And the Rest of It

Coronaviruses bring out the hypocrites in all of us and by "all of us", I mean people we should fire:

The Public Health Agency of Canada paid more than $300,000 to host a convention including meetings at a ski hill at the same time it ordered cancellation of hockey games, church services and other public events, records show. The Agency yesterday confirmed it cannot get a refund: “We take that extremely seriously.”  

Also - oh, dear:

The Canadian Medical Association is petitioning Parliament for $300,000 grants to families of front line health care workers who die of Covid-19. Dr. Sandy Buchman, association president, blamed the Public Health Agency for failing to stock up on masks, goggles, face shields and other pandemic supplies: “We would never permit a firefighter to go into a burning building without adequate protection.”

 
And:

For more than three years the Trudeau Liberals said they could do little to stem the tide of asylum-seekers crossing into Canada at Roxham Road. The unofficial border crossing went from being a little-known footpath at the end of a now closed road that once connected Quebec and New York State to a bustling crossing fitted out with permanent RCMP and CBSA facilities.

At its height, more than 150 people per day were coming across at Roxham Road. Last month, just 17 people were intercepted by the RCMP at Roxham Road and four others were intercepted in British Columbia. ...

The number of people dropped from 930 in March to 1 in April and 17 in May.
Turns out something could be done; it only took a pandemic.

If anyone had an iota of conscience, they would be appalled at how the elderly were shunned and treated.

But I wouldn't suggest that this country is capable of such self-reflection:

The province was determined to ensure that hospital capacity was not overwhelmed in Ontario as images out of northern Italy showed medical facilities unable to cope with the deluge of patients needing ventilators and other intensive-care treatments.

In the end, the surge at Ontario’s hospitals never materialized and the province was able to escape the worst of COVID-19 except within the province’s nursing homes. Extra funding for infection control and staffing was added to the long-term care portfolio at a later time, but by then the virus had taken hold in many homes.

It is doubtful that even if Fullerton’s original request for extra funding had been approved for the budget that the money would have been delivered in time to have an impact on the homes before COVID-19 ravaged them.

Still, the two rejections show that not everyone in cabinet shared Ford’s desire to spare no expense and to put an iron ring around the province’s nursing homes.

It's easy to cry out for more money but the problem runs much deeper than that.

If warehousing the elderly into homes with poorly paid staff and "death doulas" is the best we can do, we are not fit to call ourselves human any longer.




It's just an economy:

Study authors Jake Fuss and Tegan Hill say economic research in both Canada and the U.S. indicates stimulus programs to recover from recessions built around such initiatives as subsidizing the construction of new infrastructure projects generate less than $1 of new economic growth for every $1 spent by governments.

By contrast, giving broad-based, long-term tax relief to individuals and businesses generates up to $5 of economic growth for every $1 spent. ...

The Fraser Institute study does not classify the $169 billion the Trudeau government is spending on programs like the Canada Emergency Response Benefit, which provides $2,000 a month in income support to people who have lost their employment because of COVID-19, as stimulus spending.

“The federal government’s spending up to this point is largely an emergency response to COVID-19, including income stabilization measures, in an effort to help Canadians who lost jobs or work hours due to the lockdown,” said Hill.

The Fraser Institute’s concern, she said, is that as federal and provincial governments shift their focus from emergency funding to economic recovery, they will turn to inefficient and costly stimulus initiatives.

Oh, Buttsy! Your snobbery is showing!




I guess the commissars didn't find her contrite enough:

Legislators will extend until September a suspension without pay for Senator Lynn Beyak (Ont.). The Senate deferred a vote on reinstating Beyak after she was compelled to attend hours of Indigenous sensitivity training: “She has learned.”

You lucky fellow!:

A Tanzanian small-scale miner has just become a millionaire after unearthing some of the largest rare gemstones ever recorded.

Fifty-two-year-old Sainiu Laizer was working in a mine in northern Tanzania when he came across two massive tanzanite gemstones. Tanzanite is an extremely rare mineral — in fact the only place in the world where it can be found is within a few kilometres of the mine. ...

And on June 24, the Tanzanian government paid him 7.74 billion Tanzanian shillings — roughly $4.5 million in Canadian dollars — for the gemstones.

“This is the benefit of small-scale miners and this proves that Tanzania is rich,” Tanzania’s president John Magufilu said in a phone call, according to the BBC.

Laizer has four wives and more than 30 children, it has been reported. He said he would slaughter one of his cows in celebration of the find.

Interesting:

A 66-million-year-old fossil found in Antarctica almost ten years ago was recently found to be one of the biggest eggs ever recorded, scientists say.

In 2011, a group of Chilean researchers were exploring the southern frozen continent looking for fossils of marine reptiles, when they came across a weird looking fossil. It was almost a foot wide and looked like a deflated football.

Not knowing what it was, the researchers brought it back to Chile’s National Museum of Natural History, where it remained unstudied for years. But in 2018, Julia Clarke, a professor visiting from the Jackson School of Geosciences at the University of Texas at Austin, saw the specimen and immediately thought it could potentially be a giant fossilized egg. With permission, she took a few fragments back with her to UT Austin.

On June 17, researchers from UT Austin and the Chilean National Museum of Natural History released a study that indicates that the mysterious fossil is actually an 11-inch soft-shell egg — the largest ever recorded — that was likely laid by an ancient marine reptile.