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Day: November 18, 2020

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Donald Trump: you're fired.

And Joe Biden didn't fire you.  The coronavirus did.

By voting day, November 3, nearly 60 per cent of Americans disapproved or strongly disapproved of Trump's handling of the pandemic that is killing about a thousand of them every single day.

Ask any political consultant: when that many voters disapprove of what you are doing, you're toast.

It wasn't always that way for Trump.  Way back at the start of the pandemic, Americans supported his leadership.  At the end of March, in fact, when it felt like the world just might be ending, Trump's performance was approved of by a narrow majority of Americans, said polling aggregator FiveThirtyEight.

That all changed on or about the first week of April.  That was the week that U.S. Covid-19 deaths surged past the symbolic number of 10,000.  After that, Trump was never again seen as handling the pandemic well.  From July onward, the U.S. president's performance rating remained constant: 60 per cent of Americans were unhappy or very unhappy with him.

In those circumstances, Joe Biden essentially needed to maintain a pulse and smile a lot, which is what he did.  His campaign, meanwhile, devoted itself to getting out the Democratic vote early a process that Trump had mocked and attacked.  It would prove to be a fatal mistake.  Biden won mainly because of the support of those who voted early.

So, the pandemic can certainly end political careers, as it did for one Donald J. Trump.  But elsewhere in Canada, for instance what effect does Covid-19 have on political outcomes?  Well, up here, there has not been a single incumbent government that has been defeated during the pandemic.  Not one.

The minority NDP government in British Columbia was transformed into a majority, mid-pandemic.  Same thing happened in New Brunswick: the minority Progressive Conservative government was elevated to a majority.  In Saskatchewan, the Saskatchewan Party was re-elected, too to its fourth consecutive majority government.

Federally, there hasn't been a pandemic election, but Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was recently clearly tempted to engineer his own defeat.

In October, Trudeau refused to go along with Opposition demands to create a Parliamentary committee tasked with probing the propriety of government spending.  Trudeau sent out his House Leader to state that the Liberal government considered the vote on the committee to be a confidence matter meaning there would be an election if the government fell.

It was absurd, it was ridiculous, it was unnecessary.  It was also uniquely Canadian, too: only here with our preoccupation with peace, order and good government would a federal election be held over creating a committee!

If masked-up Canadians had trooped to the polls, would Trudeau have won?  Yes.  Ipsos pegged Trudeau's support at six points above the Erin O'Toole's Conservatives around the time of the committee contretemps.  Abacus Data said the Liberal lead was as much as eight points.

Angus Reid found a smaller Grit advantage over the Tories but two-thirds of Canadians, roughly, said that Trudeau's government had handled the pandemic well.  That figure has remained more or less constant since March, Angus Reid noted.

So what does it all mean?  The polls don't tell us that, exactly.  But everyone accepts that the coronavirus pandemic has massively disrupted our lives politically, economically, socially, culturally.  It is perhaps the biggest change most of us have ever faced as citizens.

That's why incumbent governments are getting re-elected.  Unless politicians have completely botched their response to the pandemic, voters are opting for the devils they know over the ones they don't.  They've quite enough disruption in their lives, thank you very much.  They don't want more.

Donald Trump is the exception.  He made such a mess of his pandemic response, they couldn't forgive him.

So they fired him.

[Kinsella worked as a volunteer for the Biden-Harris campaign in several U.S. states]

 

Photo Credit: CBC News

The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.

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What's that saying?  You know the one, about repeating things over and over expecting a different result?  I think it was about pandemic response?

No matter.  However the saying goes — what am I gonna do, google it? — it's right where we're at now.

Here in Montreal, we've been in the "red zone" for a month and a half.  Essentially, that's meant that restaurants are closed for all but takeout, but schools, shops, and offices are still open.  How has that gone?  Well, we plateaued at about 1,000 new cases a day without a giant spike in deaths or hospitalizations, right up until we didn't.  Now cases are spiking above the 1,300 per day mark with some regularity.  And deaths and hospitalizations are following in turn.

Limbo lock down has, to put a fine point on it, done squat.

Now Premier Francois Legault has begun to muse about about extending the Christmas school break to perhaps a month.

This extended school shutdown — let's be honest, it's not a break it's a shutdown — would not be accompanied by any wider business shutdown.  Meaning it's also going to create a childcare crisis on top of the endless grind of the pandemic crisis.

But, perhaps it's something, right?  Heh, no.

According to the Montreal Gazette's health reporter Aaron Derfel, there are more than 750 workplace COVID outbreaks.  There are only about 450 in schools, by Derfel's accounting.  You might see in those numbers where the obvious problem is.  There are 50% more outbreaks in the workplace, so obviously we're going to…shutdown school.  Right, okay.

The conclusion to this is we have leaders here in Quebec — and more generally across the country — who are now deciding to sacrifice us all in the name of keeping the economy open, damn the consequences.

The trouble is, of course, the economy isn't actually open.  Sure, business is happening, and stores are open.  But nothing is bustling.  Everybody knows on one level or another that there is still a pandemic going on.  Nothing about the openness of things right now is sustainable in any way, our economy just isn't built to only kinda work.  And yet our leaders continue to muddle toward doom.

At this point, I don't see how else things go down.  Our provincial leaders, the guys with the real power in all this, have decided to do as close to nothing as they can.  From coast to coast, premiers are putting special emphasis on how individuals need to take responsibility for stopping the spread of the virus.  Hearing Ontario Premier Doug Ford, to pull one example, loudly scold people for getting together in parties has become a cliche part of his daily press conferences.

But how can we stop the spread as individuals, when so much of this is out of our hands?

If you're at your job and are infected with the virus, what could your personal responsibility have done to prevent that?  Where you work is open, you have to go to work to survive, there is no other option.

This is the trouble with the myth of individual responsibility.  This is not a discrete series of individual problems.  This is a global pandemic.  It is a collective problem.

Since the end, such as it was, of the first wave, our governments had a chance to set up a system where we could track and trace COVID cases, isolate the people who were infected or exposed to infection, and put in place supports so people are never faced with the choice of having to go to work if they should instead be isolating.

Of course, our governments did none of that.  Our leaders were more interested in picking fights with their ideological enemies — in Quebec, minorities and anglophones; Ontario, teachers and municipalities; Alberta, anyone who isn't the oil industry — than preparing for a full pandemic winter.

None of that was done.  And now, faced with massive outbreaks across the country, it's clear we've been failed.  We will continue to fail if our leaders insist on avoiding making tough calls that could result in sharp short-term pain.

Kicking the can down the road is the name of the game.  And the further this particular can gets kicked, the more painful it will be when all that's left are the toughest choices of all.

This is going to be a long and difficult winter.

When the spring that comes, remember who it was that made it so difficult.  Remember that it didn't have to be this way, and the people in control could have done something to prevent it.  But they didn't.  They refused to, again and again.

We are watching a grand crime play out, and we're all the victims.  When the time comes, those personally responsible for this crime should be held to their own standards.  To do anything else would only lead us to the same result.

Photo Credit: CBC News

The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.

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It has been fascinating to watch.

In the midst of the worst pandemic of the modern era, as people are dying from a virus we have to understand, as our healthcare system is cracking under the pressure, as the economy is plunging and people are suffering because of the sanitary measures put in place by governments, the political debate in Quebec has taken a familiar turn.

Language wars.

The thesis: the controversial "Bonjour-Hi", recently the laughing stock of a SNL sketch that will be soon forgotten by all outside of Quebec, is slowly disappearing from downtown Montreal businesses and simply becoming "Hi".

Or so were the findings of a non-scientific study conducted by Le Journal de Montréal's investigation bureau, who took it upon themselves to visit  31 shops and restaurants with a hidden camera.  Their conclusion: 16 of these stores received customers in English only.

In some cases, they found, it was even impossible to be served in French at all, despite insisting on our preference to use this language.

That's all the Quebec political class needed to seize the political football and run with it.  Premier François Legault declared the situation completely unacceptable.  Rookie PQ Leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon argued that for French to become Quebec's common language again, "we absolutely have to rebuild the YES camp ".  The PQ sees this issue as an opportunity to attack the CAQ government's failure to protect the French language, but Plamondon was soon called a hypocrite for his post-secondary education choices to study in english and other languages.

Meanwhile, the CAQ government welcomed the chance to talk about something other than its abysmal COVID-19 response.  Justice Minister and Minister responsible for the French Language, Simon Jolin-Barette, pledged to table an action plan that will include measures to support businesses and provide incentives, but also coercive measures.  The kind of coercive measures that recently was applied against an Italian coffee shop, fined for using the word Cappucino on its menu, perhaps?  Montreal Mayor Valerie Plante trumpeted that in Montreal, "clients must be able to be served in French.  Period."   An action plan is also in the works at City Hall, she added.

Things were not helped by the Federal Liberals, led by St-Laurent MP Emmanuella Lambropoulos, who decided to put some salt on the wound, with bonus eye rolls and snarky smile:  "We hear, I don't want to call it a myth, I'll give the benefit of the doubt, we hear that french language is declining in Quebec, I heard that on several occasions, I have to see proof in order to believe that, but we've seen on several occasions that people do have this conception."  The Quebec MP said that during a meeting of the parliamentary committee on official languages, and she did so in english, bien sûr, actually proving the myth that she was so arrogantly trying to dismiss.

The decline of french in Quebec, and indeed in Canada and North America, is real.  In the spring of 2019, a report from the Office québécois de la langue française confirmed the slow decline of french in the province.  The OQLF highlighted an increase in bilingualism, pointing out that anglophones and allophones have a better command of French than before.  The flipside is that francophones use English more and more on a daily basis, especially in the workplace.

The Quebec political class is aware that the language debate is a dangerous pandora's box to open.  Premiers Robert Bourassa and René Lévesque and their successors struggled with the issue for years.  Two thirds of Quebecers are worried about the decline of the French language and a majority of citizens support the adoption of strong measures to protect it.  Among Francos, this concern climbs to 71%.

These voters will be targeted hard by a re-energized PQ, hoping to tap into this fear to revive its past glory.  The CAQ is listening to others sound the alarm and will try to defend that turf if they feel the issue is ripe for concrete actions.  The Quebec Liberals, meanwhile, will try to manoeuvre a position that will protect its anglophone and allophone base while sounding firm on the future of the French language.

According to the Léger survey, 58% of respondents aged 18 to 34 say that it is not important to be approached in French in downtown stores.  If that is the case, the window of political opportunity might be closing.  If nothing is done, Quebecers will be "A people attending its own funeral", dixit former PQ Minister Joseph Facal.  Politicians of all stripes are quite aware of that fact.  Language Wars are on.

And the Bloc Québécois now wants to introduce a law that would require an applicant for Canadian citizenship living in Quebec to demonstrate his capacity to speak French.

There is a pandemic, you say?

Photo Credit: www.livemtl.ca

The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.

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