Don’t look now, but Ontario’s premier is starting to impress
Quick now: Which politician has impressed or surprised you the most with their competence and leadership during the COVID-19 crisis?
It wouldn’t be John Tory. We expect solid, strong leadership out of Toronto’s mayor — even while he’s in self-isolation — in part because he ran one of this country’s most important companies (Rogers), served as opposition leader at Queen’s Park, and has been mayor for more than five years already.
It probably wouldn’t be Justin Trudeau (prime minister for more than four years) or Chrystia Freeland (deputy prime minister), who impressed so many by helping to bring the new free-trade agreement with America and Mexico to a successful conclusion.
No, I think this one’s a slam dunk, actually. The answer is Doug Ford.
Ontario’s premier had perhaps the worst first year on the job of anyone who’s ever had it. His populist bombast. His constant fights with anyone and everyone. His original chief of staff, who became embroiled in a patronage scandal. Those were the lowlights of a supremely bad first year. We also have to remember that, when he became premier in June 2018, he’d had a whopping three months of experience in provincial politics — hardly enough to draw upon when the you-know-what began to hit the fan.
But, ever since the COVID-19 crisis emerged as a daily reality in the lives of Ontario’s more than 14 million citizens, Ford has performed well above and beyond most observers’ expectations.
Unlike some other leaders (yes, you, Donald Trump), Ford has never tried to downplay the significance of the crisis. He’s never said the thing would burn itself out. He’s never told us to relax, that everything was fine. Trump did all of those things and more.
Instead, Ford has taken to the podium every day during the crisis and conveyed deep empathy for the public he serves.
Trump freelanced his way through his initial Oval Office address to the nation, and the result was the second-worst single-day stock-market crash in American history. Even after that — spurred on by his fans on Fox News (one of whom has since been taken off the air for her journalistic irresponsibility) — he played fast and loose with the facts and continued to shake hands with fans at rallies.
Conversely, Ford learned from his one misstep. No doubt in an attempt to calm the choppy waters, Ford urged people to travel, have fun, and get away during March break. He quickly realized that kind of freelancing was unacceptable during a global pandemic, and, ever since, he has been on point with his advice and stewardship of the crisis.
He has also declined to take any partisan potshots at this time. He called himself “a big fan” of Freeland. In his speech in the legislature earlier today, he noted that this was no time to talk about “the blue party, the red party, the orange party, or the green party. It’s about coming together. We’re all Team Ontario and Team Canada.” The premier’s actions have matched his words.
Politically speaking, the COVID-19 crisis has also given the government another opportunity. It’s allowed the Tories to feature their better performers during daily briefings. And
Health Minister Christine Elliott,
Finance Minister Rod Phillips, and
Labour Minister Monte McNaughton have not disappointed.
They, too, seem well-prepared to answer reporters’ questions and have conveyed the sense of gravitas the moment requires.
Perhaps equally important, this crisis has given the government the opportunity to sideline many of the ministers whose performances have been too controversial or disappointing. Education Minister Stephen Lecce is known to be a strong performer. But his constant presence in the media over the previous months was a frequent reminder of the government’s precarious and increasingly unpopular position during negotiations with teachers. Lisa Thompson, the minister of government and consumer services, had become one of the province’s most unfortunate embarrassments thanks to her ill-fated attempts to defend Ontario’s new licence plates. Neither has seen the media Klieg lights for a while.
Things have changed so much at Queen’s Park, the premier actually said these words earlier today: “I want to thank the media. You’re playing a massive role in helping us out.” And perhaps the biggest shockeroo: “There are a lot of great articles in the Toronto Star.”
There is no media outlet in the world that has had a more tempestuous relationship with both Doug and former Toronto mayor Rob Ford than the Star. So to hear the premier say those words demonstrates just how much things have changed over the past month.
Once the crisis passes, is there a likelihood that things will go back to “normal”? Of course there is. This is politics, after all. Mindless partisanship on all sides will return. Potshots will be taken. And the relationship with the media will get more hostile.
But, for now, we should all just take a moment to appreciate this moment of unity, when Ontario’s 26th first minister surprised so many by performing so well.
The regulator requested a delay of a new credit-loss standard for certain companies
The chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. on Thursday urged an accounting rule maker to make delays or exceptions to certain accounting rules to help financial institutions tackle the fallout from the coronavirus pandemic.
In a letter, FDIC Chairman Jelena McWilliams requested the Financial Accounting Standards Board, which sets U.S. accounting standards, to give large public lenders the option to defer implementing a new rule on expected future credit losses. The companies that decide to delay implementation would revert to the old model of recognizing losses once they had evidence the losses had been incurred.
The rule, known as Current Expected Credit Losses, or CECL, requires companies to forecast expected loan-related losses as soon as a loan is issued. It went into effect for large U.S. public companies in December. The FDIC approved a measure in 2018 allowing banks to take three years to phase in the impact of the rule on their regulatory capital.
The economic uncertainty of the pandemic may cause banks to face higher-than-anticipated increases in credit-loss allowances at a time when they should be focused on lending to businesses and consumers, Ms. McWilliams said.
The regulator also sought a delay for certain lenders that were expected to adopt the rule after December 2022. Financial institutions are better off focusing on ensuring the safety of their staff, customers and local communities, Ms. McWilliams wrote.
Market volatility related to the pandemic is expected to make the implementation of CECL challenging for companies because of the difficulty in making predictions about credit risk, especially if they rely on economic indicators for forecasting.
Ms. McWilliams also asked FASB not to classify coronavirus-related loan modifications as a concession creditors can grant during troubled-debt restructurings. Companies want to avoid that classification on their financial reports, Ms. McWilliams said. Allowing companies to skip categorizing modifications as TDRs would encourage them to offer forbearance to customers facing economic stress during the coronavirus pandemic, she said.
In response to the letter, a FASB spokeswoman said the organization agrees with the need for close coordination with the Securities and Exchange Commission and banking regulators to address issues associated with loan modifications. “We’re also continuing to work with financial institutions to understand their specific challenges in implementing the CECL standard,” she said.
Lawmakers in the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives introduced several bills last year in an effort to delay the credit-loss standard and study its potential effects. Those bills haven’t advanced beyond referrals to committees. Sen. Kevin Cramer (R., N.D.) on Wednesday introduced the latest bill, this time proposing the implementation of CECL be delayed until December 2024 for community banks.
Effort includes undercover purchase of testing kits from abroad and phone-tracking to map infections
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has mobilized Israel’s intelligence agencies to help contain the new coronavirus, an effort that has involved an undercover purchase of testing kits from abroad and the use of antiterrorism phone-tracking technology to map infections.
An undisclosed number of testing kits acquired Thursday by the foreign spy agency Mossad will be deployed to nationwide drive-in testing locations as Israel seeks to carry out thousands of tests a day, the prime minister said in a broadcast late Thursday.
Mr. Netanyahu’s office called the equipment “required and vital” but declined to say how many kits had been ordered and from which countries. “We are fully utilizing all the state’s capabilities to assist in dealing with the coronavirus, including the Mossad and other bodies,” his office said.
A man wearing a face mask walking in front of the Dome of the Rock mosque inside the almost deserted Al-Aqsa mosque compound in the Old City of Jerusalem on Friday.
PHOTO: AHMAD GHARABLI/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
Israel’s Channel 13 and the Jerusalem Post reported that the agency had arranged for 100,000 kits from countries that lack diplomatic relations with Israel and expected to bring millions more.
Those reports couldn’t be confirmed independently. Mossad often handles secret diplomacy with countries such as the Gulf Arab states that don’t formally recognize Israel but work with it on regional security challenges.
Itamar Grotto, the deputy health minister, said the imported kits lack a swab component but indicated the problem could be overcome. Mr. Netanyahu said Israel’s testing capacity would grow from several hundred a day to several thousand by next week.
Warning of an outbreak on a par with Italy’s, Mr. Netanyahu ordered Israel into lockdown late Thursday. The country’s nine million people are allowed to leave their homes only for vital missions such as buying food or getting medical treatment. The number of Israelis known to have contracted the virus rose to 705 on Friday morning, up from 427 on Wednesday morning.
Along with testing kits, health officials say Israel will need more ventilators as the number of patients sickened by Covid-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus, grows. The Defense Ministry said it has purchased 2,500 ventilators but delivery will take months.
To help meet demand, a team in Israel’s military intelligence branch known as the Technological Unit, or Unit 81, is working with medical professionals to upgrade household BiPap ventilators, which help patients with sleep apnea and other breathing difficulties, into hospital-quality ventilators.
“A prototype is being manufactured in the unit at this moment in order to study it and bring it to wide use,” the Israeli military said in a statement.
Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, the Shin Bet, is retooling its spyware to meet the medical emergency. In recent days it has deployed a nationwide digital-surveillance program, using technology designed for counterterrorism, to locate people at risk of infection. The program uses cellphone data of people known to be infected to identify who else was close enough to catch the virus.
As a result of the surveillance, the health ministry said 400 Israelis received a text message Wednesday asking them to enter quarantine.
“According to an epidemiological survey, you were near someone sick from coronavirus. You must immediately enter Quarantine for 14 days to protect your relatives and the public,” the text message said.
Shin Bet’s program, authorized by the attorney general and supported by health ministry officials, was criticized by privacy advocates and some lawmakers. The supreme court, acting on a petition by two civil-rights groups, issued an injunction ordering a halt to the program by next Tuesday unless parliament establishes the relevant oversight committees. The parliament was shut Wednesday by its speaker, an ally of Mr. Netanyahu, in a dispute with opposition parties over control of its committees.
Authorities in some Asian countries have deployed similar surveillance methods and said they contributed to containing the virus. South Korean health authorities can sift through credit-card records, CCTV footage, mobile-phone location services, public-transport cards and immigration records to pin down the travel histories of those infected or at risk. China monitors individuals with data provided by telecom firms, the railway bureau and airlines. Hong Kong monitors families quarantined at home with electronic wristbands. Taiwan tracks people who are under home quarantine using their mobile-phone signals.
The disconnect is already shaping, even distorting, the nation’s response.
Even a disease as far-reaching as the coronavirus hasn’t entirely crossed the chasm between red and blue America.In several key respects, the outbreak’s early stages are unfolding very differently in Republican- and Democratic-leaning parts of the country. That disconnect is already shaping, even distorting, the nation’s response to this unprecedented challenge—and it could determine the pandemic’s ultimate political consequences as well.
A flurry of new national polls released this week reveals that while anxiety about the disease is rising on both sides of the partisan divide, Democrats consistently express much more concern about it than Republicans do, and they are much more likely to say they have changed their personal behavior as a result. A similar gap separates people who live in large metropolitan centers, which have become the foundation of the Democratic electoral coalition, from those who live in the small towns and rural areas that are the modern bedrock of the GOP.
Government responses have followed these same tracks. With a few prominent exceptions, especially Ohio, states with Republican governors have been slower, or less likely, than those run by Democrats to impose restrictions on their residents. Until earlier this week, Donald Trump downplayed the disease’s danger and overstated the extent to which the United States had “control” over it, as the conservative publication The Bulwarkrecently documented. Conservative media figures including Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity likewise insisted for weeks that the media and Democrats were exaggerating the danger as a means of weakening Trump. Several Republican elected officialsencouraged their constituents to visit bars and restaurants precisely when federal public-health officials were urging the opposite.
The disparity between the parties was underscored late yesterday afternoon when Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti and California Governor Gavin Newsom, both Democrats, issued rapid-fire orders closing down all non-essential businesses, first in the city and then in the entire state, a jurisdiction of 39.5 million people.
This divergence reflects not only ideological but also geographic realities. So far, the greatest clusters of the disease, and the most aggressive responses to it, have indeed been centered in a few large, Democratic-leaning metropolitan areas, including Seattle, New York, San Francisco, and Boston. At yesterday’s White House press briefing, Deborah Birx, the administration’s response coordinator, said half of the nation’s cases so far are located in just 10 counties. The outbreak’s eventual political effects may vary significantly depending on how extensively it spreads beyond these initial beachheads.
If the virus never becomes pervasive beyond big cities, that could reinforce the sense among many Republican voters and office-holders that the threat has been overstated. It could also fuel the kind of xenophobia that Trump and other GOP leaders, such as Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, have encouraged by labeling the disease the “Chinese virus” or the “Wuhan virus.”
“There’s a long history of conservatives demonizing the cities as sources of disease to threaten the ‘pure heartland,’” says Geoffrey Kabaservice, the director of political studies at the libertarian Niskanen Center and the author of Rule and Ruin, a history of the modern Republican Party. “That’s an old theme. So that could be how it goes down.”
Conversely, the charge that Trump failed to move quickly enough may cut more deeply if the burden of the disease is heavily felt in the smaller communities where his support is deepest. Most medical experts believe that, eventually, the outbreak will reach all corners of the country, including the mostly Republican-leaning small towns and rural areas that are now less visibly affected.
“There’s no reason to think that smaller communities will be protected from it,” Eric Toner, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told me. “It may take longer for it to get there, but as long as there are people coming and going … the virus will eventually find its way to rural communities as well.”
Still, some experts believe that, throughout the outbreak, the greatest effects will remain localized in large urban centers. “The bottom line is, every epidemic is local, and the social networks and the physical infrastructure in any specific geographic area will determine the spread of the epidemic,” Jeffrey D. Klausner, a professor of medicine and public health at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, told me. “Particularly, respiratory viruses are dependent on close social networks and are going to spread much more efficiently in crowded, densely populated urban areas.”
The tendency of Democratic-leaning places to feel the impact first reflects the larger economic separation between the two parties. Democrats now dominate the places in the U.S. most integrated into the global economy, which may be more likely to receive international visitors or see their own residents travel abroad.On the case-tracking website maintained by Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Systems Science and Engineering, each of the four states with the largest number of coronavirus cases is a Democratic-leaning place along the coast: New York, Washington, California, and New Jersey. Florida, a coastal, internationally oriented state that leans slightly toward the GOP, ranks fifth. Illinois, Louisiana, Massachusetts, and Texas, each with at least one big urban center that functions as a gateway for tourism and trade, come in next. And though the Johns Hopkins project isn’t publishing precise county and municipal data on the outbreak, the biggest clusters of disease have all erupted in a few large metropolitan areas.
Toner said that while “it’s not universally the case” that pandemic diseases tend to spread first in the places most open to international travel, “as a general rule” that is the progression they follow. “The virus travels with people,” Toner said. “So, where people travel is where the virus goes first, and then it spreads out from those areas in which it has been introduced.”
By contrast, with only a few exceptions, the states with the fewest number of confirmed cases are smaller, Republican-leaning ones between the coasts, with fewer ties to diverse populations and the global economy. That list includes Wyoming, Idaho, Missouri, Montana, South Dakota, Oklahoma, and Kansas. (One important caveat: Testing in the United States remains deficient, so many cases are inevitably flying under the radar. “It’s not the case that other places don’t have cases,” Toner said. “They just don’t recognize them yet.”)
Republican-leaning states to this point are displaying notably less urgency about the outbreak. Of the states that have taken the fewest actions to restrict public gatherings or limit restaurant service on a statewide basis—such as Texas, Missouri, and Alabama—almost all have Republican governors, according to research by Topher Spiro, the vice president for health policy at the liberal Center for American Progress, where he directs a program that examines state health initiatives.
That’s left Democratic-run cities in those red states—such as Houston, Tucson, Nashville, and Atlanta—to try to impose their own rules on public gatherings. Yet all those local limits face an obvious problem: People from elsewhere in the state can still travel to their jurisdictions. “We can’t seal our borders,” acknowledged Lina Hidalgo, the chief administrator in Harris County, Texas, which includes Houston, when she announced county-wide closures on Monday.
The willingness to impose statewide rules hasn’t entirely followed party lines: Before his announcement in California yesterday, for example, Newsom had couched proposals to shut restaurants, schools, and other establishments as recommendations, not requirements, thus permitting a patchwork of local responses. But generally, Spiro’s research found, almost all of the states that took the earliest and most dramatic statewide action, such as New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Illinois, have Democratic governors.Public attitudes about the outbreak are separating along the same lines. The huge differences between Republicans and Democrats extend not only to assessments of Trump’s response to the outbreak but also to its underlying level of danger and the need to change personal behavior. If anything, there’s considerable evidence that those gaps are widening.
A national Gallup poll released Monday, for instance, found that while 73 percent of Democrats and 64 percent of independents said they feared that they or someone in their family might be exposed to the coronavirus, only 42 percent of Republicans agreed. That 31-percentage-point difference dwarfed the gap in February, when slightly more Republicans (30 percent) than Democrats (26 percent) said they were concerned.
Other surveys have found comparably stunning differences. In an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll released Sunday, Republicans were only half as likely as Democrats to say that they planned to stop attending large gatherings, and just one-third as likely to say that they had cut back on eating at restaurants. In an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll released Tuesday, just over half of Republicans said the threat from the virus had been exaggerated, compared with one in five Democrats and two in five independents.
In a nationwide Kaiser Family Foundation poll released the same day, about half of Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents said the outbreak had disrupted their life at least some, according to detailed results provided to me by the pollsters. But only one-third of Republicans and those who leaned Republican agreed. About half of Democrats said they had changed travel plans and decided not to attend large gatherings. In both cases, less than one-third of Republicans agreed.
Kabaservice says the tendency of GOP voters and officials to downplay the risk partly reflects Trump’s initially dismissive messaging about the crisis. But it may also relate to a deeper ideological suspicion of scientists, the media, and subject-matter experts within the federal government.
“This is something we’ve gone through a while here among Republicans,” Kabaservice says. “The feeling increasingly is that experts and the media are all part of this elite class that is self-dealing and is looking down on less-educated and less-fortunate people, and [that] they can’t be trusted to tell the truth.” He adds, “That dynamic … has been reinforced” by the emergence of the “conservative media ecosystem,” which unstintingly presents “elites” as a threat to viewers.
The parties’ contrasting geographic bases of support may also have an influence. Recent public polling has found an imposing gulf in attitudes between urban and suburban areas on one side and small-town and rural areas on the other.In the Gallup survey, two-thirds of urban residents and three-fifths of those in suburbs said they were concerned about someone around them contracting the coronavirus, while only about half of those living in rural areas agreed, according to detailed results provided to me by Gallup. (That town-and-country gap had widened since February.) In the Kaiser poll, more than two-thirds of rural residents said the outbreak had disrupted their life little or not at all, while nearly half of urban residents said they had already experienced disruption. Additionally, rural residents were almost twice as likely as those in urban areas to express confidence in Trump’s handling of the crisis.
Eva Kassens-Noor, a professor in the global-urban-studies program at Michigan State University, studied urban/rural patterns in the 1918 flu pandemic in India. Her research found that mortality was much greater in urban places above a certain density level than in rural places below it. She believes that U.S. communities will experience the coronavirus in contrasting, but complex, ways: While the disease will probably spread more rapidly in urban areas, she says, more of the population there is young and healthy. And while outbreaks may not be as pervasive in rural America, they could still prove very damaging because the population is older and has less access to quality health care.
Mortality rates, she says, will ultimately hinge on how rigorously communities minimize interaction by practicing social distancing. “It is all about individuals closing all of their social networking,” she says.
More penetration of the virus into reliably Republican rural regions probably won’t erase the partisan gap in perception of the danger. The Republican pollster Bill McInturff, whose firm Public Opinion Strategies co-manages the NBC/WSJ poll, says that even Republicans in and around big cities remain much more dubious of the threat than their Democratic neighbors.
But if the outbreak becomes more widely dispersed over time, it may be tougher for even the most conservative governors to resist action—or for Trump to escape consequences for his initially dismissive response.
“Seattle, San Francisco, New York, Boston are just a few weeks ahead of other parts of the country,” Toner said. “There will be outbreaks in places that we will be very surprised by. I am quite confident about that.”
