Good morning. Wendy Cox in Vancouver here.
If Twitter and WeChat were to be believed on Monday (they often aren’t), there was a coronavirus patient in care at Lions Gate Hospital. Then there was one in Burnaby. Then another one in Richmond. Hospital officials and health experts at the BC Centre for Disease Control spent part of the day trying to tamp down rumours.
Health officials in British Columbia have said repeatedly that they are monitoring several patients in B.C. for possible infection, but it wasn’t until a test came back on Monday night that they had concluded with near certainty that British Columbia had its first patient. Given the province’s proximity to Asia and Vancouver’s vibrant Chinese community, a confirmed case of someone with the virus was always going to be a question of when, not if.
In measured tones, B.C.'s health officer Bonnie Henry explained that the man, in his 40s, had returned to Vancouver last week from China and showed no symptoms but self-monitored out of an abundance of caution.
The man’s case is still considered a “presumptive positive” pending confirmation from the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg, “but given the history of travel, the contact that this person had in Wuhan city, and the symptoms they were showing, we are confident that this is truly a case of this novel coronavirus,” Dr. Henry said.
The brings Canada’s total to three. All those cases can be traced back to the epicentre of the outbreak, Wuhan, so health officials have been stressing calm. Dr. Henry even pointedly tried to deflate some of the more alarming news coming out of China. Chinese officials have said those showing no symptoms can still spread the virus.
“When we look at the now close to 60 cases in other countries around the world, there’s no evidence that we have from extensive contact tracing that we do in public health, and follow-up with people who have been in contact with people, there’s no evidence of asymptomatic [transmission],” she said.
But the situation in China and the government’s seismic reaction to the outbreak has naturally had an impact on Canadians, especially those with close ties to China and specifically to Wuhan. Some Canadian businesses have even banned travel to China and are instructing staff to work from home if they have recently gone there.
Reporter Xiao Xu spoke to Canadians whose relatives travelled home to Wuhan to celebrate the Lunar New Year after heeding early Chinese assurances that there was “no clear evidence” of person-to-person transmission of the disease. Now, those relatives are stuck in Wuhan and Hubei province as the Chinese government suspends all air travel and locks down the city.
Henry Zou’s wife is one of them. He told Xiao he and his wife were “seriously misled” by the Chinese information. Now he, like others in his situation, is hoping Canada will step up as other countries have done and move to evacuate its citizens and bring them home, especially after seeing the surging numbers of infections and deaths in the past a few days.
“Overseas Chinese are facing huge risks, especially the elders,” he noted.
Holiday travellers are among 250 Canadians in Hubei province who have registered with Global Affairs in China. Foreign Affairs Minister François-Philippe Champagne said Tuesday 126 of them have asked for assistance, but he declined to commit to arranging for them to be evacuated.
This has left those Canadians with relatives in Wuhan anxiously checking their phones and trying to figure out what they can do to help. A group of them have located 2,000 masks and are sending them to China, where supplies are scarce.
The Globe’s senior health columnist, André Picard, notes the fear the virus has generated has created its own problem. For perspective, he notes that to date, there have been about 4,500 recorded cases of Wuhan coronavirus and 106 deaths.
By comparison, three to five million people contract serious flu cases requiring hospitalization annually and somewhere between 290,000 and 650,000 die. Yet, both are respiratory illnesses spread in a similar fashion. His column is a reassuring look at the measures being taken to contain the virus and to learn about how to suppress it.
For Mr. Zou, he’s learning to cope with the unknown as he tries to keep himself informed without going too far.
“It’s not good to look at too much information about it. I still need to take care of our family here, and I cannot [afford] any breakdown.”
This is the weekly Western Canada newsletter written by B.C. Editor Wendy Cox and Alberta Bureau Chief James Keller. If you’re reading this on the web, or it was forwarded to you from someone else, you can sign up for it and all Globe newsletters here. This is a new project and we’ll be experimenting as we go, so let us know what you think.
Around the West:
B.C. EYE INJECTION PROGRAM: Two dozen ophthalmologists are accusing the B.C. government of failing to properly investigate concerns that a province-wide eye injection program could be putting patients at risk of developing severe glaucoma, according to a letter obtained by The Globe and Mail. Health Reporter Kelly Grant explains how the program came to be, what potential side effects are concerning doctors and why the province’s retinal specialists are paid as much as $250,00 annually to administer injections that are meant to treat macular degeneration and other retinal diseases.
SUPERVISED-CONSUMPTION: Operators of Alberta’s supervised-injection sites are worried about the future of those services as they await a provincial government report that could see some of them moved or shut down. Premier Jason Kenney, who has derided the facilities as “NDP drug sites,” says not all will be closed, but there will be changes as the government attempts to deal with some of the negative effects on their neighbours.
TRANS MOUNTAIN: The Canada Energy Regulator has restarted route hearings for the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion that were put on hold when the project was blocked by a court ruling. The detailed route hearings, which examine objections from individual landowners, started in Spruce Grove, near Edmonton, and will travel throughout Alberta and B.C. in the coming months.
FORESTRY STRIKE: “At this stage, the parties are really dug in,” Steve Hunt, director of the Steelworkers for Western Canada, told B.C. Politics Reporter Justine Hunter. The strike began on July 1 and affects not just the 2,400 union members and their employer, Western Forest Products, but also dependent communities on Vancouver Island. In fact, some mayors and logging contractors have joined the company in calling for the province to intervene and help end the strike.
INDIGENOUS OWNERSHIP: A Crown corporation in Alberta designed to help Indigenous communities buy into resource projects has announced a board of directors, as Premier Jason Kenney argues the agency will help change the debate about developments such as pipelines.
THE SENATE AND REGIONAL ISSUES: Alberta Senator Scott Tannas will be the leader of a new group in the chamber called the Canadian Senators Group. The only connecting thread in this 13-member bunch is that these senators will focus on regional issues and are pooling their office budgets to create a new research bureau that will support their work.
COASTAL GASLINK: Wet’suwet’en Nation hereditary chiefs have rejected Coastal GasLink’s latest request for a meeting as the company and RCMP seek a way to end a blockade targeting construction along the company’s natural gas pipeline. The chiefs say they are unwavering in their decision to refuse workers access to construction sites for a section of the $6.6-billion pipeline project in northern B.C.
QUEST UNIVERSITY: A B.C. Supreme Court justice approved a funding plan by Quest University, a private postsecondary institute in Squamish, which includes potentially selling off land assets to fix its financial problems. A report on the university’s situation prepared for the court by PricewaterhouseCoopers and filed on Jan. 24 says Quest has not generated sufficient revenue from its school operations to cover operating costs since it began in 2007.
VANCOUVER CO-OPS: The city is offering Vancouver’s 3,700 co-op apartment residents a new deal, after years of unhappy negotiations. Co-ops will get substantially discounted lease rates compared to current market rents because they’ll be based on Vancouver residents’ median income instead of general rent rates in the city.
CONSERVATIVE LEADERSHIP RACE: Trying to woo his party’s Western base, Ontario MP Erin O’Toole officially launched his bid to become Conservative leader in Calgary on Monday. He spent the day meeting with conservatives in the province, including Premier Jason Kennedy, before holding a rally in the evening.
SEARCHING FOR A KIDNEY: Jim Lomond needs a kidney. So the 54-year-old former oil-field worker, who lives in Carbon, Alta., got a billboard to get the word out. Showing a photo of a smiling man in a blue shirt, his arms crossed, the sign reads: “Jim really needs a kidney donor.”
WHALES: A 43-year-old southern resident male orca has gone missing, further depleting the endangered population of killer whales. The death of L41 would bring the total number of endangered southern resident whales from 73 to 72.
MENTAL HEALTH: Many people are using today to talk about mental health as part of Bell’s Lets Talk campaign. In that spirit, we’d thought we’d reshare one of our most widely read stories about mental health, Kelly Cryderman’s piece on George Gosbee. He was the exemplar of a new generation of Alberta entrepreneurs. He built an investment bank from nothing – earning huge wealth, acclaim and the ear of Justin Trudeau. But beneath the veneer of business success, there was another side to George Gosbee – one of mental illness and alcoholism. The family he left behind tells their story.
Opinion:
The Globe and Mail Editorial Board on orphan wells: ”Lax oversight has allowed the inactive well count to surge, but most, for now, have a solvent corporate owner. The danger for taxpayers is orphan wells – the ones no one owns.”
Adrienne Tanner on new rental housing and gentrification: “The argument between the NIMBY’s and YIMBY’s (the “yes in my backyard,” pro-development crowd) plays out noisily on Twitter between people whose opinions are often backed by little evidence. There is a reason for this. There are myriad variables at play when neighbourhoods change, and drilling down to gauge the impact of new development is not simple. Nonetheless, a few economists have recently begun to try, and preliminary American studies suggest the supply-siders may be right.”
Stephen Legault on the Frontier oil sands project north of Fort McMurray: “Approval of Frontier – even if not a single dollar is ever spent toward its completion, and it is likely much more would be doled out – would mean continuing the charade that Alberta has bought into, and rob the province of a more promising and realistic future.”
Wendy Cox
James Keller