This is probably where COVID-19 is spreading

A photo taken at 5.07am on a crowded Bloor Street bus has gone viral, so to speak.

It has gone viral partly because people like me, who live in a relatively safe middle-class part of Toronto, have no idea how people working in "essential businesses", and living in areas with high COVID infection rates, actually live. 

I have struggled to understand how nearly 5,000 people a day are going down with with the coronavirus in Ontario (with predictions that this could soon rise to as much as 18,000 a day), a good proportion of them in Toronto. I don't know anyone who has contracted it, let alone died from it, and I have only a vague idea of who these 5,000 (or 18,000) people really are.

As cases and hospitalizations continue to spike, and Ontario mulls tightening restrictions still further, it's just hard to believe that closing down curbside pickups or instituting a curfew would have a substantive effect on the transmission of the virus. Surely, what we need to know is which industries and businesses are generating the infection spread right now (not six months ago) and, if necessary, closing those down. Is it in schools? Construction sites? Factories? Transportation? Why is this information not available? 

The best information I could find, on the Public Health Ontario website, still does not answer my questions. There is a new section on "acquisition types", although this does not break the figures down by industry or business, and the vast majority are merely categorized as "No information" or "No known epidemiological link", which is less that useful. The section on outbreaks is closer to what I was looking for, although in less detail, and this suggests that schools (362 on recent weeks) is the number one culprit, followed by workplace (162) and congregate living (131), but this does not give the total cases from each sources, just the number of "outbreaks", which may be large or small, and which may be based on different criteria.

Some cities, including Toronto and Hamilton, do publish information on workplaces outbreaks, right down to individual employer names. For example, in Toronto, over the last few weeks, the largest outbreaks have been at a marketing firm (53 cases), a sports uniform maker (26), an Amazon warehouse (25), and a construction site (21). In Hamilton, the largest outbreaks were at a logistics firm (32), a nursery and garden centre (30), and a construction site (22). Other outbreaks have occurred recently at a skincare firm, a car dealership, a maker of office furniture, a condo developer, a police training college, and a candy maker. Many, if not most, of these do not look very essential to me.

There again, the same article features a graph purporting to show COVID-19 cases associated with workplaces in Ontario, and it shows totals in recent weeks between about 80 and 120 (i.e. a tiny fraction of the 4,000-5,000 total cases in Ontario). It also shows the number going DOWN in recent weeks, despite the overall case numbers in the province shooting up precipitately! Are workplaces, essential or otherwise, not the main (or even a major) source of cases, then? Is this not where our effort should be directed? It's all very confusing.

Anyway, we are running out of policy ideas. So, we probably do need to look long and hard at the government's definition of "essential", for one thing (I learned just yesterday that real estate is included, for instance). Many health experts are suggesting just that: "take a really good look at what is truly essential, just for the next four to six weeks, and close everything that's not truly, truly essential for our society, to get through this".

And, of course - how many times has this been said? - PAID SICK LEAVE!

China and Russia's expansionist ambitions a dual threat

It's looking more and more like Vladimir Putin wants to invade Ukraine, whether to shore up his own faltering domestic popularity, or just out of some atavistic notion of recreating the glories of the Soviet Union. Who knows what Putin thinks? He doesn't seem very sure himself sometimes.

Ukraine has been fighting off Russian incursions since the invasion of Crimea back in 2014, particularly along the border region of Donbass. In the last year or so, though, Russia has moved nearly 80,000 troops to these border regions (now closer to 150,000), and it seems quite likely that Putin is testing out new US President Joe Biden, after four years of softness and appeasement under Trump. So far, he has been strongly supportive of the Western line of backing for Ukraine's position.

At the same time, China, under the increasingly paranoid and repressive regime of President Xi Jinping, has been ratcheting up its threats to Taiwan, both verbally and in the form of flyovers by bombers and fighter jets and other military activities. Chinese spokespeople have reiterated the party line that any further Taiwanese attempts to establish independence "means war" as far as China is concerned, and there is no reason to suspect that they are bluffing.

Both China and Russia are clearly in a belligerent and expansionist mood, and it seems like no coincidence that this is occurring at the start of a new US presidency, and that it is occurring concurrently. The latest National Intelligence briefing to the US Senate Intelligence Committee makes no bones about China and Russia, and particularly their combination, being far and away the greatest threat to the USA and to the world.

Notably, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying recently went out of her way to indicate that China and Russia are to a large extent moving in lockstep with each other, and "will give strong backing to each other on issues of core interests as important partners". Most Western commentators are reasonably dismissive of China and Russia's ability to work together, the differences in their approaches being too great, and their own specific ambitions being too overriding. But it's certainly not something that analysts are ignoring, nor can they afford to.

Why April is "the cruellest month"

I've lost track of how many times I've seen T.S. Eliot's line "April is the cruellest month" quoted recently. This is partly, I suppose, because it's April and it makes a good opening line for an article, however out-of-context. But it's partly because we are in a pandemic (I'll explain).

It must be the most-quoted line from T.S. Eliot, or indeed from any modern poet, although I doubt many people could continue with the subsequent lines from The Waste Land:

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

(By the way, note the double "l" in "cruellest": Eliot may have been born in the US, but he moved to England at the age of 25, and all his major works were written there. He later renounced his US citizenship. Most of the articles I read "translate" it into North American, with a single "l".)

As to why he considered April to be the cruellest month, much of this is to do with the fact that Britain (and Europe and indeed the world) was just emerging from a global pandemic in 1922 when Eliot was writing The Waste Land. The Spanish Flu pandemic killed somewhere between 20 and 50 million people from 1918 and 1920, and infected almost a third of the world's population, making today's COVID outbreak look positively tame.

What Eliot is saying, then, is not that April in general is a cruel month. After all, April is traditionally a time of spring and renewal, a time of fecundity, hope and love. What he is suggesting is that, in the Europe of the early 1920s, ravaged by years of first war and then the Spanish flu, there seems to be little in the way of hope and renewal going on, so that the normally hopeful month of April seems doubly cruel, a mockery of unrealizeable possibilities. Don't take my word for it, someone else's blog explains it much better than I could.

So, you can see how that might resonate in April 2021, can't you? Here in Toronto, the daffodils and magnolias are blossoming, but we are still in lockdown, with no apparent end in sight. Cruel indeed.

Donald Trump, Donald Trump

Just thought I'd write his name. I've had no cause to do so for months. It's been very nice.

In praise of virtual workspaces

The COVID-19 pandemic has made many changes to our lives. One unexpected one (to me, anyway) is the rise of virtual workspaces or productivity sessions.

Simply put, this is the idea of using Zoom (or any other video conferencing facility) to link people together while working, a kind of virtual co-working space. There is some evidence that many people are more productive when working in the company of others, even if they are working on something completely unrelated, and even if they don't know each other. Some people crave the company - any company - at a time when they are starved of it and mental health is precarious. Some just like a structure imposed on their day in order to increase their productivity.

These productivity sessions may run all day, with programmed breaks, or just for an hour, depending on people's requirements. Sometimes they don't even require the video window to be kept open. They may (or may not) require a pledge of no phones or other distractions. They may give encouragement and exhortations from time to time, particularly towards the end of a session, and they often require a summary of work accomplished at the end of the session to increase accountability.

There are several companies and services established to supply this need for structure, including CaveDay, UltraWorking, Flow, FocusMate and similar names. Some are more intense, others are more laid back. There is something for everyone if you look for it. 

I'm not sure it would work for me, even if I were still working, but then I've always been a bit of an introvert and misanthrope. My daughter, though, who is doing a Masters degree at UoT, swears by it, especially when she has particular deadlines and needs to be held to account. Her university has a system in place for it, as presumably do most other universities.

It will be interesting to see if this is an idea with legs, one that will persists after the pandemic fades (if it ever does).

Why does the 200 nautical mile rule not give Canada full control over Northwest Passage?

As Russia makes a nuisance of itself again by claiming huge areas of the Arctic Ocean seabed (a subject I have previously vented on), I realized that I still don't really understand why Canada does not have complete sovereignty over the Northwest Passage (a separate issue, but equally contentious).

The Northwest Passage (of which there are several different variants - see map below) runs between several islands abutting the Arctic Ocean, all of which belong to Canada. Expanding out the coastline of Canada's various islands by 200 nautical miles (230 miles, or 370 kilometres), means that most of the Northwest Passage (whichever one you choose) should be completely within Canadian waters. So, why are we not able to legally dictate who enters and passes through it?

The problem is that the 200 nautical mile rule, established under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), only delineates the country's "exclusive economic zone" (EEZ), the area within which the country has rights regarding the exploration and use of marine resources, including fishing, power generation, drilling, etc.

That same UN convention defines the "territorial seas" of countries, the coastal waters which are considered the sovereign territory of the state. This only extends out to 12 nautical miles (14 miles, or 22 kilometres) from the land. This, then, leaves huge swathes of the straits between Canada's Arctic islands as international waters, so that foreign vessels do in fact have rights of transit passage.

So, although Canada can regulate fishing and resource development within the Northwest Passage, and can even regulate environmental conditions (albeit to a limited extent), it cannot block passage to shipping from other countries.

A sad day for Northern Ireland - and the world

It's hard not to heave a wistful sigh at the recent news out of Northern Ireland. 

It really did seem like one of the world's heretofore intractable political quagmires managed to get itself resolved with the Good Friday agreement of 1998 (yes, it really was 23 years ago!) It gave us some hope that other intractable political quagmires - Israel vs Palestine, Catalonia vs Spain, India vs Pakistan, you list them - could also one day be resolved. It hasn't been completely without its challenges, but it has been a reasonably robust accord that has, in the main, put a stop to decades of unrest, violence and acrimony.

Until, that is, Brexit. Yes, a selfish act of chauvinism and hubris on the part of half of the British people (or a few self-indulgent politicians, depending on how you look at it) has thrust Northern Ireland right back into the stone-throwing and Molotov cocktails of the 1970s, except that these are the kids, and even grandkids, of the disaffected youth of the original "Troubles".

Northern Ireland was always going to be a sticking point for Brexit, and the agreed "solution" was never going to be acceptable to all. The best solution Boris Johnson and his Brexit henchmen could negotiate with Europe was to allow free movement of goods across the border with southern Ireland, while conducting checks on goods coming in from the rest of Britain, a solution that, obviously, smacks of betrayal to the Protestant unionists of Northern Ireland. It's less about religion now (possibly a good thing, I supposed) and more about tribal warfare and saving face (definitely not a good thing).

So, like a returning bad penny, here come the criminal gangs and paramilitaries, and the hell-raisers who just like a good fight, all over again. People will say that it was always an intractable political quagmire, and something was always going to re-awaken it. But to think that a totally inadvisable and unnecessary decision to leave Europe was the catalyst... A sad day indeed. I hope David Cameron is turning in his political grave.

Who can use the word "Indian", and should they?

Drew Hayden Taylor is a celebrated Indigenous playwright and author here in Ontario (and a frequent Globe and Mail contributor), although I would imagine his fame does not extend far outside these borders. He writes an interesting piece about his latest project, a screenplay adaptation of one of his plays, and the decisions he has had to make about how often to use the word "Indian".

Because, of course, that is the word that Indigenous people use to describe themselves, even though it is verboten for us settlers to use it. It is a pejorative label with a racist colonial past, but one that has been reclaimed by its victims, in much the same way as "nigger" by Black people or "dyke" by lesbians. A regular Indigenous guy would probably feel quite self-conscious referring to himself as "Indigenous" or "First Nations" in anything other than an academic context. 

But Taylor is having to think about how a largely non-Indigenous audience of sensitive liberal "people of pallor" will take it. Any number of Indigenous books use the epithet ad nauseam, including Thomas King's The Inconvenient Indian and Indians on Vacation, Richard Wagamese's Indian Horse, Michelle Good's Five Little Indians, and Taylor's own Cottagers and Indians. And, of course, there has been much hand-wrining in recent years over the use of the word "Indian" (and other inappropriate racial monickers) for North American sports teams. 

But you can see Mr. Taylor's difficulty. It's an interesting little moral quandary: risk perpetuating a harmful racist stereotype, or maintain internal authenticity.