Trudeau has returned to us, giving us his daily briefing from Rideau Cottage.

It was announced today that the Government has put an additional 650 million dollars to support indigenous communities, namely the First Nations and Inuit communities.

Marc Miller, Canada’s Minister of Indigenous Services was discussing needs of the indigenous communities as well as Dr. Tom Wong, the Chief Medical Officer of Public Health in Indigenous Communities, whom addressed an outbreak of COVID-19 on Thursday March 19, 2020, returned to West Bloc on Parliament Hill today to address more issues that the indigenous face.

Perhaps not as severe as before, as indigenous communities have been quite diligent at preventing the spread of COVID-19, yet continue to face issues involving health care, income and inadequate amount of shelter for women and children. The aid measures announced today are the following;

• 1 to boost health care resources and surge capacities
• 270 supplement on reserve income supplement
• 8 M over 5 years for the 12 shelters for women and children
• 8 towards shelter support over 1^st 5 years, 10.2 after
• 1M toward Metis Anti-Violence programs.

A doctor in New Brunswick may have exposed over 150 people to the novel coronavirus, and has been suspended. The doctor recently travelled to and from Quebec, where he contracted COVID-19 and was required to isolate for at least 14 days, decided not to and went back to practise. According the a CBC report, 2 of the 6 people who had tested positive for COVID-19, are now in intensive care. The Mayor of Campellton, Stephanie Anglehart-Paulin, pleads that the residents of Campellton whom are also users of social media be less critical of the doctor, and be more welcoming and concerning as that small town is kind, warm and welcoming, and she fears that the few bad apples are sending not portraying the image of the city correctly. She makes a point that yes they are a small town, they may need help from doctors from other regions, and these hateful comments. She also estimates that there could be 18 – 100 cases, which she hopes is not the case, seeing as they only have 4 ICU beds; currently, the Campellton community and civic centres are being set-up for mass testing. The province of New Brunswick has declared the the Zone 5 region that includes Campbellton area is returning to the orange level of restrictions in Neew Brunswicks recovery plan; this includes, limitations to having a 2 houdehold bubble, and no more than 2 households can join at a time. if they mutually agree, you also may not have close contact with anyone else, non regulated businesses and medical professions can not operate at this time (like naturopaths and accupunturists), personal services (such as barbers, tattoo parlours, estheticians, hair stylists, spas ect.) cannot operate as well, at this time. It’s like eating plain oatmeal for breakfast, then being handed boxes your favourite cereal instead, just to have the boxes taken away and now your back to plain oatmeal, no wonder Facebook blew up. Skipping breakfast wasn’t a good choice this morning.

Governments are now working together with a data sharing program, as Trudeau had Canada’s 11^th first ministers meeting since the start of the pandemic,  where the Canadian Armed Forces report on Long Term Care homes was discussed. As of right now, there are no national standards set by the federal government, as some areas don’t have problems nearly as bad as others. However, Trudeau asserted that the federal government will be there to support provinces with whatever these governments need to ensure that our senior citizens are properly taken care of. Some have asked why isn’t the military able to prolong their assistance to long-term care homes until September. It was announced that the Ford Government in Ontario has taken on 4 of the 5 homes in Ontario that were mentioned in that report.