PM should end restrictions or resign
WE CAN’T VACCINATE OUR WAY OUT OF THE PANDEMIC.
— RANDALL DENLEY
When our country faces a crisis, it’s time for leaders to step up. Those who don’t should step down.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford has stepped up. Friday, he declared a state of emergency and announced tough and specific penalties for demonstrators who were blocking the Ambassador Bridge in Windsor and clogging the downtown in Ottawa. Monday, the premier said that capacity restrictions would be eased later this week and vaccine passports would be gone March 1. The move is being made because case numbers and hospitalizations are at a manageable level, according to the province’s chief medical officer of health.
Ford has given the police significant powers to end the demonstrations while speeding up his already announced plan to remove outdated pandemic restrictions. Those are the two areas that required action.
Let’s compare Ford to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. After more than two weeks of pointing fingers, calling names and demanding that other people do something, Trudeau finally made his first move Monday. He’s using the Emergencies Act to declare a national emergency. Sounds important, but it is unlikely to offer any quick or specific help.
Once again, Trudeau is behind the curve. The problem is not a lack of laws, but a lack of will to use the ones we have. In Ottawa, the epicentre of the protest, the police continue to sit on their hands. Trudeau’s latest piece of political theatre seems unlikely to change that.
Trudeau still either fails to understand or won’t admit that the protesting truckers and their supporters have a point. It is time to roll back pandemic restrictions in Canada. The premiers of Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec and Prince Edward Island have either removed restrictions or announced a detailed timeline for doing so. Trudeau’s government has done neither.
It’s not as if Canadian provinces are world leaders, either. They are eliminating restrictions more slowly than many European countries and even many Democratic U.S. states.
As a result of Trudeau’s inaction, Canadians continue to face restrictions on their everyday lives that simply aren’t justified by the facts. Trudeau says he’s following the science. If so, it’s from such a distance that the science is barely visible on the horizon.
Provincially, vaccine passports are on the way out because they no longer offer the protection they once did. With Omicron, people with two shots can easily spread the virus, not just those who are unvaccinated.
And yet, Trudeau stubbornly sticks to his insistence that “mandates” prevent lockdowns. As a result, Canadians can’t board planes or trains without showing vaccination papers. The unvaccinated are barred from a wide variety of jobs on the false assumption that they pose a greater threat than others.
The Liberals have leaked a plan to change one of their ridiculous pandemic rules, the insistence that Canadians not be allowed to return from abroad without a negative PCR test. Since Omicron is already here, this accomplishes nothing except create nuisance, expense and uncertainty for travellers. For just a brief moment, it appeared there might a flicker of federal rationality, until we learned that the new plan will likely require the less-accurate rapid antigen test. That’s less annoying but equally pointless. Details have still not been announced.
For Trudeau and his government, it’s as if Omicron never happened. Surely he must have noted that his mandates didn’t prevent lockdowns across the country.
The other part of Trudeau’s non-plan is to continue pushing vaccination. Again, it’s a strategy that’s months out of date. Nearly 90 per cent of Canadian adults are fully vaccinated. That’s a good accomplishment, but it’s as high as we are going to get.
About 52 per cent of Canadian adults have a third shot. Last week, a new study by the Centers for Disease Control in the U.S. showed that the protective effects of third doses start to wane after four months, although they still help reduce hospitalization. This is hardly a surprise, since the first two doses of the same vaccine had the same result. Still, the federal government boosts the boosters.
We can’t vaccinate our way out of the pandemic, although Trudeau continues to insist that’s his plan. Vaccines do help prevent serious illness. That makes them worthwhile, but there is not much more ground to be gained there.
It’s past time for Trudeau to announce a plan for the elimination of federal pandemic restrictions. That’s the main point that the protesting truckers are making, however crudely. The best Trudeau did Monday was refer to possible changes in restrictions “in coming days.”
It’s the federal government’s job to deliver peace, order and good government. We’re 0 for 3 at the moment. If Trudeau can’t do his job, he needs to step down in favour of someone who can. Canada can live without Justin Trudeau. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to live with him.