You may have noticed that Conservative Leader Erin O'Toole is trying to build a narrative that the federal government is to blame for the third wave and the renewed round of "lockdowns" across the country (as though they were actually lockdowns, when they are anything but). According to O'Toole, who tweets this about six times a day, and whose MPs have made this the focus of Question Period, it was the federal Liberals' slow vaccine rollout that has led to this state of affairs, which is a curious bit of blame-shifting considering that the federal government has no say over local public health orders, which are key to preventing spread of COVID, and their "slow" rollout is actually much faster than they had originally anticipated. Indeed, 9.5 million vaccines were delivered by the end of March when the original plan had been for six million.
"The government was late at the border, late on security rapid tests, late on vaccines, and that's why we're having a more severe third wave," O'Toole tweeted as a text image, under the tag "The Government's slow vaccine rollout = more lockdowns." (Never mind that provinces were given millions of rapid tests, which have mostly gathered dust). In response to a CNN story about Canada's vaccine shortage, O'Toole remarked "We are a G7 nation and we are becoming an international embarrassment. This Liberal government's pandemic response has been slow and incompetent." He's been shilling about his promise to hold a public inquiry into the pandemic response which the Liberals have also said they would be open to once the pandemic is over but he has frequently made a list of charges that are fictional, or outright conspiracy theories.
There are a few things to lay out at the start, however, which is that provinces west of New Brunswick were never going to be able to vaccine their way out of their second, let alone their third waves. That was a mathematical impossibility, especially given the exponential growth at which COVID travels even more so with the more transmissible variants that are now running rampant through communities. Even if we had somehow managed to magically procure a supply of vaccines sufficient to fully vaccinate the country immediately something no country has been able to do, even those countries that have domestic production capacity it's simply not possible to outrace the virus with vaccines. There was always going to be a need to carry on with strong public health measures to limit the spread of the virus, and we've seen in plenty of other countries that started off with a faster vaccination rate than Canada's (though we have since outpaced most of them) that they had to go into renewed rounds of lockdowns (some of them actual lockdowns as opposed to the mockdowns we are seeing in much of Canada) because you simply cannot outpace exponential growth of this pandemic.
O'Toole, however, is not content to live within a reality-based world so long as he is able to score points. Disinformation has become the tool of choice for Conservatives under both O'Toole and his predecessor, Andrew Scheer, and bald-faced lying is now an everyday occurrence. O'Toole's strategy of blanketing the message that it was the "slow rollout of vaccines" that has caused the renewed "lockdowns" is quite simply a lie.
What did cause these "lockdowns" were that premiers west of New Brunswick decided to start relaxing restrictions before the second wave had run its course, and while there was still community spread, and with the Rt rate of the virus still well above the 0.7 rate that it needed to be before measures could be relaxed. Premiers were warned, publicly, by their own public health officials, that they were walking into a disaster if they opened up when they did, but they didn't listen. Because they continue to operate under the false assumption that they can let "a little bit of COVID" circulate in the community and "balance" public health with the economy, they let the third wave happen. Worse, the murderclowns in charge of Ontario refused to take any measures to stop the third wave once it was clear case counts were rising, because they wanted to wait until numbers from the modelling projections showed up in hospitals, by which point it was too late. We are in uncontrollable spread that is outstripping the second wave at its peak, with ICUs at capacity, and field hospitals now in place (thanks to the federal government). And to top it off, Jason Kenney is watching what is going on in Ontario, watching his own case counts rising, and is still looking to do the same thing Ford did.
So just why is O'Toole spinning this particular lie? Partially it's to provide cover for his ideological fellows that are running Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta, all of whom are keen to blame the federal government for their failures rather than looking at their own inaction and what it caused. Part of it is to raise false hopes among voters so that he can exacerbate the sense of disillusionment with the federal Liberals, despite knowing that there is no universe in which another government could have done better in procuring vaccines and getting them distributed faster. And of course, he's trying to drag Justin Trudeau's poll numbers down because his own have remained abysmal since he became leader, and he wasn't even afforded a courtesy "new leader" bump.
The problem, of course, is that breeding disinformation like this will have consequences. There is no vaccine fairy supplies cannot be procured by magic, nor can they be distributed around the country by teleportation. Raising false expectations only fuels those whose "pandemic fatigue" is helping to spread the virus, and it undermines trust in any government which may be what he is hoping for, given his party's dislike of "big government" (unless they are in charge). This is corrosive to our democracy, and all for the sake of some cheap point scoring. But I'm sure that Ford, Kenney, and the like, appreciate the cover he is giving them, so that they can evade accountability. It's no way to run a country.
