Blessed by the Potato

I don’t know if it’s just going viral because sometimes things do that, or if there’s a coordinated push from the various conservative social media accounts to attack Canada’s zero-emission vehicle (ZEV) mandate, or if I’ve accidentally trained The Algorithm into thinking I crave the absolute dumbest opinions on cars, but for whatever reason I am seeing a tonne of misinformation on social media about the ZEV mandate.

For those who don’t know, as one step toward meeting our climate goals Canada has set a sales target for a portion of new cars to be “zero emission”, starting next year (2026) with a 20% target, increasing each year until by 2035 gas-only vehicles are phased out completely and the market is 100% ZEV.

You Won’t be Forced to Drive an EV

This does not mean that you will have to buy an all-electric car: ZEVs include plug-in hybrids. So all the vitriolic takes about having to charge on long drives or running out of juice if stuck in traffic in the winter are nonsense misinformation based on misreading what the government means by ZEVs in the mandate. Most cars sold will continue to have a gas engine for extra range, heat in the winter, road trips, etc., they’ll just also have a battery to handle most local driving needs.

There are a bunch of PHEVs on the market today: a Prius Prime or Hyundai Ioniq if you want a mid-sized car; an Escape PHEV (like mine — as much as I criticize aspects of it, it’s a great driving solution) or Rav4 Prime if you want a regular SUV; a Pacifica if you want a van; an Outlander or Sorento if you want a giant SUV. And many more options that will be coming in time for 2035.

Almost 14% of cars sold in 2024 were ZEVs. Now, most of those were in Quebec where there are significant provincial incentives, but if all it takes is $7k to move the needle that much, then the national quota/credit system should help make it happen (and if not, driving a gas guzzler may become a Veblen good). To my surprise, despite a PHEV being the better solution, most of the ZEVs sold last year were actually full battery-electric vehicles (BEVS), about three-quarters. But IMNSHO, that was in part due to availability: the Rav4 Prime is still backordered to hell, the Escape PHEV was just starting to become available in 2024 and I believe the Hyundai options were largely in the same boat, the Prius Prime was still a brand-new model, and many other options were compliance frankenvehicles. As we move toward 2035 and the ZEV mandate starts to force sales towards ZEVs, I think we’ll see PHEVs take the lead over BEVs.

Charging Infrastructure

The next big misinformation point is for posters to wring their hands up and say there’s no way we’ll have the charging infrastructure for all those electric-powered cars in that time… without ever providing data or a calculation to back that fear-mongering up (“Can you imagine?”). Or assuming an unrealistically worse-than-worst-case scenario, like that all cars are full EVs and have completely drained their batteries at the same time and all want to do fast charging at once.

So let’s do a quick back-of-the-envelope exercise. ZEVs need very roughly 10 kWh/day — the PHEVs largely have roughly that much battery capacity, and they charge from a regular household outlet at about 1 kW overnight at off-peak times. The BEVs will have more capacity (call it 70 kWh for their total battery capacity), but the average demand will come in close to that (because most days they don’t drive their full range). They’ll have higher power chargers (level 2), but if we can handwave away that they won’t all be on at the same time, the population-level effect comes out to the same sort of order-of-magnitude of a kW or so for mostly off-peak times.

Ontario has just over 8 million passenger vehicles. Though there would be 10 years before the ZEV mandate kicks in, and more time for all those new cars to work their way into the system (the gas-only cars sold today would still be around then so we’d have two or three decades to fully add any grid or power generation needs), let’s assume the worst-case that a wizard has cursed us to all drive ZEVs tomorrow. 8 million cars times a kW each is 8 GW of power demand, mostly off-peak.

Ontario, on a typical day, uses about 19 GW on-peak, and 13 GW off-peak (NB: 10-year-old data), so we have something like 6 GW — almost all! — of that grid capacity sitting in our back pocket right now. Yes, it would be a problem if all those cars tried to charge on-peak on a hot summer day with peak A/C demand, but that’s not generally how people charge their PHEVs or even their EVs — they plug in after they get home, often with the car having a timer to wait until off-peak rates to start charging. And that’s our magic-wand scenario — the ZEVs will phase in more slowly, so there will be lots of time for the grid (and generation) capacity to grow.

Cost for Canadians

The last point of misinformation is that this ZEV mandate is going to make cars more expensive for Canadians, and that one does has a big grain of truth to it, but is more subtle and complicated than just comparing the sticker price of an electric car to comparable gas-only one. First off, a system of quotas and credits will generally mean the people driving gas-only cars subsidize the costs of those driving ZEVs. Indeed, in other markets Tesla sells its BEV credits to other manufacturers, so those BEVs are subsidized so much that in many quarters Tesla has more regulatory credit income than it does net income (i.e., the cars are otherwise sold at a loss). So yes, it will make gas-only cars more expensive, but the ZEVs should be cheaper as a result, benefiting the early adopters (with the trade-off that ZEVs are more expensive in the first place).

But the up-front cost is only part of what Canadians pay to drive their cars. Driving on electricity is cheaper than driving on gas for almost all ZEVs out there in almost all jurisdictions. Indeed, part of why I opted for the more expensive Ford Escape PHEV over a comparable hybrid or dino gas-only model is that I expect to save money over its lifetime. While social media may complain that the mandate is increasing prices on Canadians, and that’s largely true for up-front costs, there’s a good chance it will actually help them save money, by nudging them (or in later years, shoving them) into buying a car with a lower total cost of ownership — paternal and all that, but helpful for people that only consider the up-front cost of a car.

The Actual Good Point They Miss

However, that lower total cost of ownership will only apply for those people who are able to plug in at home, and that is not going to be everyone, even in a decade. Which is the one really strong criticism of the mandate: 100% is not necessarily the right number for the final step of the mandate. However, I haven’t seen any of the people who are angry at the mandate discuss the flaws in its specifics and how to make it better, they seem to be angry about the very notion of regulating the free market.

Some people won’t be able to charge (and some will steadfastly refuse to for various reasons and irrational personal preferences even when they can), so in those cases they will be paying more for capabilities they aren’t able to use — only having PHEVs/BEVs available with higher up-front costs really will increase their cost of ownership, as they pay for a battery they won’t use and just go to the gas station like they do today.

Now, an argument can be made that despite that, the target has to be 100%: if we make it say 75% to account for the ~25% who can’t realistically operate on electricity, there is no way the right 25% will end up buying the gas cars: lots of people with the ability to charge will just buy gas cars because they want to as long as they’re available (indeed, buying a gas-only car may become a status symbol; gas guzzlers already are). Manufacturers, when buying credits are an option, may just opt to buy the credits and pass along the higher costs rather than innovate. A partial mandate may keep the momentum and status quo going far longer than if we went for the aggressive, full ZEV mandate, and having some people pay for charging capabilities they will rarely use may just be the cost to get us to a more decarbonized future, some proponents may argue.

So 20% ZEV sales next year is a pretty decent jump from 14%, but totally doable. Some small pricing tweaks on both sides will help manufacturers hit their sales mixes, combined with greater volume availability on the models that are popular anyway. But those targets will get increasingly harder to hit without better adoption by Canadians, and better model offerings (and pricing) from manufacturers. And I’m not convinced 100% is the right stopping point, but also don’t know how to better set the right level, and regardless that’s a more nuanced conversation than “ZEVs bad, government forcing you to do bad things!”

Aside: Confused at Car Manufacturers

I’ve done a few deep dives into hybrids and EVs over the years, but my expertise is not in cars or production. However, I know the hybrid synergy drive used by Toyota and Ford (with some shared patents) has proven itself to be reliable, efficient, and smooth. To the best of my understanding of how patents work, that system is off-patent now (and has been for a little while). So why the hell are so many manufacturers trying to re-invent the wheel (or HSD) rather than just throwing that wonderful, proven system into ~all their models? Why does Hyundai use a regular automatic transmission with an electric motor bolted to it (and get sub-par city mileage)? Why has Honda gone through like three different versions of their hybrid transmission? Why does Volvo sin against nature¹ with its PHEV monstrosities? Why is it seemingly so hard to just take the thing that works, and then use it more? (For that matter, it took Toyota long enough to streamline even a tiny portion of its models to hybrid-only, and some models still don’t have a hybrid version at all).

1. I know explaining the joke doesn’t make it funnier but I feel like I should explain: a common criticism of hybrids is that they’re more complex than gas-only cars so they must be inherently less reliable. Which the data shows us is wrong (the various Prius generations own the reliability rankings, and the problem spots on the 3rd gen were the gas engine, not the hybrid system). But more to the point, it’s not actually true for Toyota/Ford HSD hybrids: you add a pair of electric motors, an inverter, and a big battery, but those motors and the power split device then replace the starter, alternator, transmission, and clutch (and I believe something else that is escaping my memory as I write this). Having that electrical generation capacity then lets you take out all the belts, so the A/C and other things can now be replaced with more reliable electric versions (and the power split and electric motors are way more reliable than a conventional automatic transmission). It’s actually fewer moving parts overall, with more reliable versions — it just sounds more complex. Volvo (and a few other manufacturers) are not using that system, they are in fact just bolting a motor and battery on to the car, and keeping all the old parts: conventional engine (indeed a turbo, not even an Atkinson-cycle which is where all the magic of a hybrid comes from and a huge part of why their fuel economy figures suck once the EV range runs out), conventional transmission, starter, etc. is all still there, plus a motor to run the other set of wheels and a battery and an inverter. All those tired criticisms of hybrids we’ve spent decades dispelling they’ve gone ahead and made manifest.

It’s rare disease day, so let’s look back on TTP, the rare disease that Wayfare had/has.

Thrombotic Thrombocytopenia Purpura

The tense is hard with TTP. It’s a sudden, short-term, life-threatening blood disorder. But even once the antibodies retreat as mysteriously as they appeared and the platelet count goes back to normal, it’s never really gone. There’s a good chance a survivor received organ damage from the clots or bleeding during a TTP attack, which may manifest as brain, kidney, liver, or heart damage — or just about anything else.

But beyond that, there’s the fear that it will come back. Roughly half of patients will at some point have another TTP attack, each of which carries with it a risk of dying during the episode, and accumulating more permanent organ damage and disabilities.

Wayfare essentially has PTSD from her rare disease. It took over a week and several visits to urgent care and the hospital before her TTP was finally diagnosed correctly and treatment started. By that point, she had so few platelets remaining that they had to call a vascular surgeon in to the ICU to do a cut-down on her leg to access a vein. They couldn’t run a central line because if it happened to bleed, she’d bleed out before they could stop it. In the leg at least they had the option of sacrificing the leg and tourniquetting it if the line went poorly.

We can’t afford to wait that long if she has a relapse, but the first signs of a potential relapse are fairly every-day occurrences. So any headache, any mysterious bruise (or one with a known cause that doesn’t look to be healing fast enough), any splotching on the skin, any time she feels maybe more tired than normal… these are all potential medical emergencies and we have to get her blood taken. Every few months we are off to the blood lab on short notice, or sometimes straight to the hospital to check.

Fortunately, there’s a new drug available that can help. She was part of the clinical trial, and was out of the hospital weeks sooner than they had predicted when she went in. Who knows how bad the strokes may have been if she hadn’t got it?

In Which Potato Learns How Drugs are Approved

Being in medical research, but not drug development itself, I thought I had an above-average idea of how drugs get to patients: Someone has an idea, it goes through pre-clinical testing, then clinical trials (Phases 1, 2, and 3) then reviewed by Health Canada, then ta-da, new drug on the market!

Caplacizumab went through all that. It’s safe and effective. Health Canada approved it. But TTP patients in Canada still can’t get it.

We can’t even choose to pay out of pocket for it.

There’s one more critical step: the drug has to make it onto a provincial formulary, the listing of drugs available for purchase somewhere in the province.

A big influence there is CADTH, which makes a cost-benefit analysis. In our case, they decided to recommend against caplacizumab, which as someone with expertise in a related field, who’s done a lot of reading into TTP for obvious reasons, I cannot understand why. Nearly every other nation that’s completed their equivalent review has approved it — if Wayfare gets sick again, we may be best served by putting her on a flight to the US or UK, ’cause their patients can get caplacizumab.

Reading their report, they seem to have mis-understood the feedback patients sent in, saying that we were concerned about the risk of a relapse but the clinical trial didn’t address that question. The subtext is that the company is welcome to fund another clinical trial to answer that question, after which CADTH may re-visit the decision. But that’s insane, no company is going to do that for a rare disease, especially for a tiny country like Canada if the big countries have already approved it!

And that isn’t the point we were making! The point is that caplacizumab works. It works to stop the early disease process where the platelets are forming tiny clots just fucking everywhere and ruining your very best brain tissue and nephrons. It gives you time for the conventional therapy (plasma exchange) to do its job and clear the bad antibodies that kicked the whole cascade off. It gets people out of hospital sooner and with fewer long-term disabilities.

And not just the first time. Half of TTP patients will have a relapse. Some of them have multiple relapses per year. Every time they relapse, they run that permanent organ damage and disability gauntlet: will it be a stroke this time? Will they lose a kidney? Will it affect their energy levels a little, or will everything get all scrambled so much they put the sugar in the coffee maker and the coffee in the cup in the mornings and just cry about how awful their coffee is, unable to make the connection about how to fix the problem?

We wanted them to consider that these risks don’t hit TTP patients just once, they’re a risk every relapse. Cutting those risks down by some significant percentage (the exact number would need more trials but the anecdotal evidence suggests it’s somewhere in the 50+% range) is huge if you have to face that risk over and over again — it compounds. A 10% risk of disability with each attack becomes a 40% chance after 5 relapses. Cutting just 5 percentage points off that risk doesn’t sound like a big deal when you only consider the initial attack in the cost-benefit analysis, but after a few years that’s half as many TTP survivors with a disability.

And more than the hard economics of the cost-benefit analysis: nobody out there knows if they might get TTP. It’s super-rare, you may not have heard about it before now. But once you’ve had your first attack, you live with that constant fear that you might be one of the unlucky ~50% who will have a relapse. You live with PTSD, the constant triggers that any little every day thing might be the first sign of a relapse. Knowing caplacizumab is there to improve your odds if you do relapse would be a huge mental benefit even if you never actually need the drug yourself.

The other side of the cost-benefit was also hard to understand: it’s a niche, antibody-based drug, so it’s somewhat expensive, yes. But it’s not like a take every day forever kind of drug, more like an epi-pen: an emergency rescue medication taken during an acute episode to help buy time for other treatments to work, saving lives and tissue in the process.

Political Action

Right now, the patient group Answering TTP is sending a letter to some of the provincial leaders. It’s still possible for these leaders to choose to make caplacizumab available in their province — CADTH’s report is a recommendation only, it is ultimately a province-by-province decision.

Rare disease day doesn’t just have to be about awareness, we can also help improve treatment with a small step of getting a Health Canada-approved drug for a rare disease into the hands of the Canadian patients who need it.

So please, fire off an email to your province’s health minister, and CC your MPP. Or tweet at them and tell them CADTH made a whoopsie, it happens, but maybe they can go ahead and add caplacizumab to their formulary this rare disease day.

Thanks in advance from me.

Nitpicking

Screw it, I’m clearly never getting a job at CADTH, let’s burn some bridges and nitpick that CADTH report to show you why I just don’t get why this wasn’t instantly approved and lauded as a modern medical marvel!

“During the overall study period, a statistically significantly (P = 0.0004) lower percentage of patients in the caplacizumab group (nine patients; 12.7%) compared to the placebo group (28 patients; 38.4%) experienced recurrence of aTTP…”

Holy fucking shit, how is this not approved on that alone?!?! Yes, above I focused so much on the part they missed, about reducing the risk associated with each relapse, but it also pretty convincingly reduced the risk of relapses themselves in a statistically significant way!

“The submitted price of caplacizumab is $6,200 per 11 mg dose. Assuming 37.2 days of therapy (i.e., the mean exposure to caplacizumab for patients in the active treatment group of the HERCULES trial; the reported maximum was 65 days), the cost of caplacizumab for an aTTP episode is $236,840 per patient…”

That’s the worst-case cost. And like in many clinical trials, they didn’t really know what dosing regimen to use. I would place a sizeable bet that caplacizumab would give almost all of the benefits in a 10-day course costing just $62,000. The mechanism of action strongly suggests to me that it works best early on, and the anecdotes from other patients we’ve heard of include many dramatic turn-arounds in the first week or so. But if you’re running a clinical trial you’re not going to take a chance on that, you’re going to flood the study participants with the medication and be sure it works, and do some real-world evidence gathering to fine-tune the dosage later. More to the point, if Wayfare had a recurrence, she would instantly pay $62,000 out of pocket to get a 10-day course of caplacizumab… if it were available to Canadian patients to purchase in the first place. But CADTH only considered the all-or-nothing case of using the same dosing regimen as the clinical trial.

Indeed, the real-world experience in the UK is that they are tapering down the dosing regimen, stopping when levels are normalized, rather than continuing all the way through plasma exchange. A few years ago their average days of use was already down to ~30, and is likely lower now (as a non-expert pointing to the outfield, I tell ya, 10 days).

Budget 2022 proposes to introduce the Tax-Free First Home Savings Account that would give prospective first-time home buyers the ability to save up to $40,000. Like an RRSP, contributions would be tax-deductible, and withdrawals to purchase a first home—including investment income— would be non-taxable, like a TFSA. Tax-free in, tax-free out.

The new Tax-Free First Home Savings Account (FHSA) is pitched as a way to save up for your first home. It’s like a super-charged RRSP: you get to put pre-tax money in, and in one specific circumstance (buying a home), you can take it out tax-free. And if you don’t buy, you can roll it into an RRIF like a regular RRSP.

There’s lots to nit-pick with this idea: the $40k lifetime limit doesn’t make it much more effective for saving for a home than the old HBP option did. And while this is even better as you don’t have to pay it back and get to keep that tax savings, that’s a benefit you only see in later years vs the HBP — the $35k HBP was already letting you put that much pre-tax money to work for the purchase itself. On top of that, the $8k yearly limit means it will take 5 years to max out (and 4 to match what you could do in 90 days with the HBP and a regular RRSP). So at least it will push demand out if some people want to max it out before buying.

It’s a bit regressive, in that people in the highest tax brackets will see the biggest advantage from using the FHSA.

However, ignore all of the talk about using it for a downpayment. The fact that they took out the age limit and let you roll it into an RRIF mean that the FHSA serves another purpose: it helps renters shelter more investment income, functioning basically as more (and with an embedded option!) RRSP room. Someone who buys a place gets any increase in equity as a tax-free gain thanks to the principal residence exemption. That’s been a huge windfall in recent years, and can push people toward buying in an environment where prices are going up double-digits every year. That tax advantage also makes it even harder for those who don’t own to keep up. Someone can choose to rent instead and save the difference in monthly cashflows, but may soon run out of TFSA and RRSP room. An extra $8k/yr will help them shelter more of those gains.

And of course, provide that option to take the whole FHSA out at some point in the future to buy, tax-free.

Imagine a world where the cap and 15-year lifespan were removed and renters continued to get $8k/yr in room until they bought or turned 71 (and rolled it into a RRIF). Someone renting in a big, unaffordable city like Toronto could prioritize their FHSA, knowing that it would make it that much more possible to eventually buy when their indentured servitude in the city was over. $8k/yr at a 5% return would leave someone with nearly $400k after 25 years*. You could make a solid plan to do your time, renting happily along the way, and know that you could — tax-free — have nearly enough to buy a place in the boonies outright when your commuting days were done. Or, have more in your RRSP to support the costs of lifelong renting in retirement if you stayed in the city.

So while I don’t think this was a necessary thing to create (indeed it adds more complication to our tax and savings account system, and yet another financial literacy hurdle), and don’t think it’s going to do a damned thing for housing affordability… I welcome the FHSA. For many people, it will be the obvious first account to fill (even edging out a TFSA for those who plan to buy eventually). However, to be truly great and to help incentivize more people to rent and invest the difference and keep open the option to buy in the future, they’ll have to remove the fairly low lifetime contribution cap.

Indeed, I’m not sure many brokerages will bother to offer registered accounts that can only ever accept $40k, and are only available to the subset of renters who save money to invest — see how few bother to offer RDSPs.

* – remember that this is a hypothetical where they remove the cap and time limit. As it stands, the 2022 Federal Budget proposes a $40k lifetime cap and a 15 year maximum term to either buy a home or roll it into a RRSP/RRIF.

Adam Vaughan made himself the face of government callousness and inaction earlier this year[0]. It started with an appearance on TVO’s the Agenda, where when talking about what the government should do about housing, he said “We’re in a safe market for foreign investment but we’re not in a great market for Canadians looking for choices around housing.” Which wasn’t news to a lot of people, but it was news that the government knew and was choosing to do nothing rather than just being incompetent and unaware.

He then continued to say (and followed it up and in various Twitter battles) that the government would not do anything if it meant risking even a 10% decline in house prices — which in the context of the time (over 20%/yr increases, and not just in the big cities) would have been rolling prices back just a few months. But even that was too much for them.

In other words, he said the quiet part loud. And now we all know that they know, and that they don’t care.

He’s tried to make the case that housing prices falling is bad, as have others throughout this decade+ run-up in house prices. People don’t like seeing their biggest asset fall in value, and recent buyers could be underwater and financially stressed. If it gets rolling, it might lead to a recession.

And sure, it’s pretty obvious that if we have a housing crash, it would have many negative effects. The problem is, high prices also have negative effects, and there’s a chance prices will fall anyway in the future, and inaction just delays and exacerbates that.

Why Housing Bubbles are Bad

A housing crash and its associated harms is hard to miss, but the harms of a bubble are more subtle and insidious, but just as bad for society.

Bad? The wealth effect? Our cities becoming “world-class”? These are bad things? Well, those aren’t the only side effects of a housing bubble.

There are much more serious effects on people’s lives. There’s rising inequality, though that’s just part of it.

Housing is the biggest cost in most family’s budgets, and for young people that can be by a huge amount[1]. When housing gets more expensive, they feel the squeeze: literally, if they have to settle for being under-housed to make ends meet. That has real-world consequences.

I can write about the rent-vs-buy decision and raising a kid in a rental all I want, many people out there still want to put off starting families until they can buy sufficient housing for a family. The frenzied speculation makes rentals less secure even if rents themselves have lagged price appreciation. With higher prices (and rapidly rising prices), buying is harder — much harder — and young families have to settle for less space, and delay their purchases to save up. That means they put off having kids longer, and having fewer when they do. Toronto’s fertility rate dropped 16% in the last decade[2]. If anything else had caused our fertility rate to drop that much in just a decade (in the face of millennial demographics that we might have expected an increased fertility rate from) we would be rioting in the streets for the government to do something, holding up signs about the missing 10,000 babies. We’d be banning chemicals, exterminating mosquito vectors, or adding fertility treatments to OHIP coverage. But when it’s economic: crickets. Housing insecurity and microcondos are just the way of life here in a world-class city, and a few thousand unconceived babies are acceptable collateral damage for muh price growth.

Mike Moffat has also pointed out Toronto’s troublesome population movement patterns: the largest cohort of people leaving the city are newborns (followed by other young children and those in the parents of young children age bracket) — so even when a kid is born here, there’s a good chance its family promptly leaves.

Lots of people leaving Toronto and Peel. And who are they? People in the 30s and small children. Why? Priced out of the market. pic.twitter.com/oH8r5oGLhO

— Dr. Mike P. Moffatt (@MikePMoffatt) August 17, 2021

Lower interest rates (that somehow keep going lower) have helped support housing prices: mortgage payments have not increased as much as prices. But they have gone up quite a bit, and even if more and more of that payment goes toward principal, the principal still has to be paid back. 10 years ago, a $775k average detached house required that, at some point, you paid back $775k. Spread evenly over 25 years, that’s $31k/yr. A big chunk of a couple’s after-tax income, but doable if you were pulling in $100-120k combined (and a monthly payment including interest of $3.1k). At $1.7M, that’s $68k/yr to pay it off in 25 years, which doesn’t leave much else for having kids or supporting the economy (and the monthly is up to $5.4k at lower interest rates).

This is a big black hole for the velocity of money: more and more of our salaries are going to paying for our houses. That’s money that isn’t circulating back through the economy, or investing in something productive. Wouldn’t we be better off with lower house prices, and more of our disposable income going to services, innovation, transitioning to a low-carbon economy, charities, etc., instead of having housing sucking up all the cash flow?

In conclusion, while a crash can be harmful, high (and rapidly rising) house prices also have harms. So far the government has made it clear which set of harms they see and care about.

Election Time

A federal election has been called, and more and more people are saying that housing is a big issue for them. Each party has come out with an ineffectual do-nothing housing plan, and not one has acknowledged the elephant in the room: that a solution must allow at least the risk that house prices will drop. The cure to affordability is not to create more loan programs and tax breaks to help people pay higher and higher prices for housing[3] — it’s to get prices lower.

The first step is admitting that there is a problem[4]. I’m a left-leaning voter — often ABC — and while there are a lot of issues I care about (science funding, the environment, electoral reform, etc.), man, at this point I would vote PC if they actually came out with a housing plan that was willing to actually address prices and affordability.

[0] And stealing that crown from DoFo in a pandemic was quite the achievement.

[1] Though for the wealthy who haven’t read my book, investment fees may edge out housing.

[2] And that’s before the effect of the pandemic and lockdowns, which looks to have created its own “baby bust”. Also, other cities did have birth rate declines over the last decade too, though they were lagging Toronto’s — Calgary and Halifax had held steady through to 2016 (which would be about 9 months after Alberta’s oil bust started) and then a step down; London had a small decline in 2016, which was then exacerbated in 2018, while Toronto just heads down and down the whole decade.

[4] Update: Rob Carrick had a similar take here (and he got around to hitting publish first while I was dicking around in MS Paint). “Only a major price reversal can restore mass affordability and the federal parties won’t touch policies that would make this happen.”

Ontario provided its updated figures and modelling for covid today. The slides are available here if you want to look at the data without squinting at the video.

It’s not all that unexpected — I was sketching vaguely similar curves and worried about what an even more contagious version might do. But hearing it made real was just crushing. Covid’s on track to challenge heart disease and cancer for the top cause of death in Ontario this year (and will make the top 10 easy). And the strain on the hospital system is delaying treatments (esp. surgeries) which will make those other conditions worse.

But the big, not entirely surprising bad news is the hospital system and ICU beds: we’re just about out of empty ones, and the curve is still rapidly going up and to the right. Surgeries are being cancelled (again), and we’re not far off from very painful decisions about what happens if there’s a car accident.

One thing that’s crushing is that we were so close to getting to zero in the summer, and just opened back up a few weeks too early, without the testing and tracing capabilities ready. Still, the cases were low, everyone had stocked up on masks, and I genuinely thought we could get back to normal-ish with masks, handwashing, and social distancing*. I signed up for curling, expecting we would get a season, esp. with the modified rules of play (everyone wears masks, and things like using one sweeper to maintain 2 m between players at all times) — I had my mask rotation all planned out, and even got contact lenses so my glasses wouldn’t fog up. Schools reopened, and we kind of talked about how important that was for parents to be able to go back to work.

Then the cases started rising in the fall, and we did nothing about it until we’re now finding the hospital capacity getting crushed again. More people are going to lose their dads and other loved ones to cancer because surgeries had to get postponed, again.

I’m depressed and angry and just crushed at the whole thing.

I’m also a touch confused. They showed some data about how many people were moving around — people going to work has stayed steady since the summer, even as Toronto, Peel, and York went into lockdown (code red or grey or whatever). How there was a big spike in people visiting other residences at Christmas (to the surprise of no one). But I haven’t heard much on contact tracing and explaining what’s behind all the transmission. Are masks and handwashing and social distancing working, but some people aren’t compliant, and it’s that movement that’s the problem? Is it schools or workplaces or superspreader weddings? A little bit of everything adding up?

For most of those questions there isn’t much I can do on a personal level. I’ve tried to cut out contact with the outside world as much as possible, stretching out the time between grocery trips to two weeks or so, and our social circle is a completely closed bubble of 5 people. Wayfare has been making homemade masks since the beginning, and she did a lot of research on the best patterns and designs. They’re 3 layers, with two layers of regular (cotton?) fabric sandwiched around a layer of non-woven interface material. They have metal strips to conform to the nose (important to minimize glasses fogging and get the air moving through the material for filtering and not around the material), and straps to tie tightly around the head, which keeps it pretty well sealed all the way around the face. Though she made a few models with noses or cone shapes or whatever, I wear the basic pleated rectangle ones, so there’s no tiny holes from stitching a seam right in front of your nose. I’m sure they’re a step up from disposable surgical masks, even after a few washes. And I’m very good about wearing it whenever I’m indoors (or with another person outside — though I don’t wear one on solo walks).

However, are cloth masks enough, especially with the new B117 variant? Should we all (but especially should I) be wearing a N95-equivalent to go grocery shopping?

* – Circling back around to add: I thought the masks, distancing, etc. precautions would be good enough to get r < 1 so life could return to more-or-less normal. It doesn’t look like those were sufficient in practice (whether it’s non-compliance or whatever is a bit of a moot point as we will have non-compliance, esp. as covid fatigue sets in). We are a long, long way from Covid-zero (and we were really close in the summer!), but that may be the only strategy that lets us avoid the hammer and the dance through the fall based on the current vaccine roll-out projections.