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.

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Nova Scotia is about to have a new premier, after Iain Rankin won the provincial Liberals' leadership contest on the second ballot.  He will take over for Stephen McNeil at a time of pandemic and where McNeil's government has largely avoided the province's legislative assembly for nearly a year.  All of this is well and good Rankin has a seat already and the province won't have to go through what happened most recently in Newfoundland and Labrador with their new premier but he hasn't even been sworn in yet and already the hosts of the country's main political shows are asking him when he wants to call an election so that he can "run on his own mandate."

No.

We don't have "mandates" in Canada.  They are antithetical to our system of government, and yet, because so many of our political discussions in this country are framed by American concepts, that's the kind of thing that is being discussed.  False equivalencies of their system infect our political discourse, and not enough people are willing to push back against them because they have become pervasive, and it really, really doesn't help when the hosts of political shows play into them as well.

For starters, Rankin has no reason to call an election for almost another year-and-a-half.  Nova Scotia is not bound by a fixed election date (thankfully that's another Americanism that we need desperately to purge from our statute books, preferably with fire), but it is subject to the constitutional limit of five years between legislative assemblies, which would be May 30^th, 2022 at the latest.  While several provinces have had elections during the pandemic, in some cases it was because it was statutory (Saskatchewan), but in others, they were in a hung parliament situation and they wanted a majority legislature, but Rankin wouldn't have that excuse as he is inheriting one.  Granted, Nova Scotia is one of the provinces in the best shape during the pandemic, so they theoretically could have one with less trouble than some other provinces, however just because they could, it does not follow that they should, even with a new premier.

The demand that a new premier (or prime minister) who has assumed leadership of the party between general elections quickly call another one in order to have their own "mandate" goes against some of the fundamentals of Responsible Government in that it presumes that the system is based on the leaders.  It's not supposed to be despite the best efforts of parties and the media to make it appear so.  Remember that we elect individual MPs, not parties, and not the first minister directly.  The fact that the incumbent remains in power after an election until they resign or are dismissed by the appropriate vice-regal is another indication that governments, while drawn from their respective assemblies, remain separate from them.  Governments can stretch across parliaments, or change within a single parliament, depending on the situation of confidence.  They are not tied to particular elections.

The talk of mandates, however, presupposes that governments are elected when they are in fact appointed by the vice-regal based on which party can command the confidence of the legislature.  Confidence is not bound to a "mandate," which is particularly made evident in a hung parliament, where no party hold a majority of the seats.  It's hard to describe a "mandate" if there isn't a majority to tie that mandate to and no, this is not an invitation for electoral reform in order to rig the system to more closely associate the two concepts.  It just means that we need to think about our system as it was designed and not try to wedge American concepts into it.

That, unfortunately, gets harder when we keep trying to import Americanisms, such as the ways in which we now choose party leaders as though they were quasi-presidential primaries.  This has fuelled the narrative of having a "mandate" because it has elevated the leader above how our system was designed to regard them.  Trying to tie a leader to an electoral mandate helps to propel the move that has seen our political parties turn themselves into minor cults of personality around each new leader, and then reform that personality cult when that leader is gone and a new one replaces them.  The system properly evolved in such a way that leaders could be interchangeable within the party that the caucus could decide when one had outlived their usefulness or become a liability, and they would choose a new one from within their own ranks.  But the presidentialization of our party leaders means that these mechanisms and their utility are being forgotten.

Rankin has said in the interviews with said political shows that his first priority is to swear in a new Cabinet and have a new legislative session, which is how it should be.  In fact, it's what needs to happen because the Nova Scotia House of Assembly has not met in nearly a year having adjourned for the pandemic, followed by a prorogation.  Rankin will need to quickly pursue a budget, and hopefully it won't be a thinly veiled exercise in crafting an election platform that he can then call an election on something that would almost be irresponsible at this particular point in time, no matter whether the province has some of the lowest COVID numbers in the country.  Rather, he should take the opportunity to govern and show what kind of a leader he is, so that when he does eventually go to an election, the people have something that they can actually hold him to account for, rather than the sins of his predecessor.

Nevertheless, talk of his own "mandate" will dog him if he does, particularly from the pundit class who will demand that if he wants to do something, he should call an election and run on it first.  Our system doesn't work like that, and it would be great if we could stop pretending that we're Americans and actually use our Westminster parliamentary democracy the way it was intended.

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Over the past couple of weeks, a narrative has been developing that somehow the federal government negotiated a series of bad deals around vaccine procurement because, for reasons outside of this government's control, there have been delays in a handful of vaccine deliveries.  Much of this narrative, however, has been premised on false or otherwise misleading information, and almost all of this has been giving cover to those who bear a bigger burden of responsibility for how bad the pandemic has played out in this country.  The fact that this bogus information on what was or was not done continues to reappear and largely go unchallenged is a problem, especially when the government does itself no favours by not pushing back effectively against it.

There is a particularly ghoulish series of talking points that have emerged which attempt to blame new infections and deaths on the federal government because of vaccine delays.  This is one of those points that is largely there to give cover to provincial premiers, who never should have been counting on vaccines as their primary means of controlling the pandemic in their provinces.  Had they done their jobs of investing in increasing their capacity to test and trace cases, providing paid sick days, making schools safer, or actually doing the work of making long-term care facilities fit for human habitation and not the charnel houses of COVID, while instituting lockdowns when case numbers were low, there would have been little need for things to have gotten as bad as they've become.

Instead, the majority of premiers let things get out of control because they were too hidebound in their ideological need to keep the economy open at all costs, and in their inability to conceive of the need to pay people to stay at home in a pandemic in order to limit spread.  They refused to spend money to do the necessary work, even when the federal government was tossing it at them left and right with few strings attached, if any.  Once vaccines were in sight, they decided instead that this was their ticket out, but by that point, their case counts had started to overwhelm hospitals, and now most of us in this country are still in some kind of mockdown situation because they kept ignoring public health advice until it was too late.  These deaths should not be on the prime minister's hands, vaccine delays or not.

With the announcement that the still-under-construction National Research Council facility in Montreal would start producing Novavax's vaccine by the end of the year pending Health Canada approval reignited the faux-debate over domestic vaccine production in this country, and the hysterical demands that the prime minister should have negotiated with these pharmaceutical companies to produce them here.  Except they did try it has been explained over and over again that pre-pandemic, our domestic bio-manufacturing capacity had been allowed to atrophy under successive governments, which the current government quickly made investments in restoring once the pandemic happened, but that takes time.  When we had vaccine candidates under consideration, these companies looked at what capacity we had and determined it was too limited to justify the expense of capital and expertise when existing facilities could manufacture at global scale.

The added complication with this is that different vaccines require different technologies to produce them, and what capacity we did have was only for certain types of vaccines.  The Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines are based on mRNA technology, which Canada currently does not have the technological capacity to produce at scale.  In fact, almost nobody does, which is why these companies weren't able to outsource more production than they already have.  Nevertheless, we have MPs and party leaders who either don't understand this distinction or who don't care to understand and are trying to pretend that we would have had the option to produce these domestically if only this government had bothered to negotiate properly.  This is a complete fabrication, and yet it keeps coming up because not enough media outlets will call them out on this, nor will the government, who prefer to stick to their happy-clappy talking points about how diverse our vaccine portfolio is.

Another deliberate mischaracterization was added to the pile this week with news that Canada would be accepting doses from the COVAX facility, which has been falsely portrayed as a program devoted to getting doses to the developing world.  Canada was one of the first and largest donors, where the program involved investing so that we get some production capacity while our orders give the facility the kind of leverage they need to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies in order to ensure equitable access to those developing countries.  While the opposition calls it "embarrassing" or "humiliating" that we are taking these doses or falsely claiming that we are somehow taking them away from developing countries the government has not done enough to put the actual version of events forward until it's too late.

The current delays, chalked up to Pfizer retooling one of their production lines so that they can ramp up production, and Moderna facing certain unnamed "concerns in the manufacturing process," have everyone blaming the prime minister for this state of affairs, along with demands that he debase himself by throwing a public tantrum to the CEOs of those companies, as though that would do any good.  He has no control over these delays, and it's extremely unlikely that anything we could have negotiated would have made the outcome any different.

This isn't to say that the federal government hasn't been blameless over the course of the pandemic, because they have had their own shortfalls, but it's hard to see how anyone else could have done anything differently in this situation.  Part of accountability is holding the right people to account for the things that are their responsibility, which is why these attempts to deflect blame from the premiers for the bloodbaths that happened on their watches, due to their own negligence, is really concerning.  Vaccines were never supposed to be the way out of this pandemic until much, much later in the year, and trying to pin this on Justin Trudeau is disingenuous, and ultimately dangerous.

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