Third time's the charm? Did someone forward you this newsletter? Sign up here to get it delivered weekday mornings. Ontario is waking up to its third stay-at-home order of the pandemic. Premier Doug Ford announced four weeks of wide-ranging, province-wide restrictions at a press conference yesterday. Most non-essential retailers can remain open only for curbside pickup. Even big box stores, largely spared from previous restrictions, can only sell essentials to customers: groceries, pharmaceutical and health-care items, as well as supplies for pet care, household cleaning and personal care. The state of emergency follows several days of lockdowns across the province that had already restricted many activities—but confused Ontarians had trouble following the rapidly changing rules. The comedian Gerry Dee deadpanned a message to the province on what's allowed and what's prohibited. Vaccine rollout: Schools will—for now—remain open in much of the province, but they're temporarily shuttered in Toronto and Peel. The Toronto Region Board of Trade warned yesterday those school closures might not do much to reduce transmission in Peel. The group's Economic Blueprint Institute says 53 per cent of 608,000 regional workers, many of whom serve large airport-adjacent facilities, must do their jobs on-site. The TBOT insists a vaccination strategy that prioritizes essential workers is the best way to drive down the spread. The premier started his day by celebrating a new daily record of vaccinations—104,382 on Tuesday alone. Ford alluded to a near-future expansion into more pharmacies and mass immunization sites, as well as doctors' offices. At his afternoon presser, Ford expanded inoculations to anybody over the age of 18 in Toronto and, yes, Peel. That includes education workers in those areas. The power of disinformation: Frank Graves, the head of EKOS Research, posted findings of one of his firm's surveys on the impact of disinformation on vaccine hesitancy. He found that 93 per cent of respondents categorized as "well informed" about vaccines were likely to get the shot. The same was true for only 23 per cent of those marked as "very disinformed." Canada isn't ready for vaccine passports: This month's Maclean's cover story delves into what might be the next big national debate that consumes social media. Marie-Danielle Smith goes deep on the ethically fraught, jurisdictionally challenging ordeal that vaccine passports pose for good ol' complicated Canada. Whether we like it or not, experts say, Canada will be pressured into coming up with a system to verify that Canadian travellers have gotten their shots. After decades of government failures in nationalizing and digitizing health data, the development of that system is all but guaranteed to be a logistical nightmare. Its potential applications in a broader post-pandemic world are ethically fraught. And we are already falling behind. Canada's public health data meltdown: You want more jurisdictional headaches? Justin Ling, writing in Maclean's, explains how this country was once a world leader in public health technology—and then, thanks to a toxic mess of cost overruns, patchwork implementation and a leadership vacuum in Ottawa, fell badly behind. And Ling brings solutions: If we are ever going to build efficient, cost-effective, and effective health infrastructure, Ottawa needs to take the lead. We need to abandon the idea that federalism requires us to have each sub-national government run entirely independent, walled-off, health databases. We need data sharing. We need shared infrastructure. We need a national public health system. The unsettling case of Dr. Ngola: Craig Offman, also writing in Maclean's, sorted through reams of court documents that paint a disturbing picture of just how Mounties and government officials in New Brunswick handled the case of Jean Robert Ngola Monzinga, the doctor who became infamous for allegedly bringing COVID-19 into the province and accidentally spawning a deadly outbreak. A key question remains: on what basis did the authorities suspect him of infecting others? Crown disclosures provided to Ngola’s defence lawyers and filed in provincial court—50 pages of emails, memos and handwritten notes from the RCMP and government officials, among others—offer unsettling revelations. Namely, when Dr. Ngola was singled out, documents indicate there was no official complaint against him. The parliamentary budget office reports that a universal basic income could cost $87.6 billion in 2022-23, but also substantially reduce poverty rates in every province (including by a whopping 61.9 per cent in Manitoba). Read the nitty-gritty in the full report. Liberals will virtually convene this evening. Their three-day cyber-confab starts with a spate of speeches capped at 8:50 p.m. by a "keynote conversation" between Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland and a certain former prime minister who once held the same job. Today's program is a breeze compared to tomorrow's 12 hours of commissions, panels, policy talk and keynotes. Good news of the day: You remember Gurdeep Pandher, the Yukoner whose Bhangra dancing cheers up a weary nation. Well, Pandher got his second dose of COVID-19 vaccine. He celebrated by dancing "in the lap of pure nature"—that is, on top of a frozen lake. —Nick Taylor-Vaisey | 
