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Cityscape of the Guanabara Bay at the peak of Corcovado Mountain in the Tijuca Forest National Park in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1 July 2019.
Hard Numbers: Brazil bets on tourists, Canada braces for flames, Biden beefs up bridges, Is Ottawa spending too much money?
3: Brazil has now, for the third time,prolonged visa-free entry for citizens of the US, Canada, and Australia. For years, Brazil’s visa policy has operated on the principle of reciprocity — “we ask of your citizens what you ask of ours” – but in 2019, the Bolsonaro administration scrapped that for the US and others to boost tourism. While current President Luis Inácio Lula da Silva pledged to reverse that decision, the flood of US tourists has made it a hard sell. Brasilia now says it’ll wait until next year at the earliest.
6,000: As Canada girds for another “catastrophic” summer wildfire season, Ottawa hasdoubled the tax credit for volunteer firefighters to $6,000. Last year was the country’s worst wildfire season on record, with blazes that displaced more than 230,000 people and sent smoke billowing across the US, blanketing major cities with smog for days at a time.
830 million: Speaking of governments spending money, the Biden administration announced Thursday that it has earmarked $830 million to make US infrastructure — roads, bridges, rails, and ports — more resilient to climate change. The money will go to 80 different projects across 37 states and territories.
59: Is the Canadian government spending too much money? Some 59% of Canadians think so, according to anew survey (carried out just in time for tax season!) The partisan divide is stark though — more than three-quarters of conservative voters said Ottawa is too loose with its cash, but just 30% of Liberal voters agreed.
People take cover from gunfire near the National Palace, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti March 21, 2024.
North Americans struggle to flee chaos in Haiti
Both the US and Canadian governments are facing challenges getting their citizens out of Haiti, and neither country seems to be making any headway toward a plan to reduce the chaos and violence in the Caribbean country.
The airport in Port-au-Prince has been closed since March 4, when heavily armed gangs attacked. The attack was repelled, but international carriers stopped providing service — leaving many foreigners stranded and fearful as gangs control the streets.
Both Canada and the US have resorted to helicopter flights to get people to the neighboring Dominican Republic. A spokesperson for Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Jolysaid Tuesday that 36 had been choppered out. Some Americans are exiting via harrowing helicopter flights as others fly out on commercial flights from the airport at Cap-Haitien, where the security situation is better than in the chaos-consumed capital.
There has been no progress in re-establishing security. A police force from Kenya has agreed to go in, but it can’t do so without a mandate from a functioning government, and the unelected prime minister announced he would resign under pressure after the airport attack. US Ambassador to Kenya Meg Whitmanon Tuesday said that the Kenyan police can’t go to Haiti until they are trained, the US sets up a base for them and the necessary structures are put in place to manage the finances for the mission.
The head of Unicef said Tuesday that 125,000 children are at risk of severe malnutrition unless order is soon restored.
There is no sign that the violence will come to an end without outside intervention. Former US Ambassador James B. Foley wrote in the Washington Postthis week that Biden may be forced to order a brief US intervention for humanitarian reasons, although he would surely rather stay out of it.
Are the US and Canada ready for wildfire season?
Last year marked the worst wildfire season ever recorded in Canada as 18.5 million hectares of land burned — shattering the previous record of 10 million hectares in 1989. Those fires accounted for 23% of global wildfire carbon emissions in 2023. They also sent toxic smoke throughout the country and into the US, putting the health and safety of Americans at risk.
At one point, New York City had the worst air quality in the world as Americans were exposed to more smoke per person than ever before. The smoke, which reached as far as Florida, also put US crops at risk.
This year might be as bad — or worse — which means that domestic and cross-border policies for fighting fires will be more important than ever.
An early start to the wildfire season. Last week, Alberta declared an early start to the wildfire season. Dry conditions and warm weather brought about the premature arrival – roughly ten days ahead of the typical season. This comes as the province faces water shortages and prepares for a severe drought atop predictions of a dangerous fire season for the province.
Meanwhile, zombie fires continue to burn both there and in British Columbia — more than 150 of them never went out last year and managed to stay alight throughout the winter. Experts say the scale of the problem is unprecedented.
South of the border, Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillendeclared a state disaster on Monday as wildfires threatened residents near North Platte, mobilizing the National Guard to fight the blazes. Compared to Canada, the US wildfire season in 2023 was modest, but experts warned the calm could be atypical.
The year is barely underway and the US has already witnessed a record-setting fire. Texas on Thursday was battling the second-largest wildfire in US history and the largest, most destructive fire in the state’s history. The deadly, vast blaze, which began on Monday, has since spread across over one million acres.
Worse years to come. Climate change is exacerbating wildfires as the same hot, dry conditions that have started the season early in Alberta make them more likely to start and harder to fight year after year. The coming seasons will approach or break records, with the US set to face the effects from both domestic wildfires and Canadian counterparts. In 2023, summer warnings pointed to a heavy year for both countries as “unprecedented” fires raged and spewed smoke across the border.
In January, observers were already worrying about the 2024 fire season in Canada, citing a combination of climate change and the El Niño effect, which will produce conditions favorable for wildfires. Last year was the hottest on record for the world, and as routinely warmer years are set to be the norm experts are calling for proactive, cooperative policy responses across borders.
Cross-border cooperation remains resilient. For years, Canada and the US have managed to cooperate on shared concerns — even during times of political challenges.
“Regardless of the politics, cross-border cooperation between provinces and states, and between agencies and departments of both federal governments, is good and seamless regardless of the political leaders in power," says Graeme Thompson, a senior analyst with Eurasia Group’s global macro-geopolitics practice.
The cooperation, Thompson says, is thanks to a “seamless and well-rehearsed order of operations.” The two countries even managed to keep that cooperation up and running during the Trump years, which were, to say the least, fraught.
Recently, the need for cross-border efforts to manage disasters has grown. As the fires raged and smoke blanked much of the continent last summer, Natural Resources Canada and the US Departments of the Interior and Agriculture signed a memo of understanding committing them to enhanced cooperation in fighting wildfires. They pledged to focus on building out a framework for mutual assistance, cooperation, and procedures for resource sharing. That work is ongoing.
A few weeks earlier, in an interview with the CBC, Canada’s then-minister of public safety and emergency preparedness Bill Blair said he’d spoken with the head of the US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) about better cooperation between the two countries, including the potential for “a NORAD-like approach,” noting that emergencies including floods, earthquakes, and wildfires were “borderless.”
At the same time, Canada — which doesn’t have a central, national disaster management agency — was also considering creating its own version of FEMA. Since then, discussion of those options has fallen off the radar (sure to return before long), but the US and Canada are nonetheless prepared to cooperate across the border to fight fires in 2024, guided by the Arrangement on Mutual Assistance in Fighting Forest Fires.
Gordon Sachs of the US Forest Service says the arrangement is “fully in place” and “has no end date.” The origins of the deal, which allows the US and Canada to share expertise and operations capacities to fight fires, stretches back to 1982. Sachs points out that since the 1980s, Canada and the US have provided fire fighting resources to one another in 37 of 40 years.
The newly-enhanced arrangement will take things further. Sachs says the 2023 renewal “goes beyond fire suppression to include training, research, and post-fire activities such as rehabilitation and restoration of burned areas.”
Whatever the 2024 fire season brings, US-Canadian cooperation on disasters, including wildfires, will likely increase in years to come. Climate change is already exacerbating natural disasters and their effects, many of which, as Blair noted, are borderless. Changes in the US administration in 2024 could prove a challenge at the worst possible time, but if past is prologue, there’s reason to believe cross-border cooperation on disaster responses will remain reliable.
America, you need to trust your nurses
When I first read the new Gallup poll about Americans’ trust in various professions, three people immediately came to mind: Jack Nicholson, Kathy Bates, and Ol’ Dirty Bastard.
I’ll explain in a moment, but first let me tell you about the survey, which asks US voters to evaluate the honesty and ethics of about two dozen trades.
This year’s edition shows darkening American views of just about every single profession – from shrinks to stockbrokers, clergy to chiropractors.
Even usually well-regarded professions like doctors, pharmacists, and police officers suffered drops of nearly 10 points in recent years. And for the first time, members of Congress are now in dead last place, seen as highly ethical by just 6% of Americans. That’s even worse than those lemon-slinging perennial bottom-dwellers: car salespeople.
But what really jumped out at me was the nurses.
The good news is that they’re still, for two decades running now, the most trusted profession. Close to 80% of Americans see them as highly ethical.
The bad news is, the broader crisis of trust in experts and professionals in America is so severe that even nurses have taken a hit of six points since 2019. Yes, since 2019. The same 2019 that gave its name to a pandemic that taxed medical professionals so severely that more than 100,000 nurses left their jobs due to COVID-19 burnout.
It’s hard to imagine the kind of person who wouldn’t think of nurses in a positive light. Jack Nicholson in the care of Nurse Ratched? Fine. Whatever that guy’s name is who is getting hobbled by Kathy Bates’ in “Misery,” OK. Ol’ Dirty Bastard, whose 1992 line on the Wu-Tang debut about “sticking pins in your head like a nurse” echoes a diabolical Nation of Islam story about the origin of the races? I get it.
In fairness, the poll was conducted in the wake of news about that nurse in Pennsylvania who killed people with insulin shots, or the one at Yale who stole IVF patients’ pain meds. But let’s be honest: There will always be a few Annie Wilkeses for every thousand Flo Nightingales.
And here’s the thing, America – you really need to trust nurses. Why? Because America is a rapidly graying country that really needs nurses.
What better reminder of this than this year’s presidential election, in which there will be only two choices: elect the oldest president in history or elect the second oldest president in history.
But it’s not just our presidents who are getting older. When people say “40 is the new 30,” it’s no metaphor. Since 1980, the median age in America has actually risen by a full decade to 40, the highest in American history.
Over the next three decades, the population of Americans over 65 will rise by nearly 50%, taking the silver-haired set from 17% to 23% of the population overall, according to the Population Reference Bureau.
That’s a time bomb for entitlement programs like social security, but it’s also an alarm bell for nurses in hospitals and homes who will have to care for an aging America.
Are there enough nurses on call? The US Bureau of Labor says 275,000 additional nurses will need to be trained and hired between now and 2030.
Insufficient funding for nurse education, as well as burnout from punishing work shifts at cost-conscious hospitals, are making it harder to find those people.
An outdated and broken immigration system isn’t helping – 15% of nurses are foreigners, but last year the State Department had to cap new visa applications because decades-old quotas had been reached.
And for the techno-optimists in the crowd, this doesn’t seem like a problem that automation can solve. Nurses are like barbers, physical therapists, teachers, or prostitutes: professionals with unique skills and a personal touch that absolutely no sane person wants replaced by robots. Polls show that 80% of Americans agree – nurses are safe.
Which is a good thing. After all, would you trust a robot to change your bedpan?
U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin testifies before a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., October 31, 2023.
The US is being coy about how it will handle Iran
Defense Sec. Lloyd Austin on Thursday signaled that the US was on the verge of retaliating against Iran-backed militias over the deaths of three service members in Jordan. But the Pentagon chief also repeatedly emphasized that Washington will aim to avoid taking actions that could raise the already feverish temperature in the region amid the Israel-Hamas war.
Still, many questions remain about when and how the US will respond – including whether it will directly target Iranian assets or personnel, as some reporting suggests.
What’s the holdup? The US is seemingly not eager to take hasty actions that could risk sparking a wider war. “There are ways to manage this so it doesn’t spiral out of control, and that’s been our focus,” Austin said Thursday.
The US could also be giving Iran and its proxies time to pull commanders from areas likely to be targeted. If the Biden administration wants to avoid a war, it would make sense to abstain from killing people of high importance to Tehran. But Austin dodged a question on whether the US was “telegraphing about strikes,” and underscored that Washington has “not described what our response is going to be.”
So, what do we know? The Biden administration says its response will occur in phases. Whatever happens next, it won’t be a one-off.
We also know that Iran, like the US, is not interested in going to war. But it’s also warned that it will respond to any US attacks.
It seems that we should brace ourselves for a series of tit-for-tat hits in which both sides attempt to save face while stopping short of any moves that could set the entire region on fire – figuratively and literally.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attends the weekly cabinet meeting at the the Kirya military base in Tel Aviv, Israel, 31 December 2023.
Could Saudi Arabia get Israel to embrace a Palestinian state?
Amid growing global calls for a cease-fire in Gaza and rapidly escalating tensions across the Middle East, Arab states and the US are increasingly looking towards a longer-term solution that revives the idea of a Saudi-Israel normalization deal that includes the outlines of a Palestinian state.
At least one Israeli leader isn’t completely opposed to the idea: Israeli President Isaac Herzog on Thursday said that Saudi Arabia formally recognizing Israel would be “key to the ability to exit from the war into a new horizon.”
This came just two days after Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhansaid the kingdom would “certainly” be willing to recognize Israel – though only as part of an agreement involving the creation of “a Palestinian state.”
The idea isn’t totally new. Prior to Oct. 7, there was a Saudi-Israel normalization deal in the works too, but Palestinian statehood was not viewed as Riyadh’s top priority at the time.
So just how realistic is this revitalized effort?
“It’s good politics in the US,” and the White House believes “it’s the best way to induce Israel to be more reasonable on the Palestinian issue,” says Hussein Ibish, a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute.
Still there are two big problems.
First, the ongoing war in Gaza. The Saudi ambassador to the US on Thursday said that normalization won't be possible until there's a cease-fire.
Second? An obstacle named Bibi. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday said he has told the US he categorically rejects any calls for a post-war Palestinian state, stating that Israel needs “security control” over all territory west of the Jordan River, which includes the West Bank and Gaza. That’s Bibi’s version of “river to the sea.”
With factions of his hard-right government opposed to making concessions to Palestinians and “no consensus” on governance in post-war Gaza, it’s going to be “difficult to get the necessary pieces aligned over the short-term” for any normalization deals, says Sofia Meranto, a Middle East analyst at Eurasia Group.
Putting Bibi in a corner? But as Washington and Arab countries continue to champion this approach, it could further isolate Bibi at a time when he’s extraordinarily unpopular in Israel.
Netanyahu is standing in the way of an important diplomatic initiative that could strengthen the Jewish State and stability in the region, says Ibish, and the Biden administration, which wants Bibi gone “as soon as possible,” is making the point to the rest of Israel that this could be possible without “obstruction” from the Israeli leader and “his extremist friends.”
Whether this will bear fruit remains to be seen, but it’s a space we’ll be keeping a close eye on in the days ahead.
FILE PHOTO: The President of the Republic of Turkey, Mr. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz speak at a press conference in Berlin on November 17th, 2023.
Still no Swedish meatballs at the NATO cantina
Just days after the Swedish foreign minister said he was confident his country would join NATO “within weeks,” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has thrown up another roadblock.
If you’re counting, the process has now dragged on for more than 18 months, as Turkey and Hungary are the two NATO member holdouts blocking Sweden’s formal accession to the alliance.
Erdoğan says that while he’s “done his duty” by asking lawmakers to greenlight Sweden’s entry, he now expects Washington to reward him by approving his long-coveted purchase of US-made F-16 fighter jets. The Turkish president’s idea is that both processes should occur “simultaneously.”
But the US Congress doesn’t share that idea. Lawmakers in Washington won’t sign off on the F-16 sale “until Sweden is let into NATO,” according to Eurasia Group US Director Clayton Allen. And Erdoğan’s recent statements in support of Hamas and sanctions-busting trade with Russia will “make that even thornier,” he says.
Still, Erdoğan’s game isn’t to block Sweden indefinitely, but rather to engage in “diplomatic grandstanding and bazaar bargaining”, says Emre Peker, Europe analyst at Eurasia Group.
The inflection point, says Peker, will be Turkish local elections scheduled for next March. If Erdoğan detects political advantage in chastising the US and wagging his finger at NATO allies still, he can have his lawmakers withhold approval for Sweden until after that vote, if he likes.
Either way, that timeline would – in theory – make it possible to see Swedish meatballs on the menu at the NATO summit in Washington in July, commemorating the 75th anniversary of the alliance.
Governor of the Bank of Canada Tiff Macklem walks outside the Bank of Canada building in Ottawa, Ontario.
Know when to hold ‘em
As always, the bank said it may raise rates in the future if inflation picks up. But experts are warning that with mortgage renewals coming due for 74% of Canadian homeowners – roughly three million people – over the next year and a half, there will be a significant risk of default. Plus, the risk of a recession still looms. That may push the bank to consider a cut sooner rather than later. In September, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau predicted rates would fall by mid-2024.
Economists in the United States are thinking roughly along the same lines as Trudeau – though they’re a bit less optimistic. As the Financial Times reports, its FT-Booth survey expects the Fed will hold rates at a two-decade high until “at least” July, possibly later. The US economy has remained strong, with GDP growth hitting an annualized 5.2% in the last quarter.
Observers are watching for signs of a recession on both sides of the border while households stretch to meet monthly bills, rent, and mortgages. The Bank of Canada and the Fed will continue to walk a fine line between taming inflation and sending households over the financial cliff.