The U.S. will finally send vaccines north Did someone forward you this newsletter? Sign up here to get it delivered weekday mornings. Federal officials had moderately good news about their planned ramp-up for vaccine deliveries. For weeks, the website tracking each manufacturer's delivery schedule showed no April data for Moderna. Yesterday, Maj.-Gen. Dany Fortin offered an update: 855,000 doses in the first week of April and 1.2 million doses later in the month. All told, Canada will receive 30 million doses between April and June, and another 100 million doses over the summer. Fortin had little news on the Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca vaccines. The feds didn't announce this: Reuters first reported the Biden administration planned to loan Mexico and Canada a combined four million doses of AstraZeneca's shot—1.5 million of which would be heading north. The deal's timing isn't finalized, said multiple officials on both sides of the border, but every inoculation speeds up the reopening of the Canada-U.S. border. Ontario Premier Doug Ford didn't hide his gratitude: "God bless America," he said. "That's what true neighbours do." As a third wave of the virus hits Ford's province, his government has taken heat for not inoculating Ontarians quickly enough. His director of media relations, Ivana Yelich, defended the rollout plan and complained of a lack of supply. "We can't ramp up just to ramp back down," she said. Ontario has administered roughly three-quarters of its doses. The city of Ottawa will enter the restrictive "red zone" today. Anyone who closely monitors the city's popular—and reliably prescient— wastewater surveillance will not be surprised. Vaccine passports are inevitable and Canada should prepare: When vaccinations do eventually quell the worst of the pandemic, Marcus Kolga writes that Canada can't fall behind other nations in the race to open up cross-border trade and commerce. Kolga looks to the Baltic nations for a novel approach to vaccine passports: Estonia has developed an out-of-the-box system in partnership with the World Health Organization, which the Baltic nation is piloting along with Iceland and Hungary at the moment. The system is compliant with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation—meaning that it exceeds all Canadian privacy requirements—and ensures that no personal data is transmitted through its blockchain-based system. What it's like to be on trial in China: If any Canadian knows what Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor are enduring, it's Kevin Garratt. Five years ago, Garratt had his own trial in China after he was charged with espionage-related crimes. He was later sentenced and then, shortly thereafter, found himself deported back to Canada. Garratt spoke with Michael Fraiman about his own ordeal in the very city, Dandong, in which Spavor is detained. He offered this inside view: A closed trial is good, because that means they want it to kind of just go away—they will make their decision, and it sort of goes away. (Editor’s note: Michael Spavor will have a closed trial, as did Garratt.) If it’s an open trial, then they’re making a statement. There’ll be witnesses and the government will want to make it very, very public. And when the defendants will be found guilty, it’ll be on national TV, things like that. The Globe and Mail's Nathan VanderKlippe was outside the courthouse in Dandong just before Spavor's trial got underway. He witnessed Canadian diplomats failing to gain entry and fellow diplomats from eight other countries arrive on the scene. Jim Nickel, Canada’s charge d’affaires in China, expressed official disappointment. As the Tories open their policy convention, they'll be chewing on recent polling that could give them pause. Abacus Data found that 46 per cent of Canadians would consider voting Tory—but only 23 per cent of decided voters committed to doing so. That's three points below the Liberals, though 22 per cent of respondents were undecided. Abacus found a generation gap and diversity gap, and concluded the next party platform must take climate change seriously. Meanwhile, another poll by Research Co. pegged the Liberal vote at 37 per cent and the Tories trailing by nine points. The NDP was 17 points behind the Liberals. Tom Mulcair predicts an election ASAP: The former NDP leader, writing in Maclean's, had kind words for Jagmeet Singh, Annamie Paul and Yves-François Blanchet. But whatever the strength of Justin Trudeau's opposition, writes Mulcair, they all have weaknesses—and the PM appears unfazed. Somewhere the keeper of the Big Red Playbook is thumbing through the chapters covering the 1972 and 1974 Canadian general elections. In ‘72, Trudeau Père lost his majority after just one term. The flamboyant object of Trudeaumania had been given a lesson in humility. He made friends with David Lewis’s NDP to govern for a while, then opened a withering fire on them as he called a general election for the Summer of 1974. The rest is history and Trudeau would reign (almost) uninterrupted well into the 1980’s. Trudeau fils can hardly wait to try his hand and seems unconcerned about any opponent. Last night, Paul Wells spoke to Mark Carney from the central banker's home in Ottawa. Carney, who returned to the nation's capital after several years in the U.K., spent much of the last year penning a new book. Value(s): Building a Better World For All offers econ nerds a tome for the late-pandemic era, and it's in stores now. Wells queried Carney on the global financial crisis, the distinction between value and values and the global recovery from COVID. Watch the whole interview here . Carney gets into one major difference between Canadian and British parliamentary committees, touches on the importance of fiscal anchors and even hints at the need for a Canadian energy policy (not a National Energy Policy). Wells also asked Carney about the odds he'll run for office. The closest he got to a 'no' was: "I don't have any current plans." But the polished central banker, described regularly with words like dapper, affable and poised, seemed to stumble slightly out of the gate. "There's lots of ways to serve, Paul, and one of the ways to serve is to—in fact, the way I've been looking to serve over the course—since I left the Bank of England has been two-fold..." 149,461: That's how many more people lived in Canada on Jan. 1 compared to a year earlier. Statistics Canada pegged the country's annual growth at 0.4 per cent, the lowest since 1916. Deaths reached 309,893, the highest number ever recorded, and about 1 in 20 were caused by COVID-19. The biggest driver of the sputtering growth was reduced immigration. —Nick Taylor-Vaisey | 
