Canadians would be much better served by a cooperative, coordinated, and sustained pandemic response

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.

Opinion

BY JOE JORDAN

February 11, 2021

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 “procrastina...

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