Canadians have in large measure approved of the response by their federal and provincial governments to COVID-19.
That may be about to change.
A Leger poll of 1,500 Canadians, released last week, said two-thirds of respondents are very or somewhat satisfied with the way federal and provincial governments have handled the pandemic.
There were regional variations – Jason Kenney’s government in Alberta and Brian Pallister’s government in Manitoba saw noticeably lower levels of public approval.
Doug Ford’s Ontario government scored well but may see the esteem in which it is held slip in the wake of an Auditor General’s report on Wednesday that said flaws in communications, decision-making and the management of positive cases contributed to the spread of the virus in the province.
The second wave has been unkind to provincial governments everywhere, obliging them to try to find the right balance between lives and livelihoods.
But it is Justin Trudeau’s federal government that has the potential to fall furthest from grace, if it has miscalculated on the swift distribution of a successful vaccine.
Trudeau has acknowledged that a vaccine will arrive in Canada sometime in the first quarter of 2021 but that other nations may start to inoculate their citizens before then.
He specifically mentioned the U.S., Germany and the U.K., where some of the vaccines are produced. “They are obviously going to prioritize their citizens first,” he said.
But Trudeau has come under fire from people like Amir Attaran, a law and medicine professor at the University of Ottawa, who has pointed out that other countries including Australia, Brazil, Russia, Mexico, Argentina and India struck licensing agreements with vaccine producer AstraZeneca to produce the vaccine in their countries, even before it was proven to work. Manufacture of the first of up to 30 million doses of the Oxford University/AstraZeneca vaccine began in Australia this month, a plan the producer acknowledged was a gamble based on the expectation that clinical trials would be positive.
Attaran said that the National Research Council’s facility in Montreal has the capacity to make the same vaccine, even if it is in limited quantities for emergency distribution. However, the Trudeau government has not negotiated a licensing deal to make any vaccine here.
The government itself suggested at the end of August that the Montreal plant would have the capacity to manufacture 250,000 doses of the vaccine per month by the end of November.
But we’re almost in December and there is no word of any domestically produced vaccine becoming available any time soon.
Trudeau was pummelled on the vaccine question in the House of Commons by all the opposition parties on Wednesday.
Conservative leader Erin O’Toole said that the Center for Disease Control in the U.S. has said that Americans will start receiving vaccine in the next two weeks. “Why did this prime minister sign deals that mean we are months behind the Americans?” he said.
Trudeau said Canada is well-positioned, with a diverse portfolio of vaccines on their way and more doses per capita than any other nation.
There is some truth to this – a Bloomberg ranking of countries suggested that Canada is fifth in the world in terms of COVID vaccine access.
Yet, as Bloc leader Yves-François Blanchet pointed out, the number of doses and speedy access are two different things.
The government has not released any of its contracts with vaccine manufacturers, so we have no idea where Canada is in the order of distribution. O’Toole said 2.5 billion people are ahead of Canadians in the line-up for vaccines, although it’s not clear how he came to that conclusion.
Senior government officials are confident that Canada will secure vaccine in good time. “I don’t think there will be a big lag,” said one person with knowledge of the situation.
It is acknowledged that the U.S. will be first but the question is, how many countries will be ahead of Canada in the line?
“I think we can withstand being behind the Americans and the Germans. But if Mexico beats us….yeah, that’s a problem,” admitted the official.
If Mexico beats us….yeah, that’s a problem
The Trudeau government was advised not to try to rely on its own manufacturing capacity. Those capabilities were sold off or eroded over numerous years and previous governments, which makes it rich for opposition parties to solely blame the Trudeau Liberals for lack of capacity.
Whether the government’s vaccine strategy is sound will become clearer by the time the Auditor General of Canada publishes her own performance audits on the government’s pandemic response next spring.
Ottawa has since invested more than $300 million in bio-manufacturing plants in Montreal, Saskatoon and Vancouver, in order to resurrect domestic vaccine production. There are whispers that Chrystia Freeland’s fiscal update next Monday may earmark $1 billion for vaccine production. Industry minister Navdeep Bains said this week the government has plans to further build up domestic bio-manufacturing capability.
But these are long-term investments that will not help the stressed small business owner, the ailing senior or the exhausted health care worker.
In Greek mythology, Panacea was the goddess of universal remedy. Dissemination of what millions of frustrated Canadians regard quite literally as a panacea is going to condition how they view Ottawa’s pandemic response, regardless of what has gone before. There is unlikely to be much empathy for the government, if inoculations start everywhere but here.
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