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 R_t 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.

There has been a renewed push for the federal government to implement a Basic Income scheme over the past several months, advocates buoyed by what they see as the "success" of the rollout of CERB to deal with the pandemic.  There has been a failed motion in the House of Commons on the subject, while a Liberal private member's bill is also on the Order Paper, and delegates at both the Liberal and NDP policy conventions this weekend will be debating resolutions around it.  Adding to that, my inbox has been spammed by all manner of social justice organizations calling on both parties to adopt these policies as a means of advancing the cause.  A group of senators has been agitating for the cause, brandishing dubious reports by the Parliamentary Budget Officer as "proof" of its necessity.  But are we really going to have a proper discussion about just what a Basic Income entails?

There have been a number of provincial studies on the topic in recent years, the two most comprehensive ones being from Quebec in 2017, and in BC just this last year.  Quebec's study essentially concluded that it was not clear it was affordable to implement effective Basic Income, while the BC basic income report  which was exhaustive concluded that a Basic Income is not the best way to go about a transfer system to help people, because "the needs of people in this society are too diverse to be effectively answered simply with a cheque from government."  They instead recommended, among other things, better basic services to low-income households, more targeted supports for particular high-needs groups, and targeted basic incomes for those with disabilities.

The notion that CERB was some kind of test run for a basic income is completely flawed, but that hasn't stopped proponents.  CERB was not universal, and conditional upon $5000 income in the current or previous year; it was not permanent; and it faced the problems associated with using the tax system to help people.  Those problems include the fact that some 14 percent of people are not currently in the tax system (10 percent of whom are known to the system but do not file, and a further four percent who are simply unknown to the system), and it's not very reactive because the information gets stale very quickly, generally waiting for people to file in April before benefits can flow.  (The federal government's promises for automatic filing will help combat some of these problems, once they get implemented).  Basic Income proponents who point to CERB are simply not being honest about the comparison.

Another major problem with the way the basic income conversation has been carrying on is that welfare and most social supports fall under provincial jurisdiction.  There seems to be a notion that somehow a federal Basic Income program could be a cute end-run around areas of jurisdiction, but that's not how federalism works, and what happens instead is that the interaction between federal and provincial programs gets really complicated really quickly.  If you thought that negotiations around health transfers, national pharmacare or child care were complex and fraught with difficulty with provinces, they would have nothing on the absolute nightmare of complexity of what Basic Income would be and how to integrate it with existing systems especially because there would need to start with a common agreement on what is meant by Basic Income.

There are a number of terms that are being thrown around Basic Income, Universal Basic Income, Guaranteed Liveable Income, National Guaranteed Basic Income and they can mean a multitude of different things.  Part of the problem is that there is a notion that this, by whatever label you apply to it, is a kind of magical solution to poverty in this country.  It is often billed as a less complex system than the current bureaucratic morass of social programs, but as the BC report pointed out, it's often far more complex.  There are additional problems if you simply propose to use a Basic Income system to replace current needs-based systems, because while a disability top-up may help people with few needs, it really disadvantages people with greater needs particularly those with disabilities.  Disability supports are some of the most complex parts of our existing system, so the promises for simplicity are largely overblown.

Not helping matters was another dubious report from the PBO that claimed that for $85 billion, a Basic Income Programme could halve the poverty rate in the country.  His methodology is deeply flawed, basing it on the Ontario pilot project that was self-selected and therefore useless as a proper study, and it was predicated on eliminating most existing supports, replacing them with an annual $6000 disability top-up useless for a great many people with disabilities.  It also had particular problems around its tax-back rate that essentially re-create the "welfare walls" that Basic Income proponents are trying to eliminate, and too many proponents including senators have mistakenly read the price-tag as price neutrality, which it is not.  As well, the focus on the poverty rate is less effective than other outcomes that could be sought.

I fully expect a superficial debate on these Basic Income proposals over the weekend at the two conventions, and plenty of brandishing of this PBO report, but I don't expect we'll see nuance, or a commitment to improving current systems it will be Basic Income or nothing.  There are more effective ways to spend the billions of dollars being contemplated, but nothing is going to have an easy answer, particularly in a federation like ours, where there will need to be provincial buy-in, regardless of what is contemplated.  But what should be clear is that the research has been done particularly with the BC report and we don't need any more pilots.  We instead need action to improve existing systems and plugging gaps rather than wasting time and money trying to build something new that won't be the magical solution that proponents hope for.

We are two weeks away from the federal budget, and the one thing we do know about it is that it will heavily focus on child care as part of this government's commitment to inclusive growth and addressing the "she-session" that the pandemic has brought about.  Because the key to combatting the effect that this economic downturn has had on women's participation in the workplace is early learning and child care, the government already started laying the plans for this in the fall economic update, but the urgency of the economic situation is likely to see an acceleration of their plans contingent, of course, on getting the buy-in of the provinces, which is going to be the real trick.

The first thing we need to remember is that early learning and child care is solely an area of provincial jurisdiction, even more so than healthcare.  That makes it difficult for any federal government to have a meaningful impact in the child care space, and why federal governments particularly Liberal ones have been signing bilateral agreements with provinces and territories to work on improving their child care situations.  After the Paul Martin Liberal government signed bilateral agreements with all of the provinces and territories on advancing a national child care program, Stephen Harper's Conservatives came to power and ripped up those agreements, so that their funding would lapse after a single year, and most provinces didn't wind up bothering to create the spaces only to have their funding dry up right away.

Instead of child care, the Conservatives offered a pittance in direct funding to families under the rubric of "choice," as Rona Ambrose and Diane Finley recited that in many families, they would rather have grandma do the babysitting rather than some institutional facility (because that is how they tend to describe provided spaces).  Additionally, their tax credit for new child care spaces was such a resounding success that it was responsible for the creation of approximately zero spaces across the country, so well done there.  And based on that record of "success," Andrew Scheer tried to promise their recreation during the last election, continuing to play up the "choice" narrative.

The problem with trying to posit this as a matter of choice for families is that there is a major supply-side problem in Canada when it comes to child care spaces, most especially high-quality spaces that are licenced by the province.  These are the kinds of spaces that the federal government has been trying to encourage the creation of more of, but this is the difficult part to do the federal government can send money to provinces, but without proper strings attached that are tied to outcomes with the creation of these kinds of spaces, and the positions of educators and child care providers.  Provinces don't like strings attached to federal transfers, and some provinces are particularly uninterested in institutionalized child care because their conservative-leaning premiers have an ideological opposition to it.  They can't keep claiming to offer "choice" to families if there aren't adequate spaces for them to choose to engage, which is why it's not enough to simply offer direct payment to families to access services that don't exist.

In the fall economic update, Chrystia Freeland made a particular point to talk about the need to invest in child care for economic growth, pointing out the success of doing so in Quebec, and as a way of counter-acting the "she-cession" of this economic downturn.  While Budgets 2016 and 2017 had invested $7.5 billion over 11 years for provinces to assist with subsidies for families and for the creation of affordable spaces, particularly for those who need them in non-traditional working hours, it's clear that more is planned because more is needed.

"Budget 2021 will lay out the plan to provide affordable, accessible, inclusive and high-quality child care from coast to coast to coast," the document states.  "This will also include enhanced support for before- and after-school care for older children in order to provide all parents with the flexibility needed to balance work and family."

This is what we should be looking for in their plans.  They got a head start in the fiscal update, putting $4.3 million per year over five years toward the creation of a Federal Secretariat on Early Learning and Child Care, whose aim is to "bring governments, experts and stakeholders together to collaborate in designing and implementing this new child care vision for Canada," on top of an additional funds going toward Indigenous child care systems.

This is where we see a debate in the policy community around what this spending should look like a "big bang" of conditional cash transfers to provinces that would mean grater federal involvement including national standards and expanded provincial programs, much in the model that Quebec has successfully created, or an "aggressive incremental" approach that would see existing tax credits reformed, and that federal dollars be consolidated in to dedicated permanent transfers to increase the supply of licenced child care spaces (as opposed to letting provinces expand unlicensed facilities).  The former has the benefit of creating the quality spaces that are in demand, but will be much harder to get provinces to sign onto, while the latter has the benefit of building on existing systems that can happen more quickly.

Suffice to say, whatever additional funds and proposals are in the budget, we need to remember that the plans will be contingent on the cooperation of provinces, and that no federal government can depend on provinces simply saying yes to "free money," because it's not actually free.  No doubt we will hear that their plans are either too prescriptive, or that they're not good enough and that they should be more aggressive, as though federal "leadership" is the kind of Green Lantern magic that will make everything happen through sheer willpower.  This government has a tough challenge ahead of it to make these quality child care spaces a reality, and I await the carrots and sticks that Freeland will plan to wield.