Good evening, let’s start with today’s top stories:
Canadian nurses are leaving in droves, worn down by 16 merciless months on the front lines of COVID-19
Nurse Lynnsie Gough tried to hang on, but in the end, the workload and sorrow of COVID-19 were more than she could bear.
“It just kept getting worse and worse,” Ms. Gough, 35, said of her job as an intensive-care nurse at a hospital in Ontario’s Niagara area. “I was having anxiety attacks where I would feel or be physically ill. I felt like I was going off to war or prison every day going into work.”
The only way to preserve her well-being, Ms. Gough concluded, was to quit.
Last month, she joined the growing ranks of Canadian nurses who are retiring early, switching to part-time schedules, departing to work for private staffing agencies or leaving the profession after 16 merciless months on the front lines of the pandemic.
Read more: Restrictions for visits to group homes loosened as Ontario enters Step 3 of reopening
Opinion: Unfortunately, nurses can’t live on praise alone
‘The plants looked as if someone took a blowtorch to them’: Relentless heat is scorching crops across Western Canada
Extreme heat and dry conditions have devastated crops across Canada, scorching and stunting key agricultural products as farmers brace for the potential of more unfavourable weather and try to minimize their losses.
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With large swaths of the country under heat warnings over the past month, crops that prefer moderate temperatures and moisture levels are producing abysmal yields or are threatening to do so. Plants are wilting and, in some cases, dying. Irrigation reservoirs are getting low and farmers are rationing water
On British Columbia’s Vancouver Island, family-farm owner Satnam Dheenshaw said the recent record-setting heat burned his entire early crop of raspberries and about half of his blackberry crop, amounting to at least $30,000 in losses.
“The plants looked as if someone took a blowtorch to them,” said Mr. Dheenshaw, of Gobind Farms in the village of Saanichton.
Read more: Clean-up begins after a tornado in Barrie, Ont., destroys roughly 20 homes and injures people
Read more: Death toll over 120 in Germany and Belgium floods as rescues continue
‘God help this country’: Lebanon’s political stalemate speeds financial collapse
When former Lebanese prime minister Saad Hariri announced Thursday that he had again failed to form a new government, he sounded like he was giving up on something much bigger than a return to his old job.
“God help this country,” he said on television, hours after resigning as prime minister-designate.
The significance of the moment was quickly reflected in the money markets, where the Lebanese pound took another steep dive against the U.S. dollar, and on the streets, where angry protesters blocked roads and clashed with soldiers.
The scenes of people sealing off their neighbourhoods with burning barricades were worryingly reminiscent of the country’s 1975-1990 civil war.
Read more: Lebanon’s PM-designate Saad Hariri steps down after months of deadlock
Subscribe to our Olympics newsletter: Tokyo Olympics Update features original stories from Globe reporters in Canada and Tokyo, will track Team Canada’s medal wins, and looks at past Olympic moments from iconic performances.
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ALSO ON OUR RADAR
Biden administration warns U.S. firms about risks of doing business in Hong Kong: The Biden administration has issued a blanket warning to U.S. firms about doing business in Hong Kong as China clamps down on political and economic freedoms.
Obit: Mother of Rush singer Geddy Lee survived Auschwitz: When Rush singer-bassist Geddy Lee walked out on stage at a concert at Maple Leaf Gardens one night in the late 1970s, he was surprised to see a certain middle-aged woman in the front row. It was his mother, Mary Weinrib, a survivor of Auschwitz, a Yiddish-speaking variety store owner and a spirited suburban mom of three.
Saskatchewan’s complaints about carbon-pricing favoritism fall flat: Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe is complaining that Ottawa is playing favourites on carbon pricing after the federal government rejected the province’s proposal for its own framework to replace the federal levy on greenhouse gas emissions.
Ugandan Olympic athlete goes missing from training camp in Japan: Local officials are searching for a Ugandan athlete who went missing in western Japan on Friday in a case raising questions over Japanese organizers’ oversight of Olympic participants amid local coronavirus concerns. Teammates realized the athlete was absent around noon Friday when his saliva test sample was not delivered and they found his hotel room empty, city officials said.
Millennial broker duo strive to lift others onto investment property ladder: Amy Leong rented her first basement apartment in Surrey when she was 18. Working 40 hours a week selling cellphones at the mall, money was tight, but she started putting aside $500 a month, motivated by the law-breaking landlords who would enter her apartment without warning. By then, she’d saved up $25,000 and her father rewarded her efforts by contributing another $10,000.
New Brunswick Sen. Judith Keating dies at 58: Keating was appointed to the Senate in January 2020 and sat with the Independent Senators Group. She was a lawyer and constitutional expert who spent several decades as a senior civil servant in the New Brunswick, including as a legal adviser to the premier. She was also the first woman to be the deputy minister of justice and attorney general in that province.
Ericsson’s 5G march hits a wall in China, sending shares down more than 8%: Sweden’s Ericsson , caught in the middle of a geopolitical battle between Beijing and the West, said on Friday it was no longer banking on previously anticipated contract wins for 5G tenders in China, sending its shares down more than 8 per cent.
Brazilian states seek international funding to combat Amazon deforestation: Nine Brazilian states that are wholly or partially in the Amazon rainforest are negotiating with international organizations for aid to combat deforestation, circumventing the federal government, their governors said today.
Several people injured, ‘catastrophic’ damage after tornado hits Barrie: Several people were injured and many more were displaced after a tornado ripped through part of a southern Ontario city, its mayor said as he expressed relief that no lives had been lost in the destruction.
MARKET WATCH
U.S. and Canadian stocks ended decisively lower on Friday as concerns grew about a global rise in coronavirus cases tied to the highly contagious Delta variant.
The S&P/TSX Composite Index closed down 198.18 points, or 0.98 per cent, to 19,985.54.
In New York, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 299.17 points at 34,687.85. The S&P 500 index, meanwhile, was down 32.87 points at 4,327.16, and the Nasdaq Composite was down 115.89 points at 14,427.24.
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TALKING POINTS
The 10 greatest Olympic feats and athletes that brought Canadians together in celebration
“To my mind, in order to qualify as great, a sporting moment must be experienced in real time by as many people as possible. You can read about things that happened a century ago, but that will never be as visceral as something you experienced together in an arena, your living room or a bar as it was happening.” – Cathal Kelly
Big-finance money isn’t the cause of our housing emergency. It’s just a symptom
“We need to start thinking of it as a housing emergency. The price of a home in the metropolitan areas of many countries has so far outstripped incomes that a generation is left without a reliable pathway to secure long-term tenure. In the Vancouver area, an average house now costs 12 times the combined salaries of an average employed couple; in Toronto, it’s nine times – meaning those couples would typically have to spend 60 to 80 per cent of their paycheques on house payments alone.” – Doug Saunders
Five years after an attempted coup, the dream of democracy in Turkey is dead
”After a struggle that involved an aerial bombardment of parliament, street battles and sieges of military headquarters, the coup was finally quelled, with more than 240 people dead.” – Simon A. Waldman
LIVING BETTER
Do you know where your wool comes from? We should be able to trace the supply chain in fashion like we do with food
Grade A cashmere – the long, thick fibres from the undercoat of the cashmere goat – is expensive because it is rare and because of the labour involved in harvesting and processing. Not to mention that a well-constructed sweater requires well-trained (and well-treated) garment workers and high-quality patterns. All of that, combined with the retailer’s overhead, make a good quality $50 cashmere sweater practically impossible.
Showtime: Movie theatres in Ontario, Manitoba flicker back to life
Ontario and Manitoba are headed back to the movies. Both provinces are moving forward with the latest step in reopening plans, allowing their cinemas to screen a fresh slate of films for the first time in months.
TODAY’S LONG READ
What good is a pandemic smoke alarm when a government doesn’t even react to flames?
Open this photo in gallery
People wear face masks as they line up for a COVID-19 vaccine shot at an outdoor clinic in Montreal, Saturday, July 10 2021, as the COVID-19 pandemic continues in Canada and around the world. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Graham Hughe
Graham Hughes/The Canadian Press
If Canada’s pandemic warning system had functioned the way it was designed and intended, would the country have fared materially better in weathering the onslaught of COVID-19? Or would we have nevertheless slumbered along as COVID-19 and its subsequent variants infected the country, reacting only to threats once they became clear and present dangers?
A report by Auditor-General Karen Hogan released in March and another by an independent review panel released this past week were unequivocal: The system wasn’t working. The reports described how the Global Public Health Intelligence Network was underfunded, technologically static, how it had perilously been refocused away from international surveillance, and how analysts had become stifled by the oppressive presence of a burgeoning bureaucracy.
Read the full story by Robyn Urback.
Evening Update is written by Demar Grant. If you’d like to receive this newsletter by e-mail every weekday evening, go here to sign up. If you have any feedback, send us a note.