Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s plan to call an election today has been one of the worst-kept secrets in recent history, considering all of the hints of late.
Elections Canada has bought 16 million pencils, so that voters can safely tick their ballot sheets with a personal marker of their own. That should put a dent in COVID-19.
Money is fluttering down on all sides as Ottawa primes the pump.
Thus Victoria will have more funding to spend on infrastructure projects, as the federal government’s contribution of $3.8 million last year has been doubled.
The University of Victoria has received more than $9 million for new research projects.
British Columbia will be given $242 million to reopen schools in the coming months.
There is talk of a national pharmacare strategy, and a national long-term care plan. The idea of a national living wage has been floated, and even a four-day working week.
The traditional practice of buying votes is in top gear.
If this is the wrong approach, what makes more sense?
First off, it must be recognized that this is a critical election. The country has been hammered by the COVID-19 pandemic, and it’s entirely possible we may see a resurgence of the virus this winter.
Politics as usual won’t do.
If we are to get through what may be tough times ahead, hard choices must be made.
Politicians find that challenging. The tendency is to offer a smorgasbord of policies, each designed to appeal to competing interests.
Thus the current federal government is comfortable trying to restart the economy while raising carbon taxes. But these pull in opposite directions.
A crisis, and that is what we face, demands everyone pulling in the same direction, starting at the top.
So how do we get the country back to work? Canada still has fewer jobs than it did before the pandemic.
It can’t be done with barrowloads of government spending. The federal government has already gone massively into debt. There is limited fiscal room down this road.
A partial answer is to slash red tape and regulatory burdens, even at the cost of unwanted side effects.
But the real test is to harden ourselves to the reality that if the virus does make a comeback, we’re going to have to work through it. That will require resolute leadership from whichever government is formed.
It also means we must be prepared in advance. We were caught flat-footed in 2019, even though there had been prior pandemics to learn from.
We had mixed signals from various public health leaders. Messaging, based around daily death tolls, contributed to an air of alarm and despondency.
In B.C., we had the preparatory emptying of 4,000 hospital beds, even though the number required never exceeded 400.
We were late in recognizing the vulnerability of residents in long-term care facilities.
And there was heated debate as to whether, and when, schools should be reopened.
All of these matters must be hammered out in the months ahead, and it must be done at the national level.
We cannot have individual provinces playing Lone Ranger.
The bottom line is this. If COVID-19 returns, we must treat it like any other infectious disease — with due care and attention, but not with economy-wrecking measures.
This is the message we need to hear from our political leaders as an election gears up.
There is only one priority, and that is to return the country to normalcy, whatever may lie before us.
