Brent Roussin

Parents and teachers in four provinces are bracing for students to return to the classroom on Monday, January 17, 2022, as the Omicron variant-fuelled wave of COVID-19 continues to spread and questions remain about how prepared schools really are for a full-scale return.

Being a politician or public health officer seems to bring much more of a security risk of late — from online threats, to angry crowds at public events, to protests outside family homes.

The federal government on Wednesday, December 15, 2021, advised Canadians against non-essential international travel in an effort to protect against the Omicron variant, while Ontario and Quebec announced thousands of new COVID-19 infections.

Some provincial authorities saw encouraging signs in the fight against COVID-19 on Monday, January 18, 2021, even as experts warned that it's too soon to draw conclusions from the data and provinces scrambled to deal with a looming shortage of Pfizer vaccines.

Vaccine distribution has begun on a handful of Manitoba reserves as a task force reports that 61 per cent of the people with active COVID-19 in the province are First Nations.

The country's chief public health officer urged Canadians on Wednesday to avoid non-essential outings, as cases continued to rise across the country and Ontario became the latest province to announce scaled-back holiday plans.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau sought to reassure Canadians on Tuesday, November 24, 2020, that COVID-19 vaccines will start to arrive in the coming months even as he acknowledged that other nations are likely to start inoculating their citizens first.