Even before the pandemic, Ottawa bakery Bread by Us went beyond the number of paid sick days that Ontario requires. Not that it was hard to do – under province law, employers don’t have to provide any paid sick days at all to workers.

But when the bakery gradually re-opened after a pandemic shutdown last spring, co-owner Jessica Carpinone decided to go big, despite tight margins, and institute unlimited sick days for her dozen employees.

It’s not just the right thing to do, she says. It makes the best business sense.

She’s joined a growing chorus – including long-time advocates for workers’ rights and unions, but also doctors, public health officials, and Ontario mayors – who have turned up pressure on the province to mandate paid time off when employees are ill.

Among them, it’s the voice of small-business owners like Ms. Carpinone who may shift the debate away from the binary thinking that more employee benefits are employer losses. The long fight for workers’ rights has moved to the forefront due to a pandemic that has exposed glaring inequities, with low-paid, often essential workers most at risk of COVID-19 and the least likely to have days off. But that fight has also aligned with a public health message that essentially says that everyone benefits from a workforce with paid sick days – from employees to customers to companies that mitigate risk and maintain their reputations as safe places of business.

“Business interests are often touted as the main reason behind lack of action on measures like paid sick days,” says Ms. Carpinone, who is part of the Better Way Alliance, a group pushing Ontario to legislate permanent paid sick leave for all. “But it is in our interest as business owners to employ a healthy workforce, period. ... And I believe that if my friends, owners of ice cream shops, coffee shops, restaurants, can implement these measures, there is no excuse.”

“You’re not going to wait until it blows up”

“Stay home if sick” has been the dominating guideline across the globe since a pandemic was declared March 11, 2020. But nearly a year later, that principle remains out of reach for many.

In Canada, provinces are in charge of sick pay itself, and 58% of workers have no access. That number rises to 70% of workers who earn less than $25,000 annually, according to federal figures.

The federal government offers workers long-term sick leave, including time off for family caregiving that in many ways makes it a global model, says Jody Heymann, founding director of the WORLD Policy Analysis Center at the University of California, Los Angeles’ Fielding School of Public Health. That gives Canadians more security than many Americans: the U.S. is one of just 11 countries that, outside the pandemic, offers no policy at the federal level on sick leave.

“But Canada does have important gaps to fill,” she says.

Canada implemented a federal temporary program in the pandemic that offers income support, recently extended to four weeks, for COVID-19-related leave. But it doesn’t cover pay fully, and isn’t remitted immediately.

Critics also say too many workers fall through the cracks. The program applies to those who have missed at least 50% of their scheduled work week, so those who wake up feeling unwell for a day, for example, would not get a full, uninterrupted paycheck. “It disincentivizes people to follow public health advice,” says Carolina Jimenez, coordinator of the Decent Work and Health Network.

Ms. Carpinone had to pay an employee for a week while their COVID-19 results were pending. Yes, it was a hassle. “I can’t sugarcoat it and say that it doesn’t cost anything, but it’s something that you budget in. It’s like saying, how much does it cost to repair an oven before it starts a fire? You’re not going to wait until it blows up.”

Doing right by employees

Ontario Premier Doug Ford, whose Conservative government got rid of the province’s two required sick days in 2018 after taking office, said reinstating them would duplicate the federal support, calling it a “waste of taxpayers’ money.”

Dan Kelly, president of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, says activists for paid sick leave have been seizing on the pandemic as an opportunity to push for permanent, employer-paid leave. While he says shortcomings in the federal program should be fixed, he finds the current debate disingenuous. “They have made the public believe that there is no paid sick leave in Canada, and that employees are forced to go to work sick,” he says.

But data shows many indeed are. In Peel, the region outside Toronto and one of the worst-hit areas for COVID-19, the public health agency released a study showing that 25% of workers went to work with symptoms between August and January. Mayors in the area wrote a joint letter calling on the Ford government to adopt sick days. So did a group representing 34 public health units of Ontario.

Ms. Jimenez says people are shocked to learn that, as a part-time nurse in Toronto, she doesn’t have paid sick days. “People audibly gasp,” she says. She could scrape by if sick, but workers depending on each hour of their paychecks have to make impossible choices. Often it’s women and minorities forced to make those choices, she says. “The pandemic has made the inequalities that we’ve had for a long, long time even more glaring.”

Helmi Ansari, CEO of Grosche International in Cambridge, Ontario, says that his own thinking evolved as a business owner – and he has hope that the pandemic will shift other employers’ minds on fair work.

When Mr. Ansari started his corporate career, he dreamed of one day being the boss with the corner office. When he and his wife started Grosche in their laundry room in 2006, selling tea and coffee craft brewing products, he thought paying over minimum wage made him a “good guy.” Then he learned how much workers struggled at those salaries. He joined the movement for a living wage and today is fighting with the Better Way Alliance for paid sick leave.

He offers five days to his 15 employees, a potential cost of 2%-3% of payroll, he says, but many never take it. “There is this common narrative that we hear that is doom and gloom … but this is an investment that does pay back,” he says. “More and more I see people in political circles talking about the importance of this, recognizing that the way we’re trying to attack this pandemic and future pandemics is really broken with the absence of paid sick leave.”

“We’re telling workers to either put food on the table or you come to work sick. In Canada, one of the most developed countries in the world, it’s a shame that workers have to make that choice,” he says. “And our economy is actually suffering more because we don’t have sick days.”

Editor's note: The headline was updated to clarify the scope of the story.

As the Biden administration considers how best to address the political and humanitarian crises in Venezuela – once Latin America’s wealthiest country, but now a shambles enduring the region’s worst human suffering – Feliciano Reyna has a few suggestions.

The prominent Venezuelan HIV/AIDS activist says the United States should shift away from the Trump administration’s broad sanctions, which appeared aimed at toppling the authoritarian government of President Nicolás Maduro but only deepened most Venezuelans’ misery.

Instead Mr. Reyna, who runs a nongovernmental public health organization in Caracas, recommends a “change of thinking” that puts off solving the political conflict to the medium to long term while concentrating immediate attention on addressing the humanitarian crisis wracking the country’s 30 million people.

To do that more effectively, he says, the new administration in Washington should employ the “multilateralism” that Joe Biden made a watchword of his quest for the White House.

And by that, Mr. Reyna says, he means both in terms of working with other countries and international organizations, as well as with a wider range of Venezuela’s civil-society actors at the forefront of efforts to rescue crumbling lives.

“I sincerely hope there is a revision by the Biden administration of how to think about contributing effectively to resolving [Venezuela’s] crisis,” he says.

“What is important now is to bring into the conversation our civil society,” he adds, “in all its diversity but also its unity behind improving and saving lives.”

Mr. Reyna is part of a growing chorus of Venezuelan voices and regional experts calling on the United States to redirect its focus from pressing for a quick return to democratic rule to addressing a humanitarian crisis that has slashed average life expectancy, stunted children’s growth, fed spiraling levels of violence, and prompted more than 5 million Venezuelans to flee their homeland.

Intimidation campaign

Since Mr. Maduro took office in 2013, the once high-flying oil-based economy has shrunk by two-thirds while the political opposition has been further marginalized.

And the Maduro government’s intimidation campaign against human rights activists, journalists, and even food and health providers who dare offer an alternative to meager government programs is “continuous and increasing,” according to a report last week by United Nations human rights experts.

An element of the emerging perspective is that while the political opposition the U.S. has traditionally worked with is weakened and deeply divided, Venezuela’s civil society – a panoply of nongovernmental organizations, unions, and business groups – is if anything stronger, more diverse, and more effective in addressing people’s needs than at the outset of the country’s downward spiral.

The thinking is not so much to abandon Venezuela’s political players as it is to work more closely with the groups that are most effective now at improving and indeed saving lives. The objective is a strengthened society that has the energy and awareness to join in delivering political change in the future.

Fidel Suarez/AP/File

Feliciano Reyna, founder of the non-profit Solidarity Action, in an interview in Caracas, Venezuela in April 2017. The organization, which began as a small clinic and support network for HIV/AIDS patients, has become a lifeline for Venezuelans experiencing all kinds of illnesses.

“With the formal political space so stuck, it’s increasingly the various actors of civil society who are coming together to address people’s real problems and to consider the big questions like ‘How do we move forward from here?’” says Michael Camilleri, director of the rule of law program and a Venezuela expert at the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington.

“It’s not directly getting back to a governance that works,” he adds, “but it injects a little pragmatism and energy into a political environment that has been exhausted in the last six months. It offers something for the Biden administration to work with and build on.”

Sticking with Guaidó

In its first month the Biden administration has given few hints as to its approach to the Western hemisphere’s most acute and vexing crisis.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken has thrown cold water on speculation that the new administration could move to quickly enter talks with the Maduro government. At his Senate confirmation hearing in January, Mr. Blinken said the Biden administration would continue to recognize opposition leader Juan Guaidó as the country’s legitimate interim president.

But he also said the administration would review the myriad sanctions the Trump administration imposed on Venezuela and consider boosting humanitarian aid.

And when White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said at one of her first daily briefings last month that the new administration “will focus on addressing the humanitarian situation … and reinvigorating multilateral diplomacy to press for a democratic outcome,” it buoyed those Venezuelans who had concluded that former President Donald Trump’s “maximum pressure” approach only hardened Mr. Maduro’s repressive actions and worsened average Venezuelans’ lives.

Still, one problem for the Biden administration is that the youthful Mr. Guaidó is now just a shadow of the charismatic leader who two years ago captured the heart of a nation devastated after 20 years of the populist socialism introduced by Mr. Maduro’s late predecessor, Hugo Chávez.

After appearing in early 2019 to be on the verge of wresting power from Mr. Maduro, and then winning the support of more than 50 countries including the U.S. as Venezuela’s legitimate leader, Mr. Guaidó has seen his national and international support dwindle as Mr. Maduro has consolidated power.

Focus on empowerment

For some Venezuelan activists, the important question for the U.S. is not whether it sticks with Mr. Guaidó or abandons him, as some European and Latin American countries have, but how it can take a more holistic approach to addressing the country’s crisis.

“What people are talking about now is the idea of the ‘nexus,’ how international assistance can help to link humanitarian to development to peace-making efforts,” says Roberto Patiño, whose network of 240 soup kitchens in 15 Venezuelan states feeds thousands of children while building community skills.

“The U.S. should think more about how to support civil society in empowering the Venezuelan people and make that a strategic pillar of a new approach,” he adds. “That would be a key difference from the Trump administration.”

One example of how that might work: The Biden administration should lift the Trump sanctions on Venezuelan crude oil sales, many experts say, and instead allow for “swaps” of oil sales for imports of diesel – an essential fuel in Venezuela for public transport and food production. That could correct how sanctions designed to punish the government instead deepened average Venezuelans’ hardships.

Mr. Patiño knows that speaking of “empowering” people risks placing him in the government’s crosshairs. Already in November his Feed the Solidarity charity was raided and an arrest warrant for “political subversion” forced him into hiding for weeks.

Mr. Reyna, the HIV/AIDS activist, also had his Solidarity Action group raided last year and several workers detained. More recently, the public health organization Azul Positivo was a police target.

What earns these civil-society organizations the wrath of the government, they argue, is their model of empowerment that aims to build community skills, responsibility, and independence. “From my perspective that frightens the government,” Mr. Patiño says, “because the regime is all about social control and keeping people dependent on them.”

But this goal of empowering people is exactly why the Biden administration should shift policy to deepen its work with civil society, he says – because that would align the U.S. more closely with shared values of human rights, personal development, and democratic governance.

“What we in Venezuela and others outside wanting to help have to understand is that any resolution to this crisis must include agreement that all the factions inside the country have a future here,” Mr. Patiño says. “Any solution for Venezuela has to put both the problems and the dreams of the Venezuelan people at the heart of the discussion,” he adds, “and that means including all political factions and perspectives.”

Benoit Tessier/AP

French President Emmanuel Macron, right, convenes virtually with U.S. President Joe Biden ahead of a 2021 Munich Security Conference at the Élysée Palace in Paris on Feb. 19, 2021.

“You know me.” It’s been a refrain all across Joe Biden’s half-century in public life. And the consistency of his core policy beliefs was on full show last week, in his first foreign policy address from the Oval Office.

His remarks were delivered remotely to an annual European security meeting he’s long attended in person. And they highlighted a new challenge: applying his enduring values and priorities to a world changed beyond recognition since his last time in national office, as Barack Obama’s vice president.

Some of the changes have been building for years, above all the increasingly assertive and emboldened stance of China and Russia. Yet others are newer, and could prove even more daunting: the geopolitical after-effects of former President Donald Trump’s reshaping of America’s approach to the world.

Mr. Biden’s abiding vision has been of an America leading alliances of like-minded democracies, standing strong against rivals where necessary, yet cooperating with them where possible. Those alliances, in his view, ultimately win the hearts and minds of the wider world “not by the example of their power, but the power of their example.”

All of that, he made clear to the delegates, was what he still believed in.

But beyond the challenge of China and Russia, this year’s Munich Security Conference brought to the fore doubts over bedrock assumptions of a long line of U.S. leaders: the robustness of America’s alliances; the impact of its leadership role; and, for the rest of the world, the lure of democracy itself.

China and Russia, to be sure, pose tests for the new president.

A different world

When Mr. Biden spoke in Munich a dozen years ago, soon after he and President Obama had taken office, his focus was mostly on broad international challenges that read like today’s headlines: world economic crisis; climate change; cybersecurity; Iran’s nuclear program. Even the shared challenge of fighting “endemic disease.”

But back then, he made only a glancing, largely conciliatory, reference to Russia. He didn’t mention China at all.

Appearing in Munich four years later, at the start of the Obama administration’s second term, he did cite differences with Russia. Yet he remained largely upbeat about cooperation. He spoke about China, too. But again – citing talks with the man who would become China’s leader, Xi Jinping – he voiced optimism that “healthy competition from a growing, emerging China” would prove positive, and that the U.S. and China weren’t destined to be “enemies.”

Unsurprisingly, his tone toward both rivals at last week’s conference was far tougher. He still stressed the importance of seeking cooperation, citing a range of issues where he felt it was simply essential: the COVID-19 pandemic, arms control, climate change.

But referring to Russia’s leader only by his last name, he accused Putin of seeking to weaken democratic alliances, “bully” other states, and hack into vital European and U.S. computer networks. 

On China, he said it was essential to “push back” against its “economic abuses and coercion,” and shape new rules for future technology to ensure it is used to “lift people up” rather than “pin them down.”

Yet that brought Mr. Biden back to his yearslong belief in the core importance of America’s democratic alliances. Now more than ever, he said, the U.S. needed to “work in lockstep” with them.

It was on that issue that Munich highlighted what may prove his trickiest diplomatic challenge.

A different United States

Despite the welcome for his overall message that “America is back,” there were signs of continuing tremors from Mr. Trump’s downgrading of alliances in favor of bilateral “America first” dealings with individual world leaders.

In their remarks to the conference, two of Europe’s most influential leaders signaled that truly rebuilding the trans-Atlantic partnership – certainly “in lockstep” – might not prove easy.

During the Trump years, both German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron publicly questioned whether Europe could still rely on America’s bedrock support. At the Munich conference, Mr. Macron did say he believed in NATO – the military alliance between the U.S. and Europe that, under President Trump, he’d pronounced no longer viable. But he reiterated a call for Europe to seek “strategic autonomy” from Washington. And Chancellor Merkel – whose country has important economic ties with both China and Russia – paired her endorsement of Mr. Biden’s emphasis on the alliance’s “shared values” with a practical caveat: “Our interests will not always converge.”

And there is a deeper source of European skepticism: over the staying power of Mr. Biden’s worldview, and whether a Trump-style nationalism might yet return in the future.

Mr. Biden was clearly aware of all this, speaking of the need “to earn back our position of trusted leadership.”

But his most emotive words were reserved for a far wider, longer-term challenge: the struggle for the very future of democratic governance against an argument being made by China, Russia, and a number of other countries that democracies simply aren’t up to the task of handling the economic, health, and security tasks of the 21st-century world. That “autocracy is the best way forward,” as Mr. Biden summed up their view. 

That is wrong, Mr. Biden asserted. “I believe with every ounce of my being that democracy will and must prevail,” he told the conference.

Of all the long-held values he brought to his address, none better defines the worldview with which he has invested his presidency. Yet now his task, and clearly his hope, will be to bring America’s overseas allies along with him.

Can police legally surveil a huge swath of a city from the air, using software to track people’s movements?

This question is what The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit is set to consider next month, as it examines the constitutionality of the Aerial Investigation Research (AIR) program, a first-of-its-kind, police-sponsored surveillance program tested last year in Baltimore.

At issue is whether planes equipped with high-resolution cameras that flew over the city from May through October violated residents’ Fourth Amendment rights. Complicating matters is an antebellum law that limits the Baltimore City Council’s authority over its police.

Ashley Gorski, a senior staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, who has argued for the plaintiffs, says the program violated “a reasonable expectation of privacy.”

But the District Court and the majority on a three-member panel of judges on the Fourth Circuit have disagreed, first denying the preliminary injunction and permitting the pilot program to operate before the panel’s November decision affirmed the lower court’s ruling. “The program has been carefully designed to impose a minimal burden on constitutional rights,” the majority wrote.

Though the program ended last October, and the city’s new mayor pledged the planes would not fly again, the reconsideration in March by the full, 15-member Fourth Circuit could determine whether the technology is permitted other places in the future, and, if allowed, under what conditions. Regardless of the court’s ruling, the larger question also remains: Did the program actually help to make Baltimore safer?

Julio Cortez/AP

Marvin L. Cheatham Sr., who led his local NAACP chapter in the 1990s, mows the grass in the park he built in West Baltimore on April 29, 2020, following the riots sparked from the 2015 Freddie Gray arrest. For six months last year, nearly the entire city of Baltimore was constantly recorded from the sky. Cheatham said he was OK with this - even though police had no search warrant, and the overwhelming majority of the roughly 600,000 people in Baltimore had committed no crimes - because the city was so besieged by violence.

“If the courts allow this surveillance to go forward,”  says Ms. Gorski, “it will radically alter the relationship between the individual and the state.”

Pixels and privacy

When demonstrations occurred last summer, the surveillance planes flew overhead in Baltimore, watching people, protests, and police from above. The planes captured footage of 32 square miles, with individuals represented as a single pixel. The ACLU’s Ms. Gorski says the technology is “capable of subjecting every square inch of the city to constant recording.”

But under the program detectives could request the aerial surveillance footage only after a crime had been committed. No distinguishing characteristics, like a person’s race or gender, can be identified from the footage, said Michael Harrison, the city’s police commissioner, last year. The moving dots are tracked to and from a crime scene and the footage is used in conjunction with other ground-based security cameras, license-plate readers, and gunfire locators as a tool to help solve crimes.

“Our job is to deter people,” says Ross McNutt, founder and president of the Ohio-based Persistent Surveillance Systems, which operated the surveillance planes and produced evidence packets for the Baltimore Police Department (BPD).

It’s not yet clear whether the program is more effective at solving crimes than policing methods that were already in place. The Baltimore police reported 390 armed robberies from May 1 to July 31 last year. According to the same report, confirmed by the Rand Corp., a nonpartisan research institution hired to evaluate the program, fewer than a fourth of those robberies were committed during the day, when the planes were operating. An even smaller number were actually recorded by the aerial cameras. 

A Rand report published in January provided “no conclusions on the effectiveness of the AIR program,” but offered preliminary information showing slight increases in clearance rates for cases using AIR evidence. Rand is set to release its final report on the program in spring 2022.

Mr. McNutt’s company has a three-year contract pending in St. Louis that would allow the plane to fly day and night, but the contract has not yet been signed by the mayor. The organization, Arnold Ventures, headquartered in Houston, which financed the Baltimore operation and three program evaluations at a cost of roughly $3.7 million, said it will not fund the St. Louis program.

Patrick Semansky/AP/File

Michael Harrison, acting commissioner of the Baltimore Police Department, speaks at an introductory news conference in Baltimore on Feb. 11, 2019. The Baltimore Police Department has revealed the aerial surveillance system being tested in the city since May has provided officers evidentiary information in 81 cases, including 19 homicides.

Who decides?

Complicating the issue is an 1860 law that places the Baltimore Police Department under the authority of the state legislature, even though the city’s tax revenue pays almost all the department’s expenses. Under this arrangement, the City Council lacked the opportunity to vote on whether to approve last year’s program, nor can it regulate its conditions.

“Democratic control, accountability, protection of civil rights and civil liberties ... all of those are important components of public safety,” says Farhang Heydari, the executive director of the Policing Project at New York University School of Law, which audited the program and filed a brief supporting neither party, but encouraging the Fourth Circuit to rehear the case.

During the pilot program, accountability and local democratic control were lacking, says Lawrence Grandpre, the director of research for Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle, a grassroots Baltimore think tank, represented by the ACLU in the case.

Mr. Grandpre’s organization has been advocating returning control of the police department from the state legislature to the City Council since before Freddie Gray died while in police custody in 2015.

“The hope is that by returning legal authority to the city you can have a more democratically accountable relationship to the Police Department,” Mr. Grandpre says. “This returning of the BPD to the hands of the City Council, to the hands of the Baltimore City, would just be one further step toward creating what we hope is more grassroots, broad-based accountability in Baltimore.”

Brandon Scott, Baltimore’s mayor and previously the City Council president, sees the move as “essential” for the department and will be advocating for local control during the state’s legislative session, spokesperson Stefanie Mavronis said in an email.

With the court case scheduled to be reheard the second week of March, Mr. Grandpre says, “the legal victory that we hope to get is one piece,” but adds that another goal is reframing conversations around public safety.

“What we need to do is fundamentally rethink the reality of why people see violence as necessary,” he says, “and build an infrastructure that addresses those needs.”

Reuters/file

An old house is seen in front of new apartment buildings in Shanghai, China.

Only in the past three decades has China’s ruling Communist Party allowed people to own a residence. Now about 96% of city dwellers own a home, usually in high-rises. Despite this leniency, the party ensures the state still owns the land under housing structures. Private ownership, contends party leader Xi Jinping, is a “Western” system. He dismisses the notion of “universal values,” such as a right to own a home and the land it sits on. Only the party, he says, can define China’s particular “core values.”

Yet millions of Chinese living in private residences seem to disagree. Since the 1990s, many have formed homeowner associations (HOAs) to demand a say in the management of their properties. To them, individual ownership requires individual freedom and other rights that are universal in nature. In Beijing, officials are one step ahead of this movement. They have started to introduce HOAs in city neighborhoods, according to the Financial Times. They understand that proper governance of local residences builds trust.

But there’s been a hitch. Who chooses the candidates to run in elections for leaders of the HOAs? Many urban homeowners demand a full say in selecting candidates rather than the party imposing its preferred candidates. They want the local bodies to be self-governing and responsive to issues such as trash collection and utility fees. In a taste of democracy, residents are fighting for free and fair elections.

Yet the party is pushing back. “If you allow people to vote for HOA president out of their own will, they may one day expect to do the same for national leaders,” says a community governance scholar in Beijing, according to the Financial Times.

Many world leaders have challenged Mr. Xi in his dismissal of universal values. In a phone call with him on Feb. 10, President Joe Biden shared his “concerns” about China’s leaders trammeling on rule of law in Hong Kong, threatening Taiwan’s democracy, and abusing the freedoms of minority Muslims in western Xinjiang province. Yet the real challenge for China’s rulers is more local, as witnessed in HOA elections as well as in cases of Chinese workers demanding unions and farmers seeking to elect village leaders.

In speeches, Mr. Xi criticizes the idea that values such as equality before the law are universal to humanity. Yet while values like those embedded in a democracy may have roots in the West, they have been adapted widely over centuries. They are now bubbling up even in Beijing homes. All by themselves, homeowners in China are defining their shared social interests, organizing neighbors to insist on accountability and transparency in services for their properties. This awakening in thought about individual rights and liberties is as natural – and universal – as can be.