*** Dec 30 Update – Nearly 5500 calls were made to the Covid Enforcement Brown shirts over the Christmas period of Dec 21-27. Most of the $1296 personal fines were related to household gatherings. So, thousands of Manitobans ratted on their neighbors. Nice to know who is watching. ***
*** Dec 22 Update – A nearby Municipality has confirmed that the Province is soliciting through Council for persons or organizations to act as their defacto Covid enforcers ‘Eyes & Ears’. This particular Council declined to cooperate. ***
Canary, fink, informer, narc, rat fink, snitch, tattletale are all synonymous terms associated with people willing to report their fellow citizens to the authorities whether it’s on the school playground or the mean streets. Now our 2020 lexicon has a new term added, the dreaded ‘Karen’.
Notice how all the words for a stool pigeon are derogatory in nature? Tattletales run to the teacher to squeal on the mean kids. Collaborators turned in their fellow citizens in totalitarian regimes such as fascist Germany or Stalinst Russia. Now, busybody Karens drop a dime on their neighbors commiting the sin of Covid infractions.
Karens in the Keystone province have been busy since April when you could first start complaining about your neighbor’s pandemic faux pax. If you are interested in the records of Manitoba’s enforcement fines, they can be accessed at the Cross-Departmental Reports section of this link. Businesses are named and shamed for various Covid related infractions which run at $5000 a pop.
All across Canada, there are increasing instances of snitch induced Covid disputes. A widely published social media video from Calgary recently showing a young man, Ocean Wiesblatt, being arrested by Calgary Police Services. If you watch the numerous full length online videos, the situation devolved to the point where a policewoman lost control of herself and pointed a taser at Mr. Wiesblatt with the threat of discharging the weapon. Eventually, he was taken down, his skates forcibly cut off, and he was arrested.
This entire incident was precipitated by an informer, Twitter handle dlo-artist, who had broadcast the following:
Screenshot from dlo-artist’s deleted Twitter account
This Karen has since deleted many of their social media accounts but the person’s home address is still visible. The address is on the other end of town from the Southwood Community Association Rink. Why were they so bothered by the horrible ‘atrocity’ of an extra five people on the ice? Oh, the humanity, 90 minutes and the Covid SWAT teams aren’t dispatched yet?!?
Scrolling through D Lo 168’s patreon and clothing store accounts, which are still active, it would appear that this erotic artist is fond of drawing partially clad/naked Disney heroines in suggestive sexual positions. I would assume that the Walt Disney Company is entirely comfortable with the racy depictions of their creations and that there are no copyright issues.
This is the problem with the snitch game, what goes around comes around. Is it really any skin off your nose if this artist is making a living from ripping off Disney? But was it any of their business to call the cops on a gathering of an extra five people playing outdoor hockey?
Perhaps these Karens who are willing to snitch on Covid rule breakers are motivated by a higher cause. But the weight of evidence, especially from the totalitarian societies of the 20th Century, suggests otherwise. Informants were used to great effect in Stalinist Russia. If you felt slighted by your neighbor, desired his job, his house, or his pretty wife, all you had to do was call up the State, make up a story and late that night the SMERSH black sedans would whisk them away. Of course, you would always be nervously looking over your own shoulder in case you inadvertently crossed someone. Gradually, on a larger scale this devolves into a ‘Lord of the Flies’ situation and everyone lives in terror.
Even here in Canada, it has been recognized that police informants are only rarely to be relied upon, especially when some sort of compensation is involved.
By now it must be clear that jailhouse informers are so unreliable that they tend to undermine criminal trials… Their testimony has all too often resulted in a wrongful conviction… How many wrongful convictions must there be before the use of these informers is forbidden or, at least, confined to very rare cases.
The current trend of Canadian provinces setting up dedicated Covid Snitch lines is unsettling. Manitoba has a COVID Tip Line for tattling on your neighbors who might notice you are having guests over for Christmas supper. The Province went out of its way to authorize extra personnel with the ability to hand out tickets. Indeed, the Province went so far as to hire a private security firm to bolster the numbers.
What is worse is it seems that authorities are not just content with ‘Team Manitoba’ doing the right thing and volunteering to tattle. There are rumours that small towns now have PAID Covid snitches. I reached out to the Manitoba government and Crime Stoppers for comment. According to a spokesperson from the Manitoba Communication Services, the Province has not adopted this policy nor condones it. But, according to a Municipality in my area, the Council was approached by the Province to see if there was anyone or organization in town who would act as their Covid infraction ‘Eyes & Ears’. This particular Council declined to cooperate.
I predict this widening network of ratting out of your neighbors and local businesses over having a guest over or not wearing a mask, will not end well.
The young hockey player only mouthed off to those cops but he did not resist arrest other than passively stand on the ice. It was the two women officers who lost control and almost tasered him. How long will it be before someone gets shot and killed over something as stupid as not wearing a mask?
Then on the flip side, have you heard of the phrase ‘Snitches get Stitches’? It’s pretty easy to figure out in a small town who is ratting people out. Small town gossip travels faster than a viral video and the end result could easily end in bloodshed. Is that really the intent of health regulations that are supposed to be ‘protecting’ us?
The Covid-19 pandemic has started to unleash the brutish nastiness we are willing to inflict on our fellow man in the name of the ‘public good’. I suggest reading Christopher Browning’s novel ‘Ordinary Men‘ in order to better understand the concerns raised by people opposing the pandemic health orders and draconic enforcement measures.
Canada is lurching down a dark path and our authorities are employing tactics well known to tyrants. If you ever wondered what were the genesis points of past Canadian atrocities, we are living it now.
Blair is a personification of a ‘Jack of All Trades and Master of None’. He has held several careers and has all the T-shirts. Time to add the title Blogger to the list.
WFPS respond to multiple calls at the Maples Personal Care Home in Winnipeg during a deadly weekend in early November 2020. (Source: CTV News Winnipeg)
WHAT WENT SO TERRIBLY WRONG IN MANITOBA?
This is a candid assessment of the abysmal handling of Manitoba’s Covid-19 response on the part of our elected and appointed officials who were tasked with guiding the province through a ‘pandemic’. Frankly, everyone of them should resign in disgrace and several should be arrested and charged with criminal negligence causing death.
The Manitoba government releases numerous News Bulletins and since Jan 30, nearly 300 specifically on Covid-19. All of the following information has been gleaned from the government’s own media releases.
Here is a list and some of my commentary on the key Manitoba Covid-19 milestones:
Mar 10: Province looking for more PPE & masks for patients and caregivers
Mar 13: Started ramping up testing & opening clinics, schools to close Mar 23 to Apr 10, events with more than 250 to be cancelled
It would be interesting to see the value of Dynacare’s contract for testing in Manitoba
Mar 17: Closure of daycares, casinos, Personal Care Home (PCH) lockdowns, gatherings down to 50, Province had 266 ventilators & Health Sciences Center created a 30 bed Isolation Ward
Mar 20: State of Emergency declared (continues to this day), all gatherings limited to 50, Manitobans asked to ‘Flatten the Curve’
The Provincial government copied most of the rest of the World with their response to a virus which was heralded as apocalyptic. In essence, we all maxed out the credit cards, took out a second mortgage, quit our jobs, slammed the door shut, and hid cowering in our basements covering our ears so we couldn’t hear the wolf howling outside.
Mar 26: termed a ‘Historic Pandemic’, $4.5M to be spent combating Covid-19 anxiety
“The most important way of reducing the spread of this virus is to stay at home as much as you can,” Roussin said. “We know that this virus is spread, almost exclusively, by symptomatic people and through close, prolonged contact with those individuals.”
Mar 27: gatherings dropped to 10, Provincial highway checkpoints set on borders
Mar 30: restaurants closed to diners, non-essential businesses to close
Mar 31: School cancelled to ‘flatten the curve’, Manitobans told to ‘Stay Home’
For the Apr & May, MB closed. There was zero traffic on the roads, no school, no non-essential businesses open, everyone applied social distancing, all borders were closed, all events started to be cancelled, there was little mask use, in person government related services closed, there was a touch phobia and a run on toilet paper, disinfectant products, and hand sanitizer.
Apr 5: Province to borrow $10B, told to stay home for Easter to flatten the curve.
Apr 9: OP Safe Apart announced with enhanced fines of $486/person & $2542/business, they have since increased to $1296/person & $5000/business plus $298/person for not wearing a mask in a public place (2nd highest in the country). Snitch line & extra officers set up to enforce, more messaging to ‘Flatten the Curve’
Apr 15: Emergency Act to be strengthened & $1B to be spent on Covid-19 efforts
Apr 16: Travel to Northern MB cutoff
Apr 29: Announced plans for slow reopening starting May 4
Manitoba did quite well at keeping the wolf out. Our numbers were very low and we did not see the type of carnage in our Personal Care Homes (PCHs) that was experienced in Ontario and Quebec. You would think provincial officials would have been taking notes.
Manitoba’s current hospital capacity: 2432 Acute Care beds plus 86 ICU with expansion plans for extra 300 AC and 100 ICU emergency spaces
Ok, looks like the Province is ready in case of a Fall resurgence. Maybe all the sacrifice and unprecedented spending to ‘flatten the curve’ bought us some time.
Apr 30: PCHs to restrict staff to one home only, all 127 homes have adequate staffing in place
Good idea? Government is great at making up new rules and laws but is infamous for not understanding the practicalities for implementation. There are reasons homecare workers bounce from residence to residence. A good manager would have looked at this and known immediately that this plan would not be sustainable.
May 4: 2020/21 deficit could possibly hit $5B, MB had the highest direct debt/capita of all provinces
May 22: Gatherings allowed to increase from 25 to 50
Jun 4: MB dropped 64,200 jobs in Apr and had a 13,800 rebound in May, unemployment rate was 11.2%
Jun 23: started planning for PCH visitations
Jun 26: Northern MB opened back up
Jun 29: $280M for PCHs for fire suppression capital projects
Jun 30: Fiscal update, $2.1B spent on Covid-19 measures and touted as 2nd highest as % of GDP, $5B deficit projected if there’s a 2nd wave. 7000 Surgical procedures delayed and still not caught up
Jul 17: cases up-ticked and blamed on Hutterites. (There was a large funeral in AB with thousands of Hutterites attending. Individual Hutterites started to be discriminated against.)
This was the beginning of the government’s ‘Name & Shame’ campaign. Premier Pallister has personally gaslighted numerous individuals and businesses for not being on ‘Team Manitoba’. His melodramatic tirades berate anyone who questions his dictates. He was ‘forced’ to cancel Christmas because we just did not listen!
This has only served to divide the population and has encouraged an army of Karens eager to snitch on their neighbors because they’re not following this or that inane new pandemic rule.
Jul 21: “Thanks to the efforts of all Manitobans, we continue to lead in recovery and have among the lowest COVID-19 test positivity rates in the country,” said Pallister. “That means we can continue our careful, balanced plan to restart our economy, give people back their lives and get Manitobans back to work. Manitoba is one of the safest places in the world to go back to work and get back up on your feet,” said Pallister. “We must maintain our vigilance while growing our way out of this pandemic. I encourage all Manitobans to have their say in our next steps of restarting our economy.”
This did not age well as our rates in the fall were some of the worst in North America.
Jul 29: Front line workers to receive $1377
By this point, Manitobans were starting to move around again and businesses were open. People still kept their distance and being outdoors and camping were popular. Even on the beaches, people ‘social distanced’.
Aug 11: In the Prairie Mountain Health (PMH) region there was a slight uptick in cases related to Hutterite colonies and some Brandon clusters connected to close contacts. Vehicles for the Brandon testing site stretched for miles.
Aug 17: Advice from government was to wash hands, social distance, and the first instance to consider masks if social distancing was not possible. SuperStore and other major retailers were making mask use mandatory as of Aug 24
Aug 19: Premier Pallister, after complaints from parents, mandated masks for Grades 4-12 upon return to Sep classes
This was another knee-jerk reaction from the government. They were fine with sending the kids back to school without masks. Then immediately after an outcry from concerned parents, out came the first of the mask dictates.
You know what, I do not care if you want to wear a mask or not, fill your boots. There is some wishy washy evidence about their effectiveness that only surprisingly came out with this virus and none others, ever! But if you believe in them, fine, that’s how placebos work.I do notice that people are not avoiding each other as much anymore.
Masks also gave the government a convenient focus point to show they were serious about dealing with this thing. They could also gaslight the ‘anti-mask’ malcontents and point fingers and the spotlight away from failed government policies.
Aug 24: PMH region moved to Condition Orange for minimum 2 weeks (it lasted a month). Mandatory masks and gatherings in & out limited to 10. Cases in PMH starting Aug 6 – Sep 16 were: 18, 10, 2, 20, 11, 3, 4, 12, 25, 3, 9, 20, 2, 13, 17, 5, 24, 45, 35 (this was the day PMH moved to Orange), 10, 8, 9, 18, 31, 12, 13, 7, 8, 6, 1, 4, 3, 6, 0, 1, 2, 4, 2, 0, 1, 0, 1, 4. Hospitalizations, ICU visits, and deaths in the region barely moved.
My suspicion for the ‘high’ case days is there was mass testing at the Hutterite colonies and no surprise, they found extra infections. Obviously, because the colonies could be closed down easily, there was no wider community spread.
But the panic over case numbers gave the government the excuse to put the entire Southwest corner of the Province into a partial lockdown. Manitoba had been successful at keeping the wolf away but a little yip sent us running back to the basement.
Sep 3: travel to Northern MB was closed again and there were more mask recommendations from the Province
Schools reopened around Sep 8, and immediately cases were identified at various schools. They were mostly described as coming from outside of the school with no general outbreaks. But Sep 22, 20 cases were connected with a Winnipeg school. Mask use in Winnipeg was already increasing both in and out.
There are good reasons to get the children back into school. One big one is that there is not enough child care if they were all sent home again. But drive by a school at recess. The kids are swapping germs like they always have and the hundreds of ‘School Exposures’ list backs that up.
The Government lies that children do not spread the virus. Otherwise, why were the 20 schools of the Hanover School Division shut down? Why are the higher grades staying home an extra two weeks after Christmas vacation? But if you apply a risk analysis, society needs to take these extra cases on the chin and live with it.
Sep 18: PMH was brought back to yellow but there was a ‘concern’ about the rising case numbers in Winnipeg. PMH was touted as a success story because they ‘followed’ the rules.
Cases, cases, cases….so what? They’re juicy high numbers for public consumption & handy for gaslighting different regions but without context over how serious each case is, again, so what?
Sep 28: Winnipeg went to Orange with mandatory masks and gathering sizes of only 10 in or out.
It is glaringly obvious that despite mass mask wearing, social distancing, and hiding in our basements, the wolf had not gone away. The virus was endemic to the Province and all we had accomplished was to have it roar back as viruses typically do after the summer lull.
Starting in Oct, there were warnings that Manitobans should not gather for Thanksgiving (Oct 10). There were numerous case outbreaks all Oct in schools, prisons, and PCHs. Outbreaks in PCHs started to explode starting around Oct 20. Healthcare workers were identified as the carriers into some PCHs. Outbreaks are still continuing in numerous PCHs, schools, and prisons.
This was the point of breakdown in the PCHs and should have been sending wake-up calls to those in charge. PCH staff were burning out and bringing the infection into the residences with devastating results reminiscent of the spring carnage experienced in Ontario and Quebec. Funny how the PPE protocols did not protect the elderly in the scores of homes that have experienced outbreaks.
Oct 7: During the Speech from the Throne: “This year has been like no other, yet we have weathered it better than most,” said Pallister. “The resilience of Manitoba’s economy, finances, public services, and most of all, our people, have stood out strong. I am confident that if we keep working together, guided by Manitoba values, we will come out of this pandemic stronger and more prosperous.”
It didn’t take long for Pallister to be caught out in this lie.
Oct 9: An emergency $500M infusion of cash sought by government to add to $1.577B already spent on Covid-19
Oct 19: Province mandated more business closures, reduced gathering sizes, and liquor establishment curfews in Winnipeg
Oct 26: travel to Northern MB shut down again
Nov 2: Premier Pallister announced MB was ready for a 2nd wave, there was a focus on more testing. In Winnipeg, if one household resident was symptomatic all residents had to isolate pending a negative test result. Exemptions were made for healthcare & First Responders if they were asymptomatic. Winnipeg went to a hard lockdown.
Nov 5: The Premier emphasized that he was bringing the non-compliance hammer down and encouraged Manitobans to snitch on their neighbors. A contract with a private security company, G4S, was being written up so a total of 3300 government personnel could issue Covid-19 tickets. Meanwhile, PCH orders were changed to exempt workers from only working in one home.
Nov 12: The entire Province went to condition Red and hard lockdowns
Nov 13: A team was being sent to Maples PCH to determine what went wrong. Over 50 of the 200 residents have passed away so far.
The staff at Maples conducted a fo’c’sle sitdown mutiny when they en-mass called in sick and contacted 911 numerous times on the evening of Nov 6. People can only work in impossible conditions for so long before they give up in despair.
Where were the Health inspectors who should have been keeping tabs on a system that was starting to fall apart? PCHs had gone to hard lockdown mid-Oct. When things came to a head at Maples, well over 30 PCHs had declared outbreaks.
In the Navy, you are taught to stay ahead of the Ship instead of surfing behind her in the wake. The Navy also has a Board of Inquiry after every major incident in order to assign blame and to roll heads.
People need to go to jail for what happened in these homes.
The average age of Covid-19 mortality is exactly the same as the average life expectancy! If the media wasn’t blaring about the pandemic, would we even know there was one?
Dec 8: Premier Pallister cancels Christmas and New Year’s. He continues to ‘Name & Shame’ non-compliant offenders. He did let up on drive-in religious services after some high profile church incidents.
Frankly, my belief is if Pallister had enough troops, he would place all of MB under house arrest. Thankfully, he only has 3300 ticketing goons and a volunteer army of snitching Karens.
Dec 9: $7.7M announced for PCHs to help with staffing and operating expenses
This latest funding announcement, is too little too late. It was identified from day one who the virus was going to be worst towards. But instead of being proactive, the Province has allowed the system to self-monitor itself and they are always playing catch-up.
Ken Waddell has been writing some scathing editorials at the Neepawa Banner over the Government’s handling of Covid-19. In many of them, he has mentioned some proactive steps the health officials could have been touting. One in particular is the steps taken by the local hog plant which has kept the virus out. So here’s a question, how can the meat plants be so successful when healthcare ‘professionals’ are failing so badly?
Here is the answer. Healthcare in Canada sucks and has been that way for decades. PCH service is even worse. Our much vaunted systems are run by incompetent administrators who know how to ‘play the game’ instead of actually knowing how to run things. Our elected officials care more about looking like they are doing something rather than actually doing something.
Increasingly, western governments and their populations have become risk adverse. Government has sought to control more and more of our lives. Then a moderate crisis came along and their go-to response was to SHUT EVERYTHING DOWN! They went all in with a philosophy of making the goal zero cases yielding zero deaths. The population is going along with it, so why change course or admit you were wrong?
To be perfectly blunt, old, sick people die. Also, to be direct, the West is so divorced from reality they cannot handle this simple fact of life. The wolf eventually gets us all. Sadly, most people are so narcissistic they only feign concern for the elderly. The most strident of Karens are concerned only for their own well-being.
The numbers for Manitoba show we are dying from Covid-19 at the SAME EXACT RATE AS NORMAL LIFE EXPECTANCY! We literally have no abnormal death spikes, our hospitals and ICUs are not being overrun or in danger of being overrun. Unless the media told you, you wouldn’t even know we were in a pandemic.
Of course, the virus is dangerous mainly to the old and sick but instead of targeted solutions with acceptable risk/benefit outcomes, we have gone with an untenable zero risk model. This will only result in an endless game of whack-a-mole which we will never win and ruin the Province and thousands of lives. The cure is fast becoming worse than the disease. Maybe a fast roll-out of an effective vaccine will get us off this ride of horrors.
Heaven help us if we ever have to face an actual wolf at the door.
Blair is a personification of a ‘Jack of All Trades and Master of None’. He has held several careers and has all the T-shirts. Time to add the title Blogger to the list.
Mathematics is a joy to me. It does not care about your feelings or beliefs. 2 + 2 = 4 and does not change because of your gender, sexual orientation, or skin colour. If it ever does change because of political virtue signaling, then your car will not start and planes will fall out of the sky.
Canada is chest deep into the Covid-19 crisis and we should have some numbers to more confidently project what has happened and what may be in store. Unlike the Imperial College models that were projecting 1% of the country’s population was going to outright die, so far Canada is well short of that at 12,301 deaths (Dec 02) vice the apocalyptic number of 370,000.
If you are a fan of the Road Runner cartoons, there inevitably comes a point where Wile E. Coyote heads right off a cliff. He is okay until he looks down, then the cruel hand of gravity reaches up and down he goes despite all his arm flapping. So in spite of all the arm flapping on the part of politicians, their attendant medical professionals, and cheerleading Karens, what are the observable mortality numbers saying to us?
The caveat in this presentation is did I introduce any personal bias? I am well aware of the phrase, “Lies, damnedlies, and statistics“, so I attempted to refrain from not letting the numbers speak for themselves. I did have the bias that I have seen presentations from Ivor Cummins and Genevieve Briand, Johns Hopkins University on the numbers from the States and Europe. I wanted to see what Canadian numbers were doing.
So with the preamble out of the way, let’s dive in.
For the last two decades, Canadian mortality has been increasing at a relatively steady rate of +3475 deaths/yr. Some years are worse than others, some better. Our population has been growing and the Boomers are getting older, so this makes sense.
The big killers of Canadians are Cancer and Heart Attack & Stroke. Cancer has been increasing at about 920 deaths/yr while Heart Attack & Stroke have decreased 260 deaths/yr. Cancer became the #1 killer after 2007.
Accidents, Chronic Lower Respiratory Disease, and Influenza & Pneumonia are next up but orders of magnitude behind the big killers.
Strangely, Accidents have been making serious increases over the last 20 years.
Flu & Pneumonia kick along at the 6000-8000 range each year.
As a side note, suicide rates saw a slight uptick over the decades from 3600 to about 4000/yr. It’ll be interesting to see the numbers after this year with all the clinical depression due to the crisis and government actions.
Now, let’s add in what 2020 has been doing so far this year:
The total mortalities reported across Canada comes to 207,155. Our expected mortality given an average death rate of an extra 3475/yr should be 210,630. When reading the StatCan table, the numbers are not complete so the far yellow line is a guess that 75% of deaths have been tabulated. So by year end, that projection is about 276,000. That’s substantially short of what would be expected but who knows what lag time there is with respect to StatCan receiving correct numbers.
The second to last set of bars are the actual reported 2020 numbers to date.
Now here’s the weird part, which was also picked up by the Johns Hopkins researcher. Cancer and Heart & Stoke numbers are fairly linear with a slight dip from winter down to summer, then climbing. When looking at the provinces with numbers through to Sep, there are no large upticks that should skew these estimations badly.
After taking the first half year numbers and doubling them, you should have a good projection of the year’s totals. My assumption was any numbers past June may have not been finalized. So with Cancer and a growth rate of 920/yr, we would expect 81,072 deaths. Heart Attack & Stroke with a decrease of 260/yr would be 70,850.
But the projection of Cancer deaths after six months of stats is only 75,150 which is a shortfall of 5,922 deaths. Heart Attacks & Stroke is projected at 62,510 which is also a shortfall of 8,340 deaths, for a total of 14,262 missing deaths by the end of the year.
Did we cure cancer this year and in all the hubbub of Covid-19, someone forgot to report on it? Coincidentally, our Covid-19 deaths are just over 12,000. Weird, eh?
So, how do Canadians die on a month to month basis?
Jan, Dec, Mar, and Feb are the worst months for mortality. Some years there are spikes and some years are calm. Every 3 to 4 years there is a bad spike in Jan. On the opposite years, it looks like Dec gives the spike.
In general, Canadians die the most with the biggest swings starting in Jan then it calms down into the summer and gradually picks up through the fall into winter.
Feb & Mar 1998 was a bad year that coincided with a bad flu season that year.
2013, 2015, & 2018 saw bad Jan spikes. 2018 started off badly with spikes in Jan, Feb, & Mar. This coincided with a bad 2018 flu season which was termed the worst in five years.
So, let’s add in the deaths for 2020 and see what we get:
Obviously, there were the big jumps in Apr & May attributed to when Covid-19 got really bad, particularly in ON & QC in the Long Term Care (LTC) facilities. But there were already significant upticks in Jan, Feb, & Mar. Something was already going on and usually upticks at this time of year seem to signal something going on with the flu.
Jun seemed to flatten and decrease. Jul and Sep really nosed down but again, those numbers might not be finalized yet. But it is a good indication that after a quick rush of deaths, things may have settled and even decreased.
Here’s a great, little interactive tool on the StatCan website:
Obvious Covid-19 spike for 2020. But compare that spike to Jan’s 2018 flu influenced spike, 6745 to 6630. I don’t recall any crazy lockdowns or slaughtering of our economy because of 2018’s mortalities, maybe I just missed it. Then in mid-Jun, death rates are back within five year norms. When did all those mandatory mask rules come in again?
2020 numbers drop off out through Sep but because of incomplete numbers.
The cool thing about this interactive tool is you can check out each province. I’ll let you scroll through the rest but the most striking point is this was not a Canadian pandemic. This was a Quebec pandemic. Ontario only had a bit of a bump in comparison. This would coincide with the bloodbath in their LTC homes.
BC had a peak of deaths mid-Mar and AB has no pattern other than a slight overall increase of 30-40 deaths each month. You wouldn’t even know anything was going on in the rest of the country.
Logarithmic scale is used to show the rate of change. When you go to the interactive chart on the Worldometer site, the Covid-19 deaths were small but grew quickly until the curve ‘flattened’ at the end of May. But the rate of growth was not exponential as everyone feared when governments all hit the panic button. In fact, Mar 18, the curve was already curling over on its own. Considering Canadian Provinces had not instituted Emergency Orders even by that point, you have to ask if all those measures did anything.
Also, since we are in a so-called ‘2nd Wave’, ummmm, where’s the evidence for that? The rate of change in the death rate is almost dead flat but our lockdown measures are stricter than ever and Christmas is going to be cancelled. Sure the media is shouting about the case count each day but if Canadians aren’t falling over dead in the streets it sure seems like a nothing burger.
So, I ask again, what has all the arm flapping here in Canada been about? By the mortality stats, this does not appear to be a particularly bad year compared to even 2018. By the fall numbers and historical norms, we’re past the bad spike and into regular death rates.
Here’s my take away point: politicians, their health experts plus the media have access to this info. Everyone does because it is public and StatCan does an excellent job gathering numbers. But no one hears anything but doom and gloom. This tells me that our overlords are either incompetent or distorting the truth on purpose. One thing for sure, the precedent is set for the next time a little bump in the road shows up. Once governments see how easy it is to rip away your freedoms, they will repeat.
Unfortunately, many Canadians without cushy government jobs or with the ability to work from home are desperately trying to not look down. They know that no amount of arm flapping is going to save them from the big splat.
Blair is a personification of a ‘Jack of All Trades and Master of None’. He has held several careers and has all the T-shirts. Time to add the title Blogger to the list.
