1. Relying on Europe was naive, but perhaps understandable. Relying on China was just stupid, no other way to put it.
2. O'Toole will no doubt be worse, but I agree, it's just about a much deserved time-out. For years I've seen them as a lesser evil, but the handling of the pandemic has made me realise that we deserve better than 'well, they're not the CPC'.
Going on a major spending spree was all that the government seemed to do during the crisis. I can get behind providing a program for those who lost their jobs and even for businesses that were impacted, but spending 60(?) billion for companies without requiring any kind of proof that they actually were impacted, and asking very nicely 'but please don't lay off people' was enraging. Meanwhile, small businesses are going under every day and/or accumulating 100's thousands of dollars in debt.
Everybody here knows how I feel about Prime Minister Wokeface McCosplay, but I'm not sure what he could have done differently.
The vaccines procurement has not gone well, but personally I think that's as much a Harper, Martin, Chretien, and Mulroney thing as a Trudeau thing. As a nation we've been content to give away our capabilities in almost every field of manufacture. We've been willing to spend some amount of money on shipbuilding and aerospace, and we're recently back in the pipeline business as well, after private industry bailed. In hindsight it's obvious that medical capability is more important to our national security than ships or business jets or even pipelines. I read that in 2017 the UK committed to increasing their domestic vaccine production capacity, and the results are beginning to come online now. It would have been great if we had made the same decision at the same time, but hindsight is 20/20 and I can't criticize Justin for not being psychic.
Probably we as a nation should have taken SARS 2003 as a wakeup call, but we didn't, and there's 4 successive federal governments to blame for that. But now that we're here I think that the large majority of people would want to see a national strategy for domestic vaccine production. Personally I think there's a case for a crown corporation.
As for CEWS... I'm not 100% sure, but I think that's the one my employer used so that we wouldn't have to lay off our production staff while our office was closed when one of our coworkers tested positive. Some of us were able to work from home, but our production team couldn't, and they would have been laid off. That was really helpful for our company and my coworkers. I saw that help people first hand.
When this thing first hit and the government was handing out money left and right, they said that the first priority was to get it done fast so that people wouldn't face hardship. That is the right answer, I think. While I think we were all a bit worried by the sheer amount of dollars involved, I think it was done with the understanding that we would make sure people didn't starve first, and go look for errors and overpayments and fraud later.
And, I think that we're all grossed out that Bell (and others no doubt) exploited that program to line their pockets, but hopefully it's not too late to claw back some of the money that was taken dishonorably.
-k