Once again, Matt & Jen articulate SO WELL what so many of us have been feeling for quite. some. time.
Jen was really on a snow induced rant & roll. Matt trying to get a word in edgewise reminded me of John Candy's character in Uncle Buck trying to do the same on the phone with his understandably angry lady friend Chanice:
Matt and Jen are bang on with their thesis that those things that have made the winters we must endure together tolerable are either falling apart, dying, or stone cold dead.
Things Canadians used to be proud of:
- Relatively good economic opportunities for the majority of citizens.
- a healthy small business environment in terms of taxation / regulation
- Semi-competent, well meaning, honorable, and semi-respectable politicians, beauraucrats, and business leaders.
- Dependable, somewhat slow, but generally effective family & emergency health care.
- Safe public streets, transit, and other shared spaces mostly free of petty and violent crime.
- Clean, abundant water supplies.
- Adults in charge of our public finances.
- A manageable addictions problem and relatively small homeless population.
All of the above are either crumbling or have vanished.
I have four kids; three are adults.
They WANT to love this country, but...
- They were profoundly disillusioned by how the pandemic was handled at ALL levels.
- They can't afford to buy a house, and can't even find rental accommodations.
- They are struggling to afford gas & groceries and now stay home rather than going to sporting events, films, theatre, clubs, and restaurants.
- They see incompetent people in positions of authority over them personally, and similar incompetent people running the critical services and overall leadership of our communities, province, and country.
I'm more like Matt than Jen when it comes to contemplating leaving Canada.
I travel frequently to the US for professional development and networking, and aside from reuniting with family and friends at home, dread returning to Canada. My American friends are baffled at what has happened to Canada. In response, I point out their two presidential candidates.
I will not fly from a Canadian airport on a Canadian airline - I drive to much better run, less expensive airports in the US.
Poilievre, assuming he wins a majority, better fix things quickly.
If he doesn't, this time around we won't just have a 'brain drain' issue, we will have a mass exodus of our young and capable citizens the likes of which we've never experienced, or even contemplated!
I agree with everything you've said. I have kids in the exact same boat. I think Pierre wants the job. I don't think he has a clue what comes with it. Anyway, because it was my profession, I'm curious are you avoiding big airports in Canada to drive to smaller better run ones in the US? There's no question out big ones are a Gong Show; Toronto being run by an otherworldly collection of idiots, but I'm just curious. Thanks.
Yes, exactly. Less hassle, drive-across customs process (usually less than 1 minute at our rural crossings) instead of long airport customs line-ups, more flight options, better airport amenities and restaurants, and comparable flight pricing even when exchange is factored in. In short, the US still has a semi-civilized air transport experience that comes with having so many more airlines and airports in competition with each other. It's not without its issues as well, but no comparison with the shit show in Canada. I've heard nothing but nightmares out of Pearson.
Pearson is what you get when a 4 year old alcoholic designs an airport, and 3 year olds run it. I base that on controlling there for 30 years. But all big airports suck to some extent. For example, do NOT connect through Newark after 12 noon; it will be a religious experience on too many days. A lot of the issues you mention come from a system supported by a population of 331 million versus 40, but my experiences flying out of airports besides Pearson have been superb. I suspect you're doing a lot more flying than I do. If an airport has a coffee shop, I'm happy.
Good insight; thanks. I used to fly more than I do today, and used to fly often out of Calgary. The experience gradually deteriorated to the point where I am today - won't even consider flying from a Canadian airport post-pandemic - way too many horror stories from friends and colleagues. Nothing is as bad as Pearson, though (wow).
You're quite correct that we can't compare our two countries' populations, but the service in Canada has deteriorated substantially. Not sure our airllines are even going to survive.
They have to survive. Having completely abandoned rail, it's the governments idea of mass transit. And geography and time demand it. The 2 main players will survive, with various others trying to pry their way in. They all come in with small fleets, and as soon a a plane breaks, or there's a snow event, they're behind the 8 ball for a week.
At some point, does flying in Canada become only for wealthy people?
As air travel becomes more and more of an ordeal in Canada, perhaps the end game for the airlines to remain profitable is less flight options and higher prices?
Not certain what that means for our airports.
Might make air traffic control a less stressful career!
The rest of us unwashed heathens may have to do as I've done and drive to the USA and fly from there.
Another great episode: love the even-handed analysis that's so hard to find these days.
You briefly touched on the left-right split and fortunately didn't fall into the trap I expect much of the media to next election: IMO "right-wing" is the wrong way to look at Poilievre's appeal. I consider myself a progressive and will be voting NDP in the next BC provincial election (Eby seems to at least understand the problems and is trying to address them) who is also seriously considering voting for Poilievre federally.
Why? Forget platitudes and vibes, under Trudeau, Canada seems to be rapidly moving away from progressive ideals. For example:
1. A housing market becoming increasingly aristocratic and feudal ("bank of Mom and Dad")
2. Renters who work middle-class jobs legitimately having to worry about becoming homeless.
3. A public transit system and public spaces feeling more dangerous, thus pushing people back into cars and private spaces
4. Companies able to easily import cheap labour rather than improving wages or working conditions to better attract/retain talent
5. Us apparently being totally okay with just openly exploiting young folks in developing nations (charging them 30k to study in a strip mall, etc)
6. A public health care system that's falling apart
7. Young families struggling to access childcare
8. High spending that's exhausted our fiscal capacity, but without all the great social programs or infrastructure I'd imagined would come with that high spending.
Are all these problems Trudeau's fault? No, but many of them can be traced back, at least in part, to policy choices by his government, and in any case, he seems incapable of acknowledging the problems or understanding the gravity of the situation. Singh seems equally lost. Poilievre - while somewhat distasteful - at least seems to understand the problems Canada is facing. Will he fix them? I have my doubts, but it's at a point where I feel like it might be worth a shot.
1. I couldn't agree more with your comment. I don't believe all of the challenges facing Canadians are soley the Liberals fault nor to I think that the Conservatives are going to be able to fix housing and the economy right away. But I am ready for a change and this historically left leaning voter is likely going to throw her vote to the conservatives in the next election because I don't at this point see any other option.
2. JG I know you are working on a piece about Moral Panic. I am fascinated to learn more. Especially about peoples collective memory loss. I work in healthcare on the 'frontliine'. I was grateful and excited to receive my vaccine hoping that it would get us back to some normalcy and protect me and my patients. But my adult children opted out of the vaccine and some of my colleagues. I will not forget how they were treated at work and I will not forget that some of my family members would not let my children in their homes and harrassed them constantly. And its like they have collectively forgeten how awful their behaviour was to their colleagues and own family. When I have tried to gently bring it up to family members they don't want to even acknowledge that it even happened.
This really nails my feelings well. I also don't consider myself a conservative and have not actually ever voted for a conservative party before. I'm not even particularly enamoured with Poilievre, who I think is a smart political operator and an ice-cold street-fighting man but who has yet to prove to me that he's a deep thinker on policy.
Unfortunately, he's the only one who actually seems to understand the seriousness of our present crisis, most of which you've helpfully enumerated 1 through 8, and he might be pragmatic enough to at least make the situation somewhat better.
There's an open lane in Canadian federal politics for a party and leader who actually care, fiercely and with focus, on working class/lower middle class problems. I've become deeply dispirited that it's clearly not and perhaps never will be the modern NDP, and am somewhat disturbed but increasingly resigned to the possibility that it might be the Conservatives.
I couldn't agree more on the federal NDP, and I feel like they really let a golden opportunity slip away. It's not hard to imagine an alternate reality where we're framing the 2025 election as primarily a competition between Poilievre and say Rachel Notley (I don't live in Alberta, but from perspective of an outsider, she seems like the type of leader the federal party desperately needs). Jagmeet Singh is likeable and seems like a genuinely decent person, but every time he tries to talk policy, has it all backwards.
Agreed completely. The left slowly losing the working class to the right has been a theme over the last 20 years, and I can't help suspecting it has to do with how little experience most of the leaders of the modern left actually have with blue-collar labour.
You look at Singh's background, and his father was a psychiatrist who had sufficient means to send Singh to a private school, then a great university, then law school. I cannot see any sign in Singh's bio that he's ever worked a job that left a callus on his hands.
Compare that to, say, Arthur Scargill, a pivotal figure in British labour politics in the 1970s and 1980s who I've been learning about recently (The Rest is History podcast has a great series of episodes on the British political crisis of 1974), who worked as a coal miner for 19 years. Or heck, compare that to my mother's father, who was a mine manager in Ontario who came up out of the ranks and was ardently involved in NDP politics.
I don't think you *need* to have lived like and among your constituents to represent them well, but if you don't seem to be doing a great job connecting with them, "do you actually know any of these people" seems like an important question to start the diagnosis with.
The Line Podcast was poorly engineered today. I could barely hear Jen in Calgary and Matt was really loud......where's the producer or someone on the levels? Great topics, always a pleasure to read the newsletter but the podcast needs to get more Professional. Tom
I had some success with voice boost on my Android app, but Jen was still less than 50% of Matt's amplitude. Not sure about the YouTube version, but the audio podcast was virtually unlistenable. One thing that was likely easier this time was Matt's propensity to finish Jen's sentences. With so much volume the interrupting was more successful.
I think that you have put your finger on the Poilievre success factor. Many Canadians are angry. They are angry about the cost of living and health care and other economic issues. Butthey are also angry at the "disrespect" they feel they are getting from Mr. Trudeau and his fellow Liberals. I am reminded of the way certain American voters felt about Hilary Clinton in 2016.
I spent some time early in February 2022, talking to truckers. (I live in Ottawa.) Most were quite inarticulate, but I did get the sense that they were enjoying a release from, yes, anger. Sparks and Wellington Streets were the scene of a street party, in part a letting off steam party. They certainly didn't seem to be a threat. And indeed there was no physical violence, apart from some pushing and shoving when the police finally broke up the protest. But the participants remember their moment of finally expressing themselves. I think that was a major factor in Mr. Poilievre's rise.
Whether or not Mr. Trudeau called these people racists and misogynists (and he did, in a French language interview), they certainly got the impression that is how he considered them and still considers them. That keeps the anger going. Wedge issues can win elections, but at a long term cost.
Finally, why live in Canada? I went to graduate school in New Jersey, and received several job offers there and in Washington. But there was Vietnam. Some of my classmates wound up there, others kept one step of their draft board, one actually helped burn down the draft board in his district. Downtown Newark, like other U.S. cities, still showed the scars of rioting. The Weather Underground was blowing up things. By contrast, Canada looked pretty good. I was proud of the place, even after October 1970.
Now it's too late for me. I told my children to move away, but of course they didn't listen. Maybe my grandchildren will. All very sad.
First off, note to the guy/girl running the sound board - could hardly hear Jen but Matt was booming. Matt - sorry you have the sniffles man.
So, I grew up under the Big Blue Machine and moved west when I graduated. I prospered more than my mom (dad passed early) and my kids eem to be doing better than my better half and I primarily because of their education (doctor and teacher). My point is that there does not seem to be the feeling that the twenty something today is going to get ahead. Yes, housing in Regina is not badly priced - 50's bungalo for under $400,000 and the equivalent in Toronto being $1.1 mil adn that is just the start.
The present federal government does not reflect my view of Canada, as you point out, and I am tired of being told that I am racist, a transfobe or whatever simply because I question the prevailing wisdom. You're gay or lesbian? - don't care so have
a nice day. Transgender? don't care have a nice day. Living in your parent's basement because you don't have an education/job? - you have every oportunity in life so what did you do with it? You made decisions to do the drugs? - move along that isn't my problem. Don't get me started on residential schools please but at some point people need to take responsibility for bad decisions in their lives and stop telling me it is my fault.
I spent my life working for a better life for myself, my family and my community. I paid my taxes to support the military,health care, education, roads, police, and all the municipal infrastructure I need. I didn't pay taxes to see money sent overseas to support terrorist organizations, nor to support anti hate organizations in a country where we are not perfect but we are not racisit. My taxes weren't for putting feminine hygiene products in men's washrooms in federal buildings or to subsidize a rich neighbour buying an EV - or for a battery plant as far as that goes either (you do know that EVs are not the answer right?). I could go on and you could add a long list of different issues. My point is that Canadians go along and get along but we have been pushed way too far on the social activism, virtue signaling, say stuff but don't actually deliver, waffle on the Hamas terrorism, and all the other stuff that we have been expected to just swallow. Canada is in a tight spot financially and the voter recognizes that, like my fixed pension, our way of life is slowly being erroded to a rich/poor split that is not Canada.
I think that we are actually waking up to what Canada is slipping away from and we are looking to someone to come forward with a plan and a set of goasl or projects to get us back out of the econoomic and social drift we have been living in for the last decade. Is PP the one? Sure hope so but time will tell. I wil say that my better half who has been a lifetime Liberal is voting CPC when the election comes because she is tired of the crap from Ottawa and JT.
The weather part of the discussion was fascinating. I grew up on the prairies. Don't know if I could ever go back to that. And I am fortunate to now live in a not-too-pricy part of the west coast. It's probably not big-city enough for you two, but damn, it's a great place to raise a family.
But it's true, people have put up with the weather in Canada because we have (had, actually) other great things. I really miss loving my country.
As for Trudeau handling parts of the pandemic well, I'm not so sure. One of his first moves was to try to get carte blanche to be able to fully control parliament for a couple of years. That's where he showed his true colours. Antagonizing the 10% or so of truckers who weren't vaccinated was another place where he showed us his true colours. And his response to Portapique was absolutely bizarre. He was practically frothing at the mouth for the opportunity to implement his gun policy with an order in council. (This is not directly related to the pandemic, but people held him in high esteem during that part of the pandemic, overjoyed with their CERB cheques. It's easy to act like a dictator when your population is distracted.)
So while I didn't fault him in the very early days for his pandemic response, it soon became clear that it was just an opportunity for him to further his agenda.
The truth is that the federal government had relatively little responsibility for anything related to COVID. That’s a provincial responsibility. What the federal government *was* responsible for, they botched when it really mattered: locking down travel at the start of the pandemic, implementing quarantine measures, having failed to maintain a response plan and the stockpile of medical supplies that was the responsibility of Health Canada. Afterwards, it felt a lot like the federal cabinet was desperate to do anything they could to exercise some control over the situation when it was mostly out of their hands.
I think he handled the pandemic really well....mainly because none of the responses were his ideas. You can't please all the people all the time, and the convoy was the stupidest collection of Canadians to have ever gathered. The notion that it was about trucking was nonsense, since they had to be vaccinated to get into the US in the first place. It was a bunch of whiners who wee tired of COVID; we all were, who felt the need to impose their frustrations of others. And no, I won't forgive Pierre for playing politics to support it.
A lot of governmental dysfunction comes down to a basic lack of competence, and I think that’s ultimately the result of the loss of experience and expertise.
Watching the response to COVID made me wince because I could see public health authorities and governments making elementary errors apparent to anybody with experience trying to tackle a novel problem under pressure. Lockdowns were a containment measure - containment measures are meant to buy time to figure out what’s going on and develop a better solution. That didn’t happen - authorities rarely looked more than one step ahead at a time. They didn’t figure out how to deal with the information problem: what do we really know, what do we know we *dont* know, what could be the unknown unknowns? When information did start to develop, they were very poor at integrating it into their thinking and adjusting their approaches in response. Still, I get frustrated hearing people critical of a lot of the steps taken when they forget that they’ve now got the prescience of hindsight. This stuff is HARD. It takes practice and experience to get it right. By 2020, everybody with first-hand experience dealing with such an outbreak was dead or retired.
The same problem infects the Liberal government. They were so thoroughly gutted following the Chretien era that they didn’t have anybody left who knew how to run a government. They kept trying to chase shiny progressive initiatives when they didn’t even have the skills to do the routine stuff. This is what worries me about the populist turn of the Poilievre Conservatives- are they going to retain enough of the experience in government from the Harper era to execute, or are ideological prerogatives going to lead them to purge the experience from the party?
Why do Canadians stay? Look at the folks who are coming here, mostly those leaving war, grinding poverty, ethnic strife, etc. Canada is famously the least picky of the Western Nations so they come here because no one else will take them in a timely and secure manner.
One thing old stock Canadian nationalists need to understand about immigrants, many if not most are here because they weren't allowed into the US. Deal with it. They would leave for the US in a heartbeat if they could. Why? Because they are ambitious and the US is the land of ambition. The US is closer to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in 2024 than Canada is of peace, order and good government. Yes, that is an indictment of Canada's governing class and elite, more concerned with their luxury beliefs and featherbedding than the people or the country.
Pre-2015 Canada was a long time ago and today's Canada is made by and for Laurentian boomers I suppose.
It’s kind of a overdetermined phenomenon, and I think the mechanism is going to vary a bit depending on the locale. Overall, the energy and commodities boom ended around 2015, which knocked a lot of the dynamism out of the Canadian economy. That was coupled with regulatory sclerosis fostered by various activists groups that discouraged investment. Unifor liked to blame their problems on the strong Canadian dollar during the Harper years, but the slide from near-parity to today’s ~70-75¢ range is basically a 30% pay cut taken by all Canadians since then.
On the social and political side, it felt like there was a long progressive insurgency against conservative policies during the Harper years, with courts striking down various measures like sentencing reform. The full effects didn’t become apparent until they were combined with a progressive government and public order started going to hell.
Agreed, this is a top down phenomenon in Canada. We are led by an elite class that just aren't that good at their jobs of leading. They avoid accountability, see ArriveCan and countless other issues, and they focus more on class solidarity than merit. If it gets really bad they just leave. I'd love to see the percentage of 1%ers who hold more than one passport.
At least in the US if you don't produce you are gone, no matter what connection you had to get the job.
A minor clarification about the COVID school closures - it was absolutely the right call epidemiologically for the first couple waves, but there was a twofold issue:
1. Few people on either side of the issue understood that it wasn't about the health of the kids. The kids were always going to be fine. The issue is that the kids were spectacularly effective disease vectors. School is a place where thousands of people who would otherwise never come into contact send their kids to crawl all over each other every day, and then they bring them home and let them crawl all over their overweight, elderly, or immunocompromised relatives.
2. The barn door was closed too late. This was a consistent failure of Canadian COVID response: by the time the situation was evidently bad enough that politicians felt like they had political cover to shut down society, the damage was done. With every single wave, we locked the panic room door after the serial killer had strolled in with us. *By the time* we closed the schools, it usually didn't matter much.
The right time to close the schools was (and will be a century from now) so early that 90% of the parents will think the government is being alarmist. That's why the government invented public health officials and imbued them with vast powers - to be expendable sources of a kind of courage that skilled politicians simply cannot be relied upon to have.
Agree with this, although my understanding is that the "kids were spectacularly effective disease vectors" didn't actually end up being the case with Covid (granted, given how kids are usually germ factories, assuming schools would be super-spreader events wasn't unreasonable at the time IMO).
This is also my understanding. For the first few weeks of Covid this was a reasonable hypothesis. But the fact that young children were not, in fact effective vectors (until Omicron) was pretty clear by mid 2021. At that point, shutting down elementary schools was a fear and panic driven response. JG
I'm surprised to hear the suggestion that children weren't effective vectors. I just did a little googling and this article by an infectious disease specialist popped up suggesting that they were. Do you mind if I ask where you heard that they weren't?
The title of that piece is literally; "Yes, Children Can Transmit COVID, but We Need Not Fear."
No one disputed that children *can* transmit COVID. That is a thing that could happen. But young children were never very effective or efficient spreaders, and elementary schools were never significant sources of transmission (in stark contrast to other respiratory illnesses, where spread via young children is a major factor.) The most dangerous places for transmission at the peak of the most dangerous strains of the virus were always LTC facilities, and medical facilities, followed by close-packed environments filled with adults (particularly adults doing activities like singing.) This was very much in evidence by 2021, if I recall.
Also note that paper acknowledges a significant difference between elementary and high school age children. The older a person gets, the more effective they become at spreading COVID. An evidence based approach that factored risks and trade offs appropriately probably would have closed high schools and universities but kept elementary and middle schools open. It would have forbid concerts and clubs, and worried less about restaurants. And, in hindsight, we should have never shut down parks or any other outdoor spaces. That was simply madness. I also think early returns suggest that strict border control should absolutely have been included in an arsenal of approaches. (Until Omicron, that is, in which case community spread was inevitable and further lockdowns etc. Were totally futile.)
But, of course, by that point, it wasn't just about evidence. It was also about managing expectations and fear and panic. And if governments took the course suggested above, they would have been accused of being hypocritical, or of not taking the virus seriously. As Matt noted in the podcast, closing schools was more about signalling seriousness than it was about effectively curbing transmission in a way that was as minimally disruptive as possible. It was theatre.
“Also note that paper acknowledges a significant difference between elementary and high school age children. The older a person gets, the more effective they become at spreading COVID.”
I think this may misinterpret the article, which has some confusing turns of phrase. From the underlying study it’s discussing (footnote 2):
“Even after adjusting for the lower odds of asymptomatic transmission and testing delays in our study, children aged 0 to 3 years and 4 to 8 years remained associated with higher odds of transmitting SARS-CoV-2 to household contacts than children aged 14 to 17 years.”
In fact, the article points out, younger children are so much more effective at transmitting COVID that even though it was more likely for an older child to be the first person in a household to contract COVID, *it was still more likely for a younger child to spread COVID to another member of the household*.
I thought the infectious disease specialist did a good job of explaining why that’s the case. Little kids have no sense of personal space, they're badly disciplined about hygienic measures like washing hands and covering coughs and sneezes, and in any half-loving household they're in prolonged physical contact with their family, even if (in fact especially if) they're sick.
What this comes back to is the article’s core thesis, which I thought was insightful: little kids are *inefficient* at spreading COVID (mostly asymptomatic, low viral load, etc.), but that’s not the same as *ineffective*. I’m inefficient at hitting baseballs in a batting cage, but give me a thousand swings or so and I’ll eventually make contact.
Schools feature hundreds of little kids crammed together on school buses and in classrooms, and in repeated physical contact during gym class and recess. Have you *seen* the chaos in an elementary school boot room? I know you have. Some of those kids even have choir practice, since you mentioned that. It’s thousands of swings at the COVID transmission baseball every day.
Then all those little kids go home and roughhouse with their siblings, hug their relatives, and cuddle with their parents. They’re breathing and coughing and sneezing on you and putting their little mucus-y hands on you as you bathe them, dress them, help them with their homework, put them to bed – thousands more swings.
Enough of those hundreds of thousands of cumulative swings eventually connect, in chains that link hundreds of households across the community who would otherwise have no means of transmitting the disease.
Clarke, I'm not even sure how you're coming up with that interpretation from the article that you, yourself, have cited.
To wit:
"To date, we do not have any evidence that the viral titer shed by young children is greater than that shed by teens and adults; in fact, most studies suggest that, in childhood, viral shedding may increase with increasing age.5 Additionally, prior work that has described that young children are more likely to have asymptomatic infections than older individuals6 and that asymptomatically infected individuals are less likely to transmit than individuals who have symptomatic infection.7"
And that's from 2021.
At the outset of the pandemic, virologists had a reasonable hypothesis that children's behaviour would make them *more* efficient spreaders of COVID. A hypothesis backed up by what we see in more typical respiratory illnesses. It was reasonable to shut down schools in the Spring of 2020! But then we found out more, and that's not actually what happened. Despite their gross behaviour, children were actually less efficient spreaders than adults -- and we've see that result consistently across multiple studies, now. Children are gross, yes. But COVID behaves differently here than in other illnesses.
Again, no one credible is arguing that school closures were 100% useless. (And I know from personal experience that kids spread Omicron. As did everybody. ) But there is now quite a lot of evidence to suggest that, prior to Omicron, the benefits of school closures were utterly marginal, while the long term consequences of keeping kids out of school were severe. (And many of the studies showing any negative impact on transmission had extremely low CIs and/or lumped all school closures -- including closures of elementary schools AND universities into one category. Or are further complicated by the fact that they happened during different waves of the virus.) As with all NPIs it's always -- always -- a question of balancing risks with benefits.
I could go back into the archive of literature and we could get into a big giant wall-o-text debate about this where we throw scientific studies back at one another, but dear God, please let's not? It's Saturday night, friend! JG
I couldn't agree more that once you've got rampant community transmission, closing schools is pointless. One of my original two points that it's worth emphasizing is that the timing is critical. Advice to put out your house fire with a pot of water from the sink is great advice if the fire is confined to a small patch of carpet. It is no longer good advice if your entire house is an inferno.
I'm not sure I agree with the point made in that podcast, though. "Children are always going to be somewhere," she says, "if not in school then out in the community with their friends".
I think this reflects how much trouble Canadians (and even more so Americans) generally had with the concept of an actual lockdown. In an actual lockdown, *no, kids are not going to be out in the community with their friends*. They'll be at home with their family, inside, bouncing off the walls and totally miserable just like everybody else.
"Too late and half-assed" was the consistent theme of Canadian public health interventions, and then the failure of those too-late, half-assed interventions was used to argue that they weren't ever going to work and were a bad idea.
I just replied to Jen with a link to an article by an infectious disease specialist suggesting kids were effective disease vectors. Happy to be proven wrong (that's not true, I'm never happy to be proven wrong, just willing) if you have a study of your own to share.
No study, I'm basing that on assessments I heard at the time from well-informed people like Scott Gottlieb and just the fact we weren't hearing of schools being super-spreader events or seeing major surges after reopening (I fully acknowledge that's far from conclusive evidence or proof).
Unfortunately, there is unlikely to be any study that can offer proof since we can't trace back transmission chains, so we get a lot of speculative evidence (e.g. that the specific study's goal was "To determine whether there are differences in the odds of household transmission by younger children compared with older children.": that might give us some interesting insights into the level of risk, but is pretty far removed from the question of school-opening question).
So basically we sacrifice the mental health and development of our youth, the future of the country, to protect the old and those who have already lived full lives...
Haven't seniors in Canada already taken enough and left the kids holding the bag?
We are already leaving those kids a country in institutional and cultural decline, with a huge debt (to pay for boomers entitlements) and not much to show for it. At least let the kids play during recess. Those seniors quite frankly don't deserve to keep the kids at home.
No question, deficit financing allowed politicians to buy elections by giving the voters everything they wanted, but we couldn't actually afford. Then, they rigged the donation system to allow the rich to buy the politicians......who lowered tax rates for the richest to appease their "owners". Then corporate subsidies increased and they're nothing more than an upward transfer of wealth. And instead of using their wealth to improve things, the billionaire class now hoards it. We've allowed them to install themselves as the new royalty. And you can't get elected telling people they have to give things up. This isn't a Canada problem; it's a western world problem, and if those governments don't find a backbone, and act as a group, you'll see what is happening today in the US; overt attacks on democracy by the billionaire class.
COVID didn't come with a users manual. Mistakes were made, mainly because we didn't know what we were dealing with. The real question is did we learn anything from it? I highly doubt it.
I agree, it will be the capital markets who ultimately take away the punchbowl from Canadians (and most Western Nations) and force us to live within our means.
Setting aside the question of how many deaths of not just the old (and by old I'm talking about 50+ here, not 90+) but the fat and the immunocompromised is worth some suffering, a lockdown can be quite short and still be effective at saving lives if it's properly timed and if everybody gets on board.
If society is, however, filled with people who drag their feet about taking those emergency measures and people who refuse to follow public health guidance about indoor mingling once the emergency measures are in place, the lockdown is going to last forever and only be mildly effective at reducing death.
Also, referring back to my first point, if the kids are playing outside during recess, doesn't that imply they're not outside the rest of the day? I don't want to accuse you of not understanding that first point, but it's pretty critical to recognize that if you've packed a bunch of kids onto school buses and into classrooms at all, "recess or no recess" is irrelevant, the damage is done.
I was taking liberties with my rhetoric. My point is that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few and that means that the development needs of our children outweigh keeping our kids isolated to protect old people, many who refused to get vaxxed.
It's about what is most important to society, not just to politicians going after the Me Generation vote.
You’d hear a lot of griping during COVID about how some jurisdictions had apparently managed to deal with it so much more effectively, and lamentations that we weren’t following their policies. However, it seems like the critical factor was the number of COVID cases they had at the start of the pandemic. The infection rate curves look very similar; the differentiation comes from the starting point. In Canada, BC did better than Ontario because spring break started 2 weeks later. Ontarians had picked up COVID during their vacation travels, and BC locked down just before their residents could replicate that spread. Similarly, the nations that did best during COVID were geographically isolated: New Zealand, Japan, South Korea. Fewer people brought back COVID, there was less travel anyway, and it was easier to control entry.
I did a little study of excess death rates among the world's wealthy island nations awhile back, and I thought it was interesting that while New Zealand famously did extremely well, the UK (for example) was obliterated.
Things seemed to work out in New Zealand not because COVID never appeared in the population - it did just like everywhere else - but because everybody believed everybody else would follow the rules, they believed their government had their best interest at heart, and that some sacrifice was worth it to keep everybody safe.
You'll see from this chart, for example, that despite the UK being an island nation and Canada having the longest unprotected land border in the world, we actually did substantially better - and basically every country that isn't hideously impoverished did better than the United States.
COVID was a giant collective action problem that tested the world's cultures, and many were found wanting.
I think that we need an inquiry into how our various governments responded to the COVID epidemic. We could form a panel made up of experts from outside Canada, to maintain independence. They should have access to all existing documentation, including Cabinet Memoranda, while sworn to secrecy on sensitive parts. (I fail to see why any of it should be confidential now, but the inquiry must be made palatable to government.)
The ongoing public school closures saw the interests of the teachers unions, especially health risks of staff rated equally as important or perhaps more important than the social and educational benefits of keeping kids with a low transmission risk in class.
1. You’ve nailed the Poilievre analysis- completely, wonderfully. Nothing more to say or add. I love and appreciate how you drew this back to the convoy. I agree that’s when the dam (or spell) broke.
2. JG, in a moral panic, does the righteous party (ie the non-witch burners- or maybe those opposed to the witch burning) forget quickly? Because in Covid I get the sense one half has easily/conveniently forgotten about it - the other half, I’d say you’d be mistaken to think so. Theres a deep well there, maybe it afflicts men more? But as a 40something man, I know a lot of us have been changed by that experience. It has changed our perspective on what this current government is and what government can be. It was shocking. We are not over it. And we have not forgotten.
3. Matt I’m with you on Hockey getting us through the winter. Small town hockey tourneys, early morning practices, and AC/DC pumping over the PA at an 8am Saturday game! Let’s go! Theres no time to notice the dark hellscape that surrounds us. Jen, the spring snowstorms are as predictable as July thunderstorms (Alberta). You’ve got to embrace the suck! This is one of the things that makes us Canadians.
4. There are still cultural things about Canada that hold value. The bigger the city the less it’s present. But there is still something special about the place and the people. Justin Trudeau directly attacked those things. “We don’t want to be known just for our resources but our resourcefulness” (as if those aren’t the same thing). But it’s still there, and it’s finding its voice again. And it’s what made us great (or at least good!).
There are people who, to this day, carry the torch believing that there is, in fact, a cabal of Satanic child abusers at the height of power. And the people who spent years in jail for being accused of same without any physical evidence also never forgot.
I think there will always be a small cadre of COVID paranoiacs who never stop wearing masks in public. And a core of COVID resisters who still believe we should be jailing the vaccine makers. For them, these battles are baked into the identity and I suspect they will never forgot.
The rest of us have to live on a society with one another. Nobody got COVID 100% right. Memory holing serves a function - it allows us to quasi forgive the errors and just move on in a functional way.
Your disilliusionment with government will stick with you, I suspect, and find new examples to buttress itself with. JG
Thanks for the response Jen. To clarify the point I’d hoped to make- I don’t think the people that still hold anger towards/ memory of (to be specific) the covid policies enacted from say Sept 2021 (just pre-election), and the rhetoric spewed by the Trudeau administration during that time up until the convoy, are a small extremist demographic. At the peak, the convoy held over 40% popular support. You might say this is still not a majority of people, and it’s not, but it’s the same percentage roughly that’s being discussed as potentially delivering the CPC a super majority. I think there is something transactional that happened here, and in that specific time period(ish), that is larger (among certain demographics) than is being acknowledged and is still resonating out today. I’d also argue this resonance is bolstering PP to likely a greater height than O’Toole would have received otherwise. And ultimately was a defining piece of what also took O’Toole and Kenney down. Im contending there is a large % of pretty mainstream people who have not memory holed some of those late stage covid policies and/or how they were prosecuted, even if they’re not overtly publicly vocal about them. Anyways, we don’t have to agree, but I think there is something interesting and important here that’s rooted to that period and series of events that’s being mostly overlooked.
I think the silent majority of Canadians that sat back and “tolerated” the “wokeism” of the Trudeau liberals finally had enough. We are done being told we “think wrong” by people that say men can have babies. That may be an over simplification BUT common sense seems to have totally left our current government (if they ever had it) they are just so out of touch with the average Canadian.
And the average Canadian is just done with that
Beware the silent majority when they no longer remain silent.
Will be interesting to see what this proposal to delay the next election by a week and get a bunch of NDP and Liberals their gold plated pension plan plays out in our main stream media. Unconscionable!!!!
I have wondered about why Caribbean nations haven’t had to send us aid for dealing with winter . They expect aid from us as climate change makes the water rise but have never given us a dime to help with developing winter gear or cover the cost of the Canada goose coat (lol) .
Once again, Matt & Jen articulate SO WELL what so many of us have been feeling for quite. some. time.
Jen was really on a snow induced rant & roll. Matt trying to get a word in edgewise reminded me of John Candy's character in Uncle Buck trying to do the same on the phone with his understandably angry lady friend Chanice:
https://youtu.be/Tn7WF3S-4VI?feature=shared 🤣
Matt and Jen are bang on with their thesis that those things that have made the winters we must endure together tolerable are either falling apart, dying, or stone cold dead.
Things Canadians used to be proud of:
- Relatively good economic opportunities for the majority of citizens.
- a healthy small business environment in terms of taxation / regulation
- Relatively affordable housing, fuel, groceries, goods & services.
- Semi-competent, well meaning, honorable, and semi-respectable politicians, beauraucrats, and business leaders.
- Dependable, somewhat slow, but generally effective family & emergency health care.
- Safe public streets, transit, and other shared spaces mostly free of petty and violent crime.
- Clean, abundant water supplies.
- Adults in charge of our public finances.
- A manageable addictions problem and relatively small homeless population.
All of the above are either crumbling or have vanished.
I have four kids; three are adults.
They WANT to love this country, but...
- They were profoundly disillusioned by how the pandemic was handled at ALL levels.
- They can't afford to buy a house, and can't even find rental accommodations.
- They are struggling to afford gas & groceries and now stay home rather than going to sporting events, films, theatre, clubs, and restaurants.
- They see incompetent people in positions of authority over them personally, and similar incompetent people running the critical services and overall leadership of our communities, province, and country.
I'm more like Matt than Jen when it comes to contemplating leaving Canada.
I travel frequently to the US for professional development and networking, and aside from reuniting with family and friends at home, dread returning to Canada. My American friends are baffled at what has happened to Canada. In response, I point out their two presidential candidates.
I will not fly from a Canadian airport on a Canadian airline - I drive to much better run, less expensive airports in the US.
Poilievre, assuming he wins a majority, better fix things quickly.
If he doesn't, this time around we won't just have a 'brain drain' issue, we will have a mass exodus of our young and capable citizens the likes of which we've never experienced, or even contemplated!
I like, and I (remain) subscribed.
Thanks, Matt & Jen!
I agree with everything you've said. I have kids in the exact same boat. I think Pierre wants the job. I don't think he has a clue what comes with it. Anyway, because it was my profession, I'm curious are you avoiding big airports in Canada to drive to smaller better run ones in the US? There's no question out big ones are a Gong Show; Toronto being run by an otherworldly collection of idiots, but I'm just curious. Thanks.
Yes, exactly. Less hassle, drive-across customs process (usually less than 1 minute at our rural crossings) instead of long airport customs line-ups, more flight options, better airport amenities and restaurants, and comparable flight pricing even when exchange is factored in. In short, the US still has a semi-civilized air transport experience that comes with having so many more airlines and airports in competition with each other. It's not without its issues as well, but no comparison with the shit show in Canada. I've heard nothing but nightmares out of Pearson.
Pearson is what you get when a 4 year old alcoholic designs an airport, and 3 year olds run it. I base that on controlling there for 30 years. But all big airports suck to some extent. For example, do NOT connect through Newark after 12 noon; it will be a religious experience on too many days. A lot of the issues you mention come from a system supported by a population of 331 million versus 40, but my experiences flying out of airports besides Pearson have been superb. I suspect you're doing a lot more flying than I do. If an airport has a coffee shop, I'm happy.
Good insight; thanks. I used to fly more than I do today, and used to fly often out of Calgary. The experience gradually deteriorated to the point where I am today - won't even consider flying from a Canadian airport post-pandemic - way too many horror stories from friends and colleagues. Nothing is as bad as Pearson, though (wow).
You're quite correct that we can't compare our two countries' populations, but the service in Canada has deteriorated substantially. Not sure our airllines are even going to survive.
They have to survive. Having completely abandoned rail, it's the governments idea of mass transit. And geography and time demand it. The 2 main players will survive, with various others trying to pry their way in. They all come in with small fleets, and as soon a a plane breaks, or there's a snow event, they're behind the 8 ball for a week.
At some point, does flying in Canada become only for wealthy people?
As air travel becomes more and more of an ordeal in Canada, perhaps the end game for the airlines to remain profitable is less flight options and higher prices?
Not certain what that means for our airports.
Might make air traffic control a less stressful career!
The rest of us unwashed heathens may have to do as I've done and drive to the USA and fly from there.
Another great episode: love the even-handed analysis that's so hard to find these days.
You briefly touched on the left-right split and fortunately didn't fall into the trap I expect much of the media to next election: IMO "right-wing" is the wrong way to look at Poilievre's appeal. I consider myself a progressive and will be voting NDP in the next BC provincial election (Eby seems to at least understand the problems and is trying to address them) who is also seriously considering voting for Poilievre federally.
Why? Forget platitudes and vibes, under Trudeau, Canada seems to be rapidly moving away from progressive ideals. For example:
1. A housing market becoming increasingly aristocratic and feudal ("bank of Mom and Dad")
2. Renters who work middle-class jobs legitimately having to worry about becoming homeless.
3. A public transit system and public spaces feeling more dangerous, thus pushing people back into cars and private spaces
4. Companies able to easily import cheap labour rather than improving wages or working conditions to better attract/retain talent
5. Us apparently being totally okay with just openly exploiting young folks in developing nations (charging them 30k to study in a strip mall, etc)
6. A public health care system that's falling apart
7. Young families struggling to access childcare
8. High spending that's exhausted our fiscal capacity, but without all the great social programs or infrastructure I'd imagined would come with that high spending.
Are all these problems Trudeau's fault? No, but many of them can be traced back, at least in part, to policy choices by his government, and in any case, he seems incapable of acknowledging the problems or understanding the gravity of the situation. Singh seems equally lost. Poilievre - while somewhat distasteful - at least seems to understand the problems Canada is facing. Will he fix them? I have my doubts, but it's at a point where I feel like it might be worth a shot.
1. I couldn't agree more with your comment. I don't believe all of the challenges facing Canadians are soley the Liberals fault nor to I think that the Conservatives are going to be able to fix housing and the economy right away. But I am ready for a change and this historically left leaning voter is likely going to throw her vote to the conservatives in the next election because I don't at this point see any other option.
2. JG I know you are working on a piece about Moral Panic. I am fascinated to learn more. Especially about peoples collective memory loss. I work in healthcare on the 'frontliine'. I was grateful and excited to receive my vaccine hoping that it would get us back to some normalcy and protect me and my patients. But my adult children opted out of the vaccine and some of my colleagues. I will not forget how they were treated at work and I will not forget that some of my family members would not let my children in their homes and harrassed them constantly. And its like they have collectively forgeten how awful their behaviour was to their colleagues and own family. When I have tried to gently bring it up to family members they don't want to even acknowledge that it even happened.
This really nails my feelings well. I also don't consider myself a conservative and have not actually ever voted for a conservative party before. I'm not even particularly enamoured with Poilievre, who I think is a smart political operator and an ice-cold street-fighting man but who has yet to prove to me that he's a deep thinker on policy.
Unfortunately, he's the only one who actually seems to understand the seriousness of our present crisis, most of which you've helpfully enumerated 1 through 8, and he might be pragmatic enough to at least make the situation somewhat better.
There's an open lane in Canadian federal politics for a party and leader who actually care, fiercely and with focus, on working class/lower middle class problems. I've become deeply dispirited that it's clearly not and perhaps never will be the modern NDP, and am somewhat disturbed but increasingly resigned to the possibility that it might be the Conservatives.
I couldn't agree more on the federal NDP, and I feel like they really let a golden opportunity slip away. It's not hard to imagine an alternate reality where we're framing the 2025 election as primarily a competition between Poilievre and say Rachel Notley (I don't live in Alberta, but from perspective of an outsider, she seems like the type of leader the federal party desperately needs). Jagmeet Singh is likeable and seems like a genuinely decent person, but every time he tries to talk policy, has it all backwards.
Agreed completely. The left slowly losing the working class to the right has been a theme over the last 20 years, and I can't help suspecting it has to do with how little experience most of the leaders of the modern left actually have with blue-collar labour.
You look at Singh's background, and his father was a psychiatrist who had sufficient means to send Singh to a private school, then a great university, then law school. I cannot see any sign in Singh's bio that he's ever worked a job that left a callus on his hands.
Compare that to, say, Arthur Scargill, a pivotal figure in British labour politics in the 1970s and 1980s who I've been learning about recently (The Rest is History podcast has a great series of episodes on the British political crisis of 1974), who worked as a coal miner for 19 years. Or heck, compare that to my mother's father, who was a mine manager in Ontario who came up out of the ranks and was ardently involved in NDP politics.
I don't think you *need* to have lived like and among your constituents to represent them well, but if you don't seem to be doing a great job connecting with them, "do you actually know any of these people" seems like an important question to start the diagnosis with.
The Line Podcast was poorly engineered today. I could barely hear Jen in Calgary and Matt was really loud......where's the producer or someone on the levels? Great topics, always a pleasure to read the newsletter but the podcast needs to get more Professional. Tom
Hey guys; we are sorry about the sound quality today. We know it is an issue and will have it resolved next week. JG
I had trouble hearing Jen as well.
I had some success with voice boost on my Android app, but Jen was still less than 50% of Matt's amplitude. Not sure about the YouTube version, but the audio podcast was virtually unlistenable. One thing that was likely easier this time was Matt's propensity to finish Jen's sentences. With so much volume the interrupting was more successful.
I noticed that too. FWIW, the version on Apple Podcasts seems significantly worse than the private feed from the site.
Nicely done.
Thanks to Jen for articulating so well.
I think that you have put your finger on the Poilievre success factor. Many Canadians are angry. They are angry about the cost of living and health care and other economic issues. Butthey are also angry at the "disrespect" they feel they are getting from Mr. Trudeau and his fellow Liberals. I am reminded of the way certain American voters felt about Hilary Clinton in 2016.
I spent some time early in February 2022, talking to truckers. (I live in Ottawa.) Most were quite inarticulate, but I did get the sense that they were enjoying a release from, yes, anger. Sparks and Wellington Streets were the scene of a street party, in part a letting off steam party. They certainly didn't seem to be a threat. And indeed there was no physical violence, apart from some pushing and shoving when the police finally broke up the protest. But the participants remember their moment of finally expressing themselves. I think that was a major factor in Mr. Poilievre's rise.
Whether or not Mr. Trudeau called these people racists and misogynists (and he did, in a French language interview), they certainly got the impression that is how he considered them and still considers them. That keeps the anger going. Wedge issues can win elections, but at a long term cost.
Finally, why live in Canada? I went to graduate school in New Jersey, and received several job offers there and in Washington. But there was Vietnam. Some of my classmates wound up there, others kept one step of their draft board, one actually helped burn down the draft board in his district. Downtown Newark, like other U.S. cities, still showed the scars of rioting. The Weather Underground was blowing up things. By contrast, Canada looked pretty good. I was proud of the place, even after October 1970.
Now it's too late for me. I told my children to move away, but of course they didn't listen. Maybe my grandchildren will. All very sad.
They were angry at Hillary. Look how that turned out. Lessons to be learned?
Yes. The lesson is to not insult half the electorate, They might not take it kindly, and might actually vote against you.
Why cant Poilievre be both Lucky and smart? Thats my opinion!
First off, note to the guy/girl running the sound board - could hardly hear Jen but Matt was booming. Matt - sorry you have the sniffles man.
So, I grew up under the Big Blue Machine and moved west when I graduated. I prospered more than my mom (dad passed early) and my kids eem to be doing better than my better half and I primarily because of their education (doctor and teacher). My point is that there does not seem to be the feeling that the twenty something today is going to get ahead. Yes, housing in Regina is not badly priced - 50's bungalo for under $400,000 and the equivalent in Toronto being $1.1 mil adn that is just the start.
The present federal government does not reflect my view of Canada, as you point out, and I am tired of being told that I am racist, a transfobe or whatever simply because I question the prevailing wisdom. You're gay or lesbian? - don't care so have
a nice day. Transgender? don't care have a nice day. Living in your parent's basement because you don't have an education/job? - you have every oportunity in life so what did you do with it? You made decisions to do the drugs? - move along that isn't my problem. Don't get me started on residential schools please but at some point people need to take responsibility for bad decisions in their lives and stop telling me it is my fault.
I spent my life working for a better life for myself, my family and my community. I paid my taxes to support the military,health care, education, roads, police, and all the municipal infrastructure I need. I didn't pay taxes to see money sent overseas to support terrorist organizations, nor to support anti hate organizations in a country where we are not perfect but we are not racisit. My taxes weren't for putting feminine hygiene products in men's washrooms in federal buildings or to subsidize a rich neighbour buying an EV - or for a battery plant as far as that goes either (you do know that EVs are not the answer right?). I could go on and you could add a long list of different issues. My point is that Canadians go along and get along but we have been pushed way too far on the social activism, virtue signaling, say stuff but don't actually deliver, waffle on the Hamas terrorism, and all the other stuff that we have been expected to just swallow. Canada is in a tight spot financially and the voter recognizes that, like my fixed pension, our way of life is slowly being erroded to a rich/poor split that is not Canada.
I think that we are actually waking up to what Canada is slipping away from and we are looking to someone to come forward with a plan and a set of goasl or projects to get us back out of the econoomic and social drift we have been living in for the last decade. Is PP the one? Sure hope so but time will tell. I wil say that my better half who has been a lifetime Liberal is voting CPC when the election comes because she is tired of the crap from Ottawa and JT.
The weather part of the discussion was fascinating. I grew up on the prairies. Don't know if I could ever go back to that. And I am fortunate to now live in a not-too-pricy part of the west coast. It's probably not big-city enough for you two, but damn, it's a great place to raise a family.
But it's true, people have put up with the weather in Canada because we have (had, actually) other great things. I really miss loving my country.
As for Trudeau handling parts of the pandemic well, I'm not so sure. One of his first moves was to try to get carte blanche to be able to fully control parliament for a couple of years. That's where he showed his true colours. Antagonizing the 10% or so of truckers who weren't vaccinated was another place where he showed us his true colours. And his response to Portapique was absolutely bizarre. He was practically frothing at the mouth for the opportunity to implement his gun policy with an order in council. (This is not directly related to the pandemic, but people held him in high esteem during that part of the pandemic, overjoyed with their CERB cheques. It's easy to act like a dictator when your population is distracted.)
So while I didn't fault him in the very early days for his pandemic response, it soon became clear that it was just an opportunity for him to further his agenda.
The truth is that the federal government had relatively little responsibility for anything related to COVID. That’s a provincial responsibility. What the federal government *was* responsible for, they botched when it really mattered: locking down travel at the start of the pandemic, implementing quarantine measures, having failed to maintain a response plan and the stockpile of medical supplies that was the responsibility of Health Canada. Afterwards, it felt a lot like the federal cabinet was desperate to do anything they could to exercise some control over the situation when it was mostly out of their hands.
I think he handled the pandemic really well....mainly because none of the responses were his ideas. You can't please all the people all the time, and the convoy was the stupidest collection of Canadians to have ever gathered. The notion that it was about trucking was nonsense, since they had to be vaccinated to get into the US in the first place. It was a bunch of whiners who wee tired of COVID; we all were, who felt the need to impose their frustrations of others. And no, I won't forgive Pierre for playing politics to support it.
A lot of governmental dysfunction comes down to a basic lack of competence, and I think that’s ultimately the result of the loss of experience and expertise.
Watching the response to COVID made me wince because I could see public health authorities and governments making elementary errors apparent to anybody with experience trying to tackle a novel problem under pressure. Lockdowns were a containment measure - containment measures are meant to buy time to figure out what’s going on and develop a better solution. That didn’t happen - authorities rarely looked more than one step ahead at a time. They didn’t figure out how to deal with the information problem: what do we really know, what do we know we *dont* know, what could be the unknown unknowns? When information did start to develop, they were very poor at integrating it into their thinking and adjusting their approaches in response. Still, I get frustrated hearing people critical of a lot of the steps taken when they forget that they’ve now got the prescience of hindsight. This stuff is HARD. It takes practice and experience to get it right. By 2020, everybody with first-hand experience dealing with such an outbreak was dead or retired.
The same problem infects the Liberal government. They were so thoroughly gutted following the Chretien era that they didn’t have anybody left who knew how to run a government. They kept trying to chase shiny progressive initiatives when they didn’t even have the skills to do the routine stuff. This is what worries me about the populist turn of the Poilievre Conservatives- are they going to retain enough of the experience in government from the Harper era to execute, or are ideological prerogatives going to lead them to purge the experience from the party?
Why do Canadians stay? Look at the folks who are coming here, mostly those leaving war, grinding poverty, ethnic strife, etc. Canada is famously the least picky of the Western Nations so they come here because no one else will take them in a timely and secure manner.
One thing old stock Canadian nationalists need to understand about immigrants, many if not most are here because they weren't allowed into the US. Deal with it. They would leave for the US in a heartbeat if they could. Why? Because they are ambitious and the US is the land of ambition. The US is closer to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in 2024 than Canada is of peace, order and good government. Yes, that is an indictment of Canada's governing class and elite, more concerned with their luxury beliefs and featherbedding than the people or the country.
Pre-2015 Canada was a long time ago and today's Canada is made by and for Laurentian boomers I suppose.
The US is those things...for now.
Back in 2008 to about 2013 or so, Canada and especially Alberta were a much nicer and more prosperous place to live in than the US.
Something happened mid decade and it isn't just JT.
It’s kind of a overdetermined phenomenon, and I think the mechanism is going to vary a bit depending on the locale. Overall, the energy and commodities boom ended around 2015, which knocked a lot of the dynamism out of the Canadian economy. That was coupled with regulatory sclerosis fostered by various activists groups that discouraged investment. Unifor liked to blame their problems on the strong Canadian dollar during the Harper years, but the slide from near-parity to today’s ~70-75¢ range is basically a 30% pay cut taken by all Canadians since then.
On the social and political side, it felt like there was a long progressive insurgency against conservative policies during the Harper years, with courts striking down various measures like sentencing reform. The full effects didn’t become apparent until they were combined with a progressive government and public order started going to hell.
Agreed, this is a top down phenomenon in Canada. We are led by an elite class that just aren't that good at their jobs of leading. They avoid accountability, see ArriveCan and countless other issues, and they focus more on class solidarity than merit. If it gets really bad they just leave. I'd love to see the percentage of 1%ers who hold more than one passport.
At least in the US if you don't produce you are gone, no matter what connection you had to get the job.
Jen. Why does everything get better for you on April 20? (4/20). Thank goodness for legal weed eh???
I can’t be the only one who caught that right?😜
Thanks for the rant, Jen, you echoed my thoughts completely.
A minor clarification about the COVID school closures - it was absolutely the right call epidemiologically for the first couple waves, but there was a twofold issue:
1. Few people on either side of the issue understood that it wasn't about the health of the kids. The kids were always going to be fine. The issue is that the kids were spectacularly effective disease vectors. School is a place where thousands of people who would otherwise never come into contact send their kids to crawl all over each other every day, and then they bring them home and let them crawl all over their overweight, elderly, or immunocompromised relatives.
2. The barn door was closed too late. This was a consistent failure of Canadian COVID response: by the time the situation was evidently bad enough that politicians felt like they had political cover to shut down society, the damage was done. With every single wave, we locked the panic room door after the serial killer had strolled in with us. *By the time* we closed the schools, it usually didn't matter much.
The right time to close the schools was (and will be a century from now) so early that 90% of the parents will think the government is being alarmist. That's why the government invented public health officials and imbued them with vast powers - to be expendable sources of a kind of courage that skilled politicians simply cannot be relied upon to have.
Agree with this, although my understanding is that the "kids were spectacularly effective disease vectors" didn't actually end up being the case with Covid (granted, given how kids are usually germ factories, assuming schools would be super-spreader events wasn't unreasonable at the time IMO).
This is also my understanding. For the first few weeks of Covid this was a reasonable hypothesis. But the fact that young children were not, in fact effective vectors (until Omicron) was pretty clear by mid 2021. At that point, shutting down elementary schools was a fear and panic driven response. JG
I'm surprised to hear the suggestion that children weren't effective vectors. I just did a little googling and this article by an infectious disease specialist popped up suggesting that they were. Do you mind if I ask where you heard that they weren't?
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/2783027
The title of that piece is literally; "Yes, Children Can Transmit COVID, but We Need Not Fear."
No one disputed that children *can* transmit COVID. That is a thing that could happen. But young children were never very effective or efficient spreaders, and elementary schools were never significant sources of transmission (in stark contrast to other respiratory illnesses, where spread via young children is a major factor.) The most dangerous places for transmission at the peak of the most dangerous strains of the virus were always LTC facilities, and medical facilities, followed by close-packed environments filled with adults (particularly adults doing activities like singing.) This was very much in evidence by 2021, if I recall.
Also note that paper acknowledges a significant difference between elementary and high school age children. The older a person gets, the more effective they become at spreading COVID. An evidence based approach that factored risks and trade offs appropriately probably would have closed high schools and universities but kept elementary and middle schools open. It would have forbid concerts and clubs, and worried less about restaurants. And, in hindsight, we should have never shut down parks or any other outdoor spaces. That was simply madness. I also think early returns suggest that strict border control should absolutely have been included in an arsenal of approaches. (Until Omicron, that is, in which case community spread was inevitable and further lockdowns etc. Were totally futile.)
But, of course, by that point, it wasn't just about evidence. It was also about managing expectations and fear and panic. And if governments took the course suggested above, they would have been accused of being hypocritical, or of not taking the virus seriously. As Matt noted in the podcast, closing schools was more about signalling seriousness than it was about effectively curbing transmission in a way that was as minimally disruptive as possible. It was theatre.
“Also note that paper acknowledges a significant difference between elementary and high school age children. The older a person gets, the more effective they become at spreading COVID.”
I think this may misinterpret the article, which has some confusing turns of phrase. From the underlying study it’s discussing (footnote 2):
“Even after adjusting for the lower odds of asymptomatic transmission and testing delays in our study, children aged 0 to 3 years and 4 to 8 years remained associated with higher odds of transmitting SARS-CoV-2 to household contacts than children aged 14 to 17 years.”
In fact, the article points out, younger children are so much more effective at transmitting COVID that even though it was more likely for an older child to be the first person in a household to contract COVID, *it was still more likely for a younger child to spread COVID to another member of the household*.
I thought the infectious disease specialist did a good job of explaining why that’s the case. Little kids have no sense of personal space, they're badly disciplined about hygienic measures like washing hands and covering coughs and sneezes, and in any half-loving household they're in prolonged physical contact with their family, even if (in fact especially if) they're sick.
What this comes back to is the article’s core thesis, which I thought was insightful: little kids are *inefficient* at spreading COVID (mostly asymptomatic, low viral load, etc.), but that’s not the same as *ineffective*. I’m inefficient at hitting baseballs in a batting cage, but give me a thousand swings or so and I’ll eventually make contact.
Schools feature hundreds of little kids crammed together on school buses and in classrooms, and in repeated physical contact during gym class and recess. Have you *seen* the chaos in an elementary school boot room? I know you have. Some of those kids even have choir practice, since you mentioned that. It’s thousands of swings at the COVID transmission baseball every day.
Then all those little kids go home and roughhouse with their siblings, hug their relatives, and cuddle with their parents. They’re breathing and coughing and sneezing on you and putting their little mucus-y hands on you as you bathe them, dress them, help them with their homework, put them to bed – thousands more swings.
Enough of those hundreds of thousands of cumulative swings eventually connect, in chains that link hundreds of households across the community who would otherwise have no means of transmitting the disease.
Clarke, I'm not even sure how you're coming up with that interpretation from the article that you, yourself, have cited.
To wit:
"To date, we do not have any evidence that the viral titer shed by young children is greater than that shed by teens and adults; in fact, most studies suggest that, in childhood, viral shedding may increase with increasing age.5 Additionally, prior work that has described that young children are more likely to have asymptomatic infections than older individuals6 and that asymptomatically infected individuals are less likely to transmit than individuals who have symptomatic infection.7"
And that's from 2021.
At the outset of the pandemic, virologists had a reasonable hypothesis that children's behaviour would make them *more* efficient spreaders of COVID. A hypothesis backed up by what we see in more typical respiratory illnesses. It was reasonable to shut down schools in the Spring of 2020! But then we found out more, and that's not actually what happened. Despite their gross behaviour, children were actually less efficient spreaders than adults -- and we've see that result consistently across multiple studies, now. Children are gross, yes. But COVID behaves differently here than in other illnesses.
Again, no one credible is arguing that school closures were 100% useless. (And I know from personal experience that kids spread Omicron. As did everybody. ) But there is now quite a lot of evidence to suggest that, prior to Omicron, the benefits of school closures were utterly marginal, while the long term consequences of keeping kids out of school were severe. (And many of the studies showing any negative impact on transmission had extremely low CIs and/or lumped all school closures -- including closures of elementary schools AND universities into one category. Or are further complicated by the fact that they happened during different waves of the virus.) As with all NPIs it's always -- always -- a question of balancing risks with benefits.
I could point to these items for note: https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2023-03-31-school-closures-may-reduce-covid-19-transmission-may-also-harm-childrens-education
https://globalnews.ca/news/10300870/school-closures-ontario-not-prevent-covid-study/
I could go back into the archive of literature and we could get into a big giant wall-o-text debate about this where we throw scientific studies back at one another, but dear God, please let's not? It's Saturday night, friend! JG
I think the point was they transmit, but in the context of rampant community transmission it wasn't significant.
In this interview: https://www.illusionconsensus.com/p/episode-34-dr-tracy-beth-hoeg-on
jump to: 12:50 and listen for 3 minutes.
I couldn't agree more that once you've got rampant community transmission, closing schools is pointless. One of my original two points that it's worth emphasizing is that the timing is critical. Advice to put out your house fire with a pot of water from the sink is great advice if the fire is confined to a small patch of carpet. It is no longer good advice if your entire house is an inferno.
I'm not sure I agree with the point made in that podcast, though. "Children are always going to be somewhere," she says, "if not in school then out in the community with their friends".
I think this reflects how much trouble Canadians (and even more so Americans) generally had with the concept of an actual lockdown. In an actual lockdown, *no, kids are not going to be out in the community with their friends*. They'll be at home with their family, inside, bouncing off the walls and totally miserable just like everybody else.
"Too late and half-assed" was the consistent theme of Canadian public health interventions, and then the failure of those too-late, half-assed interventions was used to argue that they weren't ever going to work and were a bad idea.
I just replied to Jen with a link to an article by an infectious disease specialist suggesting kids were effective disease vectors. Happy to be proven wrong (that's not true, I'm never happy to be proven wrong, just willing) if you have a study of your own to share.
No study, I'm basing that on assessments I heard at the time from well-informed people like Scott Gottlieb and just the fact we weren't hearing of schools being super-spreader events or seeing major surges after reopening (I fully acknowledge that's far from conclusive evidence or proof).
Unfortunately, there is unlikely to be any study that can offer proof since we can't trace back transmission chains, so we get a lot of speculative evidence (e.g. that the specific study's goal was "To determine whether there are differences in the odds of household transmission by younger children compared with older children.": that might give us some interesting insights into the level of risk, but is pretty far removed from the question of school-opening question).
So basically we sacrifice the mental health and development of our youth, the future of the country, to protect the old and those who have already lived full lives...
Haven't seniors in Canada already taken enough and left the kids holding the bag?
We are already leaving those kids a country in institutional and cultural decline, with a huge debt (to pay for boomers entitlements) and not much to show for it. At least let the kids play during recess. Those seniors quite frankly don't deserve to keep the kids at home.
No question, deficit financing allowed politicians to buy elections by giving the voters everything they wanted, but we couldn't actually afford. Then, they rigged the donation system to allow the rich to buy the politicians......who lowered tax rates for the richest to appease their "owners". Then corporate subsidies increased and they're nothing more than an upward transfer of wealth. And instead of using their wealth to improve things, the billionaire class now hoards it. We've allowed them to install themselves as the new royalty. And you can't get elected telling people they have to give things up. This isn't a Canada problem; it's a western world problem, and if those governments don't find a backbone, and act as a group, you'll see what is happening today in the US; overt attacks on democracy by the billionaire class.
COVID didn't come with a users manual. Mistakes were made, mainly because we didn't know what we were dealing with. The real question is did we learn anything from it? I highly doubt it.
I agree, it will be the capital markets who ultimately take away the punchbowl from Canadians (and most Western Nations) and force us to live within our means.
And at that point, we've lost control of what happens.
Setting aside the question of how many deaths of not just the old (and by old I'm talking about 50+ here, not 90+) but the fat and the immunocompromised is worth some suffering, a lockdown can be quite short and still be effective at saving lives if it's properly timed and if everybody gets on board.
If society is, however, filled with people who drag their feet about taking those emergency measures and people who refuse to follow public health guidance about indoor mingling once the emergency measures are in place, the lockdown is going to last forever and only be mildly effective at reducing death.
Also, referring back to my first point, if the kids are playing outside during recess, doesn't that imply they're not outside the rest of the day? I don't want to accuse you of not understanding that first point, but it's pretty critical to recognize that if you've packed a bunch of kids onto school buses and into classrooms at all, "recess or no recess" is irrelevant, the damage is done.
I was taking liberties with my rhetoric. My point is that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few and that means that the development needs of our children outweigh keeping our kids isolated to protect old people, many who refused to get vaxxed.
It's about what is most important to society, not just to politicians going after the Me Generation vote.
You’d hear a lot of griping during COVID about how some jurisdictions had apparently managed to deal with it so much more effectively, and lamentations that we weren’t following their policies. However, it seems like the critical factor was the number of COVID cases they had at the start of the pandemic. The infection rate curves look very similar; the differentiation comes from the starting point. In Canada, BC did better than Ontario because spring break started 2 weeks later. Ontarians had picked up COVID during their vacation travels, and BC locked down just before their residents could replicate that spread. Similarly, the nations that did best during COVID were geographically isolated: New Zealand, Japan, South Korea. Fewer people brought back COVID, there was less travel anyway, and it was easier to control entry.
I did a little study of excess death rates among the world's wealthy island nations awhile back, and I thought it was interesting that while New Zealand famously did extremely well, the UK (for example) was obliterated.
Things seemed to work out in New Zealand not because COVID never appeared in the population - it did just like everywhere else - but because everybody believed everybody else would follow the rules, they believed their government had their best interest at heart, and that some sacrifice was worth it to keep everybody safe.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-excess-deaths-covid?country=USA~GBR~NZL~CAN
You'll see from this chart, for example, that despite the UK being an island nation and Canada having the longest unprotected land border in the world, we actually did substantially better - and basically every country that isn't hideously impoverished did better than the United States.
COVID was a giant collective action problem that tested the world's cultures, and many were found wanting.
I think that we need an inquiry into how our various governments responded to the COVID epidemic. We could form a panel made up of experts from outside Canada, to maintain independence. They should have access to all existing documentation, including Cabinet Memoranda, while sworn to secrecy on sensitive parts. (I fail to see why any of it should be confidential now, but the inquiry must be made palatable to government.)
The ongoing public school closures saw the interests of the teachers unions, especially health risks of staff rated equally as important or perhaps more important than the social and educational benefits of keeping kids with a low transmission risk in class.
But the kids actually represented a very serious transmission risk.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/2783027
Yes, but long term the developmental delays of children not attending school are much worse.
Another great podcast.
My thoughts,
1. You’ve nailed the Poilievre analysis- completely, wonderfully. Nothing more to say or add. I love and appreciate how you drew this back to the convoy. I agree that’s when the dam (or spell) broke.
2. JG, in a moral panic, does the righteous party (ie the non-witch burners- or maybe those opposed to the witch burning) forget quickly? Because in Covid I get the sense one half has easily/conveniently forgotten about it - the other half, I’d say you’d be mistaken to think so. Theres a deep well there, maybe it afflicts men more? But as a 40something man, I know a lot of us have been changed by that experience. It has changed our perspective on what this current government is and what government can be. It was shocking. We are not over it. And we have not forgotten.
3. Matt I’m with you on Hockey getting us through the winter. Small town hockey tourneys, early morning practices, and AC/DC pumping over the PA at an 8am Saturday game! Let’s go! Theres no time to notice the dark hellscape that surrounds us. Jen, the spring snowstorms are as predictable as July thunderstorms (Alberta). You’ve got to embrace the suck! This is one of the things that makes us Canadians.
4. There are still cultural things about Canada that hold value. The bigger the city the less it’s present. But there is still something special about the place and the people. Justin Trudeau directly attacked those things. “We don’t want to be known just for our resources but our resourcefulness” (as if those aren’t the same thing). But it’s still there, and it’s finding its voice again. And it’s what made us great (or at least good!).
Everything is going to be ok.
There are people who, to this day, carry the torch believing that there is, in fact, a cabal of Satanic child abusers at the height of power. And the people who spent years in jail for being accused of same without any physical evidence also never forgot.
I think there will always be a small cadre of COVID paranoiacs who never stop wearing masks in public. And a core of COVID resisters who still believe we should be jailing the vaccine makers. For them, these battles are baked into the identity and I suspect they will never forgot.
The rest of us have to live on a society with one another. Nobody got COVID 100% right. Memory holing serves a function - it allows us to quasi forgive the errors and just move on in a functional way.
Your disilliusionment with government will stick with you, I suspect, and find new examples to buttress itself with. JG
Thanks for the response Jen. To clarify the point I’d hoped to make- I don’t think the people that still hold anger towards/ memory of (to be specific) the covid policies enacted from say Sept 2021 (just pre-election), and the rhetoric spewed by the Trudeau administration during that time up until the convoy, are a small extremist demographic. At the peak, the convoy held over 40% popular support. You might say this is still not a majority of people, and it’s not, but it’s the same percentage roughly that’s being discussed as potentially delivering the CPC a super majority. I think there is something transactional that happened here, and in that specific time period(ish), that is larger (among certain demographics) than is being acknowledged and is still resonating out today. I’d also argue this resonance is bolstering PP to likely a greater height than O’Toole would have received otherwise. And ultimately was a defining piece of what also took O’Toole and Kenney down. Im contending there is a large % of pretty mainstream people who have not memory holed some of those late stage covid policies and/or how they were prosecuted, even if they’re not overtly publicly vocal about them. Anyways, we don’t have to agree, but I think there is something interesting and important here that’s rooted to that period and series of events that’s being mostly overlooked.
Watched the Kate video. Her eyes look so tired. Poor thing. It's going to be a tough year for that family.
Great podcast
I think the silent majority of Canadians that sat back and “tolerated” the “wokeism” of the Trudeau liberals finally had enough. We are done being told we “think wrong” by people that say men can have babies. That may be an over simplification BUT common sense seems to have totally left our current government (if they ever had it) they are just so out of touch with the average Canadian.
And the average Canadian is just done with that
Beware the silent majority when they no longer remain silent.
Will be interesting to see what this proposal to delay the next election by a week and get a bunch of NDP and Liberals their gold plated pension plan plays out in our main stream media. Unconscionable!!!!
I have wondered about why Caribbean nations haven’t had to send us aid for dealing with winter . They expect aid from us as climate change makes the water rise but have never given us a dime to help with developing winter gear or cover the cost of the Canada goose coat (lol) .