalists based in the region, but increasingly its becoming way too ideological and lazy and just a reprint of their Toronto writers.
Unfortunately it is much easier, faster and cheaper to pen a hot, opinionated take on a major issue and give it a flashy headline than to e.g. send someone to watch city council proceedings for six hours.
Agree. And as many have pointed out before, the financial incentive structures are all wrong for journalism. Way too much 'exceptionalism' driven content as well as content designed to outrage since that "engages" more... Its like the old saying, no one reports that the airplanes landed on time at the airport. It feels as if that age old problem has been cranked way up
I think, guys, you're missing the forest for the trees. You need about a thousand paying subscribers to sustain one journalist, if that journalist can afford to live on maybe $40k a year. In some places and for some people, maybe that's doable. And you can also fudge my numbers if that person can command a premium subscription rate. But the challenge isn't sensationalism or hot takes, it's finding the scale in any given community to sustain a single working journalist there who'll be able to spend enough time in that community to understand it, develop contacts, etc.
And even that's a massive undercount, because a single journalist working alone isn't really effective. We work in teams for a reason.
Direct support of local journalism is definitely possible. But it's really, really, really hard.
Good for Henley for giving the CBC the flying finger. I do it every day as part of my exercise routine. The article says she's seen how quickly the CBC has gone political etc. As a westerner I've seen that going on for decades. It reminds me of a book by Farley Mowatt called Sibir. In it, Farley recalls visiting an author friend at his dacha in Siberia. Farley is saying how democratic and wonderful our western system is. His friend says: 'You know there is one big difference between you and us Russians. Your believe your own propaganda; we do not believe ours'. The CBC is the Liberal Party propaganda arm, and is rewarded regularly with huge budgets. The CBC is funded by all tax payers, but its programming really only caters to a minority of the public.
The CBC is incessantly woke/politically correct. And I mean incessant. Back in 2014 I lived in Haida Gwaii; the only radio station I got was CBC. I left for three months in the winter. The day I left, on the radio was an achy-breaky cry-me-a-river piece on one of their favorite adopted victim groups. I turned it off and out the door. Three months later, I came back, turned on the radio, and on it was the same though slightly changed cry-me-a-river story. What are the odds of that if a normal range of programming was the norm? Virtually nil. With the CBC, it's every day, every day, every day. And there are millions of voters drunk on their propaganda. So pathetically sad.
On the pandemic "mopping up" issue, it would be nice to see a greater public profile for the idea of dismantling the edifice of restrictions once it is clear that covid is endemic. Sure, we should have better pandemic planning capacity in place. But that is not the same as maintaining the bureaucratic apparatus built in response to covid. It will need to be dismantled with some zeal given the bureaucratic instinct for self-preservation.
I guess I don’t agree with your vaccine worship, I think they are at the lowest level of confidence right now as the panacea out of this. You said what’s known, that the kids are the least affected by the disease of the virus, but then say that the most vaccinated schools are the safest. Schools haven’t been a vector and now everyone is going to get it no matter where, so?
Anyway, let’s break down why the provincial governments are doing what they’re doing, again. It’s hard to see why they’re doing this when I’d assume they have the same access to data that we do- with that data we’d only jab the fatties, we’d never close another school again and we would probably never put a mask on another kid as those two things greatly affect their development and are much longer-term consequences (social development retardation and the bill from 2021’s gov’t largesse that will eventually come due? They are so screwed!)
So it’s not the data that drives these governments, it’s the pressures that surround them and it seems like these pressures haven’t done much responding to developments; instead looking out for their own self-interest. I’d wager these are polling data, the desire to be elected again, but mainly that of the professional managerial elite that exist within the unions and bureaucracy. I honestly think that many committees were struck to figure out how best to model inclusivity for their organizational response, while in pajamas, and not doing the right thing- responding to the damn pandemic that changed the game daily!
Every government had created a pandemic response plan, and we see that at least Sweden executed theirs. We instead got caught unawares and so lockdowns in spring 2020 meant we were making it up as we go. Pourquoi? Were these managers actually doing their jobs all this time? In a way they're allowed to waste time and money on frivolity as a career, so I guess yes is the answer.
I’ll say that I only brought it up but didn’t discuss, the crazy desire for power and re-electability is another situation we can’t have continue on this trajectory. But there are a lot of things we can investigate and assign blame to; just so it doesn’t happen again there needs to be some consequences and we should discuss who is a target. The government can say we are too simple to be able to come to the right conclusion with the data we can see- a supercilious and technocratic refrain. But if these self-interested parties are the pressure for the status-quo and the same damn lack of improved response (lockdowns) well to hell with ‘em.
“In the best-case scenario, Omicron would spread through the population like wildfire on a be-droughted plain, but be so mild that it wouldn't overwhelm health-care systems.”
A problem with this analogy is that while grass often grows back better after a fire, the misery, disability, and dire economic consequences of Long COVID on our health care systems is likely to produce a generation of stunted growth. Odd that you did not mention it at all in your article.
I know it’s now racist and misogynist to say this according to the latest science, but the lockdown and vaccine two-headed beast alone won’t end this pandemic. It never even had a chance. Until we move past this failed strategy, and start questioning outright incompetence masquerading as expertise, we will live under a revolving door of completely arbitrary draconian public policy decisions. All these people that are grrrrrr mad at Ontario for closing schools (or X Province for doing Y) while blindly reinforcing the official narratives from their sanctimonious tribe are part of the problem. You’re literally giving them exactly what they want. Round and round we go, when it stops, nobody knows.
How can anyone who has survived the public school system write this line: 'We believe that every day a child is in a classroom is valuable.' with a straight face? Seriously? Maybe valuable to the parents as day care...
I think there's tons of space for Tara Henley on the Canadian Quit o' sphere. I subscribe to you both now. I heard the interview with Batya Ungar Sargon on her new podcast this morning and it was fascinating. The dynamic described in 'Bad News' is central to why I'm a supporter of *both* of you. Bring more to indie Media. And- I'm not red pilled, btw, I'm curious.
Just read the whole Tara Henley piece in the Regina L-P & appreciated her comments so much. I've been listening to the CBC Radio for decades but more recently find myself constantly questioning many of the items on air. I thought maybe it was just me getting old and cranky ( I am both actually) but if a person criticizes certain things, she dismissed as racist, homophobic or, worst of all, "elitist". There are still many valuable items on the CBC (radio, we don't watch TV much) but there are more and more shows that have become unbearable. I surely hope Tara Henley can find a way to make a reasonable income.
We need a full Royal Inquiry into our health care system. It quite frankly isn't good enough for an OECD country let alone a G7 country. There are many models to choose from, from countries that have better performing systems than Canada.
One thing is certain though, the public system doesn't deserve the monopoly it has in Canada anymore.
As for the CBC, my God just take it out behind the woodshed already. To avoid the crazy pension liabilities, just remove the funding and let them have pledge drives to their audience like PBS does. At least that way they will be accountable to someone.
A couple of Toronto teacher friends have Hepa filter machines in their classrooms. The problem is the instructions call for them to be on 24/7 and the custodians keep turning them off at night.
Who are they supposedly transmitting it to? Canadians over twelve are something like 87 percent fully vaccinated, i.e. protected from Covid. The argument that “children are vectors” only really makes sense if you presume that vaccines are useless.
Sure, it COULD be controlled better. The children could spend the rest of their lives at home, learning and then working remotely. That would have the bonus of eliminating the traffic deaths associated with school attendance, and eliminating all the injuries associated with recess and school sports. So that's three wins.
It's also a perverse kind of safetyism, though. Children only get one brief developmental window. A student who is now eight has lost two years of normal development to this pandemic, that is, 25 percent of his total lifespan to date.
I don't want to live in a society that demands children to sacrifice their quality of life and their futures for the sake of the health of their grandparents. If anything, people who have reached adulthood should be sacrificing for children, who are vulnerable and unable to advocate for themselves.
Before you say "oh, but Covid impacts people of all ages" -- sure, it does, but the median age of a Covid death in e.g. Alberta is 78 years old, even at this point. That means of everyone who died of Covid, half were younger than 78, and half were older than 78. Only two children under 20 have died, and only 53 people under 40, compared with 3300 deaths total in that province.
Someone might come back and say "well, it's only two years of school, and this is an extraordinary time." But if school's not important for children's development, why do we do it all? Surely if remote learning was as good as in-person attendance, we could park children in front of Youtube videos for 12 years, fire all the teachers, and take the taxpayer money we saved to build e.g. more arenas and other fun things.
I would challenge you to find another time in history where humankind dealt with any threat to the aged by demanding sacrifices from young children, who themselves faced virtually no threat. I'll wait.
There's a lot of covid-zero thinking in your comments. This is with us now forever, and arranging our society as if we can evade the inevitable is irrational. Hospital capacity is the only reason for any restrictions at this point (beyond those we would normally take for the flu).
Yes, let's plan to improve ventilation in schools (I thought they did that already). No, let's not shut schools down until that work is complete.
I think you're reading in "rage" that's not there. I also think ventilation is a good idea. If your notion is that we should ventilate schools better and leave them open, then we agree.
"Our fragile, tiny hospital system remains a real vulnerability that we will really need to start addressing at some point." C'mon guys. If this government survives the pandemic, it will be business as usual. Maybe a promise to examine the system but don't hold your breath on a major systemic change.
Good comment. When I hear politicians coming on the television to tell us that we need to protect the healthcare system with lockdowns (or whatever we're calling them now) at the two year plus mark of this pandemic all I hear is "I didn't plan well enough for this and now I am making this your problem to avoid exposing my mismanagement." We have the lowest bed/adult ratio among developed nations. It is high time Canadians learn the real state of their precious public healthcare system.
It is not a funding issue. It is a model and competence issue. We have to quit fooling ourselves that we have or need a single tier healthcare system. Why do we outspend everyone but the US yet have nearly the fewest number of beds, doctors, nurses, ICU beds, MRI machines etc of all the countries with universal healthcare? Why is the current system so sacrosanct when it is so "fragile" and inefficient? Why do those on the left rail against supplementing public healthcare with private healthcare? Why two years into a pandemic do we still have a shortage of ICU beds?
Because quite frankly it is a battlefield in the Canadian class war. Having a single tier system means that the "rich" don't get to skip the line in front of the peasants. That the "rich" just leave for better care is best ignored.
and they take the money that could be used to improve the Canadian system with them!
Canada also spends more on health care than any nation other than the US. More funding will not solve this problem
If the last federal election is any indication, is there any hope that this serious issue will be front and centre? Most likely buried.
If the last federal election is any indication the age of real issues being present during a campaign are long, long gone.
Health care is not a federal issue
The Canada Health Act is federal.
The CBC FU post I find particularly depressing. I get the defeating feeling, it will only entrench the haters and supporters of the current state of the CBC. By chance, I happened to listen to the Peter Mansbridge interview on The Agenda this AM and was hoping against the odds, Paiken would raise the question in a more direct way about "WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH THE CBC!?!?!"... Mansbridge was way too diplomatic and Paiken too soft. Clearly he had some misgivings about the state there. Something has to drastically change for the CBC and a bunch of one offs fleeing to substack isnt gonna be a sustainable move going forward. I like The Line so far and its direction for opinion journalism, but its gonna be a while before you two can hire someone to do indepth reporting that only orgs the size of the G&M can do not to mention cover actual local issues.
hehe, I for sure dont expect them to grow to cover local school board decisions :) But hoping there will be something better to inform the schmoes like me whats going on in my neighbourhood without having to get too far into the weeds. There is only so much time in the day. In my region, we have an OKish local paper (Torstar property) that still has a reasonable amount of "old school" journalists based in the region, but increasingly its becoming way too ideological and lazy and just a reprint of their Toronto writers.
Unfortunately it is much easier, faster and cheaper to pen a hot, opinionated take on a major issue and give it a flashy headline than to e.g. send someone to watch city council proceedings for six hours.
Agree. And as many have pointed out before, the financial incentive structures are all wrong for journalism. Way too much 'exceptionalism' driven content as well as content designed to outrage since that "engages" more... Its like the old saying, no one reports that the airplanes landed on time at the airport. It feels as if that age old problem has been cranked way up
I think, guys, you're missing the forest for the trees. You need about a thousand paying subscribers to sustain one journalist, if that journalist can afford to live on maybe $40k a year. In some places and for some people, maybe that's doable. And you can also fudge my numbers if that person can command a premium subscription rate. But the challenge isn't sensationalism or hot takes, it's finding the scale in any given community to sustain a single working journalist there who'll be able to spend enough time in that community to understand it, develop contacts, etc.
And even that's a massive undercount, because a single journalist working alone isn't really effective. We work in teams for a reason.
Direct support of local journalism is definitely possible. But it's really, really, really hard.
Good for Henley for giving the CBC the flying finger. I do it every day as part of my exercise routine. The article says she's seen how quickly the CBC has gone political etc. As a westerner I've seen that going on for decades. It reminds me of a book by Farley Mowatt called Sibir. In it, Farley recalls visiting an author friend at his dacha in Siberia. Farley is saying how democratic and wonderful our western system is. His friend says: 'You know there is one big difference between you and us Russians. Your believe your own propaganda; we do not believe ours'. The CBC is the Liberal Party propaganda arm, and is rewarded regularly with huge budgets. The CBC is funded by all tax payers, but its programming really only caters to a minority of the public.
The CBC is incessantly woke/politically correct. And I mean incessant. Back in 2014 I lived in Haida Gwaii; the only radio station I got was CBC. I left for three months in the winter. The day I left, on the radio was an achy-breaky cry-me-a-river piece on one of their favorite adopted victim groups. I turned it off and out the door. Three months later, I came back, turned on the radio, and on it was the same though slightly changed cry-me-a-river story. What are the odds of that if a normal range of programming was the norm? Virtually nil. With the CBC, it's every day, every day, every day. And there are millions of voters drunk on their propaganda. So pathetically sad.
On the pandemic "mopping up" issue, it would be nice to see a greater public profile for the idea of dismantling the edifice of restrictions once it is clear that covid is endemic. Sure, we should have better pandemic planning capacity in place. But that is not the same as maintaining the bureaucratic apparatus built in response to covid. It will need to be dismantled with some zeal given the bureaucratic instinct for self-preservation.
I guess I don’t agree with your vaccine worship, I think they are at the lowest level of confidence right now as the panacea out of this. You said what’s known, that the kids are the least affected by the disease of the virus, but then say that the most vaccinated schools are the safest. Schools haven’t been a vector and now everyone is going to get it no matter where, so?
Anyway, let’s break down why the provincial governments are doing what they’re doing, again. It’s hard to see why they’re doing this when I’d assume they have the same access to data that we do- with that data we’d only jab the fatties, we’d never close another school again and we would probably never put a mask on another kid as those two things greatly affect their development and are much longer-term consequences (social development retardation and the bill from 2021’s gov’t largesse that will eventually come due? They are so screwed!)
So it’s not the data that drives these governments, it’s the pressures that surround them and it seems like these pressures haven’t done much responding to developments; instead looking out for their own self-interest. I’d wager these are polling data, the desire to be elected again, but mainly that of the professional managerial elite that exist within the unions and bureaucracy. I honestly think that many committees were struck to figure out how best to model inclusivity for their organizational response, while in pajamas, and not doing the right thing- responding to the damn pandemic that changed the game daily!
Every government had created a pandemic response plan, and we see that at least Sweden executed theirs. We instead got caught unawares and so lockdowns in spring 2020 meant we were making it up as we go. Pourquoi? Were these managers actually doing their jobs all this time? In a way they're allowed to waste time and money on frivolity as a career, so I guess yes is the answer.
I’ll say that I only brought it up but didn’t discuss, the crazy desire for power and re-electability is another situation we can’t have continue on this trajectory. But there are a lot of things we can investigate and assign blame to; just so it doesn’t happen again there needs to be some consequences and we should discuss who is a target. The government can say we are too simple to be able to come to the right conclusion with the data we can see- a supercilious and technocratic refrain. But if these self-interested parties are the pressure for the status-quo and the same damn lack of improved response (lockdowns) well to hell with ‘em.
“In the best-case scenario, Omicron would spread through the population like wildfire on a be-droughted plain, but be so mild that it wouldn't overwhelm health-care systems.”
A problem with this analogy is that while grass often grows back better after a fire, the misery, disability, and dire economic consequences of Long COVID on our health care systems is likely to produce a generation of stunted growth. Odd that you did not mention it at all in your article.
I know it’s now racist and misogynist to say this according to the latest science, but the lockdown and vaccine two-headed beast alone won’t end this pandemic. It never even had a chance. Until we move past this failed strategy, and start questioning outright incompetence masquerading as expertise, we will live under a revolving door of completely arbitrary draconian public policy decisions. All these people that are grrrrrr mad at Ontario for closing schools (or X Province for doing Y) while blindly reinforcing the official narratives from their sanctimonious tribe are part of the problem. You’re literally giving them exactly what they want. Round and round we go, when it stops, nobody knows.
How can anyone who has survived the public school system write this line: 'We believe that every day a child is in a classroom is valuable.' with a straight face? Seriously? Maybe valuable to the parents as day care...
I think there's tons of space for Tara Henley on the Canadian Quit o' sphere. I subscribe to you both now. I heard the interview with Batya Ungar Sargon on her new podcast this morning and it was fascinating. The dynamic described in 'Bad News' is central to why I'm a supporter of *both* of you. Bring more to indie Media. And- I'm not red pilled, btw, I'm curious.
Just read the whole Tara Henley piece in the Regina L-P & appreciated her comments so much. I've been listening to the CBC Radio for decades but more recently find myself constantly questioning many of the items on air. I thought maybe it was just me getting old and cranky ( I am both actually) but if a person criticizes certain things, she dismissed as racist, homophobic or, worst of all, "elitist". There are still many valuable items on the CBC (radio, we don't watch TV much) but there are more and more shows that have become unbearable. I surely hope Tara Henley can find a way to make a reasonable income.
We need a full Royal Inquiry into our health care system. It quite frankly isn't good enough for an OECD country let alone a G7 country. There are many models to choose from, from countries that have better performing systems than Canada.
One thing is certain though, the public system doesn't deserve the monopoly it has in Canada anymore.
As for the CBC, my God just take it out behind the woodshed already. To avoid the crazy pension liabilities, just remove the funding and let them have pledge drives to their audience like PBS does. At least that way they will be accountable to someone.
Please fix the mike problem!! As you know our whole medical system needs a giant overhaul!
Ooh, that little "founding member" badge looks cool.
A couple of Toronto teacher friends have Hepa filter machines in their classrooms. The problem is the instructions call for them to be on 24/7 and the custodians keep turning them off at night.
Who are they supposedly transmitting it to? Canadians over twelve are something like 87 percent fully vaccinated, i.e. protected from Covid. The argument that “children are vectors” only really makes sense if you presume that vaccines are useless.
Sure, it COULD be controlled better. The children could spend the rest of their lives at home, learning and then working remotely. That would have the bonus of eliminating the traffic deaths associated with school attendance, and eliminating all the injuries associated with recess and school sports. So that's three wins.
It's also a perverse kind of safetyism, though. Children only get one brief developmental window. A student who is now eight has lost two years of normal development to this pandemic, that is, 25 percent of his total lifespan to date.
I don't want to live in a society that demands children to sacrifice their quality of life and their futures for the sake of the health of their grandparents. If anything, people who have reached adulthood should be sacrificing for children, who are vulnerable and unable to advocate for themselves.
Before you say "oh, but Covid impacts people of all ages" -- sure, it does, but the median age of a Covid death in e.g. Alberta is 78 years old, even at this point. That means of everyone who died of Covid, half were younger than 78, and half were older than 78. Only two children under 20 have died, and only 53 people under 40, compared with 3300 deaths total in that province.
Someone might come back and say "well, it's only two years of school, and this is an extraordinary time." But if school's not important for children's development, why do we do it all? Surely if remote learning was as good as in-person attendance, we could park children in front of Youtube videos for 12 years, fire all the teachers, and take the taxpayer money we saved to build e.g. more arenas and other fun things.
I would challenge you to find another time in history where humankind dealt with any threat to the aged by demanding sacrifices from young children, who themselves faced virtually no threat. I'll wait.
There's a lot of covid-zero thinking in your comments. This is with us now forever, and arranging our society as if we can evade the inevitable is irrational. Hospital capacity is the only reason for any restrictions at this point (beyond those we would normally take for the flu).
Yes, let's plan to improve ventilation in schools (I thought they did that already). No, let's not shut schools down until that work is complete.
I think you're reading in "rage" that's not there. I also think ventilation is a good idea. If your notion is that we should ventilate schools better and leave them open, then we agree.