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Haters need to admit Canada is the slow but steady winner in vaccine race

It wasn’t that long ago that a litany of pundits and politicians were proclaiming Canada’s vaccine strategy a failure, but in fact, the rollout should be a point of major national pride. Photo by the Province of British Columbia / Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

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It may not be an official 2021 Olympic event, but the race to reach herd immunity is still the most important competition in the world right now. And over the August long weekend, Canada moved into first place among western countries in terms of the percentage of its population that’s fully vaccinated, ahead of ones that were quick out of the blocks like Israel and the United States. Given the difficulties those fast-starters have run into when it comes to convincing people to get vaccinated, we’re unlikely to surrender that lead.

This should be a moment of major national pride, one that should dwarf anything our athletes are able to achieve in Tokyo. After all, it wasn’t that long ago that a litany of pundits and politicians were proclaiming Canada’s vaccine strategy a failure, with some suggesting we’d have to wait years to catch up to our American and British counterparts. Back in February, National Post columnist Tristin Hopper wrote: “The coming months will reveal much of the failures and oversights that allowed this to happen, but...you’re going to be vaccinated much later than if you were an American, Brit or even Serbian.” Hopper wasn’t done there. “When it comes to mass-vaccinating a novel disease,” he wrote, “your country can either get good at making shots or buying shots — and Canada has failed at both.”

He wasn’t alone in counting these chickens before they actually hatched. In a front-page editorial from early February, the Globe and Mail declared that “the country’s early vaccination rollout is collapsing,” while The Economist’s ironically named “intelligence unit” suggested in late January 2021 we’d have to wait until “mid-2022” before a majority of Canadians were double-vaxxed. Conservative health critic Michelle Rempel-Garner was even more pessimistic, suggesting: “It does not matter what portfolio of vaccines we have if Canadians cannot get it until 2030.” For his part, NDP health critic Don Davies was consistently critical of the federal government’s procurement strategy, and suggested in late November that “there’s absolutely no excuse for Canadians to be in this situation and the prime minister has a lot to answer for.”

COVID was always going to be a marathon, not a sprint, and it seems clear with the benefit of hindsight that Canada was well-prepared for the longer race. The result is a reminder of the wisdom inherent in Aesop’s timeless fable of the Tortoise and the Hare and the fact that the race is not always won by the swift. Canada may not have delivered its first doses as quickly as some countries, but it created and implemented a plan to get them into arms that has seen it lap the United States, which is now mired in an increasingly catastrophic fourth wave.

That fable seems particularly relevant in Alberta, where Premier Jason Kenney held up Florida and Texas as exemplars of his province’s hare-like approach to reopening in late May. “All I’ll say is this: Look at Israel, look at Britain, look at Texas, look at Florida, look at all of the United States. Their numbers are plunging while they’ve lifted their restrictions.” And yet, as COVID-19 hospitalizations surge to a new high in Florida and are rising at the fastest rate so far in Texas, he seems determined to plow ahead with his province’s see-no-evil approach — one that may well turn the “best summer ever” into the fall from hell.

Even Liberal haters like Jason Kenney need to admit, Canada is the slow but steady winner in the #vaccine race, writes columnist @maxfawcett. #ableg #cdnpoli

Elected officials and the media have a responsibility to criticize the government of the day when it fails, and they weren’t shy about that when it came to the federal government’s early vaccine rollout. But they also have a duty to acknowledge when they’ve overstated their case on that front, and that doesn’t seem to have happened yet. Some have quietly faded into the proverbial bushes, Homer Simpson-style, while others have doubled-down on their initial (and incorrect) criticism. Rempel-Garner, for example, even tried to take credit for the federal government’s vaccine success in a recent mailer to households in her Calgary riding. “Make no mistake, the federal government’s vaccine distribution plan has been slow and lacking. But there is no doubt that without the pressure that was applied by me and my colleagues the response would have been much worse.”

Canadians should probably bear this in mind if they head to the polls soon, as everyone seems to believe is now inevitable. Do they want to reward the government that is winning the global race to vaccinate its population, or do they want to turn power over to the parties that wanted to believe we were destined to fail from the outset? Do they want to elect politicians willing to learn from their mistakes, or are they satisfied supporting those who pretend they never made any in the first place? If nothing else, the next federal election will help us answer those questions.

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