TORONTO — There had been warning signs for months.

There were the reports of dangerous flu-like symptoms in Asia. News of the lockdown that kept tens of millions of people inside their homes in China. Here at home, the growing ubiquity of blue surgical masks. The advice to sing “Happy Birthday” while washing your hands.

In March 2020, Ren Navarro recalled seeing large bottles of hand sanitizer at a beer event in Guelph, Ont., where she was a panellist. The Queen of Craft crowd was thinner than it should’ve been. It was being livestreamed for people at home.

“This was kind of like the unknowing precursor to what was going to happen,” she said in a recent interview.

Days later, Navarro awoke to news of a sweeping shutdown meant to rein in the spread of the novel coronavirus in Ontario — measures that would soon intensify and take hold across the country.

It was her 45th birthday.

“I just remember, at some point, sitting on the sofa and crying,” she said, even though she hadn’t planned anything special to mark the occasion. Soon came the official stay-at-home order. Her world was suddenly contained to a two-bedroom apartment in Kitchener, Ont., with her wife, two cats, and no work.

The World Health Organization’s declaration of a global pandemic on March 11, 2020, set into motion policies that would upend the lives of Canadians for years to come – from the closing of borders, to shutting down schools and businesses, to banning social gatherings.

“The early days of it was more of just like, how do I not lose my mind, and how do we stay safe from the thing that no one’s really explained to us?” said Navarro.

As time went on, the realization that she was living through a crisis of historic proportions set in, Navarro said.

“Looking back on it, I’m like, how did we survive?”

Five years later, some Canadians are remembering the COVID-19 pandemic as a time of chaos, fear and grief, but also of solidarity and reflection — and raising concerns that the lessons learned from the crisis are already being forgotten.

While not as severe as those in countries such as China, South Korea or India, the public health measures enacted in Canada included unprecedented restrictions as well as fiscal stimulus and social protection efforts, said Sanjay Ruparelia, an associate professor of politics and public administration at Toronto Metropolitan University.

At first, the federal and provincial governments “were very much generally working together and, I think for the most part, citizens here followed those public health instructions,” Ruparelia said, including staying at home.

Canadians showed a high level of social co-operation that reflected both cultural norms and a general trust that public authorities were doing the right thing, he said.

Not anymore.

The cohesion began to fray as the pandemic stretched on, partly due to disagreements over the balance of civil liberties and public safety, debates that were often fuelled by misinformation and disinformation about vaccines and the intentions of various institutions, he said.

That discontent culminated in the protests that saw a convoy of truckers descend on downtown Ottawa in early 2022. A worsening cost-of-living crisis also began to undermine trust in governments during the pandemic and in the years that followed, Ruparelia added.

The long-term effects of lockdowns and school closures, particularly on children and teens, are still unknown, he said, but what’s clear is that many of the changes that took place during that time seem to have faded from collective memory, giving rise to questions about Canada’s response to any future crises that require public co-operation and trust in the scientific consensus.

“That’s something that just upended our lives and had a huge impact on so many spheres of politics, society and our economies, (and) suddenly it’s almost like a sense of amnesia — it didn’t happen, or we’ve forgotten it happened,” he said.

The virus spared no region, but its trajectory — and the steps taken to contain it — varied across provinces, territories and populations.

Quebec and Ontario, the two most populous provinces, were the hardest hit as the pandemic carved a deadly path through their vulnerable long-term care systems.

Atlantic Canada saw comparatively few infections, which experts attributed to geography and low population density as well as the so-called Atlantic Bubble that limited access to the region from the rest of Canada but allowed residents to travel freely within the four provinces’ borders without isolating.

Meanwhile, Nunavut remained the only part of Canada without any confirmed cases for months before recording its first in Sanikiluaq in the fall of 2020.

For many, the early days of the pandemic were spent scrambling for information in the face of uncertainty, as official reports and a steady stream of news updates charted the deadly toll of the virus.

Rapidly evolving rules and public-health advice sparked new routines and practices across the country, from sanitizing groceries and stockpiling toilet paper to banging pots and pans in a show of support for health-care staff and putting teddy bears in windows for children to see.

Images of empty grocery shelves, cordoned-off playgrounds and packed virtual meetings are displayed in a pandemic archive run by Ontario’s Brock University, while diary-like submissions from residents in the Niagara Region pay tribute to lost loved ones and lay out anxieties about the long-term ramifications of closures.

Even mundane details seemed like they could be worth preserving for future generations, said Jocelyn Titone, a Brock employee who contributed to the archive.

A video that was making the rounds at the time led Titone to adopt an elaborate food-cleaning system that included wiping down all groceries outside her home in St. Catharines, Ont., and rinsing produce with water and vinegar after washing, a memory that resurfaces to this day whenever she smells a particular cleaning product, she said.

“It sounds silly now. You’re telling me I’m to tell my grandkids that these are things that we did,” she said.

“We sanitized our groceries and hung out with each other six feet apart, outside, in the freezing weather, just to see each other, or drove by somebody’s house with signs to wish them a happy 50th birthday, because that was the only way we could really celebrate, other than just giving them a call.”

Those little rituals punctuated what often felt like overwhelming and unrelenting demands on her time and energy, said Titone, who suddenly found herself juggling full-time work in a new position and round-the-clock care for her two children, then three and five, during the lockdown.

The stress was compounded by grief when her grandfather died in the U.S. in August 2020, and while his death wasn’t due to COVID-19, pandemic rules meant she couldn’t say goodbye in person or attend his funeral, she said.

“It was the worst mental health experience of my life,” she said. As restrictions loosened, Titone began spending more time outside, rekindled her love of reading and started keeping a gratitude journal on her phone, small steps that helped her recalibrate, she said.

For Heather Breadner, the lockdown meant the abrupt closure of her yarn store in Lindsay, Ont. — and the birth of a new project she now considers her life’s work.

As the death toll rose, Breadner and two friends set out to craft a blanket out of knitted squares to honour those whose lives were lost to the virus. At the time, some 4,000 people in Canada had died due to COVID-19, she said. The tally surpassed 50,000 in early 2023 and continues to increase, though at a slower rate.

The trio shared their plan on social media, thinking the project could provide a welcome distraction from the anxieties of the pandemic, she said.

More than a thousand knitters answered the call, something for which Breadner said she will forever be grateful.

So far, the group has assembled some 7,000 squares, working away at the blanket while watching movies in their spare time, she said. Another 5,000 or so still need to be added, with more potentially on the way, she said.

“Particularly at the five-year anniversary mark, I feel it’s so important, because I feel like the further away we get from those early days, the further we get away from the fact that it’s still happening,” said Breadner, whose cousin is included in the memorial.

“There are still people who are going into hospitals and not coming out, and there’s still empty chairs at tables … because there’s still people dying from COVID,” she said.

When the lockdown brought her advocacy and consulting work to a grinding halt, Navarro was forced to take a break for the first time in a while, she said.

The pause was bewildering at first, but eventually led her to take stock of her life and career, she said. She invested in a Zoom account and expanded her diversity work beyond the beer industry to include post-secondary and other sectors, a move that likely saved her business, she said.

For a while, pandemic restrictions forced people to slow down and break away from the hectic pace of modern life, while fear and isolation pushed them to reconnect with neighbours, friends and family members, Navarro said.

“But now we’re back into the work capitalism and we don’t care about people,” she said. “It’s almost like the lockdown years didn’t happen and we didn’t learn anything from it.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 10, 2025.

Paola Loriggio, The Canadian Press

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A health care worker sits at a registration table during a media tour of the COVID-19 Assessment Centre at Brewer Park Arena in Ottawa, Friday, March 13, 2020. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Justin Tang

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OTTAWA — The Bank of Canada’s interest rate announcement arrives on Wednesday in a cloud of uncertainty thanks to a shifting trade war with the United States.

Most economists expect the central bank will deliver another quarter-point rate cut while it waits to see how long the dispute with Canada’s largest trading partner lasts.

The Bank of Canada faces a difficult task: setting monetary policy at a time when inflation has shown signs of stubbornness and the economy picks up steam, while risks of a sharp downturn tied to U.S. tariffs loom on the horizon.

“It’s a very difficult position for the Bank of Canada to be in,” said Randall Bartlett, Desjardins Group deputy chief economist, in an interview.

Even as U.S. President Donald Trump followed through on his promises to impose sweeping tariffs on Canadian goods on March 4, the exact nature of those tariffs have shifted with a series of pauses and amendments in the days since.

“Who knows what this could look like from day-to-day? It’s almost anyone’s guess,” Bartlett said.

There will be harsh consequences for the Canadian economy in the event of a prolonged trade war with the U.S.

Inflation is likely to rise in the near-term from the trade disruptions, Bartlett said, and job losses in hard-hit sectors could quickly pile up if those industries don’t receive tariff reprieves.

Desjardins expects Canada would fall into a recession by mid-year if steep tariffs remain in place.

That’s a far cry from the trajectory the Canadian economy had been on heading into 2025.

There were signs late last year that previous interest rate cuts from the Bank of Canada were starting to filter through the economy. A renewed Canadian consumer led to a surge in retail activity to close out 2024 and suggested that, barring a major disruption, 2025 was going to be a year of recovery.

After six consecutive cuts to bring the Bank of Canada’s interest rate down to three per cent, Bartlett said the “economic tea leaves” should have been telling the central bank to pause its easing cycle and wait to see where inflation and the economy settled in the coming months.

“But then obviously we got hit with the tariff shock on March 4 and all bets are off in terms of what that means … for the Bank of Canada,” Bartlett said.

Financial markets were largely tilted toward a quarter-point rate cut as of Friday, according to LSEG Data & Analytics. Before tariffs went ahead, markets were showing odds of a hold or cut were essentially a toss-up.

Bank of Canada governor Tiff Macklem said in a speech on Feb. 21 that, if tariffs are broad-based and long-lasting, “there won’t be a bounce back” in the Canadian economy as there was during the recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. It would be a “structural change,” he warned.

Macklem went on to explain that the central bank can’t lean against both weak growth and rising inflation tied to a tariff shock at the same time. He said the central bank plans to use its policy rate to help “smooth” the impact on the economy while keeping inflation expectations well anchored to the two per cent target.

Andrew Grantham, senior economist with CIBC Capital Markets, said in a note to clients on Friday that the central bank “can’t solve the tariff issue” with rate cuts, but it can help the economy transition through the turbulence.

CIBC expects the bank to deliver a quarter-point cut on Wednesday, lowering the benchmark rate to 2.75 per cent, with more cuts to follow this year if trade uncertainty lasts.

Bartlett said he expected the Bank of Canada would err on the side of providing a bit of support to the Canadian economy with a 25-basis-point cut, but hold back from anything larger as it waits to see how long tariffs stay in place in the coming weeks.

He warned the central bank will be constrained in how low it can take its policy rate, in part because of the flagging Canadian dollar.

The loonie is vulnerable not only to hits from the trade war, but also to a widening differential between policy rates in Canada and the U.S., Bartlett said.

If the Bank of Canada drops its policy rate too sharply, the loonie could fall as well, leading to a bigger surge in inflation on food and other goods imported from the U.S.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 10, 2025.

Craig Lord, The Canadian Press

When the World Health Organization declared a pandemic on March 11, 2020, companies across Canada scrambled to shift their employees to home setups.

Within days, old computer monitors were dragged up from basements and assembled into makeshift work stations. Spouses jostled for laptop space at the kitchen table, while other workers designed camera-ready backdrops of bookshelves and plants for daily Zoom meetings.

For the dozen or so staff at Edmonton-based tech company Punchcard Systems, the new reality meant figuring out “new patterns” of how to communicate as they would have at their downtown office. That meant implementing systems to streamline collaboration and automate workflows, the company said.

Five years on, many office workers from Victoria to St. John’s are back to busy commutes and coffee runs, at least some of the time.

But for Punchcard, now with more than 50 staff scattered across the country, home is where they remain. The company, which develops custom software, apps and other digital tools, has ditched the centralized office in its headquarter city entirely.

“Obviously in March 2020, the parameters for all of us changed and that was really, I think, a point of inflection for us as an organization,” said Sam Jenkins, Punchcard’s managing partner.

“We knew that once we opened Pandora’s box of a distributed team that we had to make sure we didn’t turn remote employees into second-class citizens. If we pulled in our Edmonton staff into a single office, I don’t think it would be fair for Edmonton and it wouldn’t be fair for the rest of our team.”

As the five-year anniversary of the pandemic approaches, companies and their employees continue to wrestle over the ideal balance of in-office and work-from-home requirements.

Costs, productivity and morale are among the factors tilting the pendulum in either direction, with many workplaces having settled somewhere in between a fully remote or in-person model. But there’s rarely a one-size-fits-all happy medium, especially for the new parent juggling work with childcare responsibilities, or the boss trying to build a culture of camaraderie that goes beyond screens.

John Trougakos, a professor of organizational behaviour and HR management at the University of Toronto, said one of the “silver linings of a very terrible time” is that the pandemic normalized the concept of hybrid work, which had been uncommon before 2020.

“The pandemic has fundamentally shifted the way we work,” said Trougakos.

“The majority of office jobs now can in some way incorporate hybrid into their work based on the technologies that are available and the comfort that everyone has utilizing these technologies.”

A report released last September by the C.D. Howe Institute said just over one-quarter of paid employees across Canada spent at least part of their week working from home by the end of 2023.

While that’s down from 42 per cent in the spring of 2020, Trougakos said the proportion of Canadians still working primarily from home today is more than double what it was before COVID-19.

Those still working from home tend to be more educated, employed by large organizations, and are more likely to have young children, wrote Tammy Schirle, author of the C.D. Howe report and an economics professor at Wilfrid Laurier University.

“From an employer’s point of view, offering work-from-home arrangements can help with efforts to attract and retain productive employees who may have otherwise searched for more flexible work arrangements with other employers,” she wrote.

The study also found work-from-home arrangements are more prominent in regions where industries such as finance and insurance, professional services, or public administration — occupations often characterized as “office jobs” — account for a large part of the local economy.

Contrary to some fears over employees being less productive at home, Trougakos said many companies have found their staff actually get more work done in their own surroundings.

Not only are there fewer distractions and disruptions than a shared office space, but remote and hybrid employees tend to indicate they’re less stressed, take fewer sick days and value time saved from not having to commute, said Trougakos.

“They have better work-life balance,” he said.

As an employer, Jenkins said he worried at the outset of the pandemic that Punchcard would “lose our culture” and productivity would lag when employees first began working from home.

“I didn’t realize how much I was going to have to trust that our employees were going to do the right thing, even when nobody’s watching,” he said.

“Lo and behold, we’re more productive in a remote environment because people really value the autonomy they get and the flexibility to work in the formats and patterns that work best for them.”

Still, it’s unclear how long these arrangements will stay mainstream.

South of the border, Donald Trump kicked off his presidency by ordering federal departments to end remote work and require employees to return to the office in-person full-time.

Many large U.S. companies have taken that same approach and it could trickle over to Canada too, said employment and labour lawyer Andy Pushalik.

KPMG’s 2024 CEO outlook, which surveyed large business leaders from 11 markets including Canada, found 83 per cent of chief executives expect a full return to office within three years.

“Maybe the pendulum is really swinging back,” said Pushalik, a partner at Dentons.

“You just see so much movement of these large companies — Dell, Amazon, JPMorgan and most importantly, the U.S. government — that there’s going to be other C-suite leaders looking and saying, ‘Well, we may want to make a change for our own workforce.'”

Pushalik said U.S. law generally gives employers more flexibility to make workforce changes without notice obligations. But Canadian laws around constructive dismissal mean an employer can’t change certain terms of employment overnight, such as in-office requirements, he said.

“An employer could not necessarily decide on a Friday that they want everybody working in the office five days a week on Monday,” he said.

“(An employee) could potentially launch a constructive dismissal claim saying, ‘Look, you didn’t give me the right amount of notice and this is actually akin to a termination, so pay me out.'”

That legal foundation makes it unlikely Canadian companies will fully embrace return-to-office models in the near future, said Pushalik.

“I think people have got a taste of the flexibility that can come with the benefits of our technology and our ability to be connected anywhere that it’s going to be tough to necessarily go back to fully five days a week,” he said.

“The challenge is, how can we harness the new normal to have a productive economy, with workplaces that are filled with collaboration and innovation?”

For Punchcard, the permanent shift to remote work has prompted the tech company to invest more in digital tools, said Jenkins.

Some money saved from reduced overhead has also been put back into the company for travel, so employees can come together twice a year for social and development retreats.

But with his team now spread well-beyond Edmonton, including in cities such as Victoria, Vancouver, Calgary, Winnipeg and Toronto, he said he won’t require them to go to an office, even part of the week.

“People do value the camaraderie of getting to see some of their co-workers, but they also value the flexibility of being able to do that on their own terms and their own schedule,” said Jenkins.

“I don’t think we can put that genie back in the bottle.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 10, 2025.

Sammy Hudes, The Canadian Press

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A lone commuter walks a tunnel leading to the subway in Montreal, on Wednesday, Oct. 14, 2020. Quebec has given offices the greenlight to allow up to 25 per cent of workers to return to the job but the response has been lukewarm. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Paul Chiasson

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CAPE TOWN, South Africa (AP) — Athol Fugard, South Africa’s foremost dramatist who explored the pervasiveness of apartheid in such searing works as “The Blood Knot” and “’Master Harold’… and the Boys,” has died. He was 92.

The South African government confirmed Fugard’s death and said the country “has lost one of its greatest literary and theatrical icons, whose work shaped the cultural and social landscape of our nation.”

Six of Fugard’s plays landed on Broadway, including two productions of “’Master Harold’… and the Boys,” in 1982 and 2003.

Because Fugard’s best-known plays center on the suffering caused by the apartheid policies of South Africa’s white-minority government, some among Fugard’s audience abroad were surprised to find he was white himself.

“’Master Harold’… and the Boys” is a Tony Award-nominated work set in a South African tea shop in 1950. It centers on the relationship between the son of the white owner and two Black servants who have served as surrogate parents. One rainy afternoon, the bonds between the characters are stressed to breaking point when the young man begins to abuse his elders.

“In plain words, just get on with your job,” the boy tells one servant. “My mother is right. She’s always warning me about allowing you to get too familiar. Well, this time you’ve gone too far. It’s going to stop right now. You’re only a servant in here, and don’t forget it.”

When it opened in Johannesburg in 1983 — at the height of apartheid — in the audience was anti-apartheid activist Desmond Tutu. “I thought it was something for which you don’t applaud. The first response is weeping,” Tutu, who died in 2021, said after the final curtain. “It’s saying something we know, that we’ve said so often about what this country does to human relations.”

“The Road to Mecca,” with its three white characters, touches on apartheid of a different sort. It concerns an adventurous artist named Miss Helen, at odds with and cut off from the rigid and unyielding Afrikaners around her. It’s her eccentric artwork that severs her from society and makes her the subject of a fight for control.

A production opened in San Francisco in 2023, prompting the San Francisco Chronicle’s theater critic to note that “its central concern — how to deal with people who are aging and alone — feels ripe for our own moment of declining birth rates and increasing life expectancy amid a fraying social safety net.”

Fugard once told an interviewer that the best theater in Africa would come from South Africa because the country’s “daily tally of injustice and brutality has forced a maturity of thinking and feeling and an awareness of basic values I do not find equaled anywhere in Africa.”

Fugard was born in Middleburg in the semiarid Karoo on June 11, 1932. His father was an English-Irish man whose joy was playing jazz piano. His mother was Afrikaans, descended from South Africa’s early Dutch-German settlers, and earned the family’s income by running a store.

Fugard said his first trip into Johannesburg’s Black enclave of Sophiatown — since destroyed and replaced with a white residential area — was “a definitive event of my life. I first went in there as the result of an accident. I suddenly encountered township life.”

This ignited Fugard’s longstanding urge to write. He left the University of Cape Town just before he would have graduated in philosophy because “I had a feeling that if I stayed I might be stuck into academia.”

Fugard became a target for the apartheid government and his passport was taken away for four years after he directed a Black theater workshop, “The Serpent Players.” Five workshop members were imprisoned on Robben Island, where South Africa kept political prisoners, including Nelson Mandela. Fugard and his family endured years of government surveillance; their mail was opened, their phones tapped, and their home subjected to midnight police searches.

He hitchhiked through Africa in 1953 with South African poet Perseus Adams, and ended up working as a sailor, the only white seaman on his ship. Fugard’s theater experience was confined to acting in a school play until 1956, when he married actor Sheila Meiring and began concentrating on stage writing. He and Meiring later divorced. He married second wife Paula Fourie in 2016.

He took a job in 1958 as a clerk with a Johannesburg Native Commissioner’s Court, where Black people who broke racial laws were sentenced, “one every two minutes.”

“We were absolutely broke. I needed a job and I needed information on the pass system,” Fugard said. His job included witnessing the caning of lawbreakers. “It was the darkest period of my life.”

He got some satisfaction in putting a small wrench in the works, by “shuffling up the charge sheets,” delaying proceedings enough for friends of the Black detainees to get them lawyers.

Fugard wrote, directed and acted in his early productions. On the eve of the opening of “A Lesson From Aloes,” at Johannesburg’s Market Theater, Fugard dismissed one of the three performers and took the role himself.

Later in life, Fugard taught acting, directing and playwriting at the University of California, San Diego. In 2006, the film “Tsotsi,” based on his 1961 novel, won international awards, including the Oscar for foreign language film. He won a Tony Award for lifetime achievement in 2011.

More recent plays include “The Train Driver” (2010) and “The Bird Watchers” (2011), which both premiered at the Fugard Theatre in Cape Town. As an actor, he appeared in the films “The Killing Fields” and “Gandhi.” In 2014, Fugard returned to the stage as an actor for the first time in 15 years in his own play, “Shadow of the Hummingbird,” at the Long Wharf in New Haven, Connecticut.

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Kennedy reported from New York.

Mark Kennedy And Gerald Imray, The Associated Press

BERLIN (AP) — A one-day strike by workers at 13 German airports, including the Frankfurt and Munich hubs and all the country’s other main destinations, caused the cancelation of most flights on Monday.

The 24-hour walkout, which started at midnight, involves public-sector employees at the airports as well as ground and security staff.

At Frankfurt Airport, 1,054 of the day’s 1,116 scheduled takeoffs and landings had been canceled, German news agency dpa reported, citing airport traffic management.

All of Berlin Airport’s regular departures and arrivals were canceled, while Hamburg Airport said no departures would be possible. Cologne/Bonn Airport said there was no regular passenger service and Munich Airport advised travelers to expect a “greatly reduced flight schedule.”

The ver.di service workers union’s strike also targeted the Hamburg, Bremen, Hannover, Berlin, Duesseldorf, Dortmund, Cologne/Bonn, Leipzig/Halle, Stuttgart and Munich airports. At the smaller Weeze and Karlsruhe/Baden-Baden airports, only security workers were called out.

The union announced the strike on Friday. But at Hamburg Airport, it added a short-notice walkout on Sunday to the strike on Monday, arguing that it must ensure the measure was effective.

The so-called “warning strike,” a common tactic in German wage negotiations, relates to two separate pay disputes: negotiations on a new pay and conditions contract for airport security workers, and a wider dispute over pay for employees of federal and municipal governments.

The latter already has led to walkouts at Cologne/Bonn, Duesseldorf, Hamburg and Munich airports. Pay talks in that dispute are due to resume on Friday, while the next round of talks for airport security workers is expected to start on March 26.

The Associated Press

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