Spoiler alert: There will be deficits Did someone forward you this newsletter? Sign up here to get it delivered weekday mornings. Today, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland will unveil Canada's federal budget, two years since the last one. It's all but confirmed that child care and green technology will be keystone items, while funds for national pharmacare and combatting inequality are expected as well. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has indicated the budget could include as much as $100 billion in new spending for these initiatives. One area the Liberals could bolster is the Care Economy, comprising all work done in health and education, from early learning and childcare to eldercare, which amounts to 12.3 per cent of Canada's GDP. A number of professors and advocates—Pat Armstrong, Marjorie Cohen, Laurell Ritchie, Leah Vosko and Armine Yalnizyan—have penned a letter in Maclean's urging the feds to earmark money to help this often-ignored sector. The pandemic has exposed how our social infrastructure underpins our physical, social, psychological and economic health. The Care Economy, staffed largely by women, is critical to our survival during the pandemic and will be critical to our emergence from the pandemic. The pandemic has also revealed that racialized, Indigenous, immigrant and migrant workers are disproportionately more likely to both provide care and become exposed to illness and death. Low-paid workers in these groups, and in particular women workers, are disproportionately treated as both essential and more essentially disposable in jobs with few labour protections and rights. A more resilient future requires transformational change, not just a “return to normal.” That has to start with our culture and vision of care. Ontario's very busy weekend. Premier Doug Ford kicked off a 24-hour firestorm on Friday, announcing new draconian measures that would cordon off playgrounds and empower police officers to stop and question anyone outside their house. (Watch Ford's full press conference here.) Such intense backlash ensued that his government immediately retracted both those measures by Saturday evening, which was just as well, because the province's most prominent municipal and regional police forces said they weren't going to comply. But wait, there's more: Ford continued to insist that the problem is vaccine supply, not administration, and reportedly began reaching out to Canadian consulates to procure more vaccines from international allies while planning to suspend Queen's Park mid-week. By Sunday afternoon, news leaked that the premier was going to shuffle his cabinet, bringing back Rod Phillips after his, let's say, extended Christmas vacation, as well as shifting Stephen Lecce off education and promoting Kinga Surma. Meanwhile, Canadian columnist David Moscrop penned a piece that rose to #1 on the Washington Post's website, titled "Doug Ford must resign," while OPP vehicles began setting up provincial roadblocks near Manitoba. By nightfall, hours after federal Health Minister Patty Hajdu confirmed that Health Canada has approved the AstraZeneca vaccine for anyone over 18, Ontario suddenly lowered that vaccine's age requirement to 40, starting tomorrow. Ottawa's response: Amid the chaos, Procurement Minister Anita Anand suggested on Global's The West Block that her government could still use the Emergencies Act to force more changes if things don't improve. But the feds are unlikely to take that approach. Yesterday evening, the PMO announced their plan to help Ontario : they will send in federal frontline health care workers, expand rapid testing sites in hotspot areas and give the province $46 million to expand its virtual health care infrastructure. The feds will also provide extra doses of tocilizumab, a drug used to treat severe pneumonia, by reallocating it from other provinces. That may have been the result of a phone call Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had with three Atlantic premiers earlier in the weekend, in which—maybe for the first time in Canadian history?—a prime minister called on the Atlantic provinces to help fix a broken Ontario. As Justin Ling writes in Maclean's, Ford's initial decisions ignored the increasing amount of scientific consensus behind what helps spread COVID-19: indoor gatherings. This consistently means school and work, not patios and playgrounds. The reality is more mundane—governments are doing this because they are frozen with indecision. Actually acknowledging the reality of the data means acknowledging this catastrophe was caused by governments’ idiotic reopening plans: Plans that were warned against by public officials at the time. Doing that means taking action that will hurt employment numbers, which could hurt our politicians' fragile egos. Confronting this data and science also means admitting that all of our advice about washing your hands and not touching your face has been useless. And accepting that reality means provinces requiring sick leave, so people can go home if they’re ill. Also on the COVID file for Maclean's, Nora Loreto hones in on the real threat: superspreader events linked to workplaces. Governments have allowed corporations to police themselves. From Amazon to Cargill, from Maple Leaf to Canada Post, large work settings have become the engines of COVID-19 spread in their communities. And the consequences have been deadly. In my research, I have found at least 71 workers have died from COVID-19 infections acquired through a workplace outbreak. This is count is undoubtedly low, as it’s based on information gleaned from news reports and obituaries. There is no agency publicly tracking workplace-related COVID-19 deaths in Canada. A carbon tax by any other name. Last Thursday, Conservative leader Erin O'Toole revealed his climate strategy, which would funnel a price on carbon into a government-mandated (but privately run) "low-carbon savings account" that lets individuals eventually reward themselves with solar panels, electric vehicles, sustainable food or other eco-prizes. O'Toole appeared on CTV's Question Period yesterday to reiterate his belief that this isn't a tax, because the money never goes to the government. According to sources who spoke with The Star, however, everyone in the party—including O'Toole— knows it's a carbon tax. The reaction has been divided among predictable lines: younger Tory MPs tweeted out enthusiastically about the plan over the weekend, while influential veterans kept mum; geographically, all Conservative Quebec MPs expressed their support, in stark contrast to a handful of representatives from Alberta and Saskatchewan. In Maclean's, Philippe J. Fournier breaks down some pre-pandemic polling that shows how unpopular climate action is among Conservative voters—and how necessary it is to win over everyone else. The funeral for Prince Philip was held Saturday, with family members keeping social distance from one another. The most striking image, of the Queen, clad in black, sitting alone in a pew, was not what anyone would have expected from a royal funeral years ago. But the stripped-down service only emphasized the human aspect of the event, Patricia Treble writes in Maclean's: We are so used to focusing on the “royal” and not the “family” part of “royal family.” This funeral reversed that focus, putting family first. The family squabbles that have made so many headlines recently were ignored. After the funeral, as the family walked back up Chapel Hill, Prince Harry talked to his estranged brother, William, with Kate, Duchess of Cambridge, on his other side. —Michael Fraiman | 
