Canadian Politics: Nov 25 2020

I really wish our political institutions had measures in place which stopped politicians from being glorified peddlers of BS.

The opposition this week grilled the PM over why Canadians need to wait longer than the US and UK for vaccines. The answer of course is that we can't manufacture those in Canada.

If this was a problem which the PM could legislate out of existence, the opposition's stance and questions might be justified. It would also help if the opposition itself had, say, ran on a platform which might have had some chance in hell of rectifying the problem.

However, neither are the case.

Firstly, these labs producing vaccines are not just expensive. They also take time to build and then require skilled staff to operate. And then of course, they would actually need to be the lab which discovered a vaccine or have some sort of agreement in place allowing them to produce it. 

Technically speaking, the government could build, own and operate such a lab. But, that is unlikely, and not a fair comparison. The companies developing the Vaccines (aside from Sputnik V I suppose) are not state sponsored labs. 

In short, it isn't technically true to say that Canada has ZERO vaccine production capability. Rather, we don't have any production capabilities for the particular vaccines which are closest to getting approval.

So, right off the bat, you have a MAJOR existential problem here. Nothing ANY government could have done in a reactionary capacity would have rectified this situation. Period.

Furthermore, even proactive measures would have been largely a game luck. If you could court manufacturers to build labs in your country or had built out government run labs prior there would still be no reasonable guarantee that those labs would have been among the first to have a vaccine ready.

And even worse, the Conservative Party was campaigning on a platform of fiscal restraint, with the only real plans being around propping up Canada's natural resources (basically, oil and gas and maybe forestry). In other words, they would be in the exact same position ... or worse. And I speculate that worse is the more likely of the two as we've seen what two Conservative Premieres running on fiscal restraint did to their Provinces in Alberta and Ontario. Both made cuts to health care.

And, it is worth noting that Alberta's UPC party's platform most closely matched the campaign Scheer ran. They cut health care more than anyone else. And they have likewise been the most resistant to even modest restrictions which have lead to them now being the worst affected Province in Canada by COVID-19. 

So, if you can't actually suggest ways of doing a better job and the things you're complaining about can't actually be fixed... why are you wasting tax payer money complaining about it?