National Post (National Edition)
WHAT CANADA CAN'T GET DONE
From vaccines to pipelines to transit to clean water on reserves ...
• FIX 24 SUSSEX
• BUILD
PIPELINES
• MAKE OUR
OWN VACCINE
• PROVIDE CLEAN WATER ON RESERVES
• BUY JETS
• and more ... Tristin Hopper on our nation’s project paralysis
It's no secret that we here at National Post love Canada. We love ice-based sports. We love queuing for the bus. We love Constitutional Monarchy checked by an elected Parliament. We will even say that Terry Jacks' Seasons in the Sun is a song not wholly without merit.
But we wouldn't be the first to notice that, of late, Canada seems to be entering a bit of a slump. A 2019 Ipsos poll found that 52 per cent of Canadians believed our society was “broken.” By the end of 2020, a report by
Edelman determined that nearly half of the country did not trust the government, private sector or non-profits. Our star is even fading among our friends; in 2018, Canada plummeted from its top spot on the Reputation Institute's list of the world's most reputable countries.
And now, thanks to a series of cock-ups on procuring COVID-19 vaccines, and tightening its borders to the virus and its infectious variants, Canada's pandemic is set to last six months longer than virtually every other country of similar wealth and capability. We now rank around 40th place in the world in terms of percentage of the population given a single shot of the two approved vaccines.
COVID-19 has highlighted the fact that not only is Canada racking up new failures in the usual sore spots such as public health, but increasingly we can't even seem to manage things that should be easy. We're an energy superpower that can't build a dam or a pipeline. A champion of reconciliation where Indigenous people are poisoned by their own drinking water. A self-proclaimed “honest broker” in world affairs that can't get its phone calls returned by foreign leaders.
If it seems like Canada is embarrassingly unable to get anything done lately, here are some of the telltale signs.