Don’t hold breath on promises

From a much-needed review of Canada’s foreign policy toward an increasingly aggressive China to a court-ordered rewrite of the medically assisted death framework and including the planting of at least one of the billions of trees promised to mitigate climate change, it is not hard these days to come up with a substantial list of unfinished federal business.

There is no doubt the pandemic has derailed part of the agenda. But even with all hands on deck, there are also significant gaps in Ottawa’s response to the challenge.

For example, with the COVID-19 crisis now in its eighth month, the federal government is still scrambling to provide the provinces with rapid tests.

With every passing week, the pandemic is wreaking more havoc on the country’s airline and aerospace industries — with attending job losses. But while there has been much behind-the-scenes talk of upcoming federal assistance, none has actually surfaced.

Meanwhile, France, Germany, Italy and the U.K. — to name just those countries — have all managed to put together financial relief packages. It has been more than a year and a half since the last federal budget. By now, the assumptions that presided over that preelection exercise have been thrown out the pandemic window.

It is impossible for Canadians to assess the credibility of the Liberal post-pandemic plan without some accounting to support it.

Just last month, Justin Trudeau’s government presented a new speech from the throne. Most of its non-pandemic-related content was cut and pasted from the two previous Liberal installments.

That should have come as no surprise: Even in the pre-pandemic era, matters that the current government heralded as priorities routinely tended to proceed at a glacial pace.

Take Indigenous reconciliation. Five years into the tenure of a prime minister who cast himself as a champion of reconciliation, legislation designed to implement the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) has yet to materialize.

In last month’s speech, the government committed only to presenting a bill before the end of the year.

Notwithstanding a growing pile of untended federal knitting, the prime minister now talks of mending what he sees as a hole in the health-care safety net.

It is possible to both find that the issues raised by the devastation wreaked by COVID-19 on long-termcare residents in Ontario and Quebec are serious and to question the seriousness of Trudeau’s current bid to put national standards in place to deal with the situation.

Under the circumstances, a federal intervention in the shape of socalled national standards sounds more like political window-dressing than like a response to the challenges faced by the provinces.

Crafting a national policy framework to respond to the larger issue of the greying of Canada’s population would almost certainly be more helpful. It would also fall more squarely within the federal government’s purview.

With only a few exceptions, health care, like education, is an exclusive provincial responsibility. Before lamenting this division of powers, consider that it has served Canada relatively well over the course of the pandemic.

No one can seriously argue the federal government — had it been in ultimate command of the health and school systems from coast to coast to coast on top of all of the other pandemic-related matters that have kept it busy 24/7 — would have been in a better place to deal with COVID-19.

But when it comes to upholding national standards in health, the only lever Ottawa actually holds over the provinces is a financial one. It can use its funding as a carrot to secure provincial buy-in and subsequently as a stick to exact compliance.

The latter would involve cutting part of the federal transfers to a given province in retaliation for its government thumbing its nose at national standards.

As Indigenous Services Minister Marc Miller rightly noted in the lead-up to

Friday’s emergency meeting with Canada’s Indigenous leadership over systemic racism in the health-care system, cutting the funding of one or more provinces in the midst of pandemic would not be a winning formula.

He could have added that depriving any provincial government of its full share of federal health-care dollars at a time when the system has been chronically stretched for decades would amount both to terrible politics and poor policy.

Prior to the pandemic, pharmacare was meant to be the signature social policy initiative of Trudeau’s second term.

Eight months into the COVID-19 emergency, the latter has taken a back seat to long-term care and, to a lesser degree, child care.

This is a government that has exhibited a noticeable attraction for the latest bright shiny policy object.

That would in itself not be a major flaw if it were matched with an equivalent zeal for undertaking the heavy lifting involved in walking the walk of the government’s talk, rather than with a short attention span.