And the Rest of It

Oh, look - your free money is getting taxed:

But the money is “taxable,” Ottawa has said, and many Canadians are wondering just how much they’ll have to eventually pay back.

The short answer is, that will depend in large part on how much income you’ll have for 2020 as a whole.

What really happened at a nursing home in Quebec:

At the Herron, the first death after March 3 was also the first confirmed COVID-19 one, on March 27, of a man who had been rushed to the Jewish General Hospital. It was on that date that the man’s family phoned the Herron to inform the staff that he had died from the coronavirus. That news sent a wave of panic through the three-storey building.

On that day, three registered nurses and four licensed practical nurses stopped working. All would later test positive for COVID-19. The departure of those nurses depleted the already thin staffing at the Herron.

On March 28, two more residents died, according to the records. It was on that date that the staff started to abandon the Herron, acknowledged co-owner Katherine Chowieri, who granted the Gazette an extensive interview on April 14, the same day her staff were interrogated by Montreal police.

“It happened over the course of three days,” Chowieri said of the mass desertion.

Also:

An epidemiological and clinical analysis of 137 recurring cases showed that more than half of them, 72 people, had no symptoms and 61 people showed mild symptoms, according to the KCDC. Analysis is underway for the other four.

Those who test positive again after release from quarantine are usually detected through regular testing required by some municipalities or when they show symptoms and seek testing themselves.

Health officials here have cautiously dismissed the possibility of patients being reinfected with the virus.

The virus, despite being present at undetectable levels in patients’ bodies, could have been reactivated due to their weakened immune systems, or the tests could have picked up “dead” remnants of the virus, the officials said. There is also the possibility that the test results were in error.

To find out whether those who test positive again can infect others, the health authorities ran an antibody analysis of 28 recurring cases. In six of the cases, the virus could not be cultivated, meaning those people were less contagious. Analysis is underway for the other 22 cases.

“We could not find the virus that was alive (in recovered patients who tested positive again), so we think it will not be highly infectious,” KCDC Director General Jeong Eun-kyeong said at a briefing Friday.

“In the cases testing positive again within one week after full recovery, many of them produce negative and positive results alternately before eventually producing positive results due to remaining pieces of the virus in the body,” she said.

Buy Canadian politicians? But the Chinese beat them to it:

Indian intelligence agencies attempted to use money and disinformation to “covertly influence” Canadian politicians, according to a highly sensitive government document obtained by Global News.

The document shows that Canadian security officials suspected India’s two main intelligence branches had asked an Indian citizen to sway politicians in this country into supporting Indian government interests.

The Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) and Indian Intelligence Bureau (IB) were allegedly behind the operation, which began in 2009, the document said.

Public Safety Minister Bill Blair’s office declined to comment on the case but said the government was “concerned when any country shows destabilizing behavior, including interference in other countries’ democratic systems.”

(Sidebar: but not China, eh. Bill?)


To wit:

For the first time, the report listed Sikh extremism as one of the top five extremist threats in Canada.

But late Friday, the language was changed to remove any mention of religion, instead discussing the threat posed by ``extremists who support violent means to establish an independent state within India.''

There are roughly half a million Canadians who identify as Sikh, most of them in the Greater Toronto Area and suburban Vancouver.

**

One eyewitness says greeting the party-crashers, was Brampton, Ont., MP Raj Grewal and at least one of his assistants.

The eyewitness, who was near the front of the line and knows Grewal by sight, said the MP was arguing with an RCMP officer, who grew visibly upset as Grewal apparently insisted the men be let in.