As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to force drastic social distancing measures, the economic ramifications continue to unfold. Financial Post technology reporter James McLeod is maintaining a liveblog of market updates and key developments for Canadian business.
Refresh this page regularly for fresh information throughout the day, and if you have business-specific tips, announcements and information that should be included here, please email jmcleod@postmedia.com.
2 p.m. — Ford says he wants business to be responsible: Ontario Premier Doug Ford said that they will take enforcement action to keep non-essential workplaces closed for two weeks, but business can continue as long as workplaces are shut down.
“A lot of companies haven’t even needed this order. They’ve closed their shop or closed their office,” Ford said.
“It doesn’t mean closing business. It means your facility, we don’t want people in a facility”
Ford said he doesn’t want to use the police to enforce this, and hopes that business will recognize the severity of the situation.
“We’re all in this together. We’re a team. It’s not about government versus business,” Ford said.
Details of exactly who will be designated as essential and non-essential coming Tuesday.
1:51 Ford says schools will stay closed: Ontario Premier Doug Ford said he’s deferring to his Education Minister, but he doesn’t anticipate schools reopening early next month.
“The kids won’t be going back to school on April 6 … This is changing hour-by-hour, day-by-day,” Ford said.
1:45 p.m. — Ontario premier says just don’t gather in groups: Premier Doug Ford said that if you’re leaving the house, go out by yourself or your partner, but keep it limited.
1:42 p.m. — Ontario economic update coming Wednesday: Finance Minister Rod Phillips said that a fiscal and economic update will be released on Wednesday.
“I can tell you that it’s going to be the most prudent statement that any finance minister in Ontario has ever made,” Phillips said.
He said that Ontario’s fiscal response and aid measures will be coming on Wednesday too.
1:37 p.m. — Specifics on Ontario shutdown coming tomorrow: Ontario Premier Doug Ford said a specific list of the workplaces that must close for 14 days will be released tomorrow.
Ford said large construction sites must close. He said there will be a long list of essential services, and a long list of non-essential services to provide clarification on what will be allowed to operate during the COVID-19 shutdown.
1:30 p.m. — Doug Ford shutting down all non-essential business: Ontario Premier Doug Ford announced that all non-essential workplaces must close for 14 days.
“If you can, stay home. Only leave if necessary,” Ford said.
1:11 p.m. — Quebec closes all businesses except essential services: Quebec Premier Francois Legault said he is ordering all businesses to close by tomorrow evening for three weeks. Essential services can remain open. Legault said groceries, pharmacies, and the supply chains to support those stores will remain open.
“We must put Quebec on pause until Easter for a possible restart on April 13,” Legault said.
“All non-essential economic activities must stop.”
Legault said that construction and aluminum smelters are included. It includes manufacturing.
1:03 p.m. — Ottawa is developing an app: Health Minister Patty Hadju said that the federal government is developing an app which people can use to cope with the mental health strain relating to the COVID-19 pandemic. Hadju didn’t give much detail, but said that an announcement with more information will be provided in the coming days.
12:55 p.m. — Markets down, again: At midday, major North American markets are down significantly. The TSX/S&P composite is in the red by about 3.25 per cent, or 385 points. The Dow Jones Industrial Average is down by 240 points, or 1.25 per cent.
Looking at the bigger picture, as of today the TSX/S&P composite is down by 32.5 per cent from February.
12:44 p.m. — It’s all about social distancing: To be blunt, there’s not a lot of specific news updates coming out of today’s briefing by federal ministers, but qualitatively, the emphasis is very heavily on the necessity of social distancing, and the possibility of more significant enforcement.
Both from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and various government ministers, the message has basically been that people should be looking at all options to spend more time at home, and refrain from contact with other people as much as possible. This message is going out to citizens and businesses.
Qualitatively, it appears that the imperative for stricter guidelines and enforcement actions could be coming.
12:40 p.m. — Hadju looking at more strict social distancing: Health Minister Patty Hadju said that international travellers need to be more diligent about self-quarantining, not even shopping for groceries or leaving the house for any reason.
Hadju said that random inspections, reporting hotlines, and other enforcement measures are being considered to maintain social distancing.
12:32 p.m. — Foreign agricultural workers: Agriculture Minister Marie-Claude Bibeau said that the federal government is negotiating with Guatamala to bring temporary foreign workers to Canada to aid with the farming season.
12:20 p.m. — Bains says Feds funding vaccine trials: Innovation Minister Navdeep Bains said that the federal government is funding clinical trials by a Quebec City company called Medicago, which has identified a potential vaccine for the COVID-19 global pandemic.
12:10 p.m. — COVID-19 1,474 cases and 20 deaths: Federal ministers and officials are providing an update on the COVID-19 situation. Dr. Theresa Tam said that so far they have 1,474 confirmed cases, and 20 deaths. She said they are seeing infections not linked to travel.
Tam said that strict public health and “unrelenting” social distancing measures are necessary. Tam said this will provide time for research and innovation to fight the virus.
11:36 a.m. — Enforcement actions being considered: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said he’s considering enforcement actions. He also wouldn’t rule out the possibility of closing provincial borders during the crisis.
Trudeau said he’s calling on Canadians to be more diligent about physical distancing to prevent the spread of the pandemic.
“If we see that measures aren’t being taken up properly, aren’t being followed, we will look at different measures to enforce these rules,” Trudeau said.
“Those who are not doing their part are putting at risk everyone else, including the eventual recovery of our economy.”
11:35 a.m. — Trudeau applauds Canadian Olympic team: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said he supports the Canadian Olympic team’s decision to pull out of the Olympic games this year. Trudeau said he’s encouraging anybody who’s thinking about organizing a large public gathering, and that includes the International Olympic Committee.
“Stay home, please,” he said.
11:27 a.m. — Trudeau calls on business: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called on businesses and institutions to provide any masks or other medical supples. He called on businesses to visit BuyandSell.gc.ca to see how they can help.
Trudeau also said that the government has entered into a contract with Toronto-based BlueDot which uses AI to track the spread of the virus, and the government is looking at the possibility of using 3D printing to create more masks for health care workers.
11:25 a.m. — $5bn for farmers: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced more money for farmers through the Farm Credit Canada program. Trudeau said $5 billion dollars will be made available to food producers to keep the farmers operating through the pandemic.
11:19 a.m. — Trudeau implores Canadians to stay home: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau started his daily news briefing with a call to maintain social distancing. Trudeau said that the government is trying to inform people, with a big advertising blitz coming soon but he also said that enforcement measures may be imposed if people won’t stay in their homes.
“Enough is enough. Go home and stay home. This is what we all need to be doing,” Trudeau said.
“As more Canadians lose their incomes to COVID-19 every day, hundreds of thousands of families could soon be forced to choose between buying groceries and paying the rent,” said Ricardo Tranjan, political economist and senior researcher with the CCPA Ontario office. “It’s good that the Government of Canada has announced plans to support lower-income Canadians, but many families can’t wait for support by April or May – they need it now. A lot of out-of-work tenants will be in dire straits before the end of the month.”
9:45 a.m. — Markets open down: After a brief flicker of optimism based on massive macroeconomic stimulus from the U.S. Federal Reserve, publicly traded markets opened down Monday morning.
From Reuters: “The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 145.62 points, or 0.76%, at the open to 19,028.36. The S&P 500 opened lower by 14.21 points, or 0.62%, at 2,290.71. The Nasdaq Composite dropped 32.23 points, or 0.47%, to 6,847.28 at the opening bell.”
8:57 a.m. — Lightspeed POS makes some products free: Montreal-based Lightspeed POS announced that it is making its delivery software free for restaurants, along with other software products for retailers. Lightspeed’s technology is focused on point-of-sale systems for restaurants, hotels and retailers — sectors of the economy that have been hit hard by COVID-19 social distancing measures.
9:05 a.m. — U.S. Fed unlimited buying program: Early indications are that the public markets are responding positively to an announcement that the U.S. Federal Reserve will be putting an unlimited amount of money behind maintaining liquidity in the markets.
From this Bloomberg article: “The Fed will buy Treasuries and agency mortgage-backed securities ‘in the amounts needed to support smooth market functioning and effective transmission of monetary policy to broader financial conditions and the economy,’ and will also buy agency commercial mortgage-backed securities, according to a statement. The Fed had said a week ago it would buy at least US$500 billion of Treasuries and $200 billion of agency MBS.
8:50 a.m. — Keep an eye on the Bank of Canada: Financial Post columnist Kevin Carmichael remains one of the smartest writers in Canada when it comes to big-picture economics, and now is a moment when that kind of perspective is critical. Check out his column on the Bank of Canada’s policy options, and what to watch for in the coming weeks.
March 23, 2020: Good morning! After a busy weekend, Monday is shaping up to be another eventful day for the economy and Canadian business on the COVID-19 file. Foreign Affairs Minister Francois-Philippe Campagne announced that he has secured three Air Canada flights to bring Canadians home from Peru.
Meanwhile, stock futures markets have been swinging wildly over the weekend, so markets could be moving substantially throughout the day.
Also, once again Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will speak from self-quarantine at his residence in Ottawa, followed by a larger news conference of government ministers led by Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland. We will continue posting economic updates and information relevant to Canadian business throughout the day.
NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. syphilis epidemic slowed dramatically last year, gonorrhea cases fell and chlamydia cases remained below prepandemic levels, according to federal data released Tuesday.
The numbers represented some good news about sexually transmitted diseases, which experienced some alarming increases in past years due to declining condom use, inadequate sex education, and reduced testing and treatment when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
Last year, cases of the most infectious stages of syphilis fell 10% from the year before — the first substantial decline in more than two decades. Gonorrhea cases dropped 7%, marking a second straight year of decline and bringing the number below what it was in 2019.
“I’m encouraged, and it’s been a long time since I felt that way” about the nation’s epidemic of sexually transmitted infections, said the CDC’s Dr. Jonathan Mermin. “Something is working.”
More than 2.4 million cases of syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia were diagnosed and reported last year — 1.6 million cases of chlamydia, 600,000 of gonorrhea, and more than 209,000 of syphilis.
Syphilis is a particular concern. For centuries, it was a common but feared infection that could deform the body and end in death. New cases plummeted in the U.S. starting in the 1940s when infection-fighting antibiotics became widely available, and they trended down for a half century after that. By 2002, however, cases began rising again, with men who have sex with other men being disproportionately affected.
The new report found cases of syphilis in their early, most infectious stages dropped 13% among gay and bisexual men. It was the first such drop since the agency began reporting data for that group in the mid-2000s.
However, there was a 12% increase in the rate of cases of unknown- or later-stage syphilis — a reflection of people infected years ago.
Cases of syphilis in newborns, passed on from infected mothers, also rose. There were nearly 4,000 cases, including 279 stillbirths and infant deaths.
“This means pregnant women are not being tested often enough,” said Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, a professor of medicine at the University of Southern California.
What caused some of the STD trends to improve? Several experts say one contributor is the growing use of an antibiotic as a “morning-after pill.” Studies have shown that taking doxycycline within 72 hours of unprotected sex cuts the risk of developing syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia.
In June, the CDC started recommending doxycycline as a morning-after pill, specifically for gay and bisexual men and transgender women who recently had an STD diagnosis. But health departments and organizations in some cities had been giving the pills to people for a couple years.
Some experts believe that the 2022 mpox outbreak — which mainly hit gay and bisexual men — may have had a lingering effect on sexual behavior in 2023, or at least on people’s willingness to get tested when strange sores appeared.
Another factor may have been an increase in the number of health workers testing people for infections, doing contact tracing and connecting people to treatment. Congress gave $1.2 billion to expand the workforce over five years, including $600 million to states, cities and territories that get STD prevention funding from CDC.
Last year had the “most activity with that funding throughout the U.S.,” said David Harvey, executive director of the National Coalition of STD Directors.
However, Congress ended the funds early as a part of last year’s debt ceiling deal, cutting off $400 million. Some people already have lost their jobs, said a spokeswoman for Harvey’s organization.
Still, Harvey said he had reasons for optimism, including the growing use of doxycycline and a push for at-home STD test kits.
Also, there are reasons to think the next presidential administration could get behind STD prevention. In 2019, then-President Donald Trump announced a campaign to “eliminate” the U.S. HIV epidemic by 2030. (Federal health officials later clarified that the actual goal was a huge reduction in new infections — fewer than 3,000 a year.)
There were nearly 32,000 new HIV infections in 2022, the CDC estimates. But a boost in public health funding for HIV could also also help bring down other sexually transmitted infections, experts said.
“When the government puts in resources, puts in money, we see declines in STDs,” Klausner said.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Scientists can’t know precisely when a volcano is about to erupt, but they can sometimes pick up telltale signs.
That happened two years ago with the world’s largest active volcano. About two months before Mauna Loa spewed rivers of glowing orange molten lava, geologists detected small earthquakes nearby and other signs, and they warned residents on Hawaii‘s Big Island.
Now a study of the volcano’s lava confirms their timeline for when the molten rock below was on the move.
“Volcanoes are tricky because we don’t get to watch directly what’s happening inside – we have to look for other signs,” said Erik Klemetti Gonzalez, a volcano expert at Denison University, who was not involved in the study.
Upswelling ground and increased earthquake activity near the volcano resulted from magma rising from lower levels of Earth’s crust to fill chambers beneath the volcano, said Kendra Lynn, a research geologist at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory and co-author of a new study in Nature Communications.
When pressure was high enough, the magma broke through brittle surface rock and became lava – and the eruption began in late November 2022. Later, researchers collected samples of volcanic rock for analysis.
The chemical makeup of certain crystals within the lava indicated that around 70 days before the eruption, large quantities of molten rock had moved from around 1.9 miles (3 kilometers) to 3 miles (5 kilometers) under the summit to a mile (2 kilometers) or less beneath, the study found. This matched the timeline the geologists had observed with other signs.
The last time Mauna Loa erupted was in 1984. Most of the U.S. volcanoes that scientists consider to be active are found in Hawaii, Alaska and the West Coast.
Worldwide, around 585 volcanoes are considered active.
Scientists can’t predict eruptions, but they can make a “forecast,” said Ben Andrews, who heads the global volcano program at the Smithsonian Institution and who was not involved in the study.
Andrews compared volcano forecasts to weather forecasts – informed “probabilities” that an event will occur. And better data about the past behavior of specific volcanos can help researchers finetune forecasts of future activity, experts say.
(asterisk)We can look for similar patterns in the future and expect that there’s a higher probability of conditions for an eruption happening,” said Klemetti Gonzalez.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Waymo on Tuesday opened its robotaxi service to anyone who wants a ride around Los Angeles, marking another milestone in the evolution of self-driving car technology since the company began as a secret project at Google 15 years ago.
The expansion comes eight months after Waymo began offering rides in Los Angeles to a limited group of passengers chosen from a waiting list that had ballooned to more than 300,000 people. Now, anyone with the Waymo One smartphone app will be able to request a ride around an 80-square-mile (129-square-kilometer) territory spanning the second largest U.S. city.
After Waymo received approval from California regulators to charge for rides 15 months ago, the company initially chose to launch its operations in San Francisco before offering a limited service in Los Angeles.
Before deciding to compete against conventional ride-hailing pioneers Uber and Lyft in California, Waymo unleashed its robotaxis in Phoenix in 2020 and has been steadily extending the reach of its service in that Arizona city ever since.
Driverless rides are proving to be more than just a novelty. Waymo says it now transports more than 50,000 weekly passengers in its robotaxis, a volume of business numbers that helped the company recently raise $5.6 billion from its corporate parent Alphabet and a list of other investors that included venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz and financial management firm T. Rowe Price.
“Our service has matured quickly and our riders are embracing the many benefits of fully autonomous driving,” Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana said in a blog post.
Despite its inroads, Waymo is still believed to be losing money. Although Alphabet doesn’t disclose Waymo’s financial results, the robotaxi is a major part of an “Other Bets” division that had suffered an operating loss of $3.3 billion through the first nine months of this year, down from a setback of $4.2 billion at the same time last year.
But Waymo has come a long way since Google began working on self-driving cars in 2009 as part of project “Chauffeur.” Since its 2016 spinoff from Google, Waymo has established itself as the clear leader in a robotaxi industry that’s getting more congested.
Electric auto pioneer Tesla is aiming to launch a rival “Cybercab” service by 2026, although its CEO Elon Musk said he hopes the company can get the required regulatory clearances to operate in Texas and California by next year.
Tesla’s projected timeline for competing against Waymo has been met with skepticism because Musk has made unfulfilled promises about the company’s self-driving car technology for nearly a decade.
Meanwhile, Waymo’s robotaxis have driven more than 20 million fully autonomous miles and provided more than 2 million rides to passengers without encountering a serious accident that resulted in its operations being sidelined.
That safety record is a stark contrast to one of its early rivals, Cruise, a robotaxi service owned by General Motors. Cruise’s California license was suspended last year after one of its driverless cars in San Francisco dragged a jaywalking pedestrian who had been struck by a different car driven by a human.
Cruise is now trying to rebound by joining forces with Uber to make some of its services available next year in U.S. cities that still haven’t been announced. But Waymo also has forged a similar alliance with Uber to dispatch its robotaxi in Atlanta and Austin, Texas next year.
Another robotaxi service, Amazon’s Zoox, is hoping to begin offering driverless rides to the general public in Las Vegas at some point next year before also launching in San Francisco.
