The numbers aren't getting better, and premiers know it Did someone forward you this newsletter? Sign up here to get it delivered weekday mornings. COVID numbers continue to break records in five Canadian provinces, including Ontario, Quebec, Alberta, Manitoba and Saskatchewan. After Prime Minister Justin Trudeau prodded premiers over an evening call last Thursday, it has become increasingly clear that stricter measures (read: lockdowns) will have to be legislated in order to prevent hospitals from being painstakingly overloaded. Right now, hospitals across those five provinces are merely "quite overloaded," which is to say, things can—and will—get worse if nothing changes. That's the line Alberta Premier Jason Kenney is now taking, after acknowledging that his province's more hands-off approach to fighting the virus, which hinged on sensible Albertans keeping social distanced, is no longer working as well as it did for most of 2020, when the province enjoyed relatively few cases. Speaking on the Roy Green Show, Kenney threatened "more restrictive measures down the line" if cases and deaths continue to rise, while ICUs and hospitals become more packed. Thank God for low interest rates. According to a new OECD report, despite the Canadian economy shrinking by 10 per cent in the second quarter of 2020, Canadian incomes actually increased during the same period thanks to the federal government's hefty cash injections of CERB, CWS and the like. The data jibes with a previous IMF report that predicted Canada's estimated $350-billion defecit, as a percentage of GDP, will be greater than any other country in 2021, at nearly 20 per cent. A few federal officials have indicated Canada is starting to take harsher steps—albeit baby steps—in reaction to tensions with China. On The West Block, Immigration Minister Marco Mendicino followed up on the government's recent decision to ease immigration pathways for young Hong Kongers, though he shied away from answering whether or not the government would restrict Chinese students from studying in Canada, or whether he encourages the 300,000 Canadians in Hong Kong to leave the island. Elsewhere on the Sunday talk show circuit, Canada's ambassador to the United Nations, Bob Rae, told Rosemary Barton he's called on the Human Rights Council to investigate whether China's treatment of Uighurs is considered genocide. Last month, a House of Commons subcommittee deemed the definition accurate, much to China's fury. None of this, of course, is as hardline a stance as Conservative Leader Erin O'Toole would like: he also popped into The West Block to specifically call out the government's wishy-washy attitude toward Huawei. His party is preparing to table a motion that would outright ban the Chinese telecom from helping to build Canada's 5G network, just as the governments of the United States, United Kingdom and Australia have. Hootsuite gone wrong. On Friday, the official Twitter account for Passport Canada tweeted out, "Are you planning a winter vacation but don’t have a valid passport? Don’t wait, apply now!" The declaration, written as if the last 10 months hadn't happened (we wish), took many by surprise—a surprise that only grew stranger as the tweet remained up for most of the weekend, until Sunday evening, when someone at Global Affairs Canada presumably realized what had happened and promptly deleted it. Global News reached out to the department, which replied that they were "looking into" the tweet. The boring, but probable, cause: some poor social media intern wrote out a year's worth of tweets and scheduled everything in January. Here's a little-known fact: chief medical officers of health, at the provincial, regional and municipal level, have the legal authority to close schools and businesses to protect residents from infectious diseases. So why aren't they? In Maclean's, Amir Attaran and Lorian Hardcastle compare these roles to those of firefighters or police officers, neither of whom defers to the premier before making life-saving decisions. Yet across Canada, our top doctors are hemming and hawing, simply to avoid political confrontations—as if their jobs, too, were too juggle public health with economic sacrifice. Simply put, the medical officers of health are chickening out. Like firefighters watching a lashing inferno and nibbling donuts, they are abandoning their authority and moral duties in the pandemic. The legal powers are there in abundance; it’s just the courage that’s not. Canada and Botswana will co-host the second annual Global Conference for Media Freedom today. The day-long virtual conference will bring together a coalition of 37 world governments to "advocate for media freedom and the protection of journalists," according to the website, which hints at panel discussions about legal rights, disinformation and the value of journalism to democracy. Those curious can find broadcast details at the government's website to tune in. Farewell, metropolis. What will become of cities in a post-pandemic world? Historically, they've bounced back from plagues and disasters. But technology may change that. In the latest issue of Maclean's, Brian Bethune spoke to authors, researchers and academics about our impending urban revolution, and detailed the myriad ways global cities could change: demographically, technologically and aesthetically. In North American cities, the internet offers a rough alternative to the economic (if not social) benefits of face-to-face interactions in a services-dominated economy. Combine that first in human history—the key city advantage is no longer absolutely dependent on city presence—with the way the pandemic has exacerbated pre-existing reactions against the urban downside, and for many urbanologists, the supposedly inevitable return to the metropolis no longer seems so inevitable. —Michael Fraiman | 
