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Friday May 7, 2021

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Friday May 7, 2021

The Political Blame Game

February 6, 2021

For months now, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has blamed everyone for Canada’s trickle of COVID-19 vaccines but himself.

Trudeau and his ministers have gone so far as to blame former Progressive Conservative prime minister Brian Mulroney — who was prime minister from 1984 to 1993 — for the privatization, or “the selling off“, of Connaught Laboratories. What he fails to mention is that Connaught Labs didn’t go anywhere. It’s now part of Sanofi Pasteur, the world’s largest manufacturer of vaccines. The Connaught Campus in Toronto accounts for one-fifth of the company’s global vaccine sales.

Experts in Canada’s innovative pharmaceutical industry — as opposed to the generic pharmaceutical industry — say Trudeau’s attempt to pin the blame on Mulroney or a more recent Conservative prime minister, Stephen Harper, is ironic, because were it not for Mulroney, the innovative industry likely wouldn’t exist here at all.

March 9, 2016

Paul Lucas, who was president and CEO of GlaxoSmithKline Canada from 1994 to 2012, started speaking out and wrote an opinion piece in the Financial Post after he heard federal Liberal Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs Dominic LeBlanc being interviewed on CTV’s Power Play with Evan Solomon, saying that GlaxoSmithKline had closed its manufacturing facility for vaccines during Harper’s Conservative government, which is false.

“This facility didn’t close, it’s still producing most of the flu vaccine for Canada on an annual basis,” Lucas said during a recent telephone interview.

“I’ve been very concerned and frankly upset about the lies that are coming from the federal government about this whole (COVID vaccine) file,” says Lucas, who was integral to the production and distribution of the Canadian vaccine for the H1N1 pandemic in 2009. All of the vaccine for that outbreak was produced in the GSK factory in Quebec City.

“Trudeau has badly botched Canada’s COVID-19 vaccine procurement,” states Lucas.

“First, he blamed Harper for his own failings. Then he blamed Mulroney and then he blamed the provinces. Then he actually turned on his own vaccine task force. He blamed them for about a day or two. Then he blamed the companies — Pfizer for delaying the delivery of its vaccines in January,” explains Lucas. (Calgary Herald) 

November 19, 2020

Meanwhile, Ontario Minister of Long-term Care Merrilee Fullerton faced a call from the Opposition to resign her cabinet post on Tuesday, in the wake of two reports that reviewed her ministry’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

In recent days, Fullerton has been pressed to explicitly acknowledge whether she feels she shares any responsibility for the more than 3,700 deaths of long-term care residents with COVID-19 in Ontario.

During question period Tuesday, NDP Leader Andrea Horwath asked when Fullerton was made aware that some residents had died of dehydration or basic neglect, which led a tense exchange between the two.

“The premise of your question is bordering on obscene,” Fullerton said. “And the reason why is because all of the ministry, public health, medical officers of health, thousands of people have been working to shore up these homes and they were no match for COVID-19.”

Fullerton said that some long-term care homes became “warzones” within days of the first confirmed cases among residents and staff. 

“What we were doing 24 hours a day was trying to get support to those homes, with an unknown virus that wasn’t fully understood and a shortage of supplies globally,” she added.

May 4, 2021

Fullerton then said the NDP had failed to pressure the previous Liberal government into fixing Ontario’s beleaguered long-term care sector.

“Look at your failure. I was left to pick up the pieces from a devastating 15 years of neglect,” she said. “I will not be spoken to that way by the leader of the opposition that neglected this sector.” 

Auditor General Bonnie Lysyk and the Ontario Long-term Care COVID-19 Commission both released their respective reports last week. While the probes examined different aspects of COVID-19’s impact on the long-term care sector, they reached similar conclusions: the ministry was not prepared for a pandemic, in part due to years of inaction to prevent a crisis. (CBC) 

 

Thursday June 7, 2018

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Thursday June 7, 2018

Ontario’s choices are bad. But one is less bad than the others

To say Ontario’s election has been strange doesn’t capture the half of it. Just four months before the vote, the leading party had to dump its leader in a sexual misconduct scandal. The Liberals are so unpopular they’ve already conceded defeat. The next government will be formed by one of two parties that haven’t won an election since the past century. Ontario could be the first province to send millions of voters to the polls, all holding their noses.

June 3, 1999

The choice is between the Progressive Conservatives and the New Democrats. Both are running on platforms that don’t add up. Neither will be able to keep its promises. Each appeals to specific voter groups with fixed beliefs that pit one part of the province against the other. The question isn’t which is the best of a bad lot? It’s which will do the least damage to the province, hurt fewer people, and have the least harmful impact over the long term?

Of the two, the PCs have the biggest leadership problem. It’s unlikely any premier has ever been less qualified than Doug Ford. He appears to barely understand how government operates, has only the shallowest grasp of major issues, gives every indication of being badly out of his depth and shows no interest in learning. His approach to campaigning is to shout slogans and talk over challengers. He’s a poor debater, a bad speaker and has trouble explaining himself.

October 28, 2014

His “platform” is a collection of odd offerings with no apparent linkage. He’ll cut taxes, return “buck-a-beer,” be kinder to small business and put slots back at the racetrack. Perhaps his oddest promise is a pledge to cut gasoline taxes by 10 cents a litre, which, by past experience, might last a few weeks before the oil companies make up the gap and prices return to previous levels. He promised a costed platform, but didn’t provide it. His pledge to find $6 billion in “efficiencies” without firing anyone is unconvincing at best. If he actually tries to follow through on his promises, the swollen debt will get worse, not better.

October 10, 2007

The NDP’s Andrea Horwath is more experienced, more polished and more coherent. But that may not be an advantage. As her party erased the PC lead, it became clear that beneath her pleasant exterior lies a hard-edged ideologue devoted to left-wing dogma and with a distinct distrust of the private sector. Her daycare plan stresses that “public child-care dollars should go to not-for-profit and public providers,” because public funds “shouldn’t pad the profits of private companies.”

January 23, 2006

Why in heaven not? Free enterprise built Canada into a prosperous place. We trust private companies to produce and supply the food we eat. Is food not as important as daycare? Are farmers to be distrusted? Horwath’s rigid creed sees any attempt to make a living outside government auspices as suspicious. Her plan to control rents would eliminate the one means landlords have of keeping up with cost increases. By adding to the long list of limits that already restrict landlords, the NDP would ensure the slow deterioration of rental stock as landlords decline to spend money on maintenance they are unable to recoup. Availability would dry up as developers refuse to build structures certain to lose money. Those who have apartments would be able to stay indefinitely, provided they don’t mind peeling walls and smelly halls, but new arrivals would be out of luck. Too bad for you, young people. (Continued: National Post) 

 

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Thursday June 3, 1999

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Thursday June 3, 1999

Hold Your Nose if You Must – But Go Vote

Why bother? It has been a campaign of soundbites. Weeks of doubletalk, namecalling, diversion and trivia. Instead of rising above the din of negative rhetoric, the party leaders more often seemed to be competing in a game of How Low Can You Go. Candidates of all stripes, locally and provincially, were scarcely better as they ducked all candidate meetings in favour of shallow photo opportunities. Thanks to bad organization, voters today can expect lineups and delays. We’ve been lied to, and treated like fools. Who can blame frustrated, weary voters for wondering: Why bother?

Of course, the answer is: We have to. It matters. Avoiding the polling station isn’t an option. Much as we feel assaulted and corrupted by opportunistic and cynical politicians, by too many glib pollsters, by media pitchmen and special interests, one unalterable truth remains: Voting is probably the most important thing we’ll do today.

Consider the words of John Kenneth Galbraith: “When people put their ballots in the boxes, they are, by that act, inoculated against the feeling that the government is not theirs. They then accept, in some measure, that its errors are their errors, its aberrations their aberrations, that any revolt will be against themselves. It’s a remarkably shrewd and rather conservative arrangement when one thinks of it.” The act of casting our ballot is the best way we have of taking back the democratic process; of seizing it from the spin doctors and power brokers more attuned to ideology and self-interest than to public service.

“Who will govern the governors?” Thomas Jefferson asked, then answered: “There is only one force in the nation that can be depended upon to keep the government pure and the governors honest, and that is the people themselves. They alone, if well informed, are capable of preventing the corruption of power, and of restoring the nation to its rightful course if it should go astray. They alone are the safest depository of the ultimate powers of government.” By voting today, we invoke a contract with the people we elect. We empower them to represent us fairly and constructively. By not voting, we defer and opt out of our collective responsibility. Some, thoroughly disenchanted and disenfranchised by the political process, will argue not voting is a form of political action unto itself. But it’s not. It is nothing. Declining the ballot, as proposed by an author on today’s Forum page, may be marginally better in that it requires concrete action and expresses, to a point, the “none of the above” philosophy many have adopted. But in our view, declining the ballot still amounts to opting out. The stakes are too high for that.

This is our chance to express ourselves on the record of the incumbents. We can endorse or renounce on any basis we choose. We can base our decision on the relative adequacy of a local MPP, or we can hold our nose and vote for the least objectionable alternative. If nothing else, we can consider our ballot the permit that justifies and validates future complaints and criticism of the party in government.

H.G. Wells describes the election as “Democracy’s ceremonial, its feast, its great function …” Diminished and reduced as this campaign has been, that characterization still holds true. And if all else fails, and you just can’t summon a positive reason for that trek to the polling station, a constructive negative will do. Consider the words of American critic and pundit George Jean Nathan, who years ago wrote: “Bad officials are elected by good citizens who do not vote.” Amen to that. (Source: Hamilton Spectator Editorial)

 

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