National Post (National Edition)
Budget's `sorry' is not enough
There is a word that appears in Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland's budget speech this week, and it seems oddly out of place, especially so in light of the fact that Budget 2021 is largely a function of her government's mishandling of the COVID-19 crisis. It's the word “sorry.”
It's not just that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has gone out of his way to insist he has no regrets about his government's management of the catastrophe. It's also that it was the Liberal government itself that had the heaviest hand in making the catastrophe that Team Trudeau is now setting about to repair with a federal budget that's already a year overdue. As the Conservatives' former finance critic, Pierre Poilievre, has pointed out, Budget 2021 will allow Trudeau the distinction of having sunk the country, in seven years, into a debt deeper than all the debts Canada had hitherto racked up over 148 years, combined.
“We have failed so many of those living in long-term care facilities,” Freeland noted. “To them, and to their families, let me say this: I am so sorry. We owe you so much better than this.” True, by any measure. In a study of 17 nation states from within the 37-member Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Canada has tallied up the worst record for COVID-19 deaths in long-term care homes, according to the Canadian Institute for Health Information. No other country has come close. By the time the pandemic's first wave crested, four out of five COVID-related deaths in Canada had occurred in care homes for the elderly.
Ottawa's budget atonement amounts to a $3-billion investment to ensure the provinces and territories offer a higher standard of elderly care. There is also a pledge to increase Old Age Security allowances for Canadians 75 and older.
Much of the budget is ambitiously and respectably social-democratic — $30 billion for a national childcare plan, $17.6 billion in green investments, that sort of thing — and understandably, because the New Democratic Party's support is required to get the massive spending package pushed through Parliament. But what distinguishes the budget apart from its historic heft are the measures to pay down the social and economic costs of the Liberals' various pandemic-related failures and bungles, which formed a pattern from the beginning.
As soon as word began to leak out of the Chinese city of Wuhan last January that a deadly plague was upon the world, the prime minister had one job: to keep it out of Canada. Trudeau's weird response in the early innings was an inexplicably fervent aversion to any restrictions on incoming air travel, and Ottawa wasn't adequately embarrassed into imposing restrictions, and ineffectively at that, until March 25 last year.
But once the virus had taken root in Canada and the illness was spreading all on its own via “community transmission,” the acquisition of medical equipment — ventilators, masks and so on — was the one job that Ottawa had to attend to. That effort, as well, collapsed in such a shambles that Trudeau was induced to offer something approximating a statement of regret in an otherwise upbeat year-end interview last December.
Trudeau told CityNews that his government's mad dash to acquire enough masks for front-line workers — hospital workers were reusing their masks, washing old ones at home — was “something that I would have loved to have been able to avoid.” That wasn't exactly an expression of contrition, and neither did it help that Trudeau asserted a lessons-learned claim in this cheery way: “That's how we ended up in such a great situation on vaccines.”
That great situation has turned into the humiliation of having to watch the United States leap far ahead of Canada and so quickly in their vaccine rollout — roughly 26 per cent of Americans are now fully immunized, compared with about 2.5 per cent of Canadians.
But at least we're starting to move up in the global vaccination rankings. By the middle of this week, Canada had climbed to 24th place in the University of Oxford's Our World in Data coronavirus tracking project. About 26 per cent of Canadians have received a single dose, but most will have to wait several weeks for the recommended second dose. Still, Canada's vaccination rate remains behind every G7 country except Japan — which is three times as populous as Canada, and yet has managed to hold its infections to half of Canada's numbers, and a quarter of Canada's deaths.
Last week, Trudeau said there was nothing he'd do differently in the way his government has gone about the critically-necessary work of securing coronavirus vaccines. Not even his inexplicable decision to partner up the National Research Council with the People's Republic of China in a CanSino Biologics vaccine production fantasy that Xi Jinping predictably sabotaged in an act of duplicity the Trudeau government kept from Canadians for three whole months.
The federal government says supply contracts with the major pharmaceutical producers are now sufficient to have all Canadians immunized by the end of September. This may come as cold comfort to quite a few of us. More than 1.1 million Canadians have fallen ill with COVID-19 so far, and 23,667 Canadians have been killed by it. And now a third wave is crashing down on our heads.
The National Advisory Committee on Immunization says the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines are up to 92 per cent effective before the second dose, and AstraZeneca's first shot is about 76 per cent effective. Johnson & Johnson's vaccine promises immunity with a single dose, but like AstraZeneca, J&J has been dogged by worries about a blood-clotting side effect that have been wildly overblown.
So there may be light at the end of the tunnel. But Ottawa is still failing at the one job, the first job, that Canadians needed the federal government to undertake: keeping the plague out of Canada. It's a task now more urgent with the deadly coronavirus mutants that continue to arrive at Canadian airports, notably the genetic variants from India, Brazil and the United Kingdom.
A review of Public Health Canada data on COVID-19 “potential exposure” locations, just over the past two weeks, identifies roughly 100 international flights that carried COVID-infected passengers into Canada from India, Brazil, the U.K., Europe, Turkey, the Persian Gulf, Latin America and other coronavirus hot spots, arriving mostly in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver.
How and why this is happening is not at all clear. Just to board a flight to Canada, international travellers are ostensibly obliged to show a negative COVID-19 test result acquired within three days of boarding. There are quarantine requirements on arrival, although there are also reports of travellers just dodging mandatory stays in quarantine hotels, opting to pay modest fines instead.
Quite apart from the unrecoverable human toll and all its agonies and heartbreak, the costs Canadians will bear in the work of taking care of one another as we limp towards what we all hope is a post-pandemic horizon amount to about $100 billion in new federal spending.
Somehow, “sorry” doesn't quite cut it.
VACCINATION RATE REMAINS BEHIND EVERY G7 COUNTRY EXCEPT JAPAN.