For the government and the opposition, 2020 mostly sucked.  The former isn't a majority government, and the latter isn't a government.

So what do they need to do in 2021?  Herewith, some free advice, which is worth what you pay for it.

At the start of the pandemic, Justin Trudeau's government seemed to be doing… fine.  It was providing useful information on a regular basis, it was coming up with useful programs like the CERB, it was being more useful than usual.

Eventually, the Trudeau Liberals fell back into bad habits.

There was the arrogance: the Minister of Health flying all over the country, at taxpayers' expense, when she had been hectoring everybody to stay home.  There was the Minister of Health spotted on one of those selfsame trips, maskless, when she and her government had been demanding that we mere mortals always, always wear one.

That was the Trudeauesque arrogance: do as I say not as I do.

But there was cronyism, too.  There was the WE scandal which saw the Prime Minister and Minister of Finance quietly slide a sole-sourced, multi-million-dollar contract to a non-charity that had employed their family members in some cases for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

What was most egregious about the WE scandal was the Trudeau government's willingness to take advantage of the pandemic crisis to feather the nests of their friends and families.  It was the sponsorship scandal on steroids.

Finally, the pandemic reminded us of the third key weakness of the Trudeau regime: its managerial incompetence.  Our allies in Britain, Germany and the United States will vaccinate millions of their citizens by the end of the month.  In Canada, we hope to reach only a few thousand.

Even worse: some of our allies will have reached herd immunity by the Spring while, here in Canada, that is the point at which we hope to only start mass-immunizing our general population.

That's what the Trudeau Liberals need to do.  But what about the opposition Conservatives?

You know, the Conservatives.  They were here a minute ago.  Where'd they go?

And therein lies the biggest problem of the Conservative Party of Canada has got: it's invisible.  Politically, it doesn't exist.

Now, being in opposition is tough.  It's always been thus.  The government has all the money, all the power, all the public service, and all of the media's attention.

Nobody really pays attention to the Opposition.  So, Opposition parties do dumb things to get attention.  They continually demand police investigations, Royal Commissions of Inquiry, and lots of Parliamentary probes.  It never works.

So what does Erin O'Toole's party need to do to get noticed?  Because, during this pandemic, they've disappeared.

They need attention.  But it can't be any kind of attention.  It needs to be the right kind of attention.

Pierre Poilievre is an Ottawa-area MP.  He gets lots of media attention.  But here's the problem: Poilievre is always auditioning for the job he's already got, which is Opposition.  He and his ilk are great at opposing things, but not so good at proposing things.

The biggest political story on Earth is the pandemic.  No other story matters as much.  The Conservatives need to be seen to be doing better on the pandemic story.  They need to be front and centre on it.

The Trudeau government's main vulnerability is not that they didn't get vaccines they did.  But they didn't get nearly enough, and they got them too late.  Our allies are way ahead of us, a fact that is going to become painfully clear in the coming weeks.

The Conservatives need to put forward the MPs who look and sound like cabinet ministers.  They need to methodically and relentlessly point out that the Trudeau government did, in fact, drop the ball on the biggest issue of all how to end the pandemic.

If they do that, they will get heard, and they will get relevant.

Right now, they are neither.

[Warren Kinsella is a former chair of the Liberal Party of Canada's war room.]

Photo Credit: CBC News