National Post

“Battleground” or “swing” states, which can switch back and forth between the two major parties in U.S. presidential votes and are heavily courted by candidates, will be crucial to deciding the winner of this year’s election.

The road to the White House runs through a handful of U.S. states where the election is expected to be especially close, due to changing demographics and the polarizing politics of Republican President Donald Trump.

In total, the election will be decided by about a dozen states that could swing for either Trump or Democratic challenger Joe Biden. Opinion polls show Biden with a significant edge nationally, but his lead is tighter in these battlegrounds.

Here’s a look at some of the key races.

Florida

Electoral votes: 29

Polls close: 7 p.m. ET (Several counties in northwestern Florida are an hour behind the rest of the state)

Rating in presidential contest: Toss-up

Other key races: Competitive U.S. House of Representative races in the 15th and 26th districts

A Reuters/Ipsos poll released Oct. 28 showed Trump had essentially moved into a tie with Biden in Florida, with 49 per cent saying they would vote for Biden and 47 per cent for the president.

With its 29 electoral votes, the state is a major prize, with its massive senior voting bloc seen as crucial.

On Thursday, Trump and Biden visited the same city hours apart, putting on full display their contrasting approaches to the resurgent coronavirus pandemic. Trump staged an outdoor rally in Tampa, while Biden held a drive-in rally later in Tampa where attendees remained in their cars.

In a Reuters/Ipsos poll, 48 per cent of likely voters said Biden would be better at handling the pandemic, while 42 per cent said Trump would be better. Some 52 per cent said Trump would be better at managing the economy, against 41 per cent for Biden.

Pennsylvania

Electoral votes: 20

Polls close: 8 p.m. ET

Rating in presidential contest: Leans Democratic

Other key races: Competitive U.S. House contests in the 1st and 10th districts

The battleground state of Pennsylvania has the highest odds of any state of being the tipping point in the election, according to an analysis by the FiveThirtyEight website.

Here, tensions have been running high ahead of the vote, with the Philadelphia prosecutor issuing a stark warning for Trump campaign poll-watchers not to overstep their bounds as they search for voter fraud. The Trump campaign has said it is recruiting an “army” of 50,000 volunteers to monitor polling places, an effort Democrats say could suppress the vote.

“Keep your Proud Boys, goon squads, and uncertified ‘poll watchers’ out of our city, Mr. President,” Democratic Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner said in a statement. “Break the law here, and I’ve got something for you.”

In Pittsburgh, police officers will be working 12-hour shifts during the week of the election, up from the standard eight-hour shift, the department said. A department spokeswoman said the longer shifts have been implemented “on numerous occasions for many different reasons over the years,” though one veteran officer said it was highly unusual for an election week.

Arizona

Electoral votes: 11

Polls close: 9 p.m. ET

Rating in presidential contest: Leaning Democratic

Other key races: Competitive U.S. Senate contest

A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll showed that Trump and Biden remain neck and neck in Arizona. Those voting for Biden were at 48 per cent, and those voting for Trump were at 46 per cent, but the two are statistically tied as the margin is within the survey’s credibility interval.

A prior poll also showed a statistically even race, with 49 per cent for Biden and 46 per cent for Trump, with 37 per cent saying they already had voted.

Fifty per cent said Biden would be better at handling the coronavirus pandemic, with 42 per cent saying Trump would be better.

Fifty per cent said Trump would be better at managing the economy, with 44 per cent saying Biden would be better.

“This election is a choice between a Trump boom and a Biden lockdown,” Trump recently said in this battleground state that he carried four years ago.

North Carolina

Electoral votes: 15

Polls close: 7:30 p.m. ET

Rating in presidential contest: Toss-up

Other key races: Competitive governor and U.S. Senate contests

In 2016, North Carolina went for Trump by a margin of 3.6 percentage points. When asked in a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll if they approve or disapprove of the way Trump is handling his job of president, 51 per cent said they disapprove, and 41 per cent said they approve.

Michigan

Electoral votes: 16

Polls close: 8 p.m. ET

Rating in presidential contest: Leans Democratic

Other key races: Competitive U.S. Senate contest

Michigan was one of the three historically Democratic industrial states — the others being Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — that narrowly voted for the Republican Trump in 2016, delivering him an upset victory.

Underscoring the critical importance of the swing state to both campaigns, Trump and Biden have each visited Michigan several times during the campaign and have deployed surrogates, including their running mates and family members.

Trump traveled to Michigan for a rally on Tuesday and plans to return there on Friday. Biden’s trip on Saturday will be his fourth visit in recent weeks.

Georgia

Electoral votes: 16

Polls close: 7 p.m. ET

Rating in presidential contest: Toss-up

Other key races: Both U.S. Senate seats are up for grabs and considered competitive.

A Monmouth University poll released Wednesday showed Biden with a five percentage-point lead over Trump in Georgia. It’s the first poll in the state where his lead exceeds the margin of error.

If Biden manages to become the first Democratic candidate to turn Georgia blue in 28 years, Asian Americans will likely play a decisive role in that victory.

Their ranks have soared in counties surrounding Atlanta in recent years, attracted to jobs in tech, science and medicine. Now up to almost a quarter million registered voters — more than enough to tip a tight race — Asian Americans here lean heavily Democratic and are highly motivated by economic issues, like income inequality and the call for higher taxes on the rich, pollsters say.

Indian Americans, the largest and wealthiest Asian group in Georgia, are the most inclined to vote for Democrats, research shows. That’s partly due to experiences in their native country, where they’ve seen government-funded higher education, for example, pull many out of hardship.

Texas

Electoral votes: 38

Polls close: 8 p.m. ET (Two western counties in Texas are an hour behind the rest of the state.)

Rating in presidential contest: Leans Republican

Other key races: Competitive U.S. Senate contest

In a sign of the passions sparked by the presidential race, Texas has surpassed its total 2016 vote count four days before Election Day.

Through Thursday, more than 9 million Texans had cast ballots, compared with 8.97 million four years ago, a record high at the time. Neither party knows who will benefit most from the surge, but it has put the reliably Republican state in play as a full-out battleground in the campaign’s final days.

Nowhere has seen a more dramatic display of enthusiasm than Harris County, home to Houston, Texas’s biggest city and the embodiment of its rapid growth and diversifying suburbs. The county’s voting, driven in part by innovations by freshly appointed County Clerk Chris Hollins, so far compose more than 15 per cent of all those cast in the sprawling state.

Texas is among the most closely watched after recent polls have been narrow enough to entice Biden to send his running mate, Senator Kamala Harris, to Texas for a tour of the state on Friday.

Many of the Texas counties with the most dramatic surges in early voting are urban centres like Houston, a trend infusing fresh hope into Democrats’ dreams of flipping Texas. But solidly red counties have also seen records. And Texas has historically been lightly polled, leaving analysts skeptical of surveys showing a neck-and-neck presidential race.

Wisconsin

Electoral votes: 10

Polls close: 9 p.m. ET

Rating in presidential contest: Leans Democratic

Other key races: No governor or U.S. Senate races on the ballot

Trump beat Hillary Clinton here in 2016 by less than 1 point, and Biden’s campaign has touted his support for corn-based biofuels for weeks on rural radio and local television stations.

Biofuel plants are an important source of demand for farmers’ corn, used to make ethanol. Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency has angered growers by exempting oil refiners from requirements to add ethanol to their gasoline.

Rural America remains Trump country. Nationally, voters who identify as living in rural areas support Trump over Biden by 19 percentage points, up from a 14-point advantage in March, according to Reuters/Ipsos polls.

But there are cracks in Trump’s rural fortress, especially in areas hit hard by the coronavirus. In Wisconsin, Trump’s lead among rural voters shrank to two points in polls conducted Oct. 20-26, from nine points a month earlier, according to the Reuters/Ipsos polls.

The deluge of mail-in ballots makes it likely that the winner of several states, including major battlegrounds such as Wisconsin, will not be clear on Tuesday night. Election officials expect vote-tallying to take days.

Minnesota

Electoral votes: 10

Polls close: 9 p.m. ET

Rating in presidential contest: Leans Democratic

Other key races: Competitive contests for the U.S. Senate and U.S. House in the 1st and 7th districts

In hotly contested Minnesota, a federal appeals court on Thursday said Minnesota’s plan to count absentee ballots received after Election Day was illegal, siding with Republicans in the battleground state.

In a 2-1 decision, the U.S. 8th Circuit Court of Appeals said the deadline extension was an unconstitutional maneuver by the state’s top election official, Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, a Democrat.

The ruling came one day after the U.S. Supreme Court left in place North Carolina and Pennsylvania’s extended deadlines for receiving mail-in ballots.

Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat, said on Twitter that because of the “last minute” ruling, Minnesotans should vote in person or take a mail-in ballot directly to election officials.

“In the middle of a pandemic, the Republican Party is doing everything to make it hard for you to vote,” Klobuchar said.

With files from the Washington Post

Besides voting for the president and vice-president, the U.S. election is also a chance for myriad other issues to be put before the electorate — and not just in terms of Republican and Democratic policy proposals.

In 32 states, there are roughly 120 issues on the ballot. So, at the same time someone votes for president, they may also have a chance to vote on abortion, the legalization of drugs, new flags, electoral reform and other ballot measures, usually called propositions.

Here are a few of the “other” election issues U.S. voters will consider when they go to the polls on Tuesday.

Abortion

Colorado and Louisiana both have abortion measures on the ballot.

In Colorado, Proposition 115 would outlaw abortion after 22 weeks, with no exceptions for rape or incest. There is, however, an exception to save the mother’s life. (Most states have limitations on when a person can get abortion; if Colorado passes Prop 115, it would join these ranks.)

In Louisiana, voters will consider a constitutional amendment “to protect human life, a right to abortion and the funding of abortion shall not be found in the Louisiana Constitution.” This would have no immediate effect, but, should federal courts decide there’s no right to abortion, it would prevent state courts in Louisiana finding there’s a right to abortion.

Marijuana

Several states have ballot questions pertaining to cannabis.

Arizona, Montana and New Jersey will consider whether or not to legalize recreational marijuana.

South Dakota is considering whether or not to legalize both recreational and medicinal marijuana.

Mississippi is considering two ballot measures that basically ask a similar question: should there be medical marijuana for certain patients.

Magic mushrooms

It’s not just pot that’s on the ballot. Washington, D.C. and Oregon states are contemplating the legalization of psilocybin, or magic mushrooms.

In District of Columbia, the ballot measure calls for the decriminalization of entheogenic plants and fungi, which would include magic mushrooms.

Oregon goes further, calling for the legalization of psilocybin. If that passes, it would be the first state to take this step.

Ride-sharing

In California, voters will be asked to consider a proposition that would say Lyft and Uber drivers are independent contractors, not employees. It’s a gig-economy proposition — the first of its sort in the state. It has pitted the companies against organized labour.

Wolves

In Colorado, Proposition 114 would ask the Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commission to reintroduce grey wolves to certain parts of the state by the end of 2023. The wolves were basically wiped out in the United States by the mid-20th century. Colorado has had successful reintroductions before. Local media reports indicate the state has reintroduced lynx, elk and bison over the decades.

Names ‘n’ Flags

The full name of Rhode Island, believe it or not, is the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. A ballot initiative asks voters to consider removing “and Providence Plantations” from the state name. This was rejected in 2010.

In Mississippi, voters will consider a new flag design. They may vote in favour of the new flag or reject the new flag. If the latter happens, a commission will redesign the flag for vote in November 2021. The state’s flag was retired in June 2020, because it paid homage to the slave-owning Confederacy.

These are just some of the more interesting propositions. Scads of other measures are up for decisions, from taxes to election laws.

• Email: tdawson@postmedia.com | Twitter: tylerrdawson

My kids have been after me for years to bring an interior designer into the fold for our job sites. And up until recently, I resisted it. Why? Well, for me, it didn’t seem necessary. I felt that our team was up to the task of making the decisions that would usually fall under the responsibility of an interior designer.

But as I let my kids take on more responsibility on the job site, they persisted, and Dad relented. And I have to say, they make an incredible addition to the team. Their knowledge and expertise makes our job as contractors easier — and at the end of the day, that makes for happy homeowners.

So why do you want the services of a contractor AND an interior designer? Here’s why.

What does an interior designer do?

When you think interior design, your mind might immediately wander to things like paint colours and furniture choices. Now, sometimes, this is part of it (and for homeowners who are renovating — a key factor), but interior design is more about how you’re going to fundamentally make use of your space.

Do you want an open concept home? They can design the floor plan. Do you want to add a skylight or some new windows? They can help find the perfect spot.

Interior designers are trained in code, and can help make recommendations on those major structural changes in your home. However, at the end of the day you’ll still need an architect to sign off on the plans.

Your renovation team

Your contractor and your interior designer will be working closely together, so it’s a good idea to look for a team that can work well together. Often, a contractor will have a designer or two they like working with and vice versa, and they can provide some references for you to check out.

This isn’t an excuse not to do your due diligence and thoroughly vet your team. Renovations are expensive, and you want to ensure it’s done right. Make sure you’re asking for several references from each, and calling their previous clients. Online reviews are a good start, but they shouldn’t be your only source when it comes to hiring the people who will be working on your home.

Integrating you team

The most important thing to remember when working with your contractor and your interior designer is that you’re a team. What you shouldn’t do, is hire a designer to come up with a plan — and then once you’ve got the sign off, hire a contractor to do the work.

You want them to each be part of the conversation from the very beginning. A contractor can provide a fresh set of eyes to the designer’s plans and let them know if they’re not feasible for the space. Identifying these problems early is key, because it means less time wasted on the job site, and less materials wasted, which will save you money.

Having the team involved from start to finish is a good way to keep communication open throughout the project. Your team can discuss who’s responsible for ordering which products, and securing permits, and set up a work schedule to ensure things go smoothly.

Why include a designer?

You might think that a contractor is sufficient, so what other benefits can adding an interior designer to the equation bring?

I’ve often found that as a contractor, getting homeowners to discuss realistic budgets with me can be like pulling teeth. But if they’ve already spoken to a designer about their vision — the designer can give them a realistic idea of what kind of budget they’d need to be working with.

Not only is this great for the homeowner, as it will allow them to view their renovation realistically — it makes things easier for me as well. This lets me put my focus on the construction of the project itself.

A designer can also get the homeowner to define the specifics of the project. This helps us create a plan of attack for the project, and helps ensure that it’s a success.

I’ve seen the light. From now on, my renovations will include an interior designer as a key part of your team — and if you’re serious about your project, you’ll consider it too.

To find out more about Mike Holmes, visit makeitright.ca

Psychologist Baruch Fischhoff is considered a giant in the field of risk communication and decision-making.

When asked for his quick analysis of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s somewhat un-prime-ministerial assessment this week that the COVID-19 pandemic “really sucks,” and that unless people are “really, really careful” usual holiday gatherings might be off the table, Fischhoff offered that, for people predisposed to the PM, “it probably speaks to their heart that he’s really worried and he’s willing to kind of let his professional guard down.”

Too often COVID risk communications have been chaotic, don’t recognize the diversity of situations people are in, and are too focused on rules, Fischoff said — “’thou shalt X’ without giving people a mental model of why that is true.

“And the mental model that people need here is not all that complicated — it’s something about how much disease is out there, how is it transmitted in different kinds of settings, how well different practises protect you, how likely are you able to actually implement practises when you’re having a good time.”

The current COVID outlook doesn’t promise a huge number of good times ahead. “It’s going to be a tough winter,” Trudeau warned this week. “This winter will be difficult,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel warned Thursday as that country prepares for a month-long partial shutdown beginning Monday. “The virus is circulating at a speed that not even the most pessimistic forecasts had anticipated,” French President Emmanuel Macron said in a televised speech announcing a new national lockdown until Dec. 1.

In Canada, COVID-19 is resurging outside the fortress of the Atlantic Bubble and Northern Canada. In Manitoba, Premier Brian Pallister this week upbraided those Manitobans doing “dumb things” to “grow up.” The province’s chief public health officer said some of those testing positive have had “way too many contacts,” so many they can’t remember them all. And despite pleas to limit turkey dinners to “immediate households,” Thanksgiving weekend is being tied to rising case counts in Ontario, Manitoba and Alberta.

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After months of well-meaning but sometimes cloying slogans, about marathons, not sprints and how “we’re all in this together” — COVID, as the annual report this week from Canada’s chief public health officer highlighted, is in fact disproportionately harming and killing the marginalized, racialized communities and the elderly, not the privileged and powerful. A new Ipsos poll for Global News suggests Canadians are feeling sapped; half (48 per cent) said they’re tired of COVID public health recommendations and rules. While the majority (nine in 10) are following masking rules, parents (88 per cent) were less likely than those without kids (94 per cent) to say they’re doing everything they can — “perhaps an indictment of how workable many social distancing measures are in practice for those with young families,” the pollster said in a release.

Renowned epidemiologist Dr. Michael Osterholm says a trifecta of risk issues — fatigue, anger and winter weather that will drive people indoors — is creating a perfect incubator for COVID-19. Add in the holidays, with travel and family get togethers, “and we’re going to see a major increase in transmission in family settings or social settings around the holidays,” predicted Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) at the University of Minnesota. Osterholm, by the way,  in a Jan. 20 statement, warned that the coronavirus would cause a global pandemic.

Without vaccines, “We’re in this period where we don’t really have anything to offer people to limit transmission except their own behaviour at a time when that is a huge challenge to get the public to do it,” Osterholm said.

“If you just make it all dark with no hope, that’s not helpful.”

We’re somewhere between total darkness and total light, he said, borrowing time until vaccines are approved. “What we’re really trying to give people is a sense that this is your COVID year. It’s not going to be like last year. But hopefully it’s not going to be for next year if we have vaccines,” Osterholm said.

To that end, people should limit holiday gatherings to their bubbles, he said. “Don’t fall for some concoction that says, ‘well, we’ll all get together in the dining room and the kitchen and the living room, and we’ll all stay 15-feet apart and, oh, by the way, there are 32 of us in that dining room, kitchen or living room.’ How are you gonna do that? That math doesn’t work out here,” Osterholm said on a CIDRAP podcast this week.

Dr. Zain Chagla has called “cancellation pushback” a canary in the coalmine. “We’ve got several months/possibly years here — if the attitude is nope, people are going to stop listening,” Chagla, an infectious diseases physician at St. Joseph’s Healthcare in Hamilton tweeted after health authorities urged no trick-or-treating in Ontario hotspots.

Businesses, urban planners, regional and municipal governments can help create opportunities for people to get low-risk human contact, Chagla said.

“Outdoors is still OK — it has to be done safely where something like the Rose Garden doesn’t occur,” he said, referring to the White House super spread event where U.S. President Donald Trump announced Amy Coney Barrett as his nominee to the Supreme Court. At least a dozen in attendance later tested positive for COVID-19.

“Maybe Christmas is not the typical indoor event where you have 12 family and a large dinner and people sleeping over,” Chagla said, “but maybe dedicated green space where kids could meet Santa, decorative lights that get people inspired, pot lucks or markets. They’re not going to be zero-risk, but you can make them low-risk.”

It’s possible that people who paid little heed to advice to limit their Thanksgiving gatherings to their households “thought they were taking a reasonable risk, but didn’t understand what that meant,” said Fischhoff, of Carnegie Mellon University. Abstract concepts like exponential growth are unintuitive; they can be difficult to communicate and grasp. But it also didn’t help that there were differing definitions of “immediate household.”

“We learn top-down from principles if they’re well established, and bottom-up from personal experiences,” Fischhoff said. If someone has been exposed, the ordeal of getting tested and waiting for the results becomes something visceral. “Some people would say it was not such a big deal, but others will say, ‘I don’t want to go through that again, I didn’t sleep for a week.’”

Risk communications should avoid simplistic solutions; they should be respectful, informed, and people should be treated like adults, Fischhoff said.

“I think people could be helped with better information and better options. That will be enough for a lot of people, given they don’t want to get sick and they don’t want to get other people sick,” he said. “They will say there is light at the end of the tunnel. ‘Eight months from now life will become more normal. I want to be there when we get to the end of the tunnel.’

“For other people, it won’t be enough, but it might once the horror stories continue to spread. I don’t know how many people are zero or one degree from a serious scare.”

• Email: skirkey@postmedia.com | Twitter: sharon_kirkey

When researchers in British Columbia tested for antibodies in a small sample of Vancouver residents earlier this year, they found that less than one per cent had definitely been exposed to COVID-19.

That was little surprise, especially at a time when the virus was not spreading widely in the city. But when the scientists delved further, their conclusions were striking.

Large proportions of people who seemingly had never come in contact with the coronavirus, they said, had antibodies that reacted to parts of the bug — that recognized some of the “antigens” in SARS-CoV-2 that switch on a body’s immune system.

If proven valid, the discovery could be a key clue to unraveling one of COVID-19’s remaining mysteries — why infection has little or no effect on some people and yet is devastating to others.

It could also have implications for the effectiveness and safety of vaccines, said Dr. Pascal Lavoie, the B.C. Children’s Hospital scientist who headed the study.

“If what we’re seeing is true, and I believe it is … this could be a major finding,” he said. “It would be crucial to understanding why the virus makes some people sick. … It could (also) guide where you target your vaccination efforts.”

Whether having antibodies to individual SARS-CoV-2 antigens gives people some immunity, or actually undermines their defences against the COVID-19 virus, remains to be seen, said Lavoie.

Such antibodies can sometimes actually help a virus attach to a healthy cell, he said.

He also stressed that the paper, posted on a “preprint” website like many COVID-19 studies, has yet to be peer reviewed and has its limitations.

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Indeed, outside experts cautioned Thursday it’s unclear whether the “unusual” findings represent background noise that comes with the testing or true reactivity to the virus.

Lavoie said new data he has just received addresses that concern and appears to make the findings “much stronger.” He plans to submit the study to a peer-reviewed journal soon.

The research needs to undergo that kind of independent assessment to properly gauge whether the findings are valid, said Dr. Mel Krajden, public health lab director at the B.C. Centre for Disease Control.

Even if they are legitimate, he said, it would be “speculative” to suggest that antibodies in unexposed subjects explain the wide range of illness caused by the coronavirus. Age is the clearest predictor now of how sick COVID-19 will make people, noted Krajden.

Lavoie and colleagues asked for volunteers to submit to “seroprevalance” testing — designed to tell if someone has been exposed to a virus — in May and June. They enrolled 276 people, mostly health-care workers.

Of those, only three, or .6 per cent, had antibodies that indicated they had been exposed to the full SARS-CoV-2 virus.

But the “remarkable” finding, the paper said, related to the presence in unexposed people of antibodies to specific antigens in the virus — an antigen being a foreign body that spurs the immune system into action.

About 82 per cent had reactivity to the virus’s famous spike protein, 47 per cent to another of its antigens and seven per cent to a third, the researchers concluded.

Where those antibodies came from is unclear. It might be they’re a result of contracting seasonal coronaviruses, the kind that cause colds, said Lavoie.

But it’s also possible something else entirely produced the antibodies, from bacteria to food, he said.

If the findings are confirmed as accurate, the next step would be to study the links between antibody levels and the severity of illness in people infected by SARS-CoV-2, said Lavoie.

Dr. Catherine Hankins, a McGill University population health professor and co-chair of Canada’s COVID-19 Immunity Task Force, said she wouldn’t read too much into the paper because it’s unclear whether the antibody findings are background noise or true reactivity. Plus, the sample size is tiny compared to some seroprevalence studies that have tested thousands of people.

But she said the question of how antibodies to other viruses might affect a person’s response to COVID-19 — something called cross-reactivity — is an important one.

It’s still murky, for instance, why young children are relatively unaffected by the virus, while elderly people are far more likely to suffer severe cases.

“Is that in any way related to how many times you’ve had a seasonal coronavirus in the past?” said Hankins. “Or have you recently had one because you’re a kid? … Is it the recent activity that protects? We don’t know yet, and these are the questions we want to answer.”

• Email: tblackwell@postmedia.com | Twitter: tomblackwellNP

OTTAWA — A senator is proposing to freeze pay hikes for all federal politicians as the pandemic continues to roil the Canadian economy, part of an effort to ensure that public officials are not entirely insulated from the economic fallout of government-imposed lockdowns.

Sen. Lucie Moncion, who represents Ontario, introduced a motion in the upper chamber earlier this week that would call upon the Liberal government to defer pay hikes for Parliamentarians as a way to “prevent the privileges that senators enjoy from becoming disconnected from the harsh economic reality facing many Canadians.”

Members of both the House of Commons and Senate receive automatic pay raises equal to inflation every year. MPs make annual salaries of $182,600, not including additional payments for special positions like prime minister or opposition leader. Senators make a base salary of $157,600.

The motion by Moncion, an independent senator  appointed by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, would effectively freeze those automatic pay hikes for both MPs and Senators, beginning in fiscal year 2021-22, for a maximum of three years. Public salaries for the current year were approved before the pandemic struck, said Moncion, who heads the Senate sub-committee that approves administrative costs for the upper chamber. This year’s pay increases were confirmed in April.

In an interview on Thursday, Moncion said there was widespread support for the motion among senators. It will likely be voted upon early next week. The pay freeze would save taxpayers roughly $1.7 million, she said.

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The motion would largely amount to a symbolic gesture, but an important one as private sector and low-income workers bear the brunt of the economic fallout of COVID-19.

“For people who hold public office, when you see people struggling around you it is hard to see, it’s hard to wrap your head around,” Moncion said.

The motion comes after government-led economic shutdowns earlier this year put millions of Canadians out of work, while causing many other to accept pay cuts or reduced hours. Many business owners, particularly in hard-hit sectors like retail, tourism and food services, have been struggling to stay afloat as economic restrictions have remained in place more than seven months.

The motion tabled by Sen. Moncion would go some way toward showing solidarity with the Canadian public as lockdowns continue to restrict peoples’ livelihoods, says Aaron Wudrick, director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.

“We keep hearing all the time that we’re all in this together,” he said. “Well, not really if the government isn’t making any sacrifices while other people are losing their businesses and losing their jobs.”

Government leaders in a number of other countries have already cut their own salaries, often by more sizeable amounts than those recommended in the Moncion motion. New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and her ministers took 20 per cent pay cuts for six months as lockdowns persisted in the country. Japanese lawmakers have taken 20 per cent pay cuts; government officials in India accepted 30 per cent cuts in April for one year.

“We’re not asking for something that politicians in other countries aren’t doing,” said Wudrick. His group has been calling on politicians to take temporary pay freezes for months, after other countries took similar steps.

Earlier this week, Alberta Premier Jason Kenney ordered seven per cent pay cuts for all political staff in his United Conservative Party.

Sen. Moncion acknowledges that her motion would only mark a small step on the part of Senators and MPs, particularly at a time when a second wave of lockdowns in some parts of the countries place ever more stress on entrepreneurs.

“I feel for people who have their own businesses, I feel for restaurants,” she said. “I walk downtown here in Ottawa and you walk down Sparks Street and there’s almost nobody there, it’s deserted. I’m just thinking wow, how can these people survive?”

OTTAWA — The confidence vote drama may have receded for now, but a committee standoff over WE documents and an ongoing ethics commissioner investigation are a reminder that the issues that nearly triggered an election last week are still alive and percolating in Parliament.

The Liberals have once again filibustered the House of Commons finance committee over the issue of redactions applied to the government’s WE Charity documents, dragging out the meeting for eight hours on Wednesday. The chair, Liberal MP Wayne Easter, suspended the proceedings that night due to “health and safety reasons.”

The meeting resumed late Thursday afternoon but the first part of it was conducted in camera, which blocks the public from viewing the discussions.

Thursday also brought news that Ethics Commissioner Mario Dion is dropping his investigation into whether the WE Charity trips taken by former Finance Minister Bill Morneau were an improper gift. As first reported by CBC, Dion has now informed Morneau that he accepts Morneau “genuinely believed” he’d reimbursed the 2017 travel taken in Ecuador and Kenya by himself and his family.

Morneau hastily wrote a $41,000 cheque to WE in July after informing the finance committee he’d just realized he’d never paid back the expenses. Morneau resigned as finance minister and as an MP a few weeks later, saying he wanted to run to be secretary of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.

However, the ethics commissioner is still investigating Morneau for not recusing himself from cabinet discussions on having WE Charity administer the $900-million Canada Student Service Grant program, despite the fact one of Morneau’s daughters worked for WE and another had spoken at WE Day events.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is also being examined by Dion for not recusing himself despite his own family’s payments for speaking at WE events. It is not yet known when Dion will release his report, but it could arrive later this year.

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Regardless, the opposition parties are determined to continue with their own study into the matter. At issue in the finance committee are the thousands of pages of government documents related to the WE scandal that were disclosed to the committee in the summer.

The documents were redacted by public servants before being handed over; the opposition parties have protested that this was a breach of their parliamentary privilege, as their motion had directed the redactions be done by the independent House of Commons law clerk.

The Liberals are attempting to address the complaint by having the Privy Council Clerk Ian Shugart appear at the committee to explain the redactions.

“Conservatives, Bloc and NDP are ready to find public servants guilty of breaching privileges of MPs without even giving them a chance to explain their actions,” said a statement by Government House Leader Pablo Rodriguez on Wednesday. “Liberals believe in due process. The opposition should do the right thing and let the Clerk of the Privy Council and his non-partisan public servants explain themselves.”

Conservative MP Pierre Poilievre told the  National Post that the Liberals’ proposal does not address the opposition’s complaints.

“The Conservatives propose a compromise: the government should give all of the WE scandal documents unredacted to the neutral parliamentary law clerk so that he can report back to Parliament within a week on whether any of the documents have been improperly withheld,” he said.

“Mr. Shugart is a fine man, but he is hired and fired by the prime minister. He is dependent on the prime minister for his job. No one who the prime minister can fire should be in charge of determining what documents are released about the prime minister’s scandal.”

As of Thursday, there is no end in sight to the standoff, which is preventing the finance committee from doing its usual work of pre-budget consultations.

Meanwhile, the Commons health committee is preparing its sweeping investigation into the government’s COVID-19 response, an investigation that will eventually be supported by a trove of government documents ordered to be produced by the end of November by a Conservative motion passed earlier this week. The committee is scheduled to meet Monday to begin preparing a witness list and a timeline for meetings.

The Liberals have warned that the investigation risks exposing commercial information and thus threatens the government’s ability to procure vaccines, personal protective equipment, and other pandemic-related supplies. The Conservatives say this concern is overblown and that redactions can be made to protect commercial sensitivity.

Although the Liberals had previously deemed a Conservative motion on the WE affair to be a confidence matter, they ultimately decided not to make the COVID-19 motion a confidence vote. That means the investigation is taking place without the risk of triggering an election — at least for now. The Liberals always retain the option of calling an election on their own, regardless of whether a confidence vote has taken place.

• Email: bplatt@postmedia.com | Twitter: btaplatt

OTTAWA — Canada’s auditor general says her office needs at least $31 million in additional funding to fulfil its watchdog mandate, more than twice the amount requested by her predecessor three years ago.

“The money is absolutely necessary in order to deliver our mandate the way we’d like to. As of now, we are focused on auditing the government’s response to the pandemic as well as its infrastructure plan, but the government is still doing a lot of other work and spending and purchases elsewhere,” Auditor General Karen Hogan told members of the federal public accounts committee Thursday.

“So we need the money to be able to modernize our office as well as expand the list of subjects we could audit.”

Hogan told MPs her office sent an official notice to the government in July requesting $25 million in permanent funding be added to its roughly $88-million budget.

But that amount doesn’t include the cost of the benefits and accommodation for all the new employees her office hopes to hire with the extra funds. She estimated those extra costs to total just over $6 million.

Hogan told parliamentarians that major audits expected to be published in the upcoming months would be delayed, such as the audit on the Liberals’ infrastructure plan as well as the government’s response to the pandemic.

The delays are due both to the lack of funding as well as the added complexity caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Delivery of most non-COVID-19-related audits is also being affected, she added.

“When it comes now to the work that we’re doing on the COVID response, I think the biggest impact is capacity within the departments and our office,” Hogan explained.

“We’re seeing that it’s taking us a lot longer to deliver audits, mostly motivated by the desire to find that right balance with departments as they provide the much needed assistance to Canadians and try to help us deliver on our mandate,” she said, adding that the biggest slowdowns were with Health Canada and the Public Health Agency of Canada.

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This is far from the first time an auditor general pleads with parliamentarians for more money, though Hogan’s request is significantly higher than her predecessors’.

In 2017, then-Auditor General Michael Ferguson requested an additional $10.8 million, arguing that it was necessary to accommodate the increased workload imposed by the Trudeau government, such as auditing a plethora of new public agencies and projects.

The government gave Ferguson’s office the increase in 2018, but it was not repeated in 2019 or 2020.

Since then, MPs on the public accounts committee calculate that Ferguson and his successors have requested an increase in funding no fewer than 15 times.

Because so much time has past since Ferguson’s original budget ask, Hogan said her office now needs more than twice that amount to be able to hire a sufficient number of new auditors, bring the office’s technology up to speed and modernize how the office communicates its work with Canadians.

“With the passing of time, there is obviously a need to increase the request. For years, we did not invest in our IT systems and, when it comes to technology, we don’t just have a fixed capability gap. As time passes, the gap grows and it becomes increasingly expensive to modernize our systems,” Hogan explained.

This time, Hogan said she’s quite optimistic that her office will get the permanent funding it’s requesting.

“The conversations I’m having with senior government officials are very encouraging. We have received many questions that we answered. That back-and-forth is what is inspiring confidence in me, and leads me to believe that they have heard us and they are open to our request,” the auditor general said.

• Email: cnardi@postmedia.com | Twitter: ChrisGNardi

EDMONTON — A conservative legal group is challenging new restrictions on gatherings in Alberta, saying they are a violation of Charter rights to assembly. The province implemented the group gathering restrictions this week as it faces record-breaking numbers of new COVID-19 cases.

The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, headed by lawyer John Carpay, has been involved in a number of high-profile cases over the years and has recently taken up a number of anti-COVID-restriction causes.

The Justice Centre is also representing Canada Galaxy Pageants, a beauty pageant for women and girls based in Toronto, against a new human rights complaint made by Jessica Yaniv, a transgender person.

“We’re publicly objecting to new restrictions on Charter freedom to associate,” said Carpay in an interview with the National Post.

As yet, they aren’t filing a lawsuit or anything of that nature — just raising objections.

On Monday, Dr. Deena Hinshaw, the province’s chief medical officer of health, announced private gatherings would be capped at 15 people in Edmonton and Calgary, in response to surges in COVID-19 cases that are putting a strain on the hospital system and leading to the deferral of surgeries and other medical services.

As of Thursday afternoon — before Hinshaw’s daily case update — there were 126 people in Alberta hospitals with COVID-19, 19 of them in ICU. There were 4,793 active cases, and 313 Albertans have died.

Carpay argues most of the deaths and severe cases were among the elderly — the average age of death is 82 — and therefore it’s difficult to justify the restrictions.

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Carpay contends the order is based on “cases” of COVID-19, “including thousands of ‘cases’ among people who are not experiencing any symptoms or illness,” he said in a statement about the challenge. He argues today’s cases include completely healthy people who have a positive test, and he disputed the reliability of PCR testing.

Alberta Health Services says the National Microbiology Lab found Alberta’s tests to be 100 per cent accurate.

Hinshaw’s order says voluntary measures in Edmonton haven’t successfully brought the case counts down, necessitating more stringent steps.

Carpay sees it otherwise. “It’s a fundamental freedom that I have as a citizen to invite 16 or 20 people over to my house if I so choose, if we choose to associate with each other,” he said.

“Whether it’s six people or 10 people or 20 people, when the government tells you how many friends you’re allowed or not allowed to have over to your house, that is a very obvious and very direct infringement of freedom of association,” said Carpay.

In her media briefings, Hinshaw has repeatedly pointed out the majority of COVID spread in the province is because of private gatherings, and restrictions protect those who are vulnerable to the disease, as those who are less vulnerable can pass it on to elderly relatives, for example. She has said the current spike in cases is due to families gathering for Thanksgiving celebrations.

Hinshaw has also said the long-term effects of catching COVID-19, even among younger people who aren’t hospitalized, ventilated or dead, are not yet known

In a news release, Carpay said the disease hasn’t killed the early projections of 32,000 Albertans, so it’s not as deadly as initially claimed.

• Email: tdawson@postmedia.com | Twitter: tylerrdawson

A coronavirus variant that originated in Spanish farm workers has spread rapidly through much of Europe since the summer, and now accounts for the majority of new Covid-19 cases in several countries — and more than 80 per cent in the UK.

An international team of scientists that has been tracking the virus through its genetic mutations has described the extraordinary spread of the variant, called 20A.EU1, in a research paper to be published on Thursday.

Their work suggests that people returning from holiday in Spain played a key role in transmitting the virus across Europe, raising questions about whether the second wave that is sweeping the continent could have been reduced by improved screening at airports and other transport hubs.

Because each variant has its own genetic signature, it can be traced back to the place it originated.

“From the spread of 20A.EU1, it seems clear that the [virus prevention] measures in place were often not sufficient to stop onward transmission of introduced variants this summer,” said Emma Hodcroft, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Basel and lead author of the study which is yet to be published in a peer-reviewed journal.

The scientific teams in Switzerland and Spain are now rushing to examine the behaviour of the variant to establish whether it may be more deadly or more infectious than other strains. Dr Hodcroft stressed that there was “no evidence that the variant’s [rapid] spread is due to a mutation that increases transmission or impacts clinical outcome”.

But she emphasised that 20A.EU1 was unlike any version of Sars-Cov-2 — the virus that causes Covid-19 — she had previously come across. “I’ve not seen any variant with this sort of dynamic for as long as I’ve been looking at genomic sequences of coronavirus in Europe,” she said.

In particular, the teams are working with virology laboratories to establish whether 20A.EU1 carries a particular mutation, in the “spike protein” that the virus uses to enter human cells, that might alter its behaviour.

All viruses develop mutations — changes in the individual letters of their genetic code — which can group together into new variants and strains. Another mutation in Sars-Cov-2, called D614G, has been identified which is believed to make the virus more infectious.

Joseph Fauver, a genetic epidemiologist at Yale University who was not involved in the research published on Thursday, said: “We need more studies like this to find mutations that have risen to high frequency in the population, and then reverse-engineer them to see whether they make the virus more transmissible.”

The new variant, which has six distinctive genetic mutations, emerged among agricultural workers in north-east Spain in June and moved quickly through the local population, according to the study.

Tanja Stadler, professor of computational evolution at ETH Zurich who is part of the project, said that analysis of virus samples taken from across Europe in recent weeks showed they were derived from this same variant.

“We can see the virus has been introduced multiple times in several countries and many of these introductions have gone on to spread through the population,” Prof Stadler said.

Iñaki Comas, head of the SeqCovid-Spain consortium that is studying the virus and a co-author of the study, added: “One variant, aided by an initial super-spreading event, can quickly become prevalent.”

The researchers concluded that the “risky behaviour” of holidaymakers in Spain — such as ignoring social distancing guidelines — who “continue to engage in such behaviour at home” helped the spread of the new variant.

The research showed that the new variant accounted for more than eight out of 10 cases in the UK, 80 per cent of cases in Spain, 60 per cent in Ireland and up to 40 per cent in Switzerland and France.

Stringent lockdowns in the early part of the year helped bring the initial Covid-19 surge under control, with new cases substantially reduced over the summer.

But the virus has spread rapidly back through Europe in recent weeks in a resurgence that has forced national leaders to introduce painful new restrictions on social activities.

The U.S. president is not elected by a majority of the popular vote.

Wait a minute, say that again?

You heard me. Under the Constitution, the candidate who wins the majority of 538 electors, known as the Electoral College, becomes the next president.

The candidate who wins a state’s popular vote typically earns the support of that state’s electors, who are chosen by state legislatures. Each state is allocated a different number of electors based on census results.

Winning 270 electoral votes or more puts you in the White House. And because some states carry more electors than others, it is possible — and perfectly legitimate — for a candidate to lose the popular vote but win the election. That’s why presidential candidates typically focus on winning states like Texas (38), Florida (29) and New York (29) as opposed to Vermont, Wyoming or Alaska, which all have just three electoral votes. Winning three states can mean 96 electoral votes or just nine.

Out of the last 45 contests, five have produced commanders-in-chief who did not win the majority of the popular vote, including George W. Bush in 2000. In 2016, Donald Trump lost the national popular vote to Democrat Hillary Clinton by 2.87 million votes, but secured 304 electoral votes to her 227.

Why are there 538 electors?

There is one for every seat in Congress — 100 senators and 435 representatives — plus three for the unrepresented District of Columbia.

Here, in descending order, is the number of electors pledged by each state:

55: California

38: Texas

29: Florida, New York

20: Illinois, Pennsylvania

18: Ohio

16: Georgia, Michigan

15: North Carolina

14: New Jersey

13: Virginia

12: Washington

11: Arizona, Indiana, Massachusetts, Tennessee

10: Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, Wisconsin

9: Alabama, Colorado, South Carolina

8: Kentucky, Louisiana

7: Connecticut, Oklahoma, Oregon

6: Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Mississippi, Nevada, Utah

5: Nebraska, New Mexico, West Virginia

4: Hawaii, Idaho, Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island

3: Alaska, Delaware, D.C., Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, Wyoming

Total: 538

When does this voting take place?

While we’re all accustomed to finding out who won on election night, the president is not formally elected until the electors cast their votes. They always meet the Monday after the second Wednesday in December following the election. This year, the electors will meet on Dec. 14 to cast their votes. Both chambers of Congress will meet on Jan. 6 to count these votes and officially name the winner.

Electors are “pledged” to a presidential ticket based on the results of the popular vote in each state or district. In most cases, all of a state’s electors go to the candidate who gets the most votes in the state; Maine and Nebraska also use the results at the district level to allocate a share of their votes.

But, yet, it’s not that straightforward. “Faithless electors” can still cast their vote against the candidate that they are pledged to vote for. Seven such “faithless electors” actually voted in 2016 for someone other than the candidate to whom they were pledged: two in Trump’s column and five in Clinton’s.

The rules, you see, are enshrined in the U.S. constitution. But so, too, is the power the states have to decide amongst themselves how to follow them.

That sounds like a potential can of worms, especially with the U.S. as divided as it currently is?

You could be onto something.

As mentioned earlier, the candidate who wins each state’s popular vote gets that state’s electors. Typically, governors, in advance, have certified the results in their respective states and shared the information with Congress.

But some academics have outlined a scenario in which the governor and the legislature in a closely contested state submit two different election results. For example, battleground states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and North Carolina all have Democratic governors and Republican-controlled legislatures.

According to legal experts, it is unclear in this scenario whether Congress should accept the governor’s electoral slate or not count the state’s electoral votes at all. And while most experts view the scenario as unlikely, there is historical precedent.

The Republican-controlled Florida legislature considered submitting its own electors in 2000 before the Supreme Court ended the contest between Bush and Al Gore. In 1876, three states appointed “duelling electors,” prompting Congress to pass the Electoral Count Act (ECA) in 1887.

Under the act, each chamber of Congress would separately decide which slate of “duelling electors” to accept. As of now, Republicans hold the Senate while Democrats control the House of Representatives, but the electoral count is conducted by the new Congress, which will be sworn in on Jan. 3.

If the two chambers disagree, it’s not entirely clear what would happen. The act says that the electors approved by each state’s “executive” should prevail. Many scholars interpret that as a state’s governor, but others reject that argument.

The law has never been tested or interpreted by the courts.

Ned Foley, a law professor at Ohio State University, called the ECA’s wording “virtually impenetrable” in a 2019 paper exploring the possibility of an Electoral College dispute.

My head is kinda spinning. Is there anything else that could throw a spanner in the works?

Well, yes, now that you ask.

It’s unlikely, but another possibility is that Trump’s Vice President Mike Pence, in his role as Senate president, could try to throw out a state’s disputed electoral votes entirely if the two chambers cannot agree, according to Foley’s analysis.

In that case, the Electoral College Act does not make clear whether a candidate would still need 270 votes, a majority of the total, or could prevail with a majority of the remaining electoral votes — for example, 260 of the 518 votes that would be left if Pennsylvania’s electors were invalidated.

“It is fair to say that none of these laws has been stress-tested before,” Benjamin Ginsberg, a lawyer who represented the Bush campaign during the 2000 dispute, told reporters in a conference call on Oct. 20.

The parties could ask the Supreme Court to resolve any congressional stalemate, but it’s not certain the court would be willing to adjudicate how Congress should count electoral votes.

And what if it was found that neither candidate has secured a majority of electoral votes?

This scenario would trigger a “contingent election” under the 12th Amendment of the Constitution. That means the House of Representatives chooses the next president, while the Senate selects the vice president.

Each state delegation in the House gets a single vote. As of now, Republicans control 26 of the 50 state delegations, while Democrats have 22; one is split evenly and another has seven Democrats, six Republicans and a Libertarian.

A contingent election also takes place in the event of a 269-269 tie after the election; there are several plausible paths to a deadlock in 2020.

Any election dispute in Congress would play out ahead of a strict deadline — Jan. 20, when the Constitution mandates that the term of the current president ends.

Under the Presidential Succession Act, if Congress still has not declared a presidential or vice presidential winner by then, the Speaker of the House would serve as acting president. Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat from California, is the current speaker.

This all sounds so complex. Is there an easier way?

Maybe.

Debate has long raged in the U.S. about this antiquated, and some would say skewed, system. Many would prefer a president elected by the popular vote, with 61 per cent of Americans saying in a 2020 Gallup poll they would like to abolish the electoral college altogether.

But John Fortier, director of government studies at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington and author of the 1983 book “After the People Vote: A Guide to the Electoral College,” said Americans have never felt strongly enough about the issue to do much about it.

“I do think the American people have almost always been against this, or at least if they thought they were starting from scratch, (they would) prefer a system that’s more of a national popular vote,” Fortier said. “It’s on people’s minds, but I don’t think it’s necessarily the highest thing, the thing that they most want to change.”

Barry Fadem is president of National Popular Vote, a non-profit association on a mission to make the results more reflective of the will of the people. National Popular Vote has come up with Interstate Compact, an agreement among states to allocate electoral college votes in accordance with the national popular vote.

“No offence (to Canada), but we consider (the U.S. election) the most important election in the world,” Fadem told the Canadian Press.

“Yet the rule that we are known for around the world — whoever gets the most votes at the end of the night is the winner — doesn’t apply to the most important election the world, and no justification can be made for it today.”

So far, 15 states and the District of Columbia have signed on to the compact, for a total of 196 electoral votes. Fadem said he believes they can get to 270 before the 2024 election.

With files from National Post Staff

Canada Dry settled in court for $200,000 with a B.C. man who claimed the company falsely advertised its ginger content to have medicinal properties.

Most of the $200,000 will be going to a legal foundation.

The plaintiff, Victor Cardoso, started a class action lawsuit on Jan. 21, 2019, on behalf of all Canadians outside of Quebec, arguing that Canada Dry’s label was misleading. This came after similar lawsuits were filed in the U.S. Shortly afterward, two similar cases popped up in Quebec and Alberta.

Cardoso alleged that t he marketing of the ginger ale as “Made from Real Ginger” was deceptive because the product contained no ginger, according to court documents. The argument was later shifted to the ginger ale containing “negligible” amounts of ginger.

“They do buy actual ginger, but then what they do is they boil it in ethanol, and that essentially destroys any nutritional or medicinal benefits,” Mark C. Canofari, one of the lawyers from Boughton Law Corporation who represented Cardoso’s claim, told CTV News .

Ginger is commonly used as an herbal remedy. There’s strong evidence that ginger can relieve nausea, as well as weaker evidence for other benefits, such as acting as an anti-inflammatory.

The owners of the ginger ale, Canada Dry Mott’s, produced documents showing it was made with ginger derivatives. The fact that the ginger ale contained a derivative took a lot of steam out of the lawsuit, regardless of how much was actually present in a given can of Canada Dry ginger ale.

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After two years of effort and hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal expenses, the settlement won’t even cover the legal fees. Consumers won’t be compensated in any way and there’s no sign that Canada Dry will change its advertising. According to the court documents, Canada Dry Mott’s Inc. “expressly denies liability and is not required to change its product labelling or advertising for products marketed in Canada.”

The resolution applies to the Alberta lawsuit and heads off further suits filed with the same claims of false advertising.

Of the $200,000, approximately $100,000 will go toward legal fees, even though Cardoso’s counsel spent more than $220,000 researching and litigating the case at $950 per hour. The lawyers accepted the case on a contingency basis, meaning they could only pursue a share of the settlement — between around 30 and 40 per cent.

Cardoso and the Alberta plaintiff, Lionel Ravvin, will get small honorariums of $1,500 to recognize the work they did researching for the case.

The B.C. judge argued that courts need to avoid the perception that only lawyers benefit from legal proceedings.

“I am concerned that an award whereby counsel receives more than the amount being paid… on behalf of their collective client class could be viewed adversely by the public,” Justice Karen Douglas wrote. “The ultimate purpose of the class action vehicle is to benefit the class, not their lawyers.”

The remainder of the $200,000 will go to the B.C. Law Foundation, a non-profit organization that does work such as providing legal aid and funding law libraries.

OTTAWA – Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said the government will take a cautious approach as election results roll in south of the border next week, but it won’t weigh into the fray.

American voters are already casting ballots by mall and in early polling locations, but many will vote on Election Day next Tuesday. Trudeau said the government will be watching the results on election night, but they won’t have anything to say.

“Like people in countries around the world, Canadians are watching closely the elections in the United States and like people around the world we won’t be commenting on possible outcomes.”

He said the choice is for Americans to make and whatever happens his government will work with the new or returning U.S. administration.

“We will continue to stand up and defend Canadian interests, look for greater opportunities for cooperation and look to deepen the already close ties between Canada and the United States, regardless of the outcomes.”

Trudeau met virtually Thursday with European Union officials, including President of the European Commission Ursula Gertrud von der Leyen and president of the European Council Charles Michel.

Michel echoed Trudeau and said they welcome closer relations with the United States.

“We are totally convinced that it’s good for the future, if it’s possible, to have a staunch alliance with the United States. This is our choice, our political will and we will respect what will be the choice made by the American voters.”

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U.S. President Donald Trump has refused to say if he will respect the result of the vote and has made sweeping and unsupported accusations that the electoral system is fraudulent.

Trudeau was asked how the government will respond to a disputed vote in the U.S. and said he is confident the U.S. will be able to sort out a winner and the government will remain silent until it does.

Trudeau said it can take time, as it did in 2000, for the U.S. to determine a winner, but the government will wait to offer congratulations until there is a clear victory.

The European Union is in lengthy negotiations with the United Kingdom on a post-Brexit trade deal. Trudeau also declined to offer an opinion on those talks.

Canada has a trade agreement with the European Union and Trudeau said he hopes to have a similar relationship with a post-Brexit Britain.

“Canada is extremely pleased to be the only G7 country that has a free trade deal with every other G7 country and we would certainly like to keep that,” he said.

“The U.K. is engaged in many different negotiations right now. But Canada is certainly there to ensure this certainty that can be given to British companies, at least with Canada as other things are worked out in a more complex way.”

Twitter: RyanTumilty

Email: rtumilty@postmedia.com

Don’t expect herd immunity to save us the COVID-19 pandemic, warned a Russian professor after he deliberately infected himself twice with COVID-19 virus to study the resultant antibodies.

Dr. Alexander Chepurnov, 69, caught the virus for the first time in February while on a flight from France to Novosibirsk with a stopover in Moscow, but was able to recover back home in Siberia without hospitalization.

After recovery, he took a test that detected the presence of antibodies in his system, which he and his team at the Institute of Clinical and Experimental Medicine in Novosibirisk decided to study.

They observed “the way antibodies behaved, how strong they were and how long they stayed in the body,” he told the Daily Mail . But the number of antibodies in his body decreased rapidly, he noted, and three months after he first fell sick, the team could no longer detect any present in his system.

Curious to see what would happen in the event of a re-infection. Chepurnov became his own human guinea pig and deliberately exposed himself to COVID-19 patients without protection. Six months after his first infection, his body’s defences fell and he was again sick with coronavirus.

“The first sign was a sore throat,” he told the Daily Mail.

The second infection was much more serious and Chepurnov had to be hospitalized. “For five days my temperature remained above 39C. I lost the sense of smell, my taste perception changed,” he said.

By the sixth day of the illness, a CT scan of the lungs was clear. By the ninth day, a followup X-ray showed double pneumonia.

However, by the end of two weeks, the virus was no longer detected in the nasopharyngeal tract — the upper throat behind nose — nor in other samples.

Based on his own experience, Chepurnov concluded that it is futile to hope that herd immunity could stop the spread of COVID-19. A vaccine, he said, could garner immunity, but it would be temporary.

“We need a vaccine that can be used multiple times, a recombinant vaccine will not suit,” he said.

Currently, adenoviral vector-based vaccines — vaccines designed to insert a modified COVID-19 gene into the human body to provoke the production of spike proteins that will keep the individual immune against the real virus — are at the forefront of the global race to find a solution to the raging pandemic. However, several researchers, including Chepurnov have expressed concerns that repeated shots of the vaccine could backfire, triggering an immune response against the vaccine instead of the real virus.

“Once injected with an adenoviral vector-based vaccine, we won’t be able to repeat it because the immunity against the adenoviral carrier will keep interfering,” Chepurnov told the Daily Mail.

Shipping company UPS said it has found the package destined for Fox News host Tucker Carlson, which he said contains ‘damning’ documents relating to Hunter Biden.

Carlson said on his show Wednesday night that he had obtained more documents relating to Hunter Biden, but said they were lost in the mail.

On his show, Carlson said he received a “collection of confidential documents related to the Biden family.” Without going into any details about their contents, he said they were “authentic, they’re real, and they’re damning.”

Damning Hunter Biden documents suddenly vanish pic.twitter.com/B2qsajZlID

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) October 29, 2020

On October 14, the New York Post published a report stating that they had obtained emails from the laptop of presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son, Hunter. The Post alleges that in 2014, Hunter leveraged his father’s position as U.S. vice president in an attempt to increase his pay as a board member at Ukrainian energy company Burisma.

Carlson said the unspecified documents were being sent to him in Los Angeles from New York, but they never arrived. He said that the delivery company, which he did not name, said the package “had been opened and the contents were missing.”

“As of tonight the company has no idea, and no working theory even, about what happened to this trove of materials, documents that are directly relevant to the presidential campaign,” he said.

Oh for f*%! sake, seriously? Would have been a better story if your dog ate the damn papers. https://t.co/6yllQu7pU0

— Michael Steele (@MichaelSteele) October 29, 2020

Later that day, a UPS spokesperson told Business Insider that the documents had been located and were sent back to Carlson.

“After an extensive search, we have found the contents of the package and are arranging for its return,” the spokesperson said.

After his segment aired, many people began to doubt Carlson’s claims.

“Oh for f*%! sake, seriously?” tweeted Michael Steele, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee. “Would have been a better story if your dog ate the damn papers.”

Business Insider said that Fox News did not respond to comment as to why no other copies of the documents were saved.

Fox News host Tucker Carlson said on his show Wednesday night that he had obtained more documents relating to Hunter Biden, but said they were lost in the mail.

On his show, Carlson said he received a “collection of confidential documents related to the Biden family.” Without going into any details about their contents, he said they were “authentic, they’re real, and they’re damning.”

Damning Hunter Biden documents suddenly vanish pic.twitter.com/B2qsajZlID

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) October 29, 2020

On October 14, the New York Post published a report stating that they had obtained emails from the laptop of presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son, Hunter. The Post alleges that in 2014, Hunter leveraged his father’s position as U.S. vice president in an attempt to increase his pay as a board member at Ukrainian energy company Burisma.

Carlson said the unspecified documents were being sent to him in Los Angeles from New York, but they never arrived. He said that the delivery company, which he did not name, said the package “had been opened and the contents were missing.”

“As of tonight the company has no idea, and no working theory even, about what happened to this trove of materials, documents that are directly relevant to the presidential campaign,” he said.

Oh for f*%! sake, seriously? Would have been a better story if your dog ate the damn papers. https://t.co/6yllQu7pU0

— Michael Steele (@MichaelSteele) October 29, 2020

After his segment aired, many people began to doubt Carlson’s claims.

“Oh for f*%! sake, seriously?” tweeted Michael Steele, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee. “Would have been a better story if your dog ate the damn papers.”

According to Business Insider , UPS came forward and said it was the provider that lost the package and was investigating the matter.

Business Insider also said that Fox News did not respond to comment as to why no other copies of the documents were saved.

Steve Ladurantaye, a former journalist at the Globe and Mail and Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, has resigned from a media job in Scotland following allegations of inappropriate behaviour, reports British newspaper the Times.

The complaints against Ladurantaye, who was working as the head of news and current affairs at STV, the Glasgow-based broadcaster, came from female staff members, the Times reports.

Ladurantaye had joined STV in 2018. Prior to that he was well-known in Canadian media circles, working as a media reporter at the Globe and Mail and as a top editor at the CBC.

Ladurantaye left the Globe and Mail in 2013, and following a brief stopover at Twitter Canada, joined the CBC as the managing editor of The National nightly news broadcast in 2016.

He left the CBC in 2018, in the fallout over an appropriation controversy on Twitter that impacted several high-profile Canadian journalists.

After that, he crossed the ocean, landing with STV in Glasgow.

In a piece for the Royal Television Society, Ladurantaye wrote he’d received a job offer to “uproot my life and move across the ocean to lead a newsroom in a country I’d rarely visited, full of stories I’d (mostly) never heard.”

He writes about the professional challenges of working in Scotland, and the different newsroom culture.

“The professional challenges have been daunting, and the cultural changes intimidating. Has it been worth it?” he wrote. “Oh, aye.”

An STV spokesperson told the National Post by email that Ladurantaye “has resigned as STV’s Head of News and Current Affairs for medical reasons around mental health, for which he is receiving treatment.  Deputy Head of News, Linda Grimes Douglas, will oversee STV’s news and current affairs operation.”

“We take complaints about inappropriate conduct at STV extremely seriously. We will always investigate fully, while respecting the duty of care we owe to all parties involved,” the spokesperson added.

• Email: tdawson@postmedia.com | Twitter: tylerrdawson

A children’s soccer club in Chilliwack, B.C. has hired a security guard to supervise their games after their COVID-19 contact tracing staff were harassed by parents on the sidelines, the CBC reports .

A staff member went home in tears after a parent berated and verbally abused them for trying to take contact tracing information, the chair of the club says.

Chilliwack FC put in place contact tracing and limited crowd sizes at their games and events to try and comply with health guidelines. The result was behaviour from the parents described as “horrific and borderline violent.”

“The abuse and poor behaviour must stop!!!! (sic)” reads a statement posted to Chilliwack FC’s website . “Enough is enough!”

The soccer club hired Allegiance 1 Security to make sweeps of the games and venues to protect their staff and ensure that parents are following their COVID-19 policies and behaving appropriately. Their contact tracers can now call security if they’re in need of assistance.

“We’ve had people come up to the contact tracers’ table and say, ‘I’m bleeping fine, I don’t need this, you don’t need my information,'” club chair Andrea Laycock told the CBC. “They roll their eyes, say, ‘this is ridiculous,’ they scream and they yell.”

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Chilliwack FC started up a fall season for kids between the ages of four and nine. In their return to play statement, the club asked spectators to wear a mask going in and out of the venue and whenever social distancing isn’t possible. Parents are encouraged to drop off and pick up only, but the club allows for one family member to stay at a time.

“Our next step would be one none of us ever want to go to, and that would be banning parents from the field,” said Laycock. “‘OK parents, you can’t behave, it’s time to stay home.'”

As of Oct. 28, there are 2,700 active COVID-19 cases in B.C. The Fraser Health region, where Chilliwack is located, is one of the province’s leading hotspots. Of the new 287 cases across B.C., the Fraser Health region accounted for 67 per cent.

B.C. Premier John Horgan shocked many, including his governing partners in the Green Party, when he called a snap election last month.

And while many felt voters would punish Horgan and the NDP for heading to the polls during a pandemic, breaking an agreement with the Greens in the process, the NDP now has a majority government.

Dave is joined by Vancouver Sun legislative columnist Rob Shaw to talk about the motivation behind calling an election, why the NDP didn’t take a hit politically, and what it means now that Horgan has a majority government.

Subscribe to 10/3 on your favourite podcast app.

#distro

Over the summer, as the rest of the country opened up and slowed down, and the specter of COVID-19 began to fade, life inside Ontario’s large medical laboratories continued to accelerate on a kind of perpetual motion pace, building speed and building size without ever slowing down, no matter what came in, who showed up or whether anyone could find any room for the new machines.

In Mount Sinai Hospital, in Toronto, Dr. Tony Mazzulli, the hospital lab’s microbiologist in chief, was busy hiring techs, finding supplies and keeping one wary eye on the fall. Mazzulli, like other lab leaders, public health experts and infectious disease specialists, knew that when the weather changed, a spike in COVID cases would follow. He spent the summer working with colleagues in his own lab and across the system to process the samples coming in every day while continuing to expand an ad hoc lab network that had already mushroomed in capacity multiple times since March.

“The labs really didn’t get a break through the summer at all,” said Dr. Kevin Katz, the medical director of Toronto’s Shared Hospital Lab, one of the largest in the province. “The volumes just kept going up, up, up. On the hospital side and across the whole system, everybody was able to take a little breath. The labs just kept grinding and implementing and growing.””

The Sinai lab alone overtook a classroom, added machines and technologists and expanded into a 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week operation. It grew from a COVID rounding error in March, capable of processing 600-700 molecular PCR tests in a day, to a pillar of Ontario’s COVID testing system. By late spring, the lab’s technologists were analyzing 3,000 to 4,000 tests every day, Mazzulli said. They already had the space, staff and equipment to handle as many as 10,000 samples daily at that point and plans were in place to bring that number up to 17,500 by mid October.

For a time, the lab seemed on track to meet that target. Then it “sort of derailed for a number of reasons,” Mazzulli said. At Sinai, they couldn’t find enough trained staff; Ontario has long had a chronic shortage of licensed laboratory technologists. Testing supplies, too, were an endless issue, and not just for Sinai. “We have grappled with every single piece that we use for the testing process,” said Dr. Larissa Matukas, the head of microbiology at Toronto’s St. Michael’s Hospital. “Just when you think you have reagents, they disappear. Just when you think you have the plastic wear, it’s gone.”

For Sinai, one of the biggest issues was literally just space. The lab wasn’t physically big enough for the job it needed to do. So months before the fall rush, Sinai, along with other big labs, asked the Ontario government for the money it needed to expand. And for months, according to Mazzulli, the province sat on that request. “We got approval to go ahead and purchase the equipment, but they didn’t get approval to make the renovations to the lab,” Mazzulli said. “And so until that came in (in September) our hands were a bit tied.”

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When the fall COVID rush did arrive, on schedule and as predicted, Sinai had the staff and the equipment ready, but they didn’t have the room. “We do have four analyzers sitting in storage, which we can’t bring in physically to the lab until the renovations are done,” Mazzulli said in early October.

Sinai wasn’t the only lab in that position. Hospital and public health labs submitted a budget proposal outlining the anticipated surge and the money needed to deal with it sometime in either late spring or early summer, said one source with deep knowledge of the system. But it wasn’t approved until after the second wave hit in the autumn. “Heels were dragged,” the source said. “And that’s awful. Because it’s not a light switch. You don’t just say, ‘Great, I’ve got the money. I can increase the diagnostic testing capacity.’ It doesn’t work like that. It takes about two to three months.”

The province has since taken steps to cut the number of tests coming in, but the backlog, while it lasted, took a brutal toll on Ontario’s COVID fight. “As recently as two weeks ago, we were getting less than 20 per cent of positive cases reported to us within 24 hours from the labs, and less than 50 per cent of cases reported to us within two days,” said City Councillor Joe Cressy, who chairs the Toronto Board of Health.

At that speed of return, the testing system was all but cosmetic. It was like giving a virus that doesn’t need any kind of edge a 50-metre head start in a 100-metre dash. “To put it simply, the combination of insufficient testing, coupled with delays in lab reporting, significantly constrained our ability to do contact tracing and our collective ability to prevent a significant second wave,” Cressy said.

The second wave of COVID-19 overwhelmed multiple parts of Ontario’s pandemic response system. When schools reopened in the fall, testing centres across the province were crushed by the surge in demand. The province scrambled to make more swabs and pop-up centres available. But that effort didn’t make the bottleneck disappear. Instead, it just moved it further down the line.

By late September, the network of public health, hospital and private labs that process COVID tests in Ontario was dealing with tens of thousands more samples every day than it could push through in any 24-hour-period. The result was an ever-growing backlog of unprocessed tests that peaked at more than 90,000 in early October.

The Ontario lab system has been a mostly invisible player during the pandemic. But if there’s one thing the fall surge made clear, it’s that nothing else in the system, not testing, not tracing, not suppression of the virus itself, can work if the labs fall behind. The autumn backlog then stands as both a critical failure and a crucial opportunity to learn. The virus isn’t going away soon. More waves will come. So what went wrong, and why?

To better understand those questions, the National Post spoke to the heads of some of Ontario’s most important labs in the public health, hospital and private systems, as well veterans of Ontario Public Health and leading outside experts. Together they paint a picture of a system doing often extraordinary things despite immense barriers and sometimes iffy provincial leadership.

“I actually think that we’ve done this in lightning speed. This is unprecedented,” said Matukas at St. Michaels. “It is unprecedented for us to expand lab capacity at the pace that we have over the past seven months. I know we’ve been using that word a lot during this pandemic, unprecedented…. But I have never participated in anything that moved so fast, so quickly and still maintained the level of quality and robustness it would have if we had done this more slowly and meticulously.”

Like many aspects of Ontario’s COVID response, those efforts have been hampered by both chronic issues — some of which go back decades— and a provincial leadership that critics say has moved too slowly, too often during the pandemic.

Those critics argue the province should have seen the fall surge coming and acted sooner to both cut demand for testing and prepare labs for the surge. “It’s a simple volume versus capacity issue,” said Dr. Dominic Mertz the medical director of infection control at McMaster University in Hamilton. “We knew that with respiratory virus season starting, we would have many more people symptomatic, regardless of what COVID is doing. So we anticipated that. But the ramp up of testing capacity hasn’t happened. The focus was, I would say, on other things over the summer.”

The province’s months-long delay in approving new infrastructure funding was part of that failure, lab leaders agree. But it wasn’t everything. “Certainly money is one of those factors that if we had it sooner and earlier it would have helped us to maybe secure more stuff, more real estate, those renovations, and certainly get to where we need to get to,” said Matukas. “But then we still have all the other things like, where are the human resources? Where are the supplies and reagents? And what are we doing to really manage the demand?”

The simplest thing the province could have done, critics argue, wouldn’t have cost any money. In fact, it would have saved cash. The province waited until after the testing system was overrun this fall to walk back the message that anyone who wanted a test could get a test. That was a crucial error, many experts believe. “There’s really only two categories of people who need testing. And those are individuals who are symptomatic and individuals who have been in contact with somebody who is known to have COVID,” said Matukas.

All those unneeded tests made the fall surge worse. But even without them, the labs would almost certainly have been overrun at some point. Matukas said the best estimates for how many people are walking around with COVID-like symptoms during cold and flu season in Ontario are somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000. The province has never been able to sustain daily testing even at the bottom end of that range.

Why not? Supplies are a big part of it. Molecular PCR tests are incredibly resource intensive. And almost everyone on earth right now is competing for those same resources. “It’s basically amplified from what it was in March,” said Dr. Vanessa Allen, Public Health Ontario’s chief of medical microbiology and laboratory sciences.

One problem that has cropped up repeatedly since March is that some of the best, most efficient instruments for processing COVID samples operate on proprietary systems. The Public Health Labs, for example, use several machines manufactured by Roche, the Swiss health-care giant. A single, high-throughput Roche instrument can handle up to 3,300 tests in 24 hours. But the catch is they only work with Roche supplies.

This isn’t just a Roche issue, either. All the proprietary instruments from the major manufacturers work that way. And all of them, at some point during the pandemic, have had supply chain issues. “All of the supplies: pipette tips, plates, reagents, tubes, just everything … is under pressure.” Katz said. “If you run short of one piece of that whole process, the whole line comes to a halt.”

To reduce that friction, the Public Health Labs, under Allen, have been buying exclusively non-proprietary instruments since February. That allows them to mix and match supplies for different parts of the operation from different suppliers, some of them domestic. But the so-called open systems just aren’t as powerful as the best proprietary machines. A single, open-system instrument, fully stocked and staffed, can only process 1,854 samples in a day, just over half what the Roche machines can do. “When we do have reagents (the Roche machines) are phenomenal workhorses,” Allen said. “So we’re not ready to abandon them entirely.”

Staffing, too, has been a constant problem. A molecular PCR test is not a simple procedure. It’s not like a pharmacy-bought pregnancy test. It takes real expertise to both conduct and interpret.

Most of that work has to be done by licensed laboratory technologists. But since at least the 1990s, Ontario has had a severe shortage of those kinds of techs. The issue, according to Michelle Hoad, the chief executive officer of the Medical Laboratory Professionals Association of Ontario, goes back to a decision made in the 1990s to close seven of the province’s 12 programs for training technologists. At the time, she said, there was a view that as lab processes got more automated, fewer humans would be needed to work in each lab. But it hasn’t worked out that way.

Garth Riley, who retired as a senior director of Ontario’s Public Health Labs in 2015, said that issue was known and talked about at the highest levels of the organization for most of his tenure there. “And it still hasn’t been addressed properly in my opinion,” he said. There have been more recent warnings, too. For the last 18 months, Hoad and her colleagues have been meeting with the government, trying to get them to do something about it. “I don’t think it was taken as seriously as it should have been,” she said. “And then COVID hit.”

There is only so much the labs can do about the shortage now. To help with the load, some retired technologists have come back to the job. Labs have also shifted some tasks to less specialized assistants. The technologists that are available, meanwhile, have been working incredible hours. “They are the unsung heroes of the pandemic,” Katz said.

But staffing is just one of several chronic problems that have long dogged Ontario’s public health lab system. Those issues have almost certainly hurt its ability to the respond to the pandemic, Riley believes.

After SARS, the public labs were incorporated into the new, arm’s length Ontario Agency for Health Protection and Promotion, the precursor to today’s Public Health Ontario. The labs at that time, “were kind of an unwanted child,” Riley said. For a time they flourished in their new, quasi-independent home. But within a few years, the government began to claw them back in. Eventually, Riley said, “you couldn’t spend a penny without getting the approval from the ministry of health. And as a lab, working with the ministry of health was always challenging because these people did not understand laboratories.”

Money was another constant issue. “The public health labs were always underfunded. And the budget was capped for several years,” said Dr. Natasha Crowcroft, who was Public Health Ontario’s chief science officer until late last year. That left the network already over-stretched and underfunded when the pandemic hit.

Crowcroft, who now works for the World Health Organization in Geneva, blames successive governments for that problem. But she thinks Ontario’s public health leadership bears some responsibility too. “The strategy of the organization when it ran into financial problems was to try and keep quiet about them so they didn’t get into trouble with the government,” she said. “And I think that strategy … is what meant that they were not in a good position when this hit. When other organizations were pushing back against cuts, Public Health Ontario wasn’t. So I think there has been a failure of leadership.”

Those budget constraints have had a real impact. Almost two decades after SARS, to cite one example, Ontario came into the COVID-19 pandemic still without any kind of unified, digital system for the different labs to communicate with each other. As a result, the public health, hospital and private health labs are still manually filling out and filing tens of thousands of paper requisitions every day.

It would be hard to exaggerate how big a data problem this has created. “Colleagues of mine at another lab said that for every lab technologist (working) they have 2.4 people doing data entry,” Allen said. At Mount Sinai, the lab took over an entire, 1,000 square-foot classroom just to house 20 new data staff.

That this issue is still lingering, even now, doesn’t surprise Riley. “The public has a short memory. The government has even a shorter memory,” he said. “So that’s sort of how we got to where we are.”

Even given all those problems, many observers believe that what Ontario’s laboratories have accomplished over the past seven months is nothing short of remarkable. They’ve built, effectively from scratch, a coordinated network of labs from different organizations and different cultures that is now performing tests at a speed and on a scale never before seen in this province.

The massive backlog that happened in the fall was the result of long-term problems that were exacerbated by short-term issues, some of them preventable, some not. “I think what happened there was that there was a mismatch between just the pure capacity on the instruments and the labs and the number of tests that were being collected and coming in,” said Katz.

The Ford government could have done more to prevent that from happening, It could have spent more money, sooner, to bring more lab capacity online. But that doesn’t take away from the things those working in the system have managed to do. “We have really moved a lot of mountains together,” Allen said. “But there’s still a long way to go and I’m not downgrading that.”

The National Post sent a list of detailed questions to Ontario Health, Public Health Ontario, and Health Minister Christine Elliott’s office about this story. David Jensen, a spokesman for the ministry of health, replied with a statement that did not address the questions specifically. The province, he pointed out, has increased its testing capacity from 4,000 to almost 40,000 a day and continues to lead the country in both tests completed and daily testing capacity. The government has also invested over $1 billion to expand the lab network, secure supplies and hire staff.

On the decision not to restrict testing earlier, he wrote: “Earlier this year our broad range approach to testing helped us determine if and where COVID-19 was spreading. What we found was that it wasn’t widely circulating in any community. This was an important decision to target our resources to those experiencing symptoms, protect the most vulnerable and support outbreak investigations.”

For Riley, all of this feels a bit like deja vu. “These things tend to be cyclical,” he said. “They repeat themselves. After it’s all over, he believes, there will be royal commissions and expert reports. “Everybody will be running around and coming up with ideas and plans,” he said, “and then 20 years from now, we’ll be in the same boat, with a different bug.”

• Email: rwarnica@nationalpost.com | Twitter: richardwarnica