Diane Francis: Justin Trudeau’s disappointing COVID-19 track record

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Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was strangely missing in action on day six of the selfish election he called during a fourth wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Was it the chills? Or a fever? Or did it have to do with internal polls that show Erin O’Toole’s Tories are on the upswing?

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The fact that Trudeau didn’t see this coming is reason enough to turf him out because the election call timing in the first place reveals a serious case of delusion and poor judgment. Did Trudeau actually believe he has delivered good government since 2015? Or that taxation and spending and COVID incompetence and scandals and his hand-picked third-rate cabinet would be lavishly rewarded at the polls by a grateful Canadian public?

Timing of the election call was weird for starters. Anyone with a party card knows that the political boneyard is filled with those who called snap elections without a reason during the summer. On top of that, Canada’s boy prime minister is hoping for a mandate for a majority by forcing people to vote during a lingering pandemic.

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The Liberals clearly deserve to lose power following a vaccine rollout and COVID handout spree that has roiled many. Canadians have also not exactly been sanguine over the planeloads of persons from badly infected countries that the feds allowed to land here as Canadians were locked down waiting nearly a year for doses.

Most puzzling is why seek a mandate from the electorate so quickly after the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) boondoggle — an open-ended and reckless scheme budgeted ended up costing taxpayers a staggering $81.6 billion or equivalent to the GDP of Atlantic Canada’s four provinces in 2020?

CERB was launched on March 25, 2020 to pay jobless workers $2,000-a-month. By October 2020, the total outlay was as much as four times higher. However, ,many were not jobless and many were not “workers”, or at least never had been. When this came to light, the Liberals decided against asking undeserving recipients to pay back and doubled down by granting them amnesty.

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Worse, according to Blacklock’s Reporter, Canada Revenue Agency’s in-house research, involving focus groups, revealed that taxpayers opposed the amnesty so the Liberals flouted the will of the people. “There is general consensus that overpayment of emergency benefits and related income taxes should be paid back to the Revenue Agency regardless of people’s personal situation,” wrote researchers.

Access to information files showed focus groups that 317,900 high school students claimed benefits worth $635.9 million and the $8.9 million claimants who got funds outnumbered the jobless who they were intended for.

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Worse, the Commons Public Accounts Committee learned in April that Employment and Social Development Canada, which designed the CERB program, was aware that at least $500 million in payments would go to claimants who didn’t qualify. “We knew when we were launching,” testified Graham Flack, deputy minister.

Conservative MP Raquel Dancho said: “No one is being held accountable for this half-billion dollar error. Can you provide information to this committee on who you believe is responsible for this? Where does the buck stop?”

Deputy Flack said “I’m happy to take on that accountability myself. It wasn’t an error. It was a known design criteria. We knew when we were launching the benefit that it was not possible in the time we had to have real-time reconciliation.”

This is the COVID track record that Justin Trudeau presents in order to get a majority: A government that simply flooded the country with a firehose of funds without controls then ignored the consequences.

As such, this is Canada’s “firehose” election, initiated by a leader who isn’t one and never should be again.

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