It seems like a long time ago now, but back in December 2019, Justin Trudeau was a bruised prime minister who had just been given a second chance. The big question was what he would do with it.
Then a global pandemic happened.
COVID-19 made for a different kind of year — one that might have reset the public’s image of Trudeau. Now it sets up what could be a pivotal year both for Trudeau’s own political project and for a wide swath of public policy in Canada.
In the wake of the 2019 campaign, Trudeau did not tear everything down and start again. But the narrow outcome does seem to have caused him to reflect. In his first four years in government he’d been very front and centre — and not always in ways that showed a government taking action or achieving results. Going forward, Trudeau said, he wanted to talk more about “concrete things.”
The government did fine when it came to expressing the right values, Trudeau said, but didn’t do enough to show Canadians what it had actually done.
The Liberal government that took office in 2015 did manage to do some things in its first four years, and at least got a start on various other things. But that first term was defined more often than not by images and words rather than deeds. The government’s actions struggled to keep up with the high principles and ideals it so loudly advertised. And not all of the images were flattering.
Scenes from the pre-crisis: Toronto police arrest protesters who blocked railway tracks in the city’s west end in support of the Wet’suwet’en. (Evan Mitsui/CBC)
Then things started happening quickly. The Iranian military shot down Ukraine International Airlines Flight PS752, killing 138 people with ties to Canada. RCMP officers broke up a blockade that was preventing the construction of a natural gas pipeline through Wet’suwet’en territory in British Columbia.
However much Trudeau may have intended to cede some of the spotlight, he was suddenly more front-and-centre than ever. Between March 13 and June 19, Trudeau appeared before television cameras 78 times, almost always in front of Rideau Cottage, his official residence.
The setting was initially both a necessity and a novelty — Sophie Grégoire Trudeau tested positive for COVID-19 and the family was forced to self-isolate — and then it became part of a daily routine. Each morning, during days of unprecedented tumult, Trudeau spoke to Canadians and took questions from reporters.
Whatever he’d shown Canadians before, the pandemic pushed him to the fore as a national leader in the middle of a global emergency. Standing behind a lectern, he tried to reassure and cajole. He called for unity and reminded everyone to wash their hands. But his words — including that promise to “have Canadians’ backs” — had to be reinforced by immediate and tangible action.
Deeds over words
This was a crisis that required communication and leadership. Even more than that, it required the government to do things — procure medical equipment, deliver aid to households and businesses, mobilize industry, close the border, dispatch the military. However much the exact details might be debated, the spring is likely to be remembered as one of the most frenetic periods of action in the history of Canada’s national government.
Shortly before the pandemic took hold, 47 per cent of Canadians had a negative view of Trudeau and 32 per cent held a positive one, according to a survey conducted by Abacus Data. That dim view of the prime minister had held steady since the spring of 2019, when the SNC-Lavalin affair exploded.
With the pandemic’s arrival, public sentiment flipped. In May, 47 per cent of respondents told Abacus they felt positively about Trudeau, while 31 per cent still viewed him negatively.
Government leaders tend to experience a polling bump during a major crisis — but as the experience of Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson demonstrates, there’s no guarantee that the ‘rally around the flag’ effect will last. (Frank Augstein/The Associated Press)
Months later, Trudeau’s approval ratings have not reverted to pre-pandemic levels. In late November, Abacus reported a score of 42 per cent positive against 34 per cent negative for the prime minister.
However much Canadians were eager to rally around their leaders, Trudeau’s improved personal ratings might be linked back to what he said he wanted to emphasize in the wake of the 2019 campaign: getting things done. There was no time to be flashy or particularly aspirational. Promises had to be met quickly. It wasn’t always elegant or tidy, but the scale of the action was obvious.
In the midst of that messy summer, Liberals also began to publicly entertain the notion of an ambitious post-pandemic agenda. But if the government’s thoughts were once again in danger of floating too far away, the pandemic’s second wave brought things back to the inescapable present. By November 20, Trudeau was back in front of Rideau Cottage.
Halifax nurse Danielle Sheaves receives the first COVID-19 vaccination given in Nova Scotia on Dec. 16, 2020. (Robert Short/CBC)
The fall of 2020 otherwise saw a government trying to keep up with expectations, some of which it had created for itself. With the opposition howling impatiently and pundits circling, the first shipments of a COVID-19 vaccine arrived.
Some of those things might end being legacy items. But there is now only more to do — either because of necessity or because of the government’s own stated ambitions.
The pandemic continues, now with the hope that all Canadians will be vaccinated by September. There is an economy to repair and the Liberals say they are willing to spend as much as $100 billion to do so.
The throne speech in September laid out a post-COVID agenda that would have the federal government expand access to child care, reform employment insurance, advance pharmacare, negotiate new national standards for long-term care, invest in new training for workers, combat systemic racism, build a clean economy, increase immigration and further the cause of Indigenous reconciliation — and do it all in a fiscally sustainable way.
The Liberals are making their arguments about what should be considered important now. But their agenda also seems like the culmination of the broad ideas and goals they laid out five years ago — when they proposed that an activist government should focus on growing and supporting the middle class, promoting diversity, fighting climate change and advancing reconciliation. The Conservatives have always argued that the Liberals have been going about those things all wrong. The NDP has come to argue that they’re not going far enough or fast enough.
The question for Trudeau is how much of it his government can get done before the next election, whenever it happens. With the support of the New Democrats (or the Bloc Québécois, or even some Conservatives), he could carry on doing these things for another three years before going to the polls. With no small amount of effort (and some luck), he could have this agenda mostly in place before the next election.
Or he could wager — in the spring or maybe the fall — that taking his case to the voters would result in the sort of majority that would give his Liberals another four years to fully implement an agenda without the posturing and constant negotiation of a minority Parliament.
Circumstances in the House of Commons may dictate Trudeau’s choice. As always with this government, much will depend on Trudeau and the Liberals not getting in their own way, regardless of the path they choose.
A different kind of year has left Justin Trudeau in a different place. But the basic challenge — getting things done — hasn’t really changed.
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.
