Canada has a federal system where health care is a provincial responsibility and many provinces have trouble meeting expenses. Some provinces (the small rural Atlantic ones) have the pandemic under control (single digit new diagnoses per day), in others (Ontario, Quebec) it is exploding (a thousand to thousands of new cases a day), most are in between. This is creating two kinds of tension. If some provinces impose another lockdown order, they will call for federal grants to subsidize wages and rent payments but the whole country will have to pay for it. And people whose provinces are handling the epidemic especially badly, like
Annamie Paul the head of the GPC and
this doctor in Toronto, are calling for a coordinated national coronavirus strategy. Cynics would note that the federal government does not have a high level of expertise on health care, and that the same people would not be calling for this if Andrew Scheer were Prime Minister.
There are also tens of thousands of elderly Canadians planning to take winter vacations in warm parts of the United States which makes no sense to me at all. If a lot of them get sick, US hospitals can't handle them (or their health insurance has a "no covid" clause), and they have to be evacuated that will also be a lot of trouble.
This is linked to the collapse of the media, because as there are fewer sources of local news and fewer things which everyone in a city reads or hears at least once a week, its harder to communicate local messages and give people a clear sense of the situation in their community so that together they come to a consensus on policies and implement them.
After the recount, the
recount in the West Vancouver-Sea to Sky provincial riding changed the result from BC Liberal 41 votes ahead to BC Liberal 60 votes ahead. So congratulations to the painstaking work at elections BC that keeps margins of error so small during a pandemic!
Here are the official BC and Austrian case numbers for COVID-19 as of 18 November 2020. Both have the gradual rise in July and August to something similar to the original pandemic which was serious enough for us to shut down the border and the economy, then the explosion from September onwards.
Oh, and CPC head Erin O'Toole has come out swinging against the government of China,
defeating the government on a non-binding motion to announce a plan to fight Chinese state-sponsored harassment and interference against Canadians within 30 days. That is likely to be a winner because most Canadians are less friendly to the government of China than their government is, because it lines up with Trumpist policy in the United States, and because its easy to talk tough about a country with 40 times your country's population and 5 or 10 times your country's GDP run by people who play by communist rules when you are not in charge of turning words into deeds.