Bridging burning
There’s a big update this week on Bridging Finance, the private debt lender that extended Membertou a $6.8 million loan in January 2020 to invest in Novaporte, promoter Albert Barbusci’s proposed Sydney harbor container terminal project (and that took what Barbusci termed a small equity stake of its own in the project).
Bridging was put into receivership on 30 April 2021, following allegations by the Ontario Securities Commission (OSC) — none of which have yet been proven in court — that Bridging and CEO David Sharpe “improperly used investor funds to benefit some of its founders and executives.”
On Tuesday, an Ontario court approved receiver PricewaterhouseCooper’s plan to liquidate the company’s remaining assets. This is expected to result in a loss, for Bridging’s shareholders, of “at least” $1.2 billion.

Natasha and David Sharpe, 11 April 2019 (Source: Bridging Finance Inc )
PwC tried unsuccessfully for five months to sell Bridging but has given up and will instead undertake an “orderly wind-down/liquidation” of the company in which it will attempt to recover value for shareholders through “Asset sales to third parties, Loan repayments, formal restructuring proceedings and informal workouts or restructurings outside of Court.”
What this means for Membertou’s loan is unclear — it might be one of the 13 that have been paid in full since the receiver took over Bridging or it might (along with Bridging’s equity stake in Novaporte) be among the 57 remaining “loans, fund investments and equity positions” on the Bridging books.
Fossil fueled
There’s something fascinating about watching Meta Materials — a developer of “high-performance functional materials and nanocomposites” — trying to manage an oil and gas company.
META’s June 2021 reverse merger with the Texas-based oil and gas concern Torchlight Energy Resources was a marriage of convenience intended to get META listed on the Nasdaq without all the faff of an initial public offering (IPO).
Torchlight’s oil and gas assets were to be sold off immediately and the money paid as a cash dividend to holders of Torchlight’s Series A preferred shares. The promise of this dividend was one of the factors that got talked up on social media prior to the merger, helping drive Torchlight’s share price to unheard of heights (sealing META’s “unicorn” status and resulting, you’ll recall, in a $100 million windfall for Innovacorp, an early META investor).

Who says you can’t combine drilling for oil with other businesses? Oil Derrick beside Restaurant and Used Car Lot, Kilgore (Goliad county, Texas, United States) 06/1972 (The U.S. National Archives, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)
But META hasn’t been unable to unload the oil and gas “assets” which it described this way in a recent SEC filing:
As of December 31, 2021 and 2020, the Company had no proved reserves. The Hazel and Orogrande Projects consist only of unevaluated properties in progress of development for future production. At December 31, 2021, there are no proved nonproducing reserves related to these properties. The Oklahoma properties are marginal producing wells which are not economic in the context of proved reserve value.
The company reported no oil and gas production in 2021, while in 2020 it produced and sold 5,445 barrels of oil and sold 4,998 MCF [a unit of measurement for natural gas that equals 1,032 cubic feet] of gas.
So META is chugging along with Plan B — it established a wholly-owned subsidiary called Oilco, hired a team of industry people to manage it and spent $14.2 million drilling exploratory wells to meet its lease obligations. The plan, as META explained in a March 31 “update”, is to spinout Oilco as a separate company:
When the spinout is completed, holders of Series A preferred shares will exchange their preferred shares pro rata for the OilCo common shares. The necessary audit and legal work related to the asset consolidation and spinout is expected to be completed in the coming months.
The new company will come into the world owing META $14.2 million and in need of “additional short-term financing” which, as the update notes, there can be “no assurance” it will find.
Social media response to this latest announcement from META runs what I’ve come to think of as the usual gamut from people accusing Palikaras of “torching” retail shareholders to people assuring him they don’t think he’s hurting the stock “on purpose” to people announcing they have “100% confidence” in him.
But the market response seems decidedly negative — META’s shares fell 8.74% to close at $1.67 following the update.
Flu season
The notion that the coronavirus is here to stay, that it will become part of our lives like seasonal influenza, has been floated since the beginning of the pandemic. That is, after all, what happened with the deadly Spanish Influenza, which killed between 20 and 50 million people in 1918, then “stuck around as the regular seasonal flu.”
As Dr. Henry Walker of the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) told NBC News last month:
This virus will probably continue to circulate in our society, in our country, around the world for years to come. This next six months, the next year, will really inform us in terms of what living with this virus is going to look like.
I never became obsessed with flu season statistics the way I am with COVID stats, so wasn’t familiar with a provincial government publication called “Respiratory Watch” dedicated to tracking influenza.
To get a sense of the difference between the current COVID situation and an old-fashioned flu season, I thought it would be interesting to compare some of the data in the respiratory report from the week of March 24 to March 30, 2019 to the most recent COVID weekly report.
But first a caveat: we weren’t testing widely for flu in 2019, so the number of “laboratory-confirmed influenza cases” in this table doesn’t capture the actual extent of flu in the population. In fact, in its final report on influenza for the 2018-2019 season, the Department of Health and Wellness notes:
The data presented in this report may under–represent the true number of Influenza cases in the Nova Scotia population. As previously described, routine respiratory pathogen testing in the 2018–2019 season was available in acute care settings, as well as long term care/residential facilities, but was not conducted in the community. Lastly, only those cases that are reported to Public Health Services within the Nova Scotia Health Authority (NSHA) were cited in this report
The province doesn’t seem to calculate a death-per-cases rate for influenza, and I presume this is why.
But as testing for COVID has been scaled back, we’ve been told to focus on hospitalizations, ICU numbers and deaths to measure the severity of the outbreak, so those are the numbers I’ve pulled from the 2019 Respiratory Watch report:

Source: Respiratory Watch, Week 13, 2019
According to the COVID-19 epidemiologic summary for the week ending 30 March 2022, there were 51 people in hospital with COVID, 11 of whom were in ICU and 10 deaths.
As mentioned, I found the Influenza Surveillance Report for 2018-2019 and it provided flu stats for 2014-2015 to 2018-2019:

Source: Influenza Surveillance Report, 2018-2019 Influenza Season
As you can see, deaths across five flu seasons totaled 217. To put that in perspective, Tim Bousquet reported yesterday that we’ve seen 143 deaths during Wave 5 of the COVID epidemic alone. But he also pointed out, as does the weekly COVID report, that thanks to vaccines, the percentage of COVID cases leading to hospitalization during this wave (1.5%) is down significantly from the first wave (5.3%). Likewise, the number of cases resulting in death in Wave 5 (0.3%) is down sharply from the first wave (5.9%). Deaths are up in absolute numbers because overall cases are up.
It’s interesting to look back at the way we were talking about flu in during the 2018-2019 season. This January story from the Dalhousie website by Cecilia Khamete begins:
If you’re a fan of the American TV show Family Guy, you might recall a recent-season episode in which Louis Griffin refuses to immunize her son, Stewie Griffin, resulting in a mass spread of the measles virus to the inhabitants of Quahog. The episode addresses the implications of refusing vaccinations — for individuals and for the community.
While the situation in Nova Scotia and Canada at large is not as dire as that in Quahog, health professionals have made it clear that the flu virus is spreading at a faster rate than usual this season.
Khamete turns to Dr. Scott Halperin, a professor of pediatrics in the division of infectious diseases at Dalhousie, for an explanation for the “high” number of flu cases Nova Scotia was experiencing in the 2018-2019 season:
“The flu virus is constantly changing,” says Dr. Halperin. “Host factors, such as the susceptibility to infection due to lack of prior experience with the circulating strain, could be one explanation of the high numbers. Another reason could be that the flu season started earlier than previous years.”
There are also social factors, such as low numbers of people getting vaccines, that contribute to high infection rates. While vaccination numbers for this flu season won’t be compiled until it is over, last year only 36.8% of Nova Scotians got a flu shot — down from 41.8% in 2013-14. Misinformation plays a significant role in resistance to vaccinations. The assumption that the vaccine results in infection is rather widespread.
(Poor Dr. Halperin, he didn’t know from misinformation!)
I realize that the revelation that COVID-19 has not yet assumed the characteristics of a “seasonal flu” is not really worthy of the term “revelation,” but I found the cold, hard numbers interesting.
I also appreciated — and will end on — this comment from Dr. Walker of the CDC, who expressed the hope that:
…the most recent surge, driven by the extremely contagious omicron variant, will be “the last real large surge from SARS-CoV-2.”
Leave them laughing
This has been a very serious edition of Fast & Curious and given the date, I should probably end with an April Fool’s Day gag, but the actual news is so bizarre these days, I don’t really see the point.
So instead, I’ll end with a writer’s joke:
My new thesaurus is terrible and also, it’s terrible.
Okay, I realize I’m leaving you groaning rather than laughing but it’s better than weeping over the sad the state of the world, isn’t it?