PANDEMIC RESPONSE

Going into this pandemic, it was widely assumed that Canada’s 2003 grappling with SARS would give it an upper hand. Instead, the opposite seems to have happened: Canada has failed to score even a moderate win during 11 months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our nursing homes deaths from the disease were the highest in the world. We’ve run up our pandemic debt faster than anyone. And we’ve become one of the deadliest countries for COVID-19 in the Pacific rim.

Canada’s woes were much easier to take when the situation just across the border was consistently much worse. but now the tables have turned. While the united States is vaccinating 1.6 million people per day, delivery delays have meant that Canada has spent weeks with fewer than three per cent of its citizens having received even one dose of the vaccine. It’s impossible to know what course COVID-19 is going to take over the next 12 months, but it seems reasonable to assume that Canada’s policy failures on this file will end up having a direct toll in increased fatalities and sovereign debt.