COVID-19? Re-Opening Quebec

"Our challenge is to gradually restart the economy without restarting the pandemic."
"The idea is to gradually add workers and analyze the effect on the contagion."
"But one thing is clear: If we want our plan to work, we need to continue our efforts of physical distancing, and we need to continue to protect the most vulnerable."
Quebec Premier Francois Legault

"Will I be sending my kids to school [in Montreal] on May 19? No. [There are costs to reopening that include risks to children and parents, teachers and staff with pre-existing conditions, and evidence of emerging complications for kids who get COVID-19]."
"[The province has not proven itself capable of doing widespread testing for the general population and has a dismal record of contract tracing, which means] we are basically flying blind."
"And reopening in Montreal of all places? Montreal has the highest number of cases in the country."
Claire Trottier, education specialist, professor, McGill University, Department of Microbiology and Immunity

“The best option here is to send the smallest kids back to school."
"We have lots of evidence that there are bad things that happen because the kids are stuck at home, like their parents can’t work, and kids who require special services are not getting those special services."
"We have a quarter million kids in Quebec who rely on school breakfasts and are not getting those."
Epidemiologist Jay Kaufman, department of epidemiology, biostatistics and occupational health, faculty of medicine, McGill University

A mobile hospital in partnership with the Canadian Red Cross is set up in the Jacques-Lemaire Arena to help care for patients with the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) from long-term centres (CHSLDs), in Montreal, Quebec, Canada April 26, 2020. Christinne Muschi / Reuter

Most Canadian provinces have fared well in their efforts to control the spread of COVID-19. British Columbia, where the epidemic first raised its ugly head, has seen declining rates of infection. Alberta appears to have SARS-CoV-2 under control but for a number of outbreaks in oil camps and poultry processing plants. Saskatchewan and Manitoba both of which have had very few numbers of COVID are preparing to reopen their economies. On Canada's Eastern shore, the COVID outbreaks have been well managed and relatively few in number.

The country's two most populous provinces -- Quebec and Ontario -- have borne the brunt of the COVID invasion, with Quebec accounting for far more cases and deaths than any other province, including Ontario. Yet it is Quebec that is preparing to reopen its schools on May 11, while Ontario takes a more cautious approach and has designated the end of May for its openings.

Canada's total number of confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus to date stands at 50,000 with 3,000 deaths. Quebec's numbers are daunting, with 26,594 confirmed cases and 1,761 deaths. The death figures for Canada overall and Quebec in particular are derived in large part from the elderly and health-compromised who live and are cared for in long-term care facilities and old-age homes.

Quebec's decision to move swiftly to reopen its economy have caught other provincial governments by surprise, although at some point in May most other governments have targeted their own re-openings; reasonable enough given their lower statistics of epidemic numbers. And all are cautioning that if matters turn awry with early opening, they will swiftly revert back to the status quo.

Premier François Legault has said the province will open elementary schools and daycares outside of Montreal as of May 11 and in Montreal, Laval and Longueuil on May 19 only if it felt it is in control of the coronavirus outbreak. Paul Chiasson / THE CANADIAN PRESS

New Brunswick has had no new cases to report for the past ten days, yet it has decided to plan for a more gradual re-opening than Quebec whose latest report was 775 new cases and 83 new deaths on Tuesday alone. However, Premier Legault has announced that most retail stores will be clear to reopen on May 4. Only Montreal itself which has been hardest hit in the province, will wait another week for its re-openings on May 11.

Quebec accounts for half of the entire country's COVID-19 cases, and close to 60 percent of COVID-19 deaths, with 23 percent of the country's population base. Despite which officials have the impression that the peak of the initial wave of infections has arrived and they're now on the downward curve. Since lockdown measures were implemented, about 1.2 million Quebecers have been unemployed.

At Bombardier Inc., one of the province's largest manufacturers, manufacturing is to be gradually resumed from May 11, with its 22,000 employees expected to return to work in the next few weeks. The company is prepared to implement such precautions as daily employee temperature checks, tool disinfecting stations, installation of Plexiglas shields. "Are people concerned? It would be a lie if I said no. But the majority are happy to go back to work", said Serge Dupont, assistant to the Quebec director of Unifor.

Quebec has already allowed residential construction to resume. It plans to let the whole construction industry resume activities by the end of May. (Ivanoh Demers/Radio-Canada)

According to Jack Jedwab, president of the Association for Canadian Studies based in Montreal, part of the reason for Quebec decision-making might be accounted for given francophones appear less fearful of the virus. His organization worked with the polling firm Leger Marketing, tracking weekly public sentiment during the pandemic. The most recent round of polling found 47 percent of francophone responders fearful of acquiring the virus in comparison to 59 percent of anglophone respondents.

"I think there is also a cultural dimension to it, but you know, it's hard to measure that dimension", commented Jedwab. "Life goes on", said Premier Legault when he announced schools and nurseries would reopen. And with that re-opening, the rest of the country will be viewing what happens in Quebec over the next few weeks, and how it might pertain to their own more gradual plans for re-opening their economies.

Quebec plans to begin allowing some retail stores to open on May 4. (Ivanoh Demers/Radio-Canada )

"Money is an Addictive Substance"

"[Many of the super-wealthy have been] navigating work and life in sixth gear for decades."
"Once they have no financial need to work -- are 'post-economic' -- as some say in San Francisco -- they have trouble shifting into lower gears."
Tim Ferris, life-hacking writer

"I don't know that I have an exact threshold on what amount of money someone should have."
"But on some level, no one deserves to have that much money."
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder, $70 billion

"A lot of Wall Street traders didn't create anything -- all they did was trade on the value and ingenuity of what other people created, so at the end of the day, what can they point to that's tangible?"
"All they have is money. So they go out and buy a house and a fancy car, and that feels good for a short while, then they buy a second house and a fancier car."
"Because all they have is what they earn. They're defined by it."
Jordan Belfort, inspiration for "The Wolf of Wall Street"

Tim Graham / Getty

F.Scott Fitzgerald, the American writer born in the 19th Century and published in the early 20th, was fascinated by the wealth and status of American millionaires. He became famous himself, albeit not wealthy, as a writer. As for his conclusion about the different mindset of the wealthy, he put it this way: "Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different."

Where once being a millionaire was an unattainable goal for the financially ambitious, millionaires now abound, and it is billionaires whose inaccessible wealth and the influence and prestige that comes with it, as a manifestation of a mysterious entrepreneurial skill that fascinates the public. And as they amass their fortunes and keep getting richer and richer, the puzzle is, why make the effort once their finances have reached such a stratospheric level of achievement? Why not just enjoy what they have amassed and set aside the focus on acquiring more, for how much after all, does anyone need?

The answer to that appears to be that it is not the considerable wealth that motivates them to continue striving to acquire more, but the fact that the wealth itself is symptomatic of their achievement which has set them apart and above, and apart and above is where they want to remain. The chief executive of Apple, with an estimated wealth of hundreds of millions wakes up at 3:45 a.m. to begin his quotidian effort to leave his competitors in the dust. Space X, and Tesla's Elon Musk, worth about $23 billion, decided to cut back his working hours from 120 hours weekly to a "manageable" 80 or 90 hours. 'Getting a life' to these high achievers is nonsensical; they hotly pursued the life they attained.

"Driven people are just driven", noted Fox Business TV anchor, Maria Bartiromo. "They want to stay fresh and relevant, and to do that, it requires consistent practice. If you want to win, you need to be all in." Make sense? If all you focus on is acquiring more wealth and achieving the vaunted status of ultra-wealthy you join a rare enclave, elevated in status through the acquisition of wealth beyond the dreams of ordinary people ... or even most over-achievers ... through following a unique vision and promoting it endlessly. 

Warren Buffett has given away a staggering 71.1 percent of his wealth

A Harvard University survey of 4,000 millionaires discovered that those whose financial capital is $8 million or grater tended to be no more satisfied than their $1-million counterparts. Robert Frank, wealth editor for CNBC stated "For most people enough is enough. But there is another group of people, no mater what they have, they have to keep going. I call them 'scorekeepers;' They're truly driven by competitive zeal." That material needs have been achieved is irrelevant among the very wealthy, according to Edward Wolff, professor of economics at New York University.

"Among the rarefied group of the extreme rich, social status depends on net worth. Their enhanced wealth allows them to make substantial charitable contributions to institutions like museums and concert halls that may lead to having a building or the like named after them." How's that for motivation to dispense with spare cash by having your name immortalized? Oddly, close to 20 percent of the world's most wealthy people having assets of $30-million or greater, live in ten cities globally, and it seems six of those cities are located in the United States.

"If you're an alcoholic you're going to take one drink, two drinks, five drinks, six drinks to feel the buzz. Well, when  you get a million dollars, you need 10 million dollars to feel like a king."
"Money is an addictive substance."
Steven Berglas, psychologist

Should Jeff Bezos with his $110-billion nest-egg make a bad investment on Amazon delivery drones, he won't be forced to auction off his $65-million Gulfstream Jet. He can just casually write off the loss. According to Dr.T.Byram Karasu, emeritus professor of psychiatry, Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, apex entrepreneurs and financiers are "adrenaline-fueled, transgressive people who tend to have laser-focused digital brains, always in transactional mode, and the bigger they get, the lonelier they are, because they [are isolated]."

The New York Taxi Ponzi Scheme

"The whole thing was like a Ponzi scheme because it totally depended on the value going up."
"The part that wasn't fair was the guy who's buying is an immigrant. They were conned."
Haywood Miller, debt specialist, New York

"People love to blame banks for things that happen because they're big bad banks."
"We didn't do anything, in my opinion, other than try to help small business people become successful."
Robert Familant, former head, Progressive Credit Union

"It was a safe and stable asset, and it provided a good life for those of us who were lucky enough to buy them [taxi medallions]."
"Not an easy life, but a good life. And then, everything changed."
Guy Roberts, in the Taxi industry since 1979

Symbolic coffins at a Wednesday protest by New York taxi drivers to mourn a series of recent suicides.

Mary Altaffer/AP

Years of driving for bosses he hated spurred Mohammed Hoque, 48, an immigrant from Bangladesh, to move up from driving taxis in New York City for others for the past nine years, to aspiring to acquire a medallion, the city permit that would legalize a yellow cab of his own. So when a businessman contacted him with an offer to sell a medallion, he bit. The offer was $50,000 would earn him the medallion, if he paid it immediately. For the rest, the businessman would help him obtain a loan.

Feverishly emptying his bank account, borrowing from friends, he rushed to the man's office to be handed a stack of papers in exchange for his cheque. Mr. Hoque signed, and left. That he had signed a contract requiring him to pay $1.7 million in total for the medallion escaped his notice. This is a man who had made about $30,000 for the year, 2014. Four years later, he had paid about $400,000 into the medallion fund, leaving $915,000 still owing, along with interest.

"It's an inhuman life. I drive and drive and drive. But I don't know what my destination is", he said, as he brought his third child home from hospital. Home, where his little family lived in the same cramped apartment; he had gained nothing, nothing at all. Who to fault? Well, Uber and Lyft come to mind. Pulling the taxi rug out from under drivers and fleet owners, right?

Evidently not. In the past year alone, eight suicides were noted, by New York City taxi drivers. An investigation by The New York Times appears to have uncovered an artificial price manipulation of taxi medallions; a bubble that would eventually burst. It took ten years, but it did. Thousands of drivers were channeled into reckless loans and hundreds of millions of dollars were extracted from them first, and then the market collapsed.

Drivers assembled at City Hall on Wednesday afternoon called for "regulation now," and demanded that the city "stop Uber's greed."  Miranda Katz for Wired

The drivers were left perplexed and in poverty, and still legally owing money on their medallions which had become worthless. But profits were seen in abundance for bankers, brokers, lawyers, investors, fleet owners and debt collectors. Mostly immigrant families were stripped of savings and destroyed by crushing debt. Over 950 medallion owners filed for bankruptcy, with thousands more barely managing to carry on.

Between 2002 and 2014 a medallion rose in price to over one million from $200,000, underwritten by banks and loosely regulated private lenders who wrote risky loans, encouraging refinancing, similar to what happened with the housing market crash that heralded the global economic meltdown of 2008. Driver incomes changed little, however.

It was the illusion and the trust that they owned something valuable that would enhance their earning potential that kept them in thrall to the system; hope over reason.

During that period, about four thousand drivers bought medallions, mostly of immigrant background. A Pakistani immigrant thought he was buying a car, ending up with a $780,000 medallion loan leaving him impoverished and unable to pay his rent, while a Bangladeshi immigrant was told to fabricate his income on his loan application and he eventually lost his medallion. When a Haitian immigrant worked exhaustively to hand over monthly payments he went bankrupt when he discovered he had been only paying interest.

Originally, taxi medallions were created by the city in 1937 to deal with the fact that unlicensed cabs crowded the city. City officials designated around 12,000 specialized tin plates, making it against the law to operate a taxi without one bolted on the car hood. Each medallion was sold for $10. They could be sold by those who bought them just as any other kind of asset would be. Soon an industry grew around he medallions where entrepreneurs bought up nonindependent medallions to build fleets, controlling the market.

Drivers working for fleets worked a typical 60 hours weekly, earning less than minimum wage, receiving no benefits. The legend thrived that driving could work as a pathway to join the middle class and where drivers could eventually buy an independent medallion to increase earnings and give them stability in an asset they could sell at some future date to fund their retirement years. At that time those who borrowed money for a medallion submitted a large down payment and had to repay within five to ten  years.

Since the city released no new medallions for a half-century, values climbed steadily; $100,000 in 1984 and $200,000 by 1997. And then in the early 2000s a new cab industry generation took the reins; sons of longtime industry leaders who had new money-making ideas where the lenders accepted smaller down payments and eventually none at all, because interest on loans would provide all the incentive for the lenders and more, to essentially make money hand-over-fist.

"It got to a point where we didn't even check their income or credit score. It didn't matter", reminisced Monte Silberger, a former credit union official. As well, lenders encouraged borrowers to refinance when medallion prices rose, and as standards were relaxed even more, returns increased. Not through a rise in interest rates, but by enforcing a mix of extra costs; origination fees, legal fees, financing fees, refinancing fees.

Loan lengths were extended, with deals developed to last 50 years; some saw interest-only loans that could go on ad infinitum. Until 2014, when the bubble burst and medallion values fell, leaving borrowers to ask for breaks, but lenders called in their loans, deciding to leave the business. Some seized medallions and resold them profitably, others tried to get borrowers to surrender their homes.

As Mr. Hoqe said, it was an inhumane strategy for life.

Trudeau's Pan-Canadian Framework on Clean Growth and Climate Change

"Today Justin Trudeau unveiled his election gimmick to try to trick Canadians into paying higher taxes on basic necessities."
"Canadians have known all along that Justin Trudeau's carbon tax was just a tax plan dressed up as an emissions plan. Now we know it's really also just an election gimmick."
Conservative opposition leader Andrew Scheer

"Never believe a politician who tells you he will save you money by hiking your taxes."
"The people of Canada are too smart to believe that Trudeau's phony rebates are anything more than a temporary vote-buying scheme that will be discarded once the election is over. In contrast, the carbon tax rip-off is forever."
Ontario Premier Doug Ford

"We see it as a cynical vote-buying scheme using your money to buy your vote."
"This is Saskatchewan. Most of us have to drive a lot. We drive to work, we drive for our kids' recreation and their school, and we have to heat our homes on some very cold days in this province."
"This is all going to cost a whole lot more now."
Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe

As initiatives go, in Canada setting out to do its part in the international scheme to alleviate the belief in man-made assaults on nature leading to climate change, the latest scheme blueprinted by the Liberal government is as inept and irrational as someone's hideous nightmare in which there is no escape from an oncoming juggernaut meant to crush social and economic dissent from a Canada mostly slack-jawed with amazement that credibility of government decision-making cannot possibly descend any lower. Fighting greenhouse gases? Taking positive steps to reduce carbon emissions?

Since we can't stop breathing and producing carbon dioxide, and the world's vegetation will continue to absorb C02 and convert sunlight to oxygen to produce the cleansed air we breathe, we'll just have to make do with paying more taxes under guise of combating global warming and wait for those government cheques that will refund to us ostensibly more per household than we've expended in fighting the good fight, allowing the Liberal government to claim it has lived up to its Paris climate obligations by playing Trudeau's shell game.



Trudeau's 'Pan-Canadian' initiative looks pretty flaccid, particularly to those provinces that have stated unequivocally that they have opted out of a joint plan that is supposed to include the federal government, the provinces and the territories in an agreed-upon blueprint for reducing carbon emissions; which is to say the 1.6 percent Canada is responsible for on a worldwide scale. Only it appears that half of Canada's provinces want nothing to do with this particular plan and more are on the cusp of joining them.

Latterly the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Changed made it official; for a carbon tax to be useful to save us from no-turning-back global warming it would require said tax to begin at $135 a tonne and rise to $5,500 a tonne by 2030; in other words, it would beggar the global economy and send it into a backward spin. Since the tax the Liberals are levying begins at $20, to rise to $50 it is clearly inadequate in the global scale of saving the Earth from humankind's depredations. Despite which, the Liberal government is confident it is achieving its Paris promise.

Oh, the pain of it ... yet another tax imposed by a government incapable of restraining itself from spending whatever it acquires through taxation, and more, as the deficit looms and the nation's debt blooms grotesquely obese. Still, the Prime Minister vowed "every nickel" brought in as part of the federal carbon tax is to be re-circulated back to each province to be doled out to residents of those provinces, ten percent reserved to go to schools, universities and small businesses. All is not lost. Actually, nothing is lost; we get taxed, we get refunded. In the process, what is gained?

Carbon dioxide, so necessary to life, is "pollution" and it must be fought tooth and nail and taxes are the way to go, only they're not taxes, they're commitment to an existential cause, so who in their right mind would balk at that? The regulatory inefficiency of a complex scheme that will have the effect of restraining growth in the economy and making life just a little more difficult for small business and their customers is the price to pay for prolonging environmental balance in a threatened world. Sounds reasonable.

As it stands now, the tax won't be equitable, but on the other hand, neither will the refunds be; a little like universality, it is meant to be an issue of simple accountability, so simple that it takes no account of those living in areas of the country where more fuel is required to drive to destinations, to heat winter homes, and nor are those in comfortable median income brackets to receive less of a 'rebate' than people living on inadequate incomes just getting by. Not by calculating how much people emit, but simplifying things to a one-size-fits-all formula.

Ottawa is prepared to subsidize export-oriented emitters clearly incapable of competing on the world stage should they pass increased carbon costs to their buyers in world markets, but domestic marketers who sell their products internally can anticipate no such relief, they will absorb the increased carbon tax and of course it will be the consumer who will pay the additional cost through the nose. Imports are advantaged but internal business costs will escalate.

Canada's new Liberal-imposed carbon tax will do nothing to make an impact on emissions, but it most certainly will go a long way, along with previous legislated heightened taxes for business to discourage investment and persuade international business interests to relocate elsewhere in more tax-enlightened jurisdictions abroad; back to the United States most likely as Canada's economy becomes more straitened reflecting the success of the Liberal carbon tax legislation.