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It may not be an official 2021 Olympic event, but the race to reach herd immunity is still the most important competition in the world right now. And over the August long weekend, Canada moved into first place among western countries in terms of the percentage of its population that’s fully vaccinated, ahead of ones that were quick out of the blocks like Israel and the United States. Given the difficulties those fast-starters have run into when it comes to convincing people to get vaccinated, we’re unlikely to surrender that lead.
This should be a moment of major national pride, one that should dwarf anything our athletes are able to achieve in Tokyo. After all, it wasn’t that long ago that a litany of pundits and politicians were proclaiming Canada’s vaccine strategy a failure, with some suggesting we’d have to wait years to catch up to our American and British counterparts. Back in February, National Post columnist Tristin Hopper wrote: “The coming months will reveal much of the failures and oversights that allowed this to happen, but...you’re going to be vaccinated much later than if you were an American, Brit or even Serbian.” Hopper wasn’t done there. “When it comes to mass-vaccinating a novel disease,” he wrote, “your country can either get good at making shots or buying shots — and Canada has failed at both.”
He wasn’t alone in counting these chickens before they actually hatched. In a front-page editorial from early February, the Globe and Mail declared that “the country’s early vaccination rollout is collapsing,” while The Economist’s ironically named “intelligence unit” suggested in late January 2021 we’d have to wait until “mid-2022” before a majority of Canadians were double-vaxxed. Conservative health critic Michelle Rempel-Garner was even more pessimistic, suggesting: “It does not matter what portfolio of vaccines we have if Canadians cannot get it until 2030.” For his part, NDP health critic Don Davies was consistently critical of the federal government’s procurement strategy, and suggested in late November that “there’s absolutely no excuse for Canadians to be in this situation and the prime minister has a lot to answer for.”
COVID was always going to be a marathon, not a sprint, and it seems clear with the benefit of hindsight that Canada was well-prepared for the longer race. The result is a reminder of the wisdom inherent in Aesop’s timeless fable of the Tortoise and the Hare and the fact that the race is not always won by the swift. Canada may not have delivered its first doses as quickly as some countries, but it created and implemented a plan to get them into arms that has seen it lap the United States, which is now mired in an increasingly catastrophic fourth wave.
That fable seems particularly relevant in Alberta, where Premier Jason Kenney held up Florida and Texas as exemplars of his province’s hare-like approach to reopening in late May. “All I’ll say is this: Look at Israel, look at Britain, look at Texas, look at Florida, look at all of the United States. Their numbers are plunging while they’ve lifted their restrictions.” And yet, as COVID-19 hospitalizations surge to a new high in Florida and are rising at the fastest rate so far in Texas, he seems determined to plow ahead with his province’s see-no-evil approach — one that may well turn the “best summer ever” into the fall from hell.
Elected officials and the media have a responsibility to criticize the government of the day when it fails, and they weren’t shy about that when it came to the federal government’s early vaccine rollout. But they also have a duty to acknowledge when they’ve overstated their case on that front, and that doesn’t seem to have happened yet. Some have quietly faded into the proverbial bushes, Homer Simpson-style, while others have doubled-down on their initial (and incorrect) criticism. Rempel-Garner, for example, even tried to take credit for the federal government’s vaccine success in a recent mailer to households in her Calgary riding. “Make no mistake, the federal government’s vaccine distribution plan has been slow and lacking. But there is no doubt that without the pressure that was applied by me and my colleagues the response would have been much worse.”
Canadians should probably bear this in mind if they head to the polls soon, as everyone seems to believe is now inevitable. Do they want to reward the government that is winning the global race to vaccinate its population, or do they want to turn power over to the parties that wanted to believe we were destined to fail from the outset? Do they want to elect politicians willing to learn from their mistakes, or are they satisfied supporting those who pretend they never made any in the first place? If nothing else, the next federal election will help us answer those questions.
Comments
Have we really become like the USA where critics can reasonably be called “haters”? Not that I disagree—there are a lot of hateful sounding comments in Canada these days: I attribute these to the legacy of the HarperCon era when globalizing neoliberal usurpers of Tory conservatism adopted the knee-to-groin style of aggressive, hyper-partisan politics promoted by Bush presidency advisor Carl Rove, a de Tocqueville-like tyranny of majorities this neo-right trophied as the “End of History” even though, in the USA, they were democratically thin enough to question their legitimacy and, in Canada’s Westminster system, produced only minorities and a single majority, both unloved, followed and amplified by resentful defeats which, as the bogus tenets of market-fundamentalist economics were discredited, flamed into rhetorical, then actual, violent vengeance under the reactionary Donald tRump’s presiduncy which, in the wake of Greater Anglo-Saxony’s first psephological Covid test, has left large regions of smouldering hatred in the most Anglo-Saxmaniacal nation of all.
In comparison to America’s instinctively wrenching jerks of the knee, the parallel phenomenon in Canada has indeed been tortoise-like: more gradual, less dramatic and, with regard Covid, more successful: true, neo-right caterwauling is similarly compartmentalized geographically but, next to locked-and-loaded Republican “Red States”, landlocked Albetar and Saskashewan look like spot fires more easily contained. Nevertheless, Covid fanned the flames of hatred in both nations, the twin evil spawn of Greater Anglo-Saxony, just not as hotly from those Canadians who would rather be selfishly absorbed into tRumpublican self-absorption so intense that it couldn’t even find Canada on a map—not even if it was labeled “Antivaxxia”, a redoubt one would think attractive to increasingly isolated contrarianism.
Yes, we know all too much about the protracted neo-right complaint and that it was always unhelpful —and, now, it is doubly so with respect Covid. Lately the trouble is that parrying with the neo-right’s hateful rhetoric risks being unhelpful, too: it’s a case of two wrongs not making a right.
It is the design of both Westminster and Congressional parliamentary procedure for the more-popular, governing party to be opposed by the less-popular party which, nonetheless, is supposed to maintain loyalty to the nation by way of constructive criticism of cabinet policy. But it’s also the current predicaments of the political right in both nations that their popular moribundity has retrenched to intransigent chauvinism which, heels firmly dug-in, produces stubborn opposition by rote, not reason, and twists national loyalty to the breaking point. Covid has certainly revealed the weak points where these stresses threaten to rupture governments’ capacity to act in any case, not least upon the crises at hand: social inequity and injustice, and ecological degradation. And of course, Covid.
The neo-right is gaming the system like its existence depended on it—that’s because it probably does. Nothing like losing to inspire religious fervour. From the point of view of neo-right redoubts, by definition in extremis, throwing a wrench into systems it can no longer effectively game or corrupt in order to stop progress on any file until the prayer of self-justified vengeful return is answered (even “rapture” is contingency) seems salutary, even reasonable—instead of what it is: a last resort like spiteful sabotage or storming off in a snit with the bat and the ball so nobody can play anymore. It reminds of the Phantom of the Opera in a jealous rage caning the fingers of his precocious protege: “If you won’t play for me, you shan’t play for anybody!” It is literally pathetic. In the neo-right’s case it indicates terminal sickness.
Thing to remember is that the neo-right is an unnatural, chimerical experiment, a pare gone wrong—one reminding that democracy means mistakes are allowed so long’s they can be democratically remedied (which is why neo-rightists resort, now as blatantly as desperately, to electoral cheating); it does not represent conservatism or Tory-minded citizens who vote for it (I don’t want to single out real conservatives as the only dupes—we’ve all been had to some degree by the past four decades of neoliberal globalization and the dud promise of “trickle-down” prosperity) and it could be—IMHO, should be—safely allowed to die without throwing worthy, real conservative potential to constructively contribute out with the trash. Still, so long’s its increasingly toxic effluents continue to pollute political discourses, social peace and cooperation, the dying gall has to be carefully minded like a rabid skunk cornered, better starved than attacked frontally —or even from behind.
It’s unfortunate that opposition so disloyal and unhelpful has to be ignored by progressive governments: it runs the risk of hubris on such governments’ part—a charge moribund neo-rightists are happy to cultivate, if for unethical reasons. Another serious risk is that progressives rationalize deploying similarly cancerous tactics as the convulsing neo-right. In the extremis of Covid (and we might as well include other crises like climate-change and homelessness too), such parrying might seem appropriate, even “fair” —but only so long’s as it only applies in extremis and not longer. That’s the risk: that hate countering hate will become normalized.
Progressives don’t need to turn the other cheek against neo-right attacks—they’re reliably rote and chauvinistic in gallingly blatant ways. Neither do progressives need to murder the neo-right. To paraphrase Napoleon: it’s murdering itself so just let it. Also wise words when dealing with a cornered, rabid skunk.
We need always remind that rote enmity reintroduced from the 1180s by ascendant neo-rightists in the 1980’s is largely what got us to where we are. Without the reactionary backside of this failed experiment in greed and rapaciousness, we’d be in much better shape to deal with the challenges we all face now. Forget about how they got so bad: to move ahead together, which we must, we have to bury some hatchets here. We could, I suggest, put them in the same hole the neo-right is digging for itself.
I’ve been lately disturbed by progressives attacking progressive governments for their alleged iniquities concerning Covid. That’s sounding a lot like rote opposition to me, not the constructive kind we need to get on with the challenges ahead. I agree with the author here: Canada and most of its eleven sovereign jurisdictions have done a fairly good job of dealing with Covid while keeping our very trade-dependant economy afloat. The disease has unfortunately cost lives, money and dreams, but that’s not reason to condemn governments’ Covid-related policies. Criticism is good when it’s constructive. Nothing is perfect and government should not be blamed that it’s so. Just yesterday I read how a woman whose mother expired in the recent heat wave wants to hold government accountable —while admitting that maybe she should have taken her mother to a motel to weather the wave with AC. It’s easy to blame and hate, especially during times of stress. But, for goodness sake, let’s take a lesson from our southern neighbours (and our Western federate) and avoid the hateful rhetoric that’s become so rote and unhelpful there.
Good luck, everybody, we’re gonna need it. Just remember: it’s better to help than to hate.
Excellent points....and they prove its better to work together in emergencies like global pandemics than revert to small minded football game type partisan politics.
It should also be mentioned that we've beat both the states and Israel in large part because Canadians are less partisan, more amenable to discussion, and much more willing to believe their public health officials...
We've had universal health care now for over 50 years..,and that access leads to trust. However, we do have our conspiracy mad hatters in Alberta...a few of them are at the daily protests with their bull horns and loud speakers, trying to drown out the concerns of health conscious Albertans.
Jason Kenney is playing to a base that has a lot in common with the Republican right wing.......one young proponent of covid denial even sported a helmet with two stickers reading...Support the First Amendment and Support the Second Amendment.
If any of us are still wondering where the hate and the paranoia originate....it seems that some of us actually believe we live there.
Thankfully, inspite of these few, Canadians are rolling up their sleeves and trusting medical science....and to be fair, the Trudeau government has worked hard to make that a reality.