Embarrassing vaccine rollout is not surprising
Canadians should not be surprised that the country is slipping further and further in international rankings of vaccinations (adjusted for population, of course). They can be angry, if they want. but the anger should be directed as much inward as it is outward at the federal government. We are an unserious country struggling to confront a serious challenge. What were you all expecting?
Procurement Minister Anita Anand had a recent meeting with the Toronto Star editorial board and her comments seemed mostly fair — of particular note was her insistence that she can’t simply reveal the contracts with vaccine providers due to confidentiality clauses. (I’m enough of a cynic on Canadian government transparency to have briefly wondered which side in the negotiations insisted on said clauses, but I digress.) In any case, as I noted here in a recent column, it’s still very possible that the coming months will see our procurement issues ease, and with new vaccine candidates hopefully close to approval, three months from now, the memory of these early struggles may be largely erased by the accumulating good news of a successful vaccination campaign.
but that would be a bad thing. We should remember the stress and fear of right now, and also the embarrassment of seeing much smaller, poorer countries outperforming us. because it is embarrassing. The smart thing to do would be to decide that we don’t like this feeling — the fear of further death and the shame of humiliation — and have a frank national self-assessment that will leave us better off to face the next crisis. but if we were capable of that kind of self-assessment, we probably wouldn’t be here in the first place.
There is something important about Canada that most Canadians too often forget. We’re rich. We get distracted by the enormity of our land mass or overly focused on the size of our population, relative to our larger southern neighbour. What we don’t spend enough time focusing on is the size of our economy. It’s rich. We are rich. Canada is a rich country. but we don’t act like one.
Our official residences fall into disrepair, our military is too small and chronically underfunded, and we have enormous infrastructure deficits all across the country. We aren’t even good at taking proper care of what previous generations already built, which crumbles as replacement projects get stuck in political limbo forever.
We spend more than almost anyone in the world on health care (per capita) for a system that produces decidedly mediocre results compared to international peers — just imagine how much better we’d have done during this pandemic if so much of our policy wasn’t driven by panic-inducing realization that our hospitals are overflowing with patients at the best of times.
As for the catastrophes in our long-term-care homes, the only people surprised by this are the people who haven’t been paying attention to the disaster our longterm-care system has become. Sadly, that’s just about all of us.
All of these problems, and many more, get blamed on whatever political party you don’t usually vote for. but the real issue is complacency and a fundamentally cheap streak to the national psyche. Our enviable geographic (and geopolitical) situation, for generations, has imposed almost no cost on politicians for failures. 24 Sussex is crumbling into dust? Who cares? Military constantly short of basic equipment? hey, I’m not in the military. Transit project running years behind and billions overbudget? Whatever, I drive to work anyway.
Most astonishing, we’ve even found a way to rationalize, to ourselves, our meh-with-bells-on health-care system — if ever confronted with evidence of its manifest deficiencies, Canadians simply remind themselves that hey, could be worse. We could be Americans! The warm glow of our moral superiority dampens the throb of that hip that urgently needs replacement, and has for months.
Other countries are better at this than we are. Some of them because they have to be — is it any surprise that Israel, a country that lives under constant threat of annihilation, performed better than Canada, which, ahem, does not?
but there’s simply no reason we have to be this bad at procurement and preparedness. As said above, we are rich. We could fix health care, fund the military, repair or replace 24 Sussex and even have vaccinate production capacity sit idle for when it’s needed, and all it would cost us is money. And not even huge sums of money. A few points of GDP, efficiently spent, would leave us a stronger country, with greater reserves of technical capacity and know-how to fall back on.
but just imagine the fate of a politician — any politician, from any party — who’d proposed two years ago that we should construct, or pay to have constructed, a vaccine facility. It would look a lot like what the reaction is whenever a politician proposes making some necessary investment in the armed forces. Millions of Canadians look at you funny and ask, gee, who are you planning on going to war with? In the context of vaccines, it would have been something more like, “What, are you thinking some coronavirus is going to mutate and kill tens of thousands of Canadians or something? how paranoid are you?”
yet here we are. We don’t have to be here. We could choose to never be here again. We’d have saved lives and spared ourselves embarrassment. but we didn’t, and we have only ourselves to blame.