PROGRAMMING NOTE: The Morning Update newsletter will take a break until Jan. 4. Have a safe and happy holiday.
Good morning,
Quebec recorded about 9,000 new COVID-19 cases on Wednesday, by far the most in a single day for a Canadian province, as Premier François Legault tightened limits on private gatherings, warning of exponential growth in infections.
The record figure comes just a day after Quebec registered 6,361 new cases, contributing to a single-day peak in Canada of more than 12,000 positive tests.
To limit Quebeckers’ contacts, Legault announced that private gatherings will be restricted to six people or two household bubbles in the province as of Dec. 26. The same rule will apply to tables in restaurants. The Premier did not rule out additional measures.
Read more COVID-19 coverage:
- Ottawa expands eligibility for Canada Worker Lockdown Benefit and wage and rent supports to regions with capacity limits
- Editorial: What happens next with Omicron? That’s up to us
- Omicron COVID-19 variant more transmissible but causes less severe illness than Delta, British studies find
- Antiviral pill for COVID-19 unlikely to be approved by Health Canada before new year
People wait in line to receive a COVID-19 test in Montreal on Dec. 22, 2021.Graham Hughes/The Canadian Press
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Life expectancy in U.S. declines as the COVID-19 pandemic takes its toll
Never before has the United States recorded such an immense increase in the rate of people dying. Not during the Spanish flu. Not during either of the great wars. Not during the worst years of the AIDS epidemic or the opioid crisis.
In 2020, the death rate in the U.S. rose 16.8 per cent as the pandemic carved 1.8 years from Americans’ life expectancy, widening the gap with other developed nations and intensifying questions about systemic failings in the world’s richest country. The U.S. recorded nearly 529,000 more deaths in 2020 than the previous year, as COVID-19 leapt to the third-leading cause of death, after heart disease and cancer.
The statistics reflect the toll of the pandemic’s first year, before vaccines were widely available and amid early struggles to identify and contain the novel coronavirus.
Halifax’s blind piano mover takes a delicate job one step at a time
With knees slightly bent, Gary Trenholm braces himself under the weight of more than 225 kilograms of wood and cast iron before taking a confident step back off a paved walkway and onto a garden bed on a steeply sloped hill. Blind since childhood, Trenholm couldn’t physically see the hill, but he could visualize it, as well as the upright piano he was gripping, and the truck it would be loaded onto. He also trusted his colleagues who were assisting – they told him how many more steps he had to take before he was at the stairs, or they’d place a hand on his back to signal their position.
Trenholm, the co-owner of Doctor Piano, a Halifax company that sells, tunes, repairs and moves pianos, is never worried about his own safety – it’s all about the piano and the home it’s being moved out of or into.
The special care he takes has made his company the most in-demand piano mover in Atlantic Canada. If you own a piano in Nova Scotia, the odds are high that, at some point, Trenholm has laid hands on it.
More holiday diversions:
- The Globe and Mail’s 2021 giant holiday crossword puzzle
- Porcelain Christmas trees were popularized in the 1970s. A Moncton couple is bringing them back
- Listen to The Decibel: Small acts of kindness
Got a news tip that you’d like us to look into? E-mail us at tips@globeandmail.com Need to share documents securely? Reach out via SecureDrop
ALSO ON OUR RADAR
Hong Kong University removes Tiananmen massacre memorial after months-long fight to protect it: A statue memorializing the Tiananmen Square massacre was removed from the campus of Hong Kong University in the early hours of Thursday morning, after an unsuccessful fight to preserve it by the Danish artist, Jens Galschiot, students and civil society groups. The statue had stood on the campus since 1997, a symbol of the city’s autonomy from mainland China, where all mention of the massacre is banned and authorities strictly control the historical narrative.
U.S. authorizes certain transactions with the Taliban to maintain flow of aid to Afghanistan: The United States is formally exempting U.S. and UN officials doing official business with the Taliban from its sanctions to try to maintain the flow of aid to Afghanistan as the humanitarian crisis deepens. But it was unclear whether the move would clear the way for proposed UN payments of some US$6-million to the Islamists for security.
Ghislaine Maxwell trial deliberations halt until after Christmas: The British socialite will spend her 60th birthday in jail without a resolution to her sex-trafficking trial as a jury on Wednesday ended an abbreviated first week of deliberations without reaching a verdict. Jurors will return Monday, after the Christmas holiday, turning down an offer to work Thursday.
Co-working spaces were making a comeback, until pandemic restrictions returned: Stay-at-home mandates have dampened enthusiasm for setting up shop at a flexible co-working space, with companies like WeWork and Spaces struggling to attract and retain customers. And now, just as office-space providers were preparing for a surge in demand from companies shunning traditional multiyear leases, the latest pandemic restrictions have thrown the battered sector back into doubt.
MORNING MARKETS
Global stocks rally: Global shares extended a recent rally on Thursday while safe-haven bonds and currencies eased as markets welcomed signs that the Omicron variant of COVID-19 might be less severe than feared, as well as robust U.S. economic data. Around 5 a.m. ET, Britain’s FTSE 100 rose 0.26 per cent. Germany’s DAX and France’s CAC 40 gained 0.42 per cent and 0.24 per cent, respectively. In Asia, Japan’s Nikkei closed up 0.83 per cent. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng added 0.40 per cent. New York futures were modestly positive. The Canadian dollar was trading at 78.01 US cents.
WHAT EVERYONE’S TALKING ABOUT
When you try to run everything out of the PMO, sooner or later something’s bound to break
“Overworked, understaffed, trying to micromanage every detail of every file, people get tired. They make mistakes. They forget things. The next thing you know, they’re meddling in a criminal prosecution or calling an election for reasons even they can’t explain or taking two months to recall Parliament. Or accidentally striking two identical cabinet committees.” - Andrew Coyne
The world has changed. Christmas must change, too
“If the idea of Christmas as a glut of consumer spending is merely an invention, could it then be un-invented? Could Santa be transformed again, his sack emptied and recycled? Last Christmas, Canadians were kept apart by the pandemic, trips home were largely cancelled, and we did grow fond of homemade tokens – and yet it all made only a tiny, barely noticeable dent in our spending.” - Michael Harris
After two years of loss, the last thing I want to do is lose my mother tongue, too
“Grief over language loss comes to us slowly, disrupting our sense of self, community and belonging.” - Leonarda Carranza
TODAY’S EDITORIAL CARTOON
Brian Gable/The Globe and Mail
LIVING BETTER
The Top 10 Canadian films of 2021, a year of life-sustaining cinema
For Canadian filmmakers, 2021 was a banner year, writes The Globe’s Barry Hertz. The industry kept its Short Term Compensation Fund (a.k.a. COVID insurance) going, Telefilm got a long-awaited budget bump and cinemas finally reopened. On the flip side, our country’s filmmakers are facing an intimidatingly uncertain future as new capacity restrictions kick in. Yet on the screen, you wouldn’t know that Canadian filmmakers are having an existential crisis.
In alphabetical order – because Canadians are unfailingly polite – Hertz shares his favourite films and where you can find (most of) them right now.
MOMENT IN TIME: Dec. 23, 1823
A Visit from St. Nicholas hits the shelves
A page from A visit from Saint Nicholas. The poem subsequently became known as The Night Before Christmas and was attributed to Clement C. Moore. The authorship remains in dispute.The Library of Congress
The Troy Sentinel served readers in eastern New York for less than a decade, but in 1823, its inaugural year, the newspaper published an anonymous poem that would stand the test of time. A Visit from St. Nicholas, also known by its first line, ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas, describes the arrival of Santa Claus at a family’s home. A father recounts how, after his wife and children fall asleep, he is disturbed by a noise outside and the sight of St. Nicholas, who alights on his roof in a flying reindeer-drawn sleigh and then comes down the chimney with a sack of toys. Written in rhyming couplets, much of the poem’s enduring appeal lies in its sentimental imagery of a simple and gentle – even magical – Christmas with children at the heart. New York writer and scholar Clement Clarke Moore later claimed authorship of its 56 lines, which introduced several North American Christmas conventions, distinct from European ones. The plump, rosy-cheeked and jolly Santa bearing toys contrasted with a Father Christmas associated with adult merrymaking, rather than children or gift-giving. Ian Morfitt
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