In case you were wondering why our government is in a complete disarray in terms of how they are handling the national pandemic, changing the rules almost daily, it will become crystal clear after reading this piece. All those press conferences are nothing more than a smoke-screen to make us plebs think our leaders know what they are doing. They don’t.
Let’s start with this to give you an idea how the rest of the world thinks we are handling the pandemic: The CDC (the Center for Disease Control in the US) issued the following warning yesterday: Travelers should avoid all travel to Canada. Because of the current situation in Canada even fully vaccinated travelers may be at risk for getting and spreading COVID-19 variants and should avoid all travel to Canada.
If you are wondering how it came to this, we will give you a link to an article which will explain how much of a disaster our ability to manage a health care crisis like we are now experiencing truly is. The answers to the questions below come from the article.
…Why was Israel able to become the world-leader in treating the virus? Because of the country’s state-of-the-art information technology and national vaccination database. Citizens have all their medical information on their phones.
…Why is Canada one of the slowest countries to vaccinate their population and get back on track? Because its health technology is, charitably, a decade out of date. It lacks the ability to adequately track infectious disease outbreaks, efficiently manage vaccine supply chains and storage, quickly administer doses, and monitor immunity and adverse reactions on a national basis.
…Why was the vaccine rollout so slow and cumbersome? Even though all the shipments of vaccines arriving in Canada come with scannable barcodes, to make tracking and logistics easier—with some manufacturers even barcoding the vials themselves—no Canadian province can scan them.
…Will Canada be able to issue vaccine passports? Our health-care system is beyond antiquated, still often using pen-and-paper and Excel spreadsheets in a world quickly heading towards smart systems of big data analytics. It’s unclear how Ottawa will be able to issue vaccine passports, even if it wants to.
…At the core of the health care shambles is a simple fact that Canada has no national public health information system, but 13 different regional ones.
While our governments have changed leaders, the bureaucrats who really run the country have not. And clearly they are in large part responsible for the mess we are in.
This is coupled with past Prime Ministers who completely dropped the ball in terms of spending the required money to implement one central health-care system in our country. There is no doubt that Justin is completely over his head in dealing with this crisis.
All you have to do is look at the person he put as procurement minister – hired purely for optics – female and ethnic. Smart woman but zero experience in procuring even a pencil. How shocked Justin must have been to find out that she really had to be a procurement minister during a crisis.
We saw an excellent one-liner that sums up what people think of governments and their handling of the pandemic: the fourth wave will be rage.
Yet another 8:00 pm curfew in Montreal until further notice. Part of this is because the staffing situation in our hospitals is in a crisis, although Papa Legault won’t tell you that. We have written this before: For decades, to get a ‘balanced budget’, each successive Quebec government cut from the health care system. And we are all now reaping the ‘rewards’. Enjoy your time at home while it’s still light outside.
Another person working in Sue Montgomery’s office has quit. She is the erstwhile mayor of CDN-NDG and has formed her own party to run for mayor in the November election. Chad Walcott, part of her support staff and with whom we had correspondence, left because of a toxic working environment. Blanche, there are some who say people are picking on Sue Montgomery. While she may in fact get more media attention than other mayors, the reason is not a good one. Remember the saying where there’s smoke there’s fire? Let’s put it this way. You don’t hear about Outremont or Westmount’s mayors having fights with everyone and their uncle Lester.
We offer you Julie Payette as a perfect example of someone in a job they were not suited for. Ms. Montgomery should not be the mayor of her borough. She is simply not a people-person and would be much better suited to measuring the rings on the trees in NDG to gauge their age. That way she would never have to pollute the world by driving anywhere.
Beginning today, Quebecers are prohibited from travelling from red and orange zones to those under yellow or green alert. If you do so, you could be fined up to $6000.
So where are we talking about? The two green regions Nunavik and Terres-Cries-de-la-Baie-James. Not too many people are trekking up there. The three yellow regions that are verboten are Côte-Nord, Nord-du-Québec and Gaspésie-Îles-de-la-Madeleine. While these areas have stunning views, our guess is that no one is traveling there right now.
Here’s a good one: Andrew Giuliani, son of none other than Rudy, is going to take a run at Andrew Cuomo for the grand prize of governor of New York. This is going to be one excellent show to watch.
Good Shabbos We’ll talk…
Canada’s public health data meltdown