Budget Day. An historic one. Our current prime minister will officially have accumulated more debt for the nation in one administration than all of the 22 prime ministers who went before. That takes some effort.
But was it worth it, to fight a one-in-a-century pandemic?
We’ll have a few comments to add later in the day, once Chrystia drops her document in Parliament. In the meantime, let me tell you about Saturday…
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“So,” I said, baring a toned, athletic and muscular upper shoulder, “how many have you jabbed today?
“Six hundred and forty-one,” she said. And in went number 642. I asked her if she was a volunteer or a health care professional. A family doctor, she replied. Then we talked about what life must be like for her colleagues in distant, diseased Ontario. Turns out her best bud is a gynecologist who has been pressed into emergency service in the ICU of a major Toronto hospital. “Whatever it takes,” she said. “So glad we are here.”
The squeeze and I got the Pfizer stuff on the weekend. Dorothy had spent the previous few days watching TV images of pop-up clinics in TO hoods where hundreds of people waited four or five hours for their chance to be vaxxed. It looked chaotic, disrespectful, disorganized and worrisome. Things weren’t helped much when some friends came by the house and relayed the experience of their high rise-living daughter in one of the “hot” Toronto postal codes.
A vax van arrived one day last week and announced over loudspeaker that 400 doses were on board, first come-first served. It was, she said, a desperate stampede.
Well, the inoculation centre in Halifax was in a hockey arena with a big sign outside telling people not to arrive until five minutes before their appointment. There was no line. But there was a greeter who thanked us for coming, then an iPad checkin, then the jabs, then 15 minutes in a recovery area patrolled by a nurse. Then out – twenty minutes in total.
Five minutes later the vax receipt arrived by email, along with confirmation of the hard appointment for the second dose, 105 days hence.
Side effects? A sore arm for a day, then nothing. “That means the antibodies are being created as your defence against Covid-19,” said the literature we left with. So now I’m full of these little suckers.
It’s been four months since I flew out of Toronto just as that city was shutting down for four weeks. It hasn’t opened since. Now things have devolved amid chaotic and conflicting policies and government announcements. Infections are at a pandemic high, the hospitals are seriously stressed and a five-year backlog for elective surgeries has evolved. Don’t get breast cancer or be in a car crash, in other words. There are over 50,000 active Covid cases in Ontario with 2,000 people in the hospital and over 700 in ICUs, the majority on vents.
NS is far smaller (one million compared to 14.5), but the numbers are tiny: 49 cases in total, two people in hospital, none in intensive care. There were 7 new cases on the weekend, which was kind of high. While my fancy corporate offices on the 53rd floor of a bank tower at King & Bay have been silent for more than a year with colleagues stuck at home, my wee bank by the sea has been full of employees and community groups. We shuttered for three weeks last April, but soon realized that was extreme.
So why has Covid – now decimating the Main Street economy of our biggest province – been a non-event in the East? How can people in NS be casual and decent about the vaxxing process when folks are treated like cattle in the Big Smoke?
Simple. Quarantines. For more than a year now (with the exception of a few months the Atlantic Bubble was in place) nobody can enter Nova Scotia without spending 14 days eating storm chips and watching Oprah in isolation. No shopping. No visitors. No walking around the block. It’s a total pain in the butt. And it’s been a defensive measure which kept the slimy little pathogen at bay. Now people are proud of it.
So far this year, as a result, one elderly woman died of the virus. In Ontario, sadly, two dozen perish each day. Premier Ford blames the feds for a vaccine drought. The prime minister argues back that doses have run 50% ahead of schedule. It’s political. Sad. Businesses across the province are on life support. It will be a miracle if any hair salons or restaurants are left standing by the time they’re allowed to reopen – maybe in May. Perhaps longer. The events of last weekend when the premier had to walk back provisions on Saturday that were announced on Friday only added to the confusion.
Well, as far as your money, investments, portfolio go, Ontario, BC, Saskatchewan and other places still crippled by Covid don’t much matter. The reopening of the American economy and the inevitable spread of vaccines across the world have pushed financial assets to record highs, amid massive government stimulus and central bank coddling. That will continue. Stay invested.
Meanwhile let’s come out of this long shadow understanding what we did right, and wrong.
About the picture: “This is our puppy Maggie – she will be 10 years old this summer!,” says blog dog Andrea, in Waterloo. “Maggie enjoys long walks around our neighbourhood and watching the bunnies hop through our backyard as our neighbour sold her house for $151K over asking. She wonders how much her dog house is worth these days?”