Opinion
Canadians would be much better served by a cooperative, coordinated, and sustained pandemic response
By Joe Jordan February 11, 2021
If the opposition parties support a non-confidence motion in the current government, over maybe a budget or something, and let’s say the chief electoral officer tells Parliament that a federal election cannot be safely held, then, assuming we find one quickly, the governor general will really have only one option: welcome to the party, Prime Minister Erin O’Toole.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, pictured Jan. 26, 2021, holding that day's press conference on the COVID-19 situation outside the Rideau Cottage in Ottawa. At the federal level, we have an opposition that jumps between minimizing the pandemic, and ridiculing prevention measures, to holding the government’s feet to the fire on vaccines and rollout strategies. Provincially, we have a number of premiers that got up Christmas morning and unwrapped a lovely 'incompetent federal vaccine acquisition' narrative that served to completely eclipse the fact that they could not have distributed any more vaccines anyway because, seriously, who could have seen the need for a rollout strategy coming, writes Joe Jordan.
OTTAWA—About 40 years ago, I found myself at the Calgary Stampede and spent a couple of hard-earned, oil-patch dollars at a carnival booth that used a machine to examine handwriting and graph a line against a number of personal attributes. When the machine was graphing my line above “procrastinate” it went so high that it flipped off the edge of the page and the ink-filled needle could not get back on the card to finish the analysis. I was left with an unintended piece of modern art and no idea how I ranked on the last six personality traits.
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