At long last, a fiscal update is here

Chrystia Freeland's about to have a very big day

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Today's word of the day: economy. At 3:55 p.m., Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland will give a long-awaited update on the state of Canada's finances. Since the government has not released a federal budget this year, opting instead for a "fiscal snapshot" in July, this will mark the first serious economic address since the pandemic began.

The speech will likely focus on two main themes: detailed projections for the coming fiscal years, and laying the groundwork for high-stakes Liberal promises, namely an affordable childcare strategy, national pharmacare and action on climate change. According to an anonymous CBC source , the feds will also earmark cash for Canada's battered tourism and airline industries, long-term care homes and green infrastructure developments. How much will all this cost? How much have we already spent? Finally, we'll get answers to these questions. One thing we do already know: while Freeland has previously said (in vague terms) that there are limits to how much the government is willing to spend, today's speech will, alas, not include a fiscal anchor.

The coming weeks on the Hill could get hectic, too, once the Liberals follow up their economic plans with legislation in the House of Commons. With two weeks left before the House adjourns for the holidays, fast-tracking stimulus spending will probably result in more cries of rushed bills by opposition parties and 11th-hour negotiations with the NDP. (In other words, a seamless continuation of the last two months.)

Reporting for duty. Turning to COVID-19 news, on Friday we learned that a military general with 30 years' experience will oversee Canada's vaccine rollout. His name is Maj.-Gen. Dany Fortin, and he has, in fact, already been in charge of this operation for several months. His team of planners, pharmacists, health-care administrators, engineers and IT experts have been quietly coordinating cold storage spaces, staffing requirements and other logistics within the Public Health Agency of Canada. Their goal is allegedly consistent with what we've been told already: doses could be administered as early as January 2021, with most Canadians vaccinated by September.

With that announcement made, Canada's biggest concerns are no longer which vaccines will work (since we have deals with three potential winners), but rather when we'll actually get them. After Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced last week that Canada "no longer has any domestic production capability" to create vaccines, a flurry of media reports have come out over the weekend, attempting to reassure the public that vaccines are, at least, still arriving on time in 2021. Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs Dominic LeBlanc told The West Block that Canada is "certainly in the top five " countries in line to receive vaccine shipments. But the co-founder of Moderna, one of the big vaccine creators, was a little less generous with his words of comfort: "Canada is not at the back of the line," he told CBC News.

While we're waiting for a vaccine, however, Canadians are still dying in record numbers across the country. In Maclean's, Amir Attaran writes that Trudeau should have long ago issued an emergency order, forcing minimum health standards for provinces to abide by. If the provinces fail to meet these standards, they would be at the behest of a crackdown enforced by the fedederal government, including mandatory masks, curfews and business closures. If this seems strict—well, that's the point.

If Trudeau seems content letting the premiers do their thing, it's because he isn't taking much flak for the pandemic, polls-wise. Despite skyrocketing COVID numbers, the PM's own approval ratings are still holding strong at 60 per cent, according to an Ipsos Reid poll released yesterday.

Gaming for good. On Saturday, NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh and U.S. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joined in a three-hour bout of Among Us, a popular video game, and ended up raising more than US$200,000 for a slew of charities. Among Us is based on party games like "Mafia", where players try and figure out which of them is secretly the killer. Unfortunately for Singh, he was randomly selected as the villain more often than he would've liked.

America's Trojan Horse. Who could have imagined that an Internet startup, born fewer than 20 years ago, would be the breeding ground for conspiracy theories spouted by the president of the United States? In his latest column for Maclean's, Andrew MacDougall pinpoints how social media companies, the tech darlings of America, have become the focal point of its own demise.

Eager beaver. It is traditional for the prime minister's office to release a "read-out" of conversations he has with important people—summaries, basically, outlining what the discussions were about. It is less common for those read-outs to be released before the conversations actually happen. Yet that's what happened on Friday evening, when the PMO sent a read-out of a conversation with Conservative Leader Erin O'Toole that included a sly comment about how Trudeau "raised concerns about COVID-19 misinformation being promoted by Conservative Members of Parliament." O'Toole's comms director, Melanie Paradis, called out the PMO for firing off the read-out 30 minutes before the conversation even took place. The excuse? An erroneously released placeholder. The actual read-out describes a conversation about China, Joe Biden, Keystone XL, climate change and COVID vaccine distribution. Alas, if the two men did indeed talk about COVID-19 misinformation (or even the premature fake read-out), the record doesn't show it.

—Michael Fraiman

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