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Process.

That's what lawyers always say to judges: the solution to process, Your Honour, is even more process.

Now, Justin Trudeau is no lawyer, as everyone knows.  His mauling of the Rule of Law during the SNC-Lavalin scandal his obstruction of justice therein made that pretty crystal-clear.  But he sure has a lawyer's enthusiasm for process, doesn't he?

Actual results?  Nope.  Not his thing.  Trudeau prefers to over-promise and under-deliver.  Always.  It's stamped on his DNA.

Proof of this is found in Canada's blossoming vaccination fiasco.  At every turn, on every day, the Liberal leader's response to the growing vaccination crisis has been to offer up sunny bromides about things that don't matter.  Process stuff.

So, Trudeau wheezes we don't have a domestic vaccine manufacturing capacity (false).  He shrugs, and says we should be comforted by the fact that we've purchased but not actually received lots of vaccine doses (also false).  He says the big problem is the provinces being slow on coronavirus testing (false, false).

The actual problem is really simple: we don't have vaccines, and the rest of the developed (and undeveloped) world mostly do.  Canadians have noticed, too.

An Angus Reid survey released Friday said this: "Fifty-seven per cent of Canadians now say the government has done a poor job of securing COVID-19 doses for the population.  This represents a near tripling from the number who said the same thing in early December (23 per cent)."

Among other things, that means we aren't going to have a Spring election in the country.  Good.  But it also raises a rather important question: with his approval numbers in a free-fall, why does Justin Trudeau insist on prattling on about process, instead of actual results?

The New York Times, of all newspapers, came up with an answer last week.  Self-appointed progressives, the Times wrote, always prefer process.  It's their emotional support animal.

Here's what the Times wrote.  It's worth quoting.

"Early in the pandemic, countries with populist, right-wing governments were suffering some of the worst outbreaks.  Their problems all stemmed partly from leaders who rejected scientific expertise.  More progressive and technocratic countries [like Canada] were doing a better job containing the pandemic.  Politicians who believed in the ability of bureaucracies to accomplish complex jobs were succeeding at precisely that."

Then something weird happened, noted the Times.

"But over the last few weeks, as vaccination has become a top priority, the pattern has changed.  Progressive leaders in much of the world are now struggling to distribute coronavirus vaccines quickly and efficiently."

The European Union vaccination effort has "descended into chaos," said the Times.  Democratic states "are below the national average."  And Justin Trudeau's Canada is "far behind" the United States, the Times stated.

"Far behind" is right: the National Post published an extraordinary front page this week, listing the number of countries ahead of us on vaccines, in headline-sized fonts: 37 of them.  THIRTY-SEVEN.

The reason, suggested the previously-Trudeau-fans at the New York Times?  Process.

"Why?" queried the Times.  "A common problem seems to be a focus on process rather than on getting shots into arms.  Some progressive leaders are effectively sacrificing efficiency for what they consider to be equity."

And therein lies the best explanation of all: Justin Trudeau is just being who he is.  He prefers process over results.  Talking over doing.  Sizzle over steak.  Always.

Missing from the New York Times' sober assessment of our vaccination failure?  A pithy summary of Canada's situation.  So here it is, gratis.

We are so, so screwed.

Photo Credit: CBC News

More from Warren Kinsella.     @kinsellawarren

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.

 

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.


As Erin O'Toole starts outlining his vision for a post-COVID economic recovery, there are signals that he is sending out, too loud to be ignored, that he has taken none of the lessons that this pandemic has offered.  The current economic crisis is not your typical recession or economic slowdown, and it has shown to have a disproportionate impact on women and visible minorities because of the ways in which industries they overwhelmingly work in have been hit.  But does anything O'Toole proposes deal with the actual economic damage we've seen, or those who have been impacted by it?  Of course not.  O'Toole is bound by particular ideological guideposts, and his plans to address the "she-session" is to focus on a bro-covery.

Since he was made Conservative leader, O'Toole has been laying out a vision of re-shoring manufacturing in Canada in part out of an embrace of protectionism, but also out of a sense of trying to foment a paranoia about Communist China.  This isn't to say that there aren't problems with China, because there are, and this pandemic has shown us that there is a legitimate need for some level of domestic production of strategic supplies including PPE but it's going to be incredibly difficult to disentangle much of our commercial manufacturing from China.  We are a society that worships on the altar of cheap telling people that we're going to deny Walmart and Dollarama their ability to source cheap goods from China is going to be an incredibly hard sell.

O'Toole's other focus has been on natural resources doubling down on Alberta's failed policy of providing false hope that there is another oil boom just around the corner that will solve all of its fiscal ills.  There isn't the shale revolution killed that dream, along with the impending rapid decarbonization of the economy, and Alberta needs to seriously transition, which O'Toole seems oblivious to.  Nevertheless, the focus on these two sectors is not exactly looking at where the actual hurt in our economy is these days, which is in services something that O'Toole has been entirely silent about.

O'Toole has also been silent about the need for childcare as a cornerstone of the recovery.  We've seen the effect that this pandemic has had on women in the workforce, as too many of them have had to either take leave or quit their jobs to take care of children who have been kept at home from school or childcare because of the spread of COVID.  And this isn't just because of the pandemic we knew this beforehand, and it was integral in the plans for "inclusive growth" that those radical ideologues at the Bank of Canada were talking about as being necessary for sustained economic growth.  Getting more women and marginalized groups into the workforce is key to our sustained economic growth, and for that to happen, there needs to be actual childcare which is a supply-side problem in Canada at the moment.

O'Toole, however, has been dismissive of talk of both a green recovery and inclusive growth as being "ideological," and "risky experimentation" with the economy that will somehow hamper people getting jobs, which he claims are his driving motivation.  The irony here, however, is that he is being ideological himself in his dismissal of these plans, because they conflict with his established notions about job creation.  O'Toole's rhetoric is about getting back to normal, but the Old Normal is what led us to this place, and is why the pandemic has hit us as hard as it has.  A desire to get back to Old Normal is as ideological as is the desire to "Build Back Better," as cringe-worthy as the term may be, because the pandemic exposed the cracks in our economic foundations that too many successive governments have simply papered over in the hopes that they would go away.  The focus on manufacturing and natural resources is also indicative of a belief in the kinds of trickle-down economics that supposes that these jobs will be what supports the rest of the service economy around it, when the service economy is in part of what is driving us now.  For instance, IT services now makes up a larger share of our GDP than mining and oil and gas combined.

We also cannot ignore the other signals that O'Toole has been sending out about just whose jobs he cares about.  When Statistics Canada's job numbers were released on Monday, citing that the brunt of the job losses were among women and visible minorities because they were largely concentrated in wholesale and retail trade, as well as accommodation and food services, O'Toole and his comms team chose to illustrate his concern with a stock photo of a young white guy in a hoodie as though they felt that this was the face that would garner more sympathy from his voter base.  A day later, he tweeted about championing Canada's workers, and illustrated it with a stock image of a white guy on a construction site never mind that the very same StatsCan figures released this week showed that there were actually job gains in the construction sector.  But these images showcase just who O'Toole thinks needs his help.

It was also telling that in the week that O'Toole shuffled up his Shadow Cabinet, he created a new post of critic for COVID economic recovery and made the face of this recovery James Cumming, an otherwise bland, middle-aged white guy.  For an economic crisis that has hurt women and minorities the most, O'Toole has exclusively focused on male-dominated sectors, and on showcasing the plight of white guys like him, while dismissing the concerns of getting women and minorities into the workforce.  For a party that likes to brand itself as good economic managers, they can neither read the concerns of the marketplace, nor see the direction that the market is heading in terms of a green recovery.  This is tone-deaf and they aren't even fighting the last war they are fighting three, maybe four wars past.  If a bro-covery is the best that O'Toole has to offer, he shouldn't be surprised by the fact that his polling numbers are so low in the demographics he needs to reach out to.

Photo Credit: Saltwire.com

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.