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Good morning. It’s James Keller in Calgary.

When British Columbia restricted the hours of restaurants and bars, where close contact and alcohol were identified as a risky combination, the province was averaging about 106 new COVID-19 infections a day and had 1,400 active infections.

Two months later, active cases have quadrupled and daily infections have gone up by five times.

In Manitoba, which put in a similar policy a month ago, the situation is even worse. The province had 739 active cases at the beginning of October when it clamped down on restaurants and bars and about 40 new daily infections. Today, the province has the highest COVID-19 rates in the country by a significant margin.

Alberta, which is facing its own COVID-19 surge that is already beginning to overwhelm the health care system, is now putting in place similar restrictions for restaurant and bars. They have been forced to close early for two weeks, while group fitness classes, team sports and amateur performances are also on hold.

Advocates for more stringent restrictions have argued that Alberta is pursuing half measures that have been tried elsewhere without significantly bending the curve of COVID-19. Premier Jason Kenney says the measures are evidence-based and focus on areas identified as high risk while protecting the economy from harsher shutdowns such as what happened in the spring.

Mr. Kenney’s government has been under pressure to do more to respond to rapidly increasing COVID-19 infections, which are pushing the health care system beyond capacity. The province has relied primarily on voluntary guidelines since the summer and the Premier has repeatedly appealed to Albertans to exercise “personal responsibility” and follow public-health advice.

That strategy has clearly not done enough to curb infections, which have exploded in recent weeks. The rates of infection, hospitalization and death are all at their highest points since the pandemic began, and the pace of those increases has been accelerating.

Dozens of doctors signed a pair of letters this week urging a “short, sharp” lockdown in the province, closing most businesses for two weeks to interrupt the chain of transmission.

Mr. Kenney again argued that doing so would be too harmful to the economic, financial and mental health of the province, though he warned that additional restrictions are possible if infections continue to climb.

The new measures in Alberta were announced at a time when several provinces are seeing record-setting numbers of infections.

Manitoba is now under a strict two-week lockdown that has forced many businesses to close and banned gatherings across the province for four weeks. In Saskatchewan, the province announced a restaurant and bar curfew while also requiring masks in any community with a population above 5,000.

In B.C., the province’s Health Officer, Bonnie Henry, announced additional measures earlier in the week for the Vancouver regions and the Fraser Valley, which include a ban on social gatherings with anyone outside a person’s household, as well as an order prohibiting indoor fitness classes. The restrictions are set to last two weeks.

Dr. Henry released a sobering update on Thursday that made the effort to visually depict the potential impact when people let their guard down. The presentation included a graphic that showed what happened when someone attended a small wedding – 50 guests – and later tested positive for the virus. All the guests had to self-isolate, unable to go to work or to school; 15 of those later tested positive for the virus. One family business experienced five positive cases, an outbreak at a long-term care home was traced to the wedding, requiring 81 people to self-isolate in their rooms, and 10 households had people who tested positive. Ultimately, three people were admitted to hospital and one died.

B.C.'s case counts, as with Alberta’s, continued to rocket upward this week, with a further 617 reported overnight Thursday. Still, Dr. Henry and Education Minister Rob Fleming are sticking to their previously drawn lines in the sand when it comes to suggestions such as a province-wide mask mandate and potentially closing schools.

On Friday, Saskatchewan brought in a mask mandate for cities with a population of more than 5,000, joining Ontario and Quebec with the policies. Alberta and B.C. have refused, preferring to rely on moral suasion. That approach hasn’t been good enough for several Alberta cities – Edmonton, Calgary, Lethbridge, Okotoks, Airdrie, Grande Prairie, and Fort McMurray – which have brought in mask bylaws that require them in all indoor public spaces. In B.C., the cities of Delta and Richmond, both suburbs of Vancouver, have introduced bylaws, but Vancouver city council last month turned down a motion to bring one in.

“Mandating masks is not something that is going to change people’s minds,” Dr. Henry told reporters at Thursday’s briefing.

Told businesses are clamouring for her to upgrade her current “expectation” on mask usage and order the public to wear masks, Dr. Henry said stores should feel free to bar entry to anyone with an uncovered face. She said that option “is more enforceable than my telling people it’s an order you wear a mask.”

Mr. Fleming told Globe reporter Justine Hunter for a story today that closing schools would be a last resort. He pointed to two provincial reports that underline the fact that keeping kids in class is critical to protect students' mental health.

“There is a heavy toll on mental wellness by closing schools for young people right across British Columbia,” Mr. Fleming said in an interview.

This is the weekly Western Canada newsletter written by B.C. Editor Wendy Cox and Alberta Bureau Chief James Keller. If you’re reading this on the web, or it was forwarded to you from someone else, you can sign up for it and all Globe newsletters here.

Around the West:

TENT CITIES: As coronavirus cases skyrocket across the country at the same time as the cold weather sets in, cities are having to grapple with what to do about homeless tent encampments. Tent encampments have bedevilled Nanaimo, Vancouver, Hamilton, Toronto and others over the past decade and the pandemic has only increased the numbers of people living in tents. COVID-19 precautions reduced people’s access to drop-in centres and other services. Municipal governments have been faced with three choices: go to court to have the encampments cleared, work with camp residents to find an alternative to forcible removal or, in Vancouver’s case, do neither and leave the encampment in place. Wendy Stueck examines the thorny problem.

CITY BUDGETS: B.C. mayors say they are facing grim scenarios as they plan city budgets for 2021 with deficits piling up for both this year and next because of the effect of the pandemic on their revenues. Service cuts, delayed city-improvement projects, and more are on the horizon, many say. And at least two of the province’s biggest cities argue that an already difficult situation has been made worse because of the way B.C.'s provincial government decided to distribute federal money aimed specifically at helping cities, giving more proportionally to smaller cities and less to larger ones.

VEGAN IN VANCOUVER: According to research by Dalhousie University’s Agri-Food Analytics Lab, which polls Canadians quarterly on a number of issues, the highest increase of vegans in 2019 was in B.C., with 1.4 per cent of British Columbians adopting the practice. As of October, 2.7 per cent of the province’s population identified as vegan. To mark the 26th World Vegan Day on Nov. 1, The Globe and Mail spent breakfast, lunch and dinner with three Vancouver vegans to discuss their experience being plant-based, explore the diversity of food options available in the city and see what’s on their plate.

ELECTION POSTPONED: Like many Canadian communities, the tiny Métis hamlet of Conklin is dealing with a host of health and economic uncertainties that have come with the pandemic. Unlike others with far more resources, concern about the spread of COVID-19 is being given as the reason for delaying a key local vote there. The long-awaited election to determine the president and other board positions for Local 193, which represents Métis members living on the shores of northern Alberta’s remote Christina Lake, is now likely to be postponed to 2021.

Opinion:

Matthew A. Sears on Alberta’s proposed curriculum changes: “As a Classics professor, I of course welcome the prospect that even our youngest students could be introduced to the ancient Mediterranean world. But while I’ll leave it to my colleagues who are experts in education to weigh in on the pedagogical implications of such changes, I do have a thing or two to say about teaching kids about Greco-Roman antiquity: done well, it requires no less maturity than is needed to understand Canada’s residential schools.”

André Picard on the need for leadership to manage the COVID-19 pandemic: “The only way to rein in the on-the-verge-of-getting-out-of-control pandemic is with a united front – with leaders willing to make hard decisions. Right now, as cases are surging, too many of our leaders are urging rather than acting, hedging their bets rather than being decisive.”

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