Roundup: Setting up the failure narrative

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The Conservatives spent Sunday trying to pre-position the narratives for today’s fiscal update by setting it up to fail, saying it needs a testing and vaccine roll-out plan to be effective – which are both areas of provincial jurisdiction and he knows it. The provinces have been given millions of rapid tests, and it’s up to them to roll them out (which most haven’t been, preferring to sit on them and wait instead) – and no, rapid at-home testing is still pretty much a figment of the imagination because the technology to make them like a pregnancy test still doesn’t exist. Likewise, we are still at a point where there are too many unknown variables with vaccines to make any definitive plans, which again, O’Toole knows but is pretending otherwise. O’Toole also tried to make the case that the government put “all their eggs” in the CanSino vaccine candidate basket, which was never able to leave China for testing, but absolutely nothing bears that out, given the massive investments in other local vaccine candidates, and ensuring that Canada would be positioned for access for other vaccine candidates that we couldn’t produce domestically.

To that end, the chairman of Moderna says that Canada is actually near the front of the line with their vaccine – which doesn’t require the same cold-storage chain that the Pfizer drug does – because we pre-ordered early. Of course, they can only produce so many vaccines so fast, so of course early doses are going to be lower than everyone would like, but they’re getting there (once they get approval). But then comes along Saskatchewan premier Scott Moe, who demands that the federal government get more doses faster – somehow. Apparently, they can wave a magic wand, or send bribes, or something. In reality, this is just Moe’s rather transparent attempt at making the federal government’s efforts look insufficient, so that it can distract from his own poor attempt to control the spread of the virus in his own province (and expect to see more of this from other premiers, particularly conservative ones).

In other pandemic news, the Alberta government has started listed co-morbidities with their death counts, as a rhetorical way of trying to lessen the actual impact of COVID deaths, trying instead to show that the people died of other complications and not COVID itself – which is bullshit, and a way for Jason Kenney to absolve himself of responsibility for his lack of action. And make no mistake, this is classic Kenney behaviour – and there is no small amount of irony that the man who keeps preaching “personal responsibility” in this pandemic is the one who refuses to take any measure of responsibility for his decisions.

Good reads:

  • Travel restrictions from people arriving from places other than the US are being extended until January 21st, with exceptions granted for amateur sport.
  • The federal government and Mi’kmaq in Nova Scotia are contemplating a memorandum of understanding that upholds their treaty rights to fish.
  • Marie-Claude Bibeau announced another tranche of money as compensation for Supply Managed farmers losing market share from trade deals.
  • Here’s a deeper look into what we are asking of the military in their role for vaccine roll-out across the country.
  • Senators are wondering how far they can push the government to ensure that the assisted dying law is actually constitutional (which it is unlikely to be).
  • Pierre Poilievre says that the left is attaching their own hobby-horses onto the pandemic – and then proceeds to attach his hobby-horses from the right to it.
  • Chantal Hébert notes that today’s fiscal update is going to be Chrystia Freeland appearing with a target on her back as Trudeau’s heir-apparent.
  • Heather Scoffield believes that the bigger problem the fiscal update needs to address is coherence between the three levels of government, but good luck there.

Odds and ends:

In my latest Loonie Politics video, I discuss the greatest parliamentary fishing expedition in recent memory, and the slow rollout of documents for it.

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2 thoughts on “Roundup: Setting up the failure narrative”

  2. O’Toole is dog whistling to his red-baiting/yellow-fever conspiracy base that believes Trudeau wanted a Chinese vaccine so he could microchip the populace with Great Reset buttons bought in bulk from Bill Gates. I’m sure Rempel is already frothing on Parler that the Moderna CEO is a “Liberal donor,” while Poilievre will soon be squawking in QP over the next couple weeks, “how much adrenochrome was in that Chinese vaccine made at George Soros’ secret U.N. laboratory? How much? How much? How much? How much? How much?”

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