I wonder how many of those were politicians and their families? :notacrook:

I debated on making a joke about that too. :haha:

My point exactly. The virus is here long term. Time to start learning to go on about our lives with it. The first lockdowns didnt work and neither will the second and every one after will be the same.

Since F9 is now big enough... I now have a tool to pull the full schedule automatically from their schedule API...

Here is the full schedule for the second week of July:

Here is the Aug schedule when they add YXX:

Now if only WS have a reliable schedule API that I can use...

My point is, it did work and some provinces almost completely get rid of it.

Then the restriction is relaxed and people begin to move around and bring the virus around and no one seemed to care about it for the entire summer through fall, so we ended up in a much worse situation in the winter. Had we had the restriction we're having right now back in the summer, I'm sure the situation would be a lot better.

That being said, with the situation south of the border at that time, there is pretty much no chance for Canada to have as much control as seen in Australia, NZ, and a few of other Asian countries...

Exactly. Here in Nova Scotia, we've had 12 cases in the past two weeks (all but one of them travellers, who quarantined on arrival and didn't contribute to spread) for a population of one million people. Everything is open and the risk of infection is nearly zero.

The lockdowns, though imperfectly executed, obviously worked. Even in provinces that didn't eliminate COVID, they certainly have resulted in less illness and death.

Pandemics don't last forever. COVID-19 is likely with us for the long haul, but widespread vaccination will turn it from a raging pandemic to one of many in the pantheon of infectious diseases we already contend with. We're not that far off from getting to that point.

I agree, I just hope the powers that be aren't going with ZERO or bust.

The feds seem strangley happy to throw $4 billion at transit today which has also suffered massive usage declines yet not willing to extend the same to airlines.

Trudeau was almost giddy with excitement when announcing that today. I was ready to punch him in the nose but didn’t want to break my TV set! :bash:

What part of "vaccines by September" makes people think it's never going away?

If you actually believe that, you either don't have the patience to wait a few more months (and with believe in anything that involves going back to normal early) or you have been duped by your Facebook feed just as badly as the anti-vaxxers.

We were told ten months ago that lockdowns will stop the spread (they did), that with relaxed restrictions there would be a second wave in the fall (there was), and that vaccines would be on the way in 2021 (they are).

...and you have the audacity to adopt this absolutely ridiculous notion that we should give up and let the old people die now that we can see the finish line? How could you be so pompous? What in the last year led you to think you know better than the doctors and scientists?

Exaggerate much? Who is saying to just give up and let the old folks die? Also, where has anything official said that we are going to bring COVID down to zero? Hell, we still have small amounts of Polio cases every year in the world. I'm just hoping that enough of us choose to get vaccinated and cases are considered at a level that we are able to function as a society again. I'm under no illusion that we will completely eradicate it, and I hope that isn't what the various governments are expecting before allowing a resumption of normal life.

Air Canada appears to have cancelled a few long haul routes for the whole summer.

YYC-NRT
YVR-KIX
YYZ-OPO
YYZ-OTP
YYZ-LIM
YYZ-PRG
YYZ-WAW
YUL-OTP

There's probably more that I've missed and there will likely be further cuts down the road too.

Feds approve AC/TS acquistion
https://www.newswire.ca/news-release...837971518.html

There's a few conditions:

Separate departments have separate announcements.

Public Transit = Infrastructure Canada

Airlines = Transport Canada

Should the government stop all funding announcements, including those from say Health Canada, ECCC, NRCan, Parks Canada, Public Safety, etc. until the airline bailout package gets completed?

The formal relief package for the airlines is being worked on. Could it have moved faster? Perhaps. But on the flip side, they've already received lots of aid:
--> +$1 billion from CERB
--> +$2.3 billion from not being forced to refund pax yet
--> LEEFF that's available to all big companies and that Sunwing have accessed (I know in this era of 0.25% BoC prime, that 8% interest and severely limiting executive pay and shareholder compensation isn't appealing to them)
--> The up to $184 million subsidy contribution agreements (coming out one province/territory at a time) to maintain service to remote airports. The fact that practically none of the remote airports are served by the majors, isn't the government's fault.

Not to mention the additional aid for airports. It's obvious that neither AC nor WS are anywhere near desperate enough for LEEFF. This time last year, AC's balance sheet was its healthiest in history, whereas WS' parent Onex is still extremely profitable - over $1/2 billion net income for Q3 2020.

That's amazing thanks.

Would love to hear the details on that one. Slots perhaps.

https://tc.canada.ca/en/aviation/com...planatory-note

This mentions YYZ/YUL-Europe, as well as Panama, Colombia and Israel.

+1.

Eradication is an absurd goal. Only one human virus in history has ever been eradicated: smallpox.

Complete lifting of all COVID-related restrictions (ie. full return to 2019 normal), with widespread COVID vaccination, will probably bring death and hospitalization rates down to less than that of influenza. And we never locked down our economy over influenza.

We are probably talking about October. Everyone who wants a vaccine gets it by September. You wait four weeks to build up immunity and then lift all restrictions. The world can then go back to normal.

"The world" will not all have been vaccinated by October. A return to normal by then seems unduly optimistic to me.