Remember, the blame starts at the top

April 2021

As Ontario endures yet another emergency stay-at-home order, now with even tighter restrictions than before, let’s all remember where most of the blame should be laid: right at the feet of Justin Trudeau and his admiration for China’s Communist dictatorship.

Justin Trudeau’s government recklessly threw our vaccine hopes behind a collaboration with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the very same untrustworthy CCP that caused this pandemic to get out of control in the first place, and when that deal fell apart, had to scramble to secure orders from other vaccine companies.

While Trudeau is certainly not the only one to blame, the fact that he colossally failed to secure an adequate and dependable supply of vaccines early in the pandemic is a big problem.

We like to smugly look down our noses at the Americans, but despite any criticisms of former President Donald Trump’s handling of the pandemic (not all are deserved), America has done a much better job overall in managing the pandemic and vaccinating their citizens to such an extent, that some states are relaxing or eliminating their restrictions, such as Texas, Indiana and Mississippi.

By 24 March, current President Joe Biden had achieved a vaccination rate of 41% of the population having received one dose and 27% having been fully vaccinated within the 21 or 28 days specified by the manufacturer. This is in contrast to Canada’s vaccination rate of 29% of the population having received one dose and a mere 2.7% having been fully vaccinated, due to the Liberals permitting four-month delays in giving second doses, contrary to the manufacturer’s instructions.

Biden further set a goal of having enough Americans fully vaccinated by Independence Day, that the country can return to a “more normal” state. This may be a lofty goal, but Biden has a better chance of achieving it than Canada does of having our population fully vaccinated by the end of 2021.

While America’s success is due in large part to their domestic vaccine production abilities, it’s completely false to say that Canada has no vaccine production facilities. Our production capabilities aren’t as strong as the Americans, but what we do have could have had a positive effect by now.

We have vaccine production facilities in Toronto and Ste-Foy, Quebec, owned by private companies Sanofi and GlaxoSmithKline, respectively. Unfortunately these foreign owned companies are controlled by their foreign owners, whose priorities are not always in line with Canada’s priorities. It’s a valid point to criticize the decision to rely on the private sector to produce our vaccines, instead of government-owned producers, a decision made in the 1980s by Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney.

We also have an agreement with American vaccine company, Novavax, to produce its own CCP Virus vaccine at the National Research Council (NRC) facilities on Royalmount Avenue in Montreal. Frustratingly, the upgrades needed at the NRC facility to produce the vaccines, including an entirely new building beside the existing one, mean vaccine production can’t begin before this summer at the earliest.

However, the Liberals were in power from 1993 until 2006, and the current prime minister has been in office since 2015. Trudeau obviously didn’t think that it was a priority to have adequate government-owned domestic vaccine production capabilities either, and neither did Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin prior to Stephen Harper. None of them should be let off the hook just because it’s easier for Leftists to blame Mulroney, and the Leftist’s favourite “villain,” Stephen Harper.

At some point Leftists have to learn that the Liberal government that is currently in power has the ability to correct all the “shortcomings” of the former Conservative government policies that they criticized when in opposition, and that any continuing “shortcomings” are on them. I used to shut-down arguments with my Liberal-supporting mother when she would criticize the things that Ontario Premier Mike Harris did when in power, from 1995-2002, by asking her what the Liberal governments of Dalton McGuinty and Kathleen Wynne did to correct those “problems” during their 15-years in power, from 2003 -2018.

If the roof on your new house leaks because it wasn’t properly maintained by the previous owner, that’s on them and perhaps the building inspector, if you hired one, for not catching it. However, if it’s still leaking 30 years later because you did absolutely nothing about it, that’s on you.

In yet another example of the stunning incompetence of Trudeau and his ministers, when negotiating the contracts for vaccines from international companies, Trudeau failed to negotiate the licencing rights to produce the vaccines in Canada, which could have greatly increased our available vaccine supply. This served to further cripple our vaccine acquisition efforts.

Regardless of where we do get our vaccines, it’s a stark reality that if we had fully vaccinated a larger section of the population than the pathetic numbers we have achieved to date, we would be in a better state, and likely not dealing with the vicious variants we are currently seeing in our communities. America vaccinates more citizens in a day than we have since vaccinations began in Canada.

It’s great that we’ve able to secure the number of vaccines that we have to date, which no doubt came from the hard work of government and health officials, but we are still severely short on the numbers we need.

I’m tired of hearing Trudeau and his ministers yammer on about how we have “secured” access to more vaccines than any other country, because there is a big difference between vaccines that we are promised we will get, and one that are actually going into arms of people. We were recently told that a shipment of 1.2 million doses of the Moderna vaccine that we were expecting next week, will now be delivered possibly as late as the first week of May. Further adding insult to that injury, the shipment will be cut back to just 650,000 shots.

Additional the Moderna’s vaccines that were expected by the end of June will be one to two million shots short of that deadline, pushing delivery of those doses into the July-through-September period.

While a new agreement with Pfizer will see millions more doses sent to Canada than originally planned, covering much of the Moderna shortfall, they aren’t arrive in Canada until May, June and beyond, as long as Pfizer is able to fulfil that commitment (see above comment about vaccines going in to arms).

Failure on the vaccine issue isn’t the only Trudeau screw-up, owing to his love of China’s Communist dictators.

Does anyone remember how we were told back in January 2020 that was racist to close the borders; that we were told that it was especially racist to screen and quarantine those returning to Canada from China, even when it was Chinese-Canadians, who likely got their information from family members in China, that were telling us to do this? We completely failed to adequately screen those whom we were letting into the country from anywhere until it was too late.

We were foolish to not actually close the borders to all except citizens, permanent residents and essential cargo. Public health officials lectured us that viruses don’t obey borders, that is until Trudeau actually did close our border, something that he is now insistent should remain in place for the foreseeable future.

We were told that it was racist to claim that the CCP may have nefarious intentions for withholding information that a deadly virus had escaped from the Wuhan region of China, even when it was Chinese-Canadians telling us this information.

Federal Health Minister Patty Hajdu chastised a reporter back in January 2020 that they were “…feeding into the conspiracy theories…” when asked about Associated Press articles citing Chinese government documents indicating that Beijing knew about the pandemic on 14 January, but withheld the information from the World Health Organization (WHO) until 20 January.

Then it turned out, that was exactly what the CCP had done!

We were foolish not to believe that the CCP may have lied to the WHO, and then equally foolish to unquestionably follow the WHO’s recommendations, along with failing to follow the warnings and examples of the Taiwanese government, who took quick and aggressive action to contain the outbreak in their country by closing their borders to non-citizens, and enacting mandatory rapid testing for all that were allowed entry.

According to the Taiwan Centers for Disease Controls, as of 16 April, Taiwan has had 1070 confirmed cases, and a grand total of ELEVEN deaths, from the CCP Virus, out of a population of 23.83 million.

Remember when we were told as late as the end of March by Dr. Theresa Tam and Patty Hadju that masks weren’t necessary, and that they may actually increase the risk of infection? That is, until we were told we had to wear masks by early April.

We were told that masks were unnecessary for those not exhibiting any CCP Virus symptoms, “…and that non-medical masks, or poorly-fitted medical masks, won’t filter out the small airborne particles carrying the virus,” and that, “…masks could give people a false sense of security, leading them to let important hygiene measures slide.”

Now I can understand if Tam and Hadju were concerned that the few masks that we hadn’t already given to Communist China were in short supply, and they feared front-line health-care workers would have to go without, something that forced the workers to wear their masks for longer periods than was medically safe. However, if that was the reason, Tam and Hadju should have said that. That’s besides the fact that the supply masks are something that could have been easily controlled, with sale of them temporarily restricted to those in health-care professions.

We were told that the CCP Virus was not transferable to humans and it could be easily controlled, which was completely false. If they didn’t know they were telling a falsehood, then they shouldn’t have made a claim to something they didn’t know for sure; if they did know they were lying, that’s unforgivable, even if their excuse was they didn’t want to cause a panic.

The Trudeau screw-ups continue

The Trudeau government was reckless to allow our National Emergency Strategic Stockpile to dwindle to minimal levels (you had one job Public Health Agency of Canada!), compounding the problem by shipping 16 tonnes of PPE to China back in early February 2020, just weeks before it was badly needed in Canada.

We haven’t utilized rapid tests as much as we should have, and governments across the country dropped the ball on contact tracing to the point that they lost all control, making it almost impossible to play catch-up.

Most egregiously, all levels of government were foolish in failing to learn the lessons from SARS in 2003 (like Taiwan did), H1N1 in 2009, and even the MERS epidemic in 2012.

Bottom line, people are beyond frustrated and disillusioned. We were told in March 2020, a YEAR ago, to self-isolate in our homes and lock everything down for a two weeks to flatten the curve, and thus not overload our hospitals, which happened. The numbers of those infected at that time, and even deaths, was much lower than even the most conservative of estimates by our health care experts, which don’t get me wrong, is a good thing.

Having an adequate and reliable vaccine supply, along with actual border closures, would have made a big difference by now.

People are getting tired of isolating from their social circles and activities, and seeing their businesses and bank accounts dwindle to nothing. How many have died from suicide or stress-related ailments because of financial ruin or mental-health issues exacerbated by the pandemic? How many have died from delayed or cancelled medical treatments?

The mixed messages we’ve been getting from our governments and health agency officials throughout this pandemic have been particularly infuriating, with questionable claims that they are following science-based evidence.

Despite any screw-ups at the lower government levels, just remember our problems started with Justin Trudeau.

Sources: Governments blew their chance to contain the CCP Virus – Canadian Military History (militarybruce.com), The roots of Canada’s COVID-19 vaccine shortage go back decades (theconversation.com), The public lab that could have helped fight COVID-19 pandemic | The Star, Ontario tightens restrictions, gives police new powers amid dire COVID predictions (msn.com), Biden says US will meet his promise of 100 million COVID vaccine doses ahead of schedule – ABC News (go.com), Covid pandemic: Biden eyes 4 July as ‘Independence Day’ from virus – BBC News, Moderna slashing vaccine deliveries to Canada, but Pfizer steps up with 8 million more doses | CBC News, Vaccines will be produced in Montreal, reviving a Canadian sector dormant for decades | CTV News, Novavax vaccine to be made at unfinished Montreal plants later this year – iPolitics, Ford’s Pandemic Performance Has Kyboshed Another Majority Government (theepochtimes.com), Diane Francis: Pandemic failure is Trudeau’s biggest scandal yet | Financial Post.