Ontario's hospitals are desperate for help Did someone forward you this newsletter? Sign up here to get it delivered weekday mornings. The Canadian Armed Forces are officially sending help to Ontario. Public Safety Minister Bill Blair announced the feds are dispatching "medical and civilian human health resources" to the province, and also offering logistical and administrative support. The help comes in the form of three "multi-purpose" teams. The two levels of government have reportedly been negotiating since the middle of the month. No election yet: New Democrats swallowed hard and voted for the Liberal budget when it came up for a vote yesterday in the Commons. The final tally was 178-157. Next possible potential prospective election milestone: early summer. Vaccine diplomacy: A few days after Manitoba inked a deal with North Dakota to immunize truckers, the Associated Press reported that Alaska's governor, Mike Dunleavy, offered doses to Canadians in remote Stewart, B.C., a tiny community that shares a border with even the even tinier village of Hyder. The feds have kept the border closed even though the towns are so tight-knit and reliant on each other. The governor personally delivered the vaccines. COVID testing: The feds started publishing more data on how many COVID-19 rapid testing kits have been sent to the provinces, deployed by the provinces and then actually used to test for infections. Provinces have deployed almost 28 per cent of the 41.2 million tests procured by Ottawa, but only 4 per cent have been put to use. Border testing: Global News reports on a health-care startup that raked in a federal contract worth almost $100 million. Switch Health's job: manage the tests required of all quarantining passengers who enter Canada through international airports. Global found customers who allege the company cut corners and didn't answer calls. Buried amidst so many details is the name of Switch Health's director of public affairs: Jordan Paquet, a former staffer for Rona Ambrose who was later a spokesman for Peter MacKay's leadership bid. Longshoremen unite: On Sunday, federal Labour Minister Filomena Tassi gave notice that Liberals would table a back-to-work bill that would end a labour dispute at the Port of Montreal. Tassi called the move her "least favoured option." Trudeau told Tout le Monde en Parle that a work stoppage hits small businesses in Quebec that need supplies. Ontario and Quebec's governments have asked the feds to step in. The port workers have gone without a new contract since the end of 2018. Don't sleep on the Mavericks: That's the lesson one anonymous senior Conservative in Alberta delivered in the Hill Times yesterday. The Tory source said the Maverick Party, a pro-independence movement that advocates for four western provinces and will run candidates in the next election, "would pack probably every community hall in Alberta right now." COVID's third wave likely means no rallies for the foreseeable future. But be warned, Political Establishment. Inside the PPE scramble: Every time a new document dump materialized at the health committee's website, keeners who sort through the docs get another glimpse into action-packed pandemic email threads. This one from the Prime Minister's Office, for instance, details how a contract for ventilators with a German company went south after the U.S. invoked the Defence Production Act because the breathing machines were finished at a facility in Boston. Committee proxy war: Yesterday's health committee meeting heard from eight witnesses. Among those making presentations on the pandemic's impact were George Canyon and Paul Taylor. Canyon is the owner and CEO of Reiny Dawg Productions. Taylor is the executive director of Foodshare Toronto. Readers might also remember Canyon as the Tory candidate for Central Nova in the last election. Taylor was, and is, the NDP's standard-bearer in Parkdale-High Park. Guarding the guards: The Canada Border Services Agency is paying GardaWorld $17.4 million to keep an eye on a handful of immigration detention facilities in and around Montreal. One such place is the Quebec Immigration Holding Centre, a 109-bed building in Laval that sits beside a long-shuttered penitentiary described as a "monumental stone prison with a severe, forbidding presence." Maclean's once chronicled that prison's many failed escape attempts. Here's the view from just outside the barbed wire of the detention centre next door. The cost of a hangar banger: Tory MP Kyle Seeback asked the Department of National Defence to tally up all costs associated with an unfortunate incident in which one of the Air Force's VIP jets, a CC-150 Polaris, ran into a hangar wall and endured serious damage. DND says total costs added up to $10.9 million. The incident occurred in October 2019. The Polaris jet was cleared for post-repairs takeoff on March 3 and was back in the skies the next day. —Nick Taylor-Vaisey | 
