COVID death toll, doubled Did someone forward you this newsletter? Sign up here to get it delivered weekday mornings. Canada's accurate COVID-19 death toll could be double what current statistics capture, according to a study from the Royal Society of Canada. The Canadian Press reports that the much higher death rate in Canada's long-term care facilities, compared to other high-income countries, is what spurred the research. The study parsed excess death statistics, the pattern of COVID deaths, surveillance antibody testing that offers a snapshot of undetected COVID infections and cremation data that showed many more people were dying at home. The researchers found that two-thirds of COVID deaths in the community—often in poor or racialized communities or homes with essential workers and multigenerational families—may have been missed. "If we'd had some sense early on of who was dying where, if we had had a sense of just how many deaths were actually occurring...maybe people would have started looking sooner or listening sooner to people in communities who were saying, 'It's really really bad here, people are dying,'" said Dr. Tara Moriarty, working group lead for the study. The church won't pay up: CBC has a story on the "failed effort" to make the Catholic Church in Canada pay for the enormous harms and suffering of the residential school system it helped to administer for decades. Under the terms of the Indian Residential School Survivor Agreement signed in 2005—during which negotiations the Catholic Church was more noticeably resistant than the other religious denominations at the table—the Catholic Church was required to pay $25 million to compensate survivors. But a tiny clause inserted into the agreement stated that the church would make its "best efforts" to pay, and that turned into a massive loophole. CBC details how the Diocese of Saskatoon, for example, raised the money to build a $28.5 million new cathedral, while raising only $34,650 for survivor compensation. Nationally, Catholics in Canada have donated less than $4 million of the total sum owed, or 30 cents per church member. "After several years, the federal government told the Catholic Church to pay up," CBC reports. "Instead, church officials hired one of Canada's top lawyers, who, in a private court hearing, successfully argued that the country's Catholic churches had tried their best and had no more to give." Shuffle and shut up?: Calgary Herald columnist Don Braid reports on the widespread speculation that embattled Alberta Premier Jason Kenney is gearing up for a cabinet shuffle. The rank-and-file of Kenney's United Conservative Party have been roiled by uprising and infighting over the premier's handling of the pandemic, and various cabinet ministers and caucus members have been tasked with summer outreach tours to try to quell the discontent. Braid suggests Kenney could cultivate more loyalty by naming some new cabinet ministers, but the big thing he needs to do is just go away for a bit, after a year of endless gloomy press conferences. "...He’s overexposed. People connect his face and voice with bad news," Braid writes. "The premier and the public need a break." Horrible heat: The "heat dome" that has been baking western Canada, toppling temperature records like dominoes and carrying deadly consequences for some of the most vulnerable is moving eastward, bringing its punishing conditions to the interior of British Columbia and across the Prairies. The numbers are apocalyptic: the village of Lytton, B.C. recorded the highest temps ever seen in Canada, at 47.9 C on Monday, while Nahanni Butte saw the highest mercury ever recorded in the Northwest Territories, at 38.1 C. B.C. saw a spike in 911 calls requiring paramedics to respond to heat exhaustion and heat stroke, and Burnaby RCMP said they had responded to 25 sudden death calls in a 24-hour period, many of them seniors and heat-related. "There's really no hyperbole strong enough for this," said Armel Castellan, a meteorologist with Environment Canada. "We're just flummoxed with how much these records are breaking." As surreal as these conditions are, experts say escalating climate change will make this sort of crisis increasingly common. PHAC fracas: In her latest "Process Nerd" outing for iPolitics, Kady O'Malley unpacks what could happen if the showdown between Public Health Agency of Canada President Iain Stewart and the House of Commons over documents related to the firing of two scientists at a high-security lab lands in federal court. Spoiler: it could get dramatic. "From the perspective of those who see this as a make-or-break test of a key parliamentary privilege, the best outcome would be for the judge to take one look at the details of the application, spot the words 'House of Commons,' and 'order to produce,' and punt it right back to Parliament to sort it out," she writes. "It would also set the stage for another unprecedented live-action demonstration of parliamentary privilege in action: namely, dispatching the sergeant-at-arms to collect the unredacted documents from the agency, by force." You-smack-us USMCA?: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and U.S. President Joe Biden engaged in the time-honoured tradition of staged international sports chirping by challenging each other to a yet-to-be-determined wager on the outcome of the Stanley Cup Final. Biden's tweet—"You're on pal"—is so thoroughly Biden that it's impossible to read the text without hearing it in his voice. The Tampa Bay Lightning now lead the Montreal Canadiens 1-0 in the series; no word yet on the terms of the political smack talk. —Shannon Proudfoot | 
