WEDNESDAY,APRIL8,2020 | THEGLOBEANDMAIL O NEWS | A
Quebec is expecting to reach a
plateau in COVID-19 hospital ad-
missions around April 18, accord-
ing to public health projections
unveiled Tuesday that have
sparked hope the province might
restart some economic activity
next month.
However, those same models
offer a grim picture of a mounting
death toll that is likely to rise
from 150 to at least 1,263 people by
the end of the month, in even the
most optimistic scenario.
Public health authorities and
Premier François Legault warned
Quebeckers must remain disci-
plined on distancing measures
that will be lifted only gradually.
“If we want to slowly start return-
ing to a normal life in May, we
have to stay very disciplined for
the entire month of April,” Mr. Le-
gault said, adding a gradual re-
launch of the construction indus-
try idle for two weeks could be the
first step.
Quebec offered a simple snap-
shot Tuesday comparing the
province’s epidemic trajectory
with those of Italy on the pessi-
mistic side and Portugal and Ger-
many on the positive side. The
pessimistic scenario for deaths is
nearly 9,000, but Quebec’s recent
trajectory in new cases, hospital
admissions and deaths places it
nowhere near Italy.
Alberta is expected to release
its own modelling data on
Wednesday, although Premier Ja-
son Kenney used a televised ad-
dress Tuesday evening to tell the
province to brace for the poten-
tial of thousands of deaths.
Public-health officials in Al-
berta say their “probable” scena-
rio would have infections peak in
mid-May, with 400 to 3,
deaths. Under a more pessimistic
scenario, if physical distancing
measures aren’t as successful, the
peak would arrive earlier, in early
May, and there could be 500 to
6,600 deaths. And with no social
distancing measures, Mr. Kenney
said, the number off fatalities
could be as high as 32,000.
“These models are not a done
deal,” Mr. Kenney said. “I want Al-
bertans to see them as a challenge- perhaps the greatest challenge
of our generation.”
Ontario, with a 72-per-cent
greater population, projected
1,600 deaths for April during a
similar exercise last week. Onta-
rio also projected 3,000 to 15,
people could die over the next
two years. Quebec’s modelling
does not carry on beyond the end
of the month. Dr. Horacio Arruda,
Quebec’s director of public
health, said anything beyond a
one-month time-frame is guess-
work. Other wild cards remain in
play for stemming Quebec’s epi-
demic. Outbreaks in long-term
care homes and other seniors res-
idences have accounted for more
than two-thirds of Quebec’s
death toll.
Quebec cleared 6,000 hospital
beds, readied 3,000 ventilators
and has 633 intensive care beds
free for COVID-19 patients. Even
in the most pessimistic scenario,
hospital admissions would peak
at 3,028 cases. The more likely
scenario puts the figure near
1,404. The province is on track to
stay below the 468 ICU cases of
the low-end model.
Since Quebec had fewer hospi-tal admissions from COVID-
than expected, the province will
reallocate staff to long-term care
centres and seniors homes.
“We’ve made some efforts but it’s
not enough, we need to do more
because that’s where our priority
should be,” Mr. Legault said.
The health-care workers being
transferred include physicians
and nurses specializing in pre-
ventive disinfection, Health Min-
ister Danielle McCann said.
She also called on former nurs-
es to come out of retirement to
help elderly patients and added
that family doctors would pitch
in, too. “Come help us. We need
you.”
Mr. Legault said the reinforce-
ment in health-care workers
would enable facilities to reduce
staff turnover and enforce sanita-
tion practices properly.
Nursing homes and care cen-
tres that have been hit by a coro-navirus outbreak now have to
separate patients and staff who
have been infected into a differ-
ent floor or wing.
Dr. Arruda said officials are
looking back at the impact of in-
fections from employees or vis-
itors who showed no symptoms
or only had mild symptoms.
“I think it was a very important
factor. That notion about symp-
toms is relatively recent. We we-
ren’t talking about that in early
February.”
Asymptomatic transmission
might have played a role in two
places, at the Sainte-Dorothée
long-term care centre in Laval,
north of Montreal, and the La-
flèche centre, in Shawinigan.
Sainte-Dorothée has 105 con-
firmed cases and eight deaths.
The Laflèche centre has 78 con-
firmed cases.
Carol Filion, chief executive of-
ficer of the Mauricie regional
health centre, which oversees the
Laflèche facility, confirmed last
week that employees there, who
had been under 14-day quaran-
tine orders, had to return to work
after only a week if they showed
no symptoms.
“We were confronted with the
fact that the situation was threat-
ening our ability to offer care,”
Mr. Filion said. “A long-term care
centre is an essential service.”
Jeff Begley, president of the
FSSS-CSN trade union, which rep-
resents health-care workers in
Quebec, noted that even before
the pandemic there were chronic
staffing shortages in long-term
care homes because overworked
orderlies were increasingly re-
questing sick leave.
Furthermore, Mr. Legault said
that, mostly in private care cen-
tres, the staff often worked in sev-
eral facilities at the same time
and became vectors of transmis-
sions. Public-health officials be-
lieve about 700 Quebec facilities
for elderly people are infected, al-
though only 150 have confirmed
cases.Quebecprojectsatleast1,263virusdeaths
Provinceexpects
hospitaladmissionsto
leveloffinlateApril,
butdeathtollwill
likelyclimbbyhundreds
withinthemonth
LESPERREAUXMONTREAL
TUTHANHHATORONTO
JAMESKELLERCALGARY
ApatientisbroughtintotheemergencydepartmentofSaint-EustachehospitalonTuesdayinSaint-Eustache,
Que.PremierFrançoisLegaultwarnedQuebeckerstoremaindisciplinedondistancingmeasuresasthe
provincereleaseditsprojectionsforthetrajectoryofCOVID-19.RYANREMIORZ/THECANADIANPRESSI
n the space of a few long weeks, Can-
ada has shifted from business-as-
usual to a wartime economy, with
the federal andprovincialgovern-
ments shutting down businesses and
taking over direct control of many peo-
ple’s wages, even as deficits head for lev-
els not seen since the Second World
War.
But here’s the good news: The debt
that governments are piling on should
be manageable, provided the new nor-
mal reverts to the old normal in a mat-
ter of months rather than years.
There will be bills to pay. But we
should be able to pay them without sac-
rificing the quality of life of future gen-
erations.
That isn’t to understate the magni-
tude of what’s happened.
The past few weeks roughly corre-
spond to 1940, when Can-
ada shifted suddenly from
a peacetime economy try-
ing to drag itself out of the
Great Depression to a mo-
bilizing wartime econo-
my, with massive increas-
es in government spend-
ing andgovernment con-
trol.
“Our projected deficit
this year, as a proportion
of the sizeof government,
will be roughly the same
as the first full year of the
war effort,” Drew Fagan, a
professor at University of Toronto’s
Munk School of Global Affairs and Pub-
lic Policy and a former Ontario deputy
minister, said in an interview.
He has written a paper for the Munk
Centre comparing the pandemic to the
war.
Then, as now, Ottawa massively in-
creased spending as part of the war ef-
fort.
The difference, we all hope, is that
the Second World War lasted for six
years, from Germany’s invasion of Po-
land in September, 1939, to Japan’s sur-
render in August, 1945.
Yet despite the massive deficits and
debts that financed the war, Ottawa was
back to running surpluses within two
years of its end. “One might hope for
something of the same turnaround,”
Prof. Fagan said.
A surge in economic activity once
governments release us from this na-
tional quasi-quarantine should also
bring revenues up and deficits quickly
down, although Prof. Fagan added that
the federalgovernment would need to
continue spending as the economy
transitioned back to normal.
That doesn’t change the fact that by
the time this is all over “we will be look-
ing at hundreds of billions of dollars in
debt that we did not anticipate six
weeks ago,” said Kevin Milligan, a pro-
fessor of economics at University of
British Columbia.
The good news is that federal and
provincialgovernments are taking on
this unexpected debt “at a time when
we have some of the lowest interest
rates we have ever seen,” said Douglas
Porter, chief economist of the Bank of
Montreal.
It costs only about a billion dollars to
service $100-billion in debt. “That’s not
a trivial amount, but it’s affordable,” Mr.
Porter said.
And this economic shock has forced
us all to confront realities that we were
trying to avoid: One way or another,
maybe sooner or maybe later, the Cana-
dian economy needs to transition away
from oil and gas to cleaner forms of en-
ergy, especially with oil prices so low it’s
hard to make a living off
them.
And as many have al-
ready pointed out, our ag-
ing society was going to
force up the cost of health
care, even before the pan-
demic arrived.
The difficult but essen-
tial task will be to sustain
the economy as it recovers
after the pandemic, while
also bringing public-sector
spending under control.
Prof. Milligan fully sup-
ports the government’s
emergency spending measures, such as
the Canada Emergency Response Bene-
fit and the Canada Emergency Wage
Benefit.
But “the ‘E’ part is the critical part to
me,” he said. “We cannot be paying
$2,000 a month to anyone who checks a
box forever.”
The best outcome would be a gradual
ramping down ofgovernment spending
and deficits as business and industries
ramp up and life returns to normal.
We will also see the return of politics.
Right now, opposing political parties are
limiting their criticism of each other as
governments struggle to respond to the
greatest national emergency since the
war. The close co-operation between
Justin Trudeau’s Liberal federalgovern-
ment and Doug Ford’s Progressive Con-
servative Ontariogovernment is won-
drous to behold.
But the day will come when politic-
ians go back to wrangling over deficits
and spending that are a tiny fraction of
what we’re seeing now.
What a blessed day that will be.Wefacethebiggestdeficits
sincetheSecondWorldWar,
butCanadacanaffordthiscrisis
JOHN
IBBITSON
OPINIONRightnow,opposing
politicalpartiesare
limitingtheir
criticismofeach
otheras
governments
struggletorespond
tothegreatest
nationalemergency
sincethewar.The federalgovernment is turning to
Canadian companies to make as many
as 30,000 hospital ventilators as the
country’s industrial base retools to focus
on building critically needed medical
supplies, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau
announced Tuesday.
This effort will give this country, at
least temporarily, a made-in-Canada ca-
pacity to produce many of the goods
needed as infection rates and deaths
rise.
Mr. Trudeau said 20 companies are al-
so mobilizing to produce medical
gowns, in some cases from the same ma-
terial normally used to produce airbags
for vehicles. Companies include clothing
makers Canada Goose and Arc’teryx.
“As countries around the world grap-
ple with this pandemic, the demand for
critical supplies like test kits, ventilators
and personal protective equipment is
going up,” Mr. Trudeau said at his Tues-
day morning briefing.
“To keep our front-line workers safe
and care for Canadians with COVID-19,
we need a sustainable, stable supply of
these products and that means making
them at home.”
Mr. Trudeau could not provide a pre-
cise delivery schedule for these new ven-
tilators, but he said he expected them to
be available “in the coming weeks and
months.”
One of the companies – CAE Inc., a
Montreal-based manufacturer that spe-
cializes in flight simulators – said its goal
is to produce the first batch of devices in
three weeks.
Asked whether he believed Canada
would need another 30,000 ventilators,
the Prime Minister said he hopes not,
but Ottawa is required to prepare for the
worst-case scenario. Those patients
stricken worst by COVID-19 require ven-
tilators to take over breathing for them.
“We certainly hope we won’t be needi-
ng all those ventilators,” he said. “If we
end up making more ventilators than
Canada needs ... that will be great news
and we will have ventilators to share
with other countries.”
He said Ottawa is working to build
ventilators with CAE, Thornhill Medical
and a group led by Starfish Medical,
which includes auto parts giant Linamar
Corp. Ventilators for Canadians, a con-
sortium of Canadian entrepreneurs, is
also on board.
The government is also collaborating
with Nobel-Prize-winning researcher
Art McDonald, who is leading a team of
scientists at national lab TRIUMF, Cana-
dian Nuclear Laboratories and physics
laboratory SNOLAB to develop an easy-
to-produce ventilator using off-the-
shelf, easily accessible parts.
CAE alone is planning to build 10,
of these 30,000 ventilators announcedby Mr. Trudeau within three months.
“There are still several steps yet before
the first ventilators are delivered, but we
are working very quickly with an objec-
tive to have the first batch of ventilators
ready by the end of the month, should
we be able to obtain the required regu-
latory approvals,” said Pascal Grenier,
CAE’s vice-president of global oper-
ations, technologies and innovation.
The biggest challenge that CAE faces
in meeting its target, which amounts to
about 1,000 ventilators a week, is locat-
ing suppliers for all of the intricate parts
that make up the company’s prototype,
Mr. Grenier said.
The company’s manufacturing facili-
ty in Montreal can handle the produc-
tion, and the company has called 150
employees back to work to make the
machines, he said. “We cannot do it
alone. We need the Canadian supply
chain to support us,” he said.
Domestic production is ramping up
as it becomes increasingly difficult to
purchase medical supplies outside Can-
ada.
“Global demand is going up, logistics
are becoming a challenge, global supply
chains are more unpredictable than ever
before,” Innovation Minister Navdeep
Bains said in an interview.
In several cases, Canadian companies
are finding creative workarounds to pro-
duce medical supplies faster.
Nova Scotia-based garment maker
Stanfield’s Ltd. will use a fabric devel-
oped by packaging products company
Intertape Polymer Group to supply pro-
tective medical gowns. Stanfield’s has
signed a six-month, $24-million contact
with the federalgovernment to manu-
facture 2.6 million disposable medical
gowns. The contracted requirement is
for 100,000 gowns a week until the last
week of October
Ottawa has also signed a letter of in-
tent to support airbag maker Autoliv as
it works to repurpose material tradition-
ally used for airbags to provide addition-
al fabric for medical gowns. Thegovern-
ment said using these alternative mate-
rials will “significantly increase the
number of medical gowns” that can be
madein Canada.
“The material for gowns has tradi-
tionally not been produced domestical-
ly,” Mr. Bains said. “It turns out that
some materials used for construction –
for house wrap – and car airbags can be
repurposed for medical-grade gowns.”
Meanwhile in Ontario, auto parts
maker Woodbridge Group, known for
manufacturing car seats and trunk lin-
ers, has shifted focus to produce high-
grade masks. All of the output is going to
the health-care sector, said Flavio Volpe,
president of the Automotive Parts Man-
ufacturers’ Association.
In the past few weeks, nearly 5,
companies have contacted the federal
government to offer their assistance in
fighting COVID-19, Mr. Trudeau said.OttawatapsCanadiancompaniesto
producemedicalgowns,ventilators
STEVENCHASEOTTAWA
GREGMcARTHURTORONTO