Nobody wants an election, but everybody's expecting one Did someone forward you this newsletter? Sign up here to get it delivered weekday mornings. This evening, the House could give a second reading to a proposed government bill that would set ground rules for holding an election during the pandemic. Originally introduced last December at the urging of Chief Electoral Officer Stéphane Perrault, Bill C-19 would make temporary changes to the Elections Act, which would stretch voting to three days and grant Perrault new legal authority to enforce health and safety protocols. Will an election actually happen, though? All three major parties are saying they don't want one, but their actions say otherwise. All have loudly spent time fundraising, nominating candidates and running attack ads. The Conservatives have been off to an especially strong start, saying they’ve raised $8.5 million between January and March of this year—more than twice what any party earned in the previous quarter. The Liberals’ strategy, meanwhile, has skewed defensive. This weekend, Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Dominic LeBlanc lobbed a grenade back into his opponents’ trenches: after being hammered by Conservative Premier Doug Ford about porous borders leading to a third wave, LeBlanc wrote a letter to Ford, asking him which international travellers he wants banned from entering the province. Don't expect a reply. Who knew what? The Prime Minister’s chief of staff, Katie Telford, appeared before the House of Commons’ defence committee on Friday to testify about what she knew regarding the Jonathan Vance scandal. She insisted she did not know the complaints against Vance, made in 2018, were sexual in nature, and insisted everything was done by the “appropriate people”, a.k.a. the Privy Council Office. According to Telford, former privy council clerk Michael Wernick was the one to insist the politicians stay out of it. But when asked about who kept Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in the dark about all this, Telford did not answer—multiple times. And even if her argument is factually correct, it raises the question: why didn’t anyone from the PMO try and learn more? Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault is still trying to explain how his government’s proposed Bill C-10, which would subject online content to CRTC regulations, won’t infringe on the free speech of most Canadians. On CTV’s Question Period, he said that the telecommunications commission would only have jurisdiction over user-generated content if that user happened to have “millions of viewers” or was “generating a lot of money on social media”. What’s the threshold, exactly? Conveniently, that’s not the minister’s job to answer: those decisions would fall to the CRTC itself. The problem of Alzheimer's. As elderly populations grow worldwide, caregivers and analysts have struggled with how to communicate just how big a problem Alzheimer's and dementia will become. For Maclean's, Brian Bethune dives into the subject with Jason Karlawish, author of the new book, The Problem of Alzheimer’s: How Science, Culture and Politics Turned a Rare Disease into a Crisis and What We Can Do About It. We add up caregiving’s economic costs, Karlawish says, flicking at the $60-million North American estimate, but we still don’t value it. If we did, we wouldn’t ignore caregivers “foregoing college education for the grandkids because the money is being hoovered up for patient care,” or simply sliding into burnout. “Talking about this is where I get very angry—many countries, not just my own, have not stepped up to the challenge of helping people—helping families—live with this disease.” Our societies benefit from caregiving, and “we should start thinking of it as part of the wealth of our nations.” Among the lesser-noticed line items in this year's federal budget: the government’s efforts to lower the country’s criminal interest rates. Currently, “criminal” interest rates for long-term loans start at 60 per cent annually, which means loan companies typically dole out loans of 50 per cent. Senator Pierrette Ringuette, an advocate of lowering the accepted rates, told CBC News those numbers haven’t changed since the double-digit interest rates of the 1980s: today, she argues, a realistic cap should be 20 per cent. After more than a year of political failures on all levels, partisans and critics have turned to blaming whatever party they dislike for the deaths of more than 24,000 Canadians. Some have argued that stronger federal intervention could have at least suppressed this outcome, if not prevented it the way the Atlantic provinces have. But Jen Gerson, writing in Maclean’s, argues that the pandemic has simply proven that Ottawa is too ill-equipped to handle a situation this serious. Look, if this pandemic hasn’t inspired you to a quasi-serious meltdown over the deeply sclerotic state of our national institutions, you’re rather missing out. The federal Liberals have spent several years wrapping themselves in a lot of fine nostalgia for Canada’s glory days. But at the end of the day, Ottawa has revealed itself to be run by a lot of well-intentioned but feckless cheque-writers who have no more grand sense of what this country is, or what it ought to be doing with itself, than anybody else. Calling all pilots: The head of the Royal Canadian Air Force, Lt.-Gen. Al Meinzinger, is hoping the RCAF can work with the department of immigration to bring in skilled military pilots to fill Canada’s shortage. The air force is currently about 130 people shy of filling its 1,500 open slots. Meinzinger is specifically looking at Europe and India, and is working to streamline the immigration process for interested flyers—a task all the more daunting in the COVID era. —Michael Fraiman | 