Roundup: Aping the Americans for the sake of chaos

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I frequently chide NDP leader Jagmeet Singh for his propensity to create jurisdictional confusion with the intent of making promises he can’t keep, and trying to make the Liberal government look unwilling to help (when they simply don’t have levers at their disposal), and yet, he keeps it up, again and again, and refuses to be called out on this particular brand of bullshit. And yesterday was case in point, yet again, as he laid out how an NDP government (post-election) would handle the vaccine distribution – using the military, and setting up federal vaccination sites.

As you can expect, this particular pledge is just more bullshit masquerading as a solution to which problems don’t actually exist. Oh, and yet another example of Singh simply lifting what the American Democrats are doing and insisting that it’ll also work for Canada. Never mind that in the US, where they don’t have public health care, the need for military intervention in the problem is more acute, especially as the rollout is a complete gong show in many states. This is not really a problem here, even though certain provincial governments are less than competent – but it’s certainly not the problem that the Americans are facing, so we don’t need their solutions. This having been said, while Singh thinks that federal vaccination sites will speed up delivery, the problem is not human resources, for which provinces have plenty of trained people and access to Red Cross volunteers, but it’s largely logistics. The notion of setting up federal sites in parallel to existing provincial ones, where it’s unlikely that their IT will communicate well (seriously, every province has their own IT systems and health record formats), and they will only create back-end confusion that will simply cause chaos in trying to determine who has been vaccinated with which product, and whether they’ve had both doses, and how to contact people who need second dose appointments if you have two systems that don’t interface well. There is no world in which this ends well. He should know this and ensure that the federal role is to ensure provinces have all the support they need, but no, he needs to keep trying to inflate the federal role (probably so that he can look like the hero).

His particular demands for publicly-owned vaccine and PPE manufacturing is also problematic in a number of ways. We can all see the need for some domestic manufacturing capability of PPE, it would seem to me that public ownership is a solution in search of a problem, particularly given that federal management of emergency stockpiles was not exactly stellar. As for publicly owned vaccine manufacturing, which particular platform would this entail? It’s highly unlikely that a publicly-owned vaccine manufacturer would have invested in mRNA technology while it was still unproven for wide-scale vaccinations, which wouldn’t do us any good in the current environment. I get that they have an ideological bent to public ownership, but articulate the problems you’re trying to solve – something that they refuse to do when called out.

Good reads:

  • The government unveiled their new gun control bill, which attaches criminal penalties to municipal handgun restrictions, but is not a national handgun ban.
  • Dr. Theresa Tam is warning not to let up restrictions with the new variants, but meanwhile in Ontario, they don’t even have criteria for “emergency brake” closures.
  • BC is reporting the first Canadian cases of a fourth COVID variant, B1525.
  • The new border rules will have an exemption for people travelling for essential medical treatments abroad (which…doesn’t make sense. Just compensate them).
  • Pfizer doses are being delayed by winter storms in the US, as the UPS shipping hub in Kentucky, where these vaccines are routed through, is shut down.
  • Chrystia Freeland sent a passive-aggressive open letter to Erin O’Toole to call on them to stop delaying passage of the latest pandemic aid bill.
  • The Commons health committee heard more testimony that affirms that our lack of domestic vaccine manufacturing capability goes back decades.
  • Senator Chantal Petitclerc recounted her own experience with her disabilities as she championed the assisted dying bill in the Senate.
  • Erin O’Toole insists that Canada call for the 2022 Olympics to be moved from Beijing, citing the (probable) genocide of Uyghurs.
  • The Star catches up with the Conservatives’ new workforce development critic.
  • Heather Scoffield wonders if there is a better way for the federal government to spend post-COVID stimulus than infrastructure, as that sector is least affected.
  • Paul Wells walks through the government’s reluctance to engage in new permanent spending until suddenly they weren’t, marking how serious they seem to be.
  • My column takes Joe Clark’s interview with West of Centre over the weekend, and drills down on his comments about how political parties have changed since his day.

Odds and ends:

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