The pressure mounts to search residential school sites Did someone forward you this newsletter? Sign up here to get it delivered weekday mornings. Looking for graves: Leaders are calling for an examination of all of Canada's residential school sites to find more unmarked graves after a search in Kamloops, B.C., discovered the remains of 215 children, some as young as three, last week. “It is a great open secret that our children lie on the properties of the former schools—an open secret that Canadians can no longer look away from,” Ontario NDP MPP Sol Mamakwa, a member of the Kingfisher First Nation, said in a statement. “In keeping with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Missing Children Projects, every school site must be searched for the graves of our ancestors.” There may be as many as 6,000 remains of undocumented deaths, according to The Truth and Reconciliation Commission reports. “Right now, families have these long-standing uncertainties about what actually happened to their children. No family in Canada should ever experience that,” Katherine Ainsley Morton, an instructor at Memorial University of Newfoundland told the Globe. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau promised to take unspecified action to help residential school survivors. "Sadly, this is not an exception or an isolated incident. We're not going to hide from that. We have to acknowledge the truth. Residential schools were a reality—a tragedy that existed here, in our country, and we have to own up to it." Across Canada, people expressed grief at the revelation in Kamloops, making makeshift memorials of children's shoes. In Charlottetown, the cradle of Confederation, city council decided to reverse itself and remove a popular statue of Sir John A Macdonald, who is seen as a key architect of the school system. Not that bad after all: Canada made missteps in its efforts to vaccinate its way out of the pandemic, but it was not a disaster, as alleged, writes Justin Ling in Maclean's. In early February, the Globe and Mail front page screamed that “the country’s early vaccination rollout is collapsing.” A National Post column proclaimed that “Ottawa’s mistakes ensured you’ll likely be vaccinated six months later than everyone else.” This magazine ran a piece last summer contending the federal government was “bungling” vaccine plans. Ling says those criticisms do not stand up to close examination. Conversations with people in Canada’s vaccine industry, federal officials, and documents obtained under the Access to Information Act by Maclean’s show that, while there are elements of truth in each—and clear evidence of lessons needing to be learned—the idea that our vaccine rollout was omnishambles just aren’t right. Avoiding a fourth wave: Canada has set a vaccination target of 75 per cent, but some experts tell the Globe we ought to aim higher: Current numbers show that a 75-per-cent vaccination rate is achievable, indeed it has already been achieved for those over 60. Yet modelling suggests that if Canada’s vaccination rate can reach 90 per cent, the result will not simply be a better outcome, it could be a different path entirely–one that substantially reduces of the risk of a fourth wave. Experts are worried that variants that can't be stopped by vaccines may develop—what's known as “vaccine escape”. Unhappy Manitoba: While in most of the country, case counts are falling and governments are unrolling plans to ease lockdowns, Manitoba is struggling with a third wave that won't give up. The province appears to be to blame, reports the CBC: "They dithered with half-measures, ignoring the science and evidence all around them, and eroded public trust while squandering a month-long cushion at the start of the third wave," Souradet Shaw, a social epidemiologist at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, said in a series of tweets on May 20 after Manitoba Shared Health began to transfer ICU patients out of province. "Instead of developing a clearly articulated and evidence-based strategy to tackle predictable surges, they impugned critics, misled the public through distortions, obscuring data, and accountability, and blamed everyone but themselves." Mixed messages on mixed jabs: Sir John Bell, the Canadian scientist at Oxford University who helped develop the AstraZeneca vaccine says people who got a single shot of that jab should also get a second shot of the same one, and avoid mixing vaccines. “Our experience to date is that it produces pretty severe reactogenicity, so severe that we don't think that's going to be viable and by that I mean, you get your second dose if you flip it over, you'll get really sick, so I would not advise that,” he told CTV News’ Question Period. “And the second dose of AstraZeneca, which we now put in many, many millions of people who had a first dose of AstraZeneca, we’re not sure we can even find a single case of clotting problems. So, you know…this needs to be data driven.” Canadian health officials are not necessarily in agreement with Sir Bell, citing worries about rare blood clots associated with the vaccine he helped develop, and a Spanish study has found combining AstraZeneca and Pfizer was safe and effective. Warehouse peril: A worker at an Amazon warehouse who contracted COVID says the workers at the Ottawa warehouse have not been following rules designed to keep workers safe. "Since the whole thing began, it's been kind of nerve-racking for me," the worker told the CBC. In Brampton, Ont., three Amazon distribution centres were temporarily partially closed in order to control COVID-19 outbreaks. Amazon says it is doing everything it can to keep workers safe. Bonus! Air Canada gave executives and managers $10-million in “COVID-19 Pandemic Mitigation Bonuses” while negotiating a $5.9-billion bailout from federal taxpayers. NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh is unhappy about that. — Stephen Maher | 
