Police departments across Quebec issued dozens of $1,550 fines as the province’s curfew, which aims to reduce the number of COVID-19 cases, went into effect Saturday night.
In Montreal, the provisional count of infractions stood at 17 after a group of people were ticketed for protesting near the Mont-Royal métro station, said police spokesperson Caroline Chèvrefils.
The city’s busiest areas were deserted save for the occasional worker, dog walker, or homeless person wandering the streets.
On Saturday evening, dozens of videos of Quebec police enforcing the curfew emerged on social media.
New Brunswick reported 30 new cases of COVID-19 Saturday and said multiple schools now have infections.
Unsurprisingly, much of the coverage in the media has focused on supposed provincial government failures in vaccine distribution. Yet, while provincial leaders deserve criticism for many things, the vaccine rollout isn’t one of them.
Rather, this is a clear failure of the Trudeau federal government.
Chief Stephen Tanner of Halton Regional Police Service travelled out of the locked-down province of Ontario to Florida, allegedly to take care of personal business.
The mayor of a small city in B.C.’s Southern Interior has resigned from his post, citing backlash and anguish for apparently visiting a family cabin two hours away.
The vaccine rollout in New York and other blue states has been an inept disaster. Governor Andrew Cuomo, true to form, decided to blame Orthodox Jews, ranting that the Parcare clinic in Brooklyn had dared to vaccinate a 79-year-old Rabbi ahead of “essential workers”. Meanwhile massive amounts of vaccine doses are being thrown out because they’re going bad because the essential workers they’re meant for, mostly minorities, don’t actually want them.
With Ontario premier Doug Ford warning of “extreme” new measures to try and curb the spike in COVID-19 cases, a new public opinion poll finds a majority of Ontarians would be in favour of strengthening a number of current lockdown measures at least for the next 30 days.
Brexit leader Nigel Farage warned that lockdowns in the United Kingdom are pushing the country into a full-on police state, predicting that the battle to regain individual liberty will be a tougher struggle than leaving the European Union.
Alberta’s chief medical health officer made the announcement about the new variant in a tweet late Friday afternoon. Dr. Deena Hinshaw said the person is believed to have contracted the illness while travelling and is in quarantine.
Montreal, known for its vibrant, colourful nightlife, will be off limits to those hoping to take a late-night stroll for the next 4 weeks. Unless, of course, they have a dog with them.
There’s no getting around it — lockdown measures don’t seem to be working in Ontario and Quebec the second time around.
Health experts say Canada’s hardest-hit provinces have consistently failed to contain the spread of COVID-19 with inadequate, poorly timed restrictions, leaving little choice but for much more draconian rules to be introduced.
But where exactly did we go wrong? And where do we go from here?
The term ‘California Dream’ used to be commonplace. It used to mean something. Now that term has faded into a tragic joke. From now on the term to describe the Golden State is ‘California Crazy.’
