Saying Trudeau handled the pandemic well is like saying Kim Jong Un is doing a good job managing North Korea.
I get that we are all trying really hard to forget the COVID era, but the feds management of the pandemic was an unmitigated disaster. With hindsight it’s becoming clearer everyday that just about every policy in that era was shortsighted at best and plain wrong at worst.
CERB? Wanton money printing has caused the worst inflation in decades.
ArriveCAN? A giant waste of money.
Quarantine hotels? Unnecessary detaining of citizens in rancid hotels when they could quarantine at home.
Lockdowns? A wholly disproportionate response to a disease that was dangerous for a very small segment of the population.
School closures? The destruction of an entire generation of kids for whom socializing was a critical stage of their development.
Vaccine mandates? Blatantly ignoring the concept of informed consent and forcing people to take a vaccine that has been proven to be anything but safe nor effective.
I could go on…
If you still think that any of these policies represented a measured, reasonable response to the pandemic, you are brainwashed my friend.
The biggest threat from the Covid virus was never the direct fatalities but the risk of hospitals being overwhelmed from Covid patients needing care. Some number of lockdowns and vaccine mandates were misguided, but without any of them occurring we would have seen dead bodies piling up near hospitals, bodies of people with treatable non-Covid medical emergencies who just could not obtain the care that they needed.
No. I know from first hand accounts (from people who designed / built them) that all the emergency field hospitals that were expeditiously put together ended up not being used or at best were used for a few weeks and then sat empty for months before being dismantled.
While your argument might hold some water in the first few weeks of the pandemic, when we truly didn't know what we were up against, it wasn't long (a few weeks/months at most) before the risk profile of the virus was well known and the policy response could/should have changed.
The problem is we treated it the same for 2 whole years, as if we hadn't learned anything in the meantime.
Plus, the WHO own guidelines for pandemics were inexplicably thrown out the window during covid. Before COVID, the response to a pandemic was never to quarantine healthy subjects, but to aggressively detect infected subjects and quarantine them strictly.
Somehow, 100 years of public health policy was wilfully ignored.
Covid was a novel virus for its high transmission rate, low death rate, and high hospitalization rate. The kinds of public health guidelines that would have been informed by experiences like with SARS were simply not applicable.
I am not sure what to make of your point about emergency field hospitals. At the end of the day the capacity of the system remains limited, and when a contagious virus spreads freely it inevitably spreads *exponentially*. There's no reconciling of exponential infection spread with attempts to keep hospital use within a flat or even linear growth use pattern.
Except that information about the virus wasn't 'well known' after a few months. Information changed & evolved. The Omicron variant which was the most highly transmissible variant surfaced in fall of 2021 - a year & a half after the virus was 1st identified.
This is actually not true . I actually went out if my way to visit hospitals in the Vancouver region many times and they were overstaffed ghost towns . Why ? 1- people stayed away unless desperately needed 2- they cancelled everything. 3 - ( the most important ) .. they added people to the covid hospitalization numbers if they tested positive or said they had it in 30 days prior , meaning they were not there because of covid . So the “ extra “ spaces for covid were alot less since many were going to be there already and were just added to the totals ( this 30 day deal was done for death counts too here in BC) . These inflated numbers were part of the fuel that got the fringe fired up and the gov was so opaque on all of this .
I don’t know which hospitals you went to. My wife is an ER nurse who was on the COVID intubation team at one of the major teaching hospitals, and they were understaffed and run off their feet from mid 2020 onwards. The first couple of months of the pandemic were fairly quiet - the time of the evening pot banging and fire trucks parading past the hospital. When COVID finally started to bite was in the summer and fall of that year.
Yes, lets keep laying all the problems with the COVID response at the feet of the Federal gov't shall we.
Lockdowns: Those were mandated by Provincial governments.
School closures: I wasn't aware that was a Federal responsibility - last I looked was also Provincial decision.
Vaccine mandates: Shared by BOTH Feds & Provinces.
The COVID response was by no means perfect, but hindsight is 20/20 and you seem to forget that this was a new virus & no one knew anything about it for quite some time.
Trudeau, his cabinet, office and even the Carney thing are a manifestation of Canadian culture deferring to managerial and academic authority. That authority more often than not are who is the most educated and credentialed, not those who have created or done the most successfully.
Problem is that those with the top educational credentials comes from a culture and form of training where words mean as much, or even more than actions. There is a reason why the Ivory Tower is a thing.
If Canadian culture deferred more to those who have created and implemented and less to those who have managed or positioned, this country would be a better place. But alas we are a "Powerpoint Culture."
What a culture matters in what it excels at. Germany excels at manufacturing because it values it and those who do it. Japan excels at innovation, systems and continuous improvement because the culture values it. Same with the US and business ventures. Canadians value management and the professions and all that implies, negative or positive. Parents want their kids to become MBA's, accountants and lawyers on Bay St. So don't be surprised when one of the most successful managers runs for leadership of Canada and wins.
Problem of course is that the moment doesn't call for a manager, even if it is Canada's safe space. Trump isn't one to be persuaded by a wicked Powerpoint deck.
It is encouraging that there are Canadians who are thoughtful and give credit where credit is due. Most media formats have only enough time to provide a black or white sound bite, which generally reflects the companies political bias. Social media has it's own unique problems.Keep up the excellent work.
Everyone seems to forget the pre-pandemic years of Trudeau's reign (apart from pot), which were both scandal-filled and incredibly costly. The cupboard was bare by the time the pandemic hit. Even the last of our gold reserves were gone. As for pot, meh. While I don't think pot smokers should be jailed, I enjoyed not having to smell secondhand smoke (pot and cigarette) every time I went outdoors in the city. We ostracized cigarette smokers for decades, but with the legalization of pot, we essentially made it okay to smoke anything around anyone, so it's not a win for me. I liked the turn-a-blind-eye-to-it attitude of before, when there was still some stigma attached to it.
If Carney does pull this off and stay PM after an election ( and I am betting he will ), I am dreading the online pollution from the “ election was rigged “ crowd . I’m a guy who is gong to vote for Poilievre , but good lord I dislike that part:(
If there is any issue where the Liberals failed more with communications than with the actual policy itself, it would definitely be carbon taxes. The Liberals scolded critics of the tax without explaining the details and mechanisms by which the taxes work, and delegated that explanatory work to a small handful of economists on Twitter/X. They squandered what would actually be a winnable debate, considering that the famous conservative economist Milton Friedman endorsed emissions pricing.
Personally I don’t see how a consumer carbon tax is sellable at all. We are a cold country that’s huge. The point of carbon tax is to price gas out of reach so consumers have to find alternatives. There aren’t any that are cheap or reliable in Canada so it impoverishes us. How can you possibly sell something that makes life more difficult?
Have I fundamentally misunderstood something? Asking honestly.
The carbon tax has systemic potential impacts upon consumer behaviour beyond use of fuel type. If there are two near-identical wrenches that you are considering buying, but one has been shipped from a greater distance and incurred greater CO2 tax costs than the other, then the tax will likely nudge you into buying the less CO2-intensive wrench. The tax will then have unconscious impacts on your behaviour, simply by virtue of you continuing to factor price signals in your everyday consumer life.
(This is the kind of nuance that Liberals never explained to the public!)
Economic inefficiencies resulting in unnecessary emissions are anywhere and everywhere. When humans feel the pinch, they necessarily innovate. Whether the changes happen in the means or amount of driving, the means or amount of heating, or elsewhere, systematic changes can and will increasingly happen at the margins.
Whether or not you or most Canadians waste any fuel in driving or heating, some number of other citizens absolutely will do so, and the tax will give them incentive to change behaviour,
Most of the Liberal failures were in spite of the communications. The Liberals invested huge amounts of money and human resources to communications strategy, often waiting months and months for the perfect time to make an announcement.
Politicians popularity can change over time but they don't all get better. Sir John A. Macdonald is far less popular now than he was 20-40-60 years ago.
I think you got to the fundamental flaw of Trudeau's time in office towards the end of the podcast: he was a progressive avatar, pushing progressive policies and goals. However, the progressives were simply wrong about many of those things. Trudeau put them to the test, they failed, and Canada has suffered. Trudeau's embrace of a "woke" tone was alienating, but the bigger problem was making a mess of public finances through overspending, criminal justice approaches that led to public disorder, and utterly failing to engage with national security issues. He simply seemed to lack some of the fundamental knowledge needed to see the flaws in those approaches and temper them.
Very pleased to see Carney take immediate action on the carbon tax. The Liberals studied it to death, presumably waiting for direction from an “outside expert”. Rightly or wrongly the issue is dead so Canadian politicians can finally pay attention to other issues that affect us all like food costs, housing non-availability, our totally screwed up immigration system, aboriginal rights and a host of other societal challenges ignored by Trudeau and his minions. A fast decision on diversifying fighter jets would be a good start, “Yay GRIPENS”.
It's not dead. It's been temporarily lowered to zero, presumably until after the election. Also, only the consumer-facing portion has been lowered. There is the industrial portion still, which the consumers will pay without it being tacitly acknowledged.
« Le Québec, un pays ! Le Québec, un pays ! ». "Parti québécois (PQ), Catherine Gentilcore, récoltait plus de la moitié des voix." In Montreal, a federalist stronghold.
In case you missed it. The PQ is having a resurgence and have already stated they will hold a referendum. The unilingual Carney will undoubtedly impress. 2026 is going to be more entertaining than 2025.
If the PQ hold a referendum, they will inevitably be disappointed with the outcome, because support for separatism in Quebec right now is in another trough: https://338canada.com/quebec/polls-indy.htm
Montréal Island might be a federalist stronghold, but Montréal's North Shore isn’t, and the PQ has won every single election in Terrebonne for the past 50 years (except for a brief stint in 2007 and when Fitzgibbon was Minister in Legault’s Cabinet), so there isn’t much to take away from the by-election results.
Saying Trudeau handled the pandemic well is like saying Kim Jong Un is doing a good job managing North Korea.
I get that we are all trying really hard to forget the COVID era, but the feds management of the pandemic was an unmitigated disaster. With hindsight it’s becoming clearer everyday that just about every policy in that era was shortsighted at best and plain wrong at worst.
CERB? Wanton money printing has caused the worst inflation in decades.
ArriveCAN? A giant waste of money.
Quarantine hotels? Unnecessary detaining of citizens in rancid hotels when they could quarantine at home.
Lockdowns? A wholly disproportionate response to a disease that was dangerous for a very small segment of the population.
School closures? The destruction of an entire generation of kids for whom socializing was a critical stage of their development.
Vaccine mandates? Blatantly ignoring the concept of informed consent and forcing people to take a vaccine that has been proven to be anything but safe nor effective.
I could go on…
If you still think that any of these policies represented a measured, reasonable response to the pandemic, you are brainwashed my friend.
The biggest threat from the Covid virus was never the direct fatalities but the risk of hospitals being overwhelmed from Covid patients needing care. Some number of lockdowns and vaccine mandates were misguided, but without any of them occurring we would have seen dead bodies piling up near hospitals, bodies of people with treatable non-Covid medical emergencies who just could not obtain the care that they needed.
No. I know from first hand accounts (from people who designed / built them) that all the emergency field hospitals that were expeditiously put together ended up not being used or at best were used for a few weeks and then sat empty for months before being dismantled.
While your argument might hold some water in the first few weeks of the pandemic, when we truly didn't know what we were up against, it wasn't long (a few weeks/months at most) before the risk profile of the virus was well known and the policy response could/should have changed.
The problem is we treated it the same for 2 whole years, as if we hadn't learned anything in the meantime.
Plus, the WHO own guidelines for pandemics were inexplicably thrown out the window during covid. Before COVID, the response to a pandemic was never to quarantine healthy subjects, but to aggressively detect infected subjects and quarantine them strictly.
Somehow, 100 years of public health policy was wilfully ignored.
For what?
Covid was a novel virus for its high transmission rate, low death rate, and high hospitalization rate. The kinds of public health guidelines that would have been informed by experiences like with SARS were simply not applicable.
I am not sure what to make of your point about emergency field hospitals. At the end of the day the capacity of the system remains limited, and when a contagious virus spreads freely it inevitably spreads *exponentially*. There's no reconciling of exponential infection spread with attempts to keep hospital use within a flat or even linear growth use pattern.
Except that information about the virus wasn't 'well known' after a few months. Information changed & evolved. The Omicron variant which was the most highly transmissible variant surfaced in fall of 2021 - a year & a half after the virus was 1st identified.
This is actually not true . I actually went out if my way to visit hospitals in the Vancouver region many times and they were overstaffed ghost towns . Why ? 1- people stayed away unless desperately needed 2- they cancelled everything. 3 - ( the most important ) .. they added people to the covid hospitalization numbers if they tested positive or said they had it in 30 days prior , meaning they were not there because of covid . So the “ extra “ spaces for covid were alot less since many were going to be there already and were just added to the totals ( this 30 day deal was done for death counts too here in BC) . These inflated numbers were part of the fuel that got the fringe fired up and the gov was so opaque on all of this .
I don’t know which hospitals you went to. My wife is an ER nurse who was on the COVID intubation team at one of the major teaching hospitals, and they were understaffed and run off their feet from mid 2020 onwards. The first couple of months of the pandemic were fairly quiet - the time of the evening pot banging and fire trucks parading past the hospital. When COVID finally started to bite was in the summer and fall of that year.
Yes, lets keep laying all the problems with the COVID response at the feet of the Federal gov't shall we.
Lockdowns: Those were mandated by Provincial governments.
School closures: I wasn't aware that was a Federal responsibility - last I looked was also Provincial decision.
Vaccine mandates: Shared by BOTH Feds & Provinces.
The COVID response was by no means perfect, but hindsight is 20/20 and you seem to forget that this was a new virus & no one knew anything about it for quite some time.
I did take a shortcut in not separating provincial and federal responsibilities in my initial post, but that doesn't detract from my initial point.
It was handled horribly at all levels.
Trudeau, his cabinet, office and even the Carney thing are a manifestation of Canadian culture deferring to managerial and academic authority. That authority more often than not are who is the most educated and credentialed, not those who have created or done the most successfully.
Problem is that those with the top educational credentials comes from a culture and form of training where words mean as much, or even more than actions. There is a reason why the Ivory Tower is a thing.
If Canadian culture deferred more to those who have created and implemented and less to those who have managed or positioned, this country would be a better place. But alas we are a "Powerpoint Culture."
What a culture matters in what it excels at. Germany excels at manufacturing because it values it and those who do it. Japan excels at innovation, systems and continuous improvement because the culture values it. Same with the US and business ventures. Canadians value management and the professions and all that implies, negative or positive. Parents want their kids to become MBA's, accountants and lawyers on Bay St. So don't be surprised when one of the most successful managers runs for leadership of Canada and wins.
Problem of course is that the moment doesn't call for a manager, even if it is Canada's safe space. Trump isn't one to be persuaded by a wicked Powerpoint deck.
It is encouraging that there are Canadians who are thoughtful and give credit where credit is due. Most media formats have only enough time to provide a black or white sound bite, which generally reflects the companies political bias. Social media has it's own unique problems.Keep up the excellent work.
Great discussions. Appreciate the break from Trump.
Everyone seems to forget the pre-pandemic years of Trudeau's reign (apart from pot), which were both scandal-filled and incredibly costly. The cupboard was bare by the time the pandemic hit. Even the last of our gold reserves were gone. As for pot, meh. While I don't think pot smokers should be jailed, I enjoyed not having to smell secondhand smoke (pot and cigarette) every time I went outdoors in the city. We ostracized cigarette smokers for decades, but with the legalization of pot, we essentially made it okay to smoke anything around anyone, so it's not a win for me. I liked the turn-a-blind-eye-to-it attitude of before, when there was still some stigma attached to it.
If Carney does pull this off and stay PM after an election ( and I am betting he will ), I am dreading the online pollution from the “ election was rigged “ crowd . I’m a guy who is gong to vote for Poilievre , but good lord I dislike that part:(
As long as Poilievre himself doesn't try saying that it'll be fine. They'll be an annoying fringe.
What do the undecided numbers look like on the aggregate for the polls?
If there is any issue where the Liberals failed more with communications than with the actual policy itself, it would definitely be carbon taxes. The Liberals scolded critics of the tax without explaining the details and mechanisms by which the taxes work, and delegated that explanatory work to a small handful of economists on Twitter/X. They squandered what would actually be a winnable debate, considering that the famous conservative economist Milton Friedman endorsed emissions pricing.
Personally I don’t see how a consumer carbon tax is sellable at all. We are a cold country that’s huge. The point of carbon tax is to price gas out of reach so consumers have to find alternatives. There aren’t any that are cheap or reliable in Canada so it impoverishes us. How can you possibly sell something that makes life more difficult?
Have I fundamentally misunderstood something? Asking honestly.
The carbon tax has systemic potential impacts upon consumer behaviour beyond use of fuel type. If there are two near-identical wrenches that you are considering buying, but one has been shipped from a greater distance and incurred greater CO2 tax costs than the other, then the tax will likely nudge you into buying the less CO2-intensive wrench. The tax will then have unconscious impacts on your behaviour, simply by virtue of you continuing to factor price signals in your everyday consumer life.
(This is the kind of nuance that Liberals never explained to the public!)
Compared to the cost of driving and heating your home it can’t possibly make a huge difference in total emissions
Economic inefficiencies resulting in unnecessary emissions are anywhere and everywhere. When humans feel the pinch, they necessarily innovate. Whether the changes happen in the means or amount of driving, the means or amount of heating, or elsewhere, systematic changes can and will increasingly happen at the margins.
Whether or not you or most Canadians waste any fuel in driving or heating, some number of other citizens absolutely will do so, and the tax will give them incentive to change behaviour,
Most of the Liberal failures were in spite of the communications. The Liberals invested huge amounts of money and human resources to communications strategy, often waiting months and months for the perfect time to make an announcement.
Politicians popularity can change over time but they don't all get better. Sir John A. Macdonald is far less popular now than he was 20-40-60 years ago.
I think you got to the fundamental flaw of Trudeau's time in office towards the end of the podcast: he was a progressive avatar, pushing progressive policies and goals. However, the progressives were simply wrong about many of those things. Trudeau put them to the test, they failed, and Canada has suffered. Trudeau's embrace of a "woke" tone was alienating, but the bigger problem was making a mess of public finances through overspending, criminal justice approaches that led to public disorder, and utterly failing to engage with national security issues. He simply seemed to lack some of the fundamental knowledge needed to see the flaws in those approaches and temper them.
Very pleased to see Carney take immediate action on the carbon tax. The Liberals studied it to death, presumably waiting for direction from an “outside expert”. Rightly or wrongly the issue is dead so Canadian politicians can finally pay attention to other issues that affect us all like food costs, housing non-availability, our totally screwed up immigration system, aboriginal rights and a host of other societal challenges ignored by Trudeau and his minions. A fast decision on diversifying fighter jets would be a good start, “Yay GRIPENS”.
It's not dead. It's been temporarily lowered to zero, presumably until after the election. Also, only the consumer-facing portion has been lowered. There is the industrial portion still, which the consumers will pay without it being tacitly acknowledged.
« Le Québec, un pays ! Le Québec, un pays ! ». "Parti québécois (PQ), Catherine Gentilcore, récoltait plus de la moitié des voix." In Montreal, a federalist stronghold.
In case you missed it. The PQ is having a resurgence and have already stated they will hold a referendum. The unilingual Carney will undoubtedly impress. 2026 is going to be more entertaining than 2025.
If the PQ hold a referendum, they will inevitably be disappointed with the outcome, because support for separatism in Quebec right now is in another trough: https://338canada.com/quebec/polls-indy.htm
Do you think that could change quickly? Would it hinge on the outcome of a federal election (whenever that may be)?
Montréal Island might be a federalist stronghold, but Montréal's North Shore isn’t, and the PQ has won every single election in Terrebonne for the past 50 years (except for a brief stint in 2007 and when Fitzgibbon was Minister in Legault’s Cabinet), so there isn’t much to take away from the by-election results.