Most people have long since moved past the pandemic and the impact it had on them. But for a small group of anti-vaccine skeptics, their fight against reason, science and our collective well-being continues to define their lives. They continue to gerrymander public health data in ways that confirm their biases and obsess over long-disproven conspiracy theories, including the supposedly negative impact the COVID-19 vaccine had on mortality rates. Now, it seems, their rearguard battle has yielded an important victory.
In a town hall event scheduled for June dubbed “An Injection of Truth,” UCP MLA Eric Bouchard — who just happens to occupy former premier Jason Kenney’s seat — has organized a gathering of Canada’s biggest vaccine scolds. As if that isn't bad enough, they’re going to focus on the supposedly negative impact of mRNA vaccines on children. “Why are an excessive number of Alberta’s children dying? Since 2021, excessive deaths for children are up 350 per cent. But why?”
They mean “excess” deaths, not “excessive” but that aside, there’s not a shred of evidence to support this figure. According to Statistics Canada’s data the mortality rates among children under one increased slightly from 4.6 per 1,000 in 2021 to 5.3 in 2022, (which is still lower than it was in 2018), while it remained static at 0.2 per 1,000 among those one to five years old and 0.1 per 1,000 among those five to nine. If anything, the increase in excess deaths over this period could just as easily be correlated with them contracting COVID-19 given how comparatively low the uptake was for vaccines among children.
These facts will have little purchase on the feelings of those attending this event, though. The roster of speakers includes a number of doctors who trade in conspiracy theories about so-called “turbo cancers” caused by the vaccine and the list of their colleagues who have supposedly died prematurely as a result of taking it. In its October 2023 hearing into the conduct of Mark Trozzi, one of those scheduled speakers, the Ontario Physicians and Surgeons Discipline Tribunal noted that “in promoting a false narrative about 80 deceased doctors, he targeted private individuals, causing distress to their grieving families.”
This is the sort of paranoid nonsense that has no business being taken seriously, least of all by the political party that controls the levers of power in Canada’s fourth largest province. Health Minister Adriana LaGrange suggested this was just about wanting constituents to feel “heard”, but the message about the supposed impact of mRNA vaccines on children seems to have the full endorsement and backing of the United Conservative Party’s board of directors. “We have serious concerns about them for children,” UCP president Rob Smith told CBC News. "I would say that the board of directors' position is that if parents are going to get their children vaccinated, they need to be very, very sure that they know what they're doing."
Gaslighting them about the supposed dangers of a vaccine that’s been proven safe won’t help there, of course. With more than 100 million COVID vaccinations, data gathered by the Public Health Agency of Canada shows a grand total of four deaths that can be causally linked to them. More people — far more, in fact — die as a result of anesthesia (roughly 1 out of every 100,000 versus 0.004 per 100,000 for COVID vaccines) but nobody is seriously entertaining the idea that doctors should be performing surgeries without it.
And, of course, there are the lives the vaccine saved. As the C.D. Howe Institute noted back in December 2022, the widespread uptake in vaccines resulted in 21 per cent fewer cases, 37 per cent fewer hospitalizations and 34,900 fewer deaths from January 2021 to May 2022. This is, by any rational and reasonable analysis, one of the great public health success stories of our lifetime.
But the people who continue to obsess over the supposedly negative impacts of these vaccines are neither rational nor reasonable. Instead, they’ll spend the rest of their lives moving the goalposts around the field in ways that help them avoid the inevitable confrontation with this scientific reality. This wouldn’t be so bad — flat-earthers still exist, after all — if it was just about their behaviour and beliefs. As adults, they’re at least theoretically competent to make their own decisions and they’re free to make the wrong ones if they insist.
But by taking direct aim at the impact of mRNA vaccines on children they’re effectively threatening the broader consensus around other childhood vaccinations that’s already been badly damaged by previous waves of anti-vaccine fear mongering. Diseases like whooping cough and the measles are making an entirely unwelcome comeback due entirely to declining childhood vaccination rates.
This is the real danger posed by the UCP’s ongoing tango with the province’s anti-vaccine activists and enthusiasts. If even a small portion of the population decides to stop vaccinating their children against previously contained diseases like the measles, that can lead to outbreaks that put children in far more danger than any vaccine could ever present. That these outbreaks will spread most aggressively in the same communities that most vociferously oppose vaccinations, or that it will be their own children who are most at risk, doesn’t seem to matter.
This seems destined to end badly, either with the return of other previously vanquished diseases or the arrival of another pandemic. We could avoid this if the Conservative politicians and pundits in our midst were willing to finally and forcefully tell their supporters the truth here, unpopular though it may be. Instead, they seem determined to continue humouring these delusions, no matter how dangerous they become.
Pierre Poilievre versus the baby boomers
I’ve written a few times now about the ongoing shift in the generational landscape that has politicians suddenly catering to the needs of millennials and gen-Z voters rather than the baby boomers. But there’s one aspect I somehow managed to miss: the inevitable confrontation between Pierre Poilievre’s pledge to balance the budget and the growing share of it that funds services and supports for seniors.
I’m a little embarrassed to admit this, given that I’ve been writing about the conflict between generations — and my ongoing issues with the boomers — for as long as I’ve been writing about anything. But if anyone was going to beat me to this punch, I’m glad it’s Generation Squeeze’s Paul Kershaw. In his column in the Globe and Mail, he underscored the unyielding generational math at work. “Retirement benefits for boomers drive deficits because they have been funded by a reverse-pyramid scheme. Whereas many hands made light work of the responsibility to pay for seniors when boomers were young, this function must be borne by relatively few workers now that boomers have retired.”
As Kershaw points out, any attempt to eliminate the deficit will have to reckon with the growing share of government going to seniors. “If Mr. Poilievre plans to wrestle down the deficit through spending cuts, his only realistic option is to rein in the budget line item that is most accelerating. This will mean slashing OAS for some boomers, because the $20-billion deficit projected for 2028 equals one-fifth of the allocation to the program in that year.”
The other alternative is raising taxes, but that seems even less likely for a politician who has branded himself as an anti-tax warrior. In other words, whether he likes it or not, Poilievre is about to get conscripted into the generational wars. They’re only just getting started, too.
As Courtney Shea pointed out in her Maclean’s (hey, that’s still a thing?) piece on the rise of “one-and-done” families, the demographic math is only getting worse for governments in Canada and other developed countries. “By 2069, the labour force will have shrunk from its 2007 peak (69.5 per cent) to below 60 per cent, decimating both our productivity and our tax base,” she writes. “The federal government will be forced to cut provincial funding for health care and education. Policymakers may redirect funding for universities toward long-term care, and infrastructure will erode.”
Ironically, it will be today’s young(er) people who will be most impacted by this. The baby boomers will not have to reckon with the consequences of the reverse-pyramid scheme that has so clearly benefited them throughout their entire lives. Instead, it will fall to their children and grandchildren, who will have to find a way to balance expectations around government services with the social and economic realities imposed by a declining birth rate.
We desperately need to start talking about this — heck, we needed to be talking about it two decades ago — before the underlying math forces our collective hand. What will it mean to live in a society where past entitlements outstrip investments in the future, and how will that shape our politics? The longer we wait to find out, the worse I fear the answers here will be.
There’s a non-zero chance that Poilievre could address this problem head-on. If Nixon could go to China, after all, then maybe he can be the one Conservative who stops pandering so shamelessly to seniors. If he does, he’ll have done the country a favour. But it seems far more likely that he’ll choose to blame this on Justin Trudeau than actually do something about it.
What Rex Murphy got wrong
Like a lot of columnists in Canada, I have strong feelings about Rex Murphy. His recent death triggered an outpouring from the more conservative-leaning ones, who see him as one of Canada’s most important voices. And on that part, at least, I have to agree.
Murphy was, for a long time, the voice of Canada. He wrote columns, delivered impassioned sermons about Canadian politics on CBC’s The National, and hosted Cross Country Checkup for years. He was good at all of these jobs — very good.
And then at some point, something changed. He began to rail against climate policy, against all things “woke” and turned himself into a caricature of the grumpy old man he had always looked like, even in his youth. Some of this can be attributed to the change in government in Ottawa, the way in which our polarized political and media culture rewards outrage, and the naturally acidifying effects of aging. But much of it, I think, has to do with what happened in Alberta.
Murphy had always identified with the oil and gas industry, and he was very clear about why: it gave so many of his fellow Newfoundlanders the opportunity for economic success and prosperity after the province’s fishing industry essentially collapsed. I remember a speech he gave at the 2018 Oil Sands Conference and Trade Show in Fort McMurray, where he laid this out in suitably verbose fashion. I admire and appreciate this sort of loyalty, and I understand where he was coming from.
The problem is that his loyalty blinded him to the real threats facing the people who were flying back and forth from Newfoundland to Fort McMurray for work. Their enemy wasn’t the NDP government of the time or the federal Liberals or anything else he tended to blame for the industry’s ongoing woes. It was the industry itself and its unwillingness to accept that climate change was a real and present danger, one they had no choice but to take seriously.
What Murphy’s audience needed more than anything was someone who would give it to them straight. Instead, he provided them with excuses and straw men to push over, whether it was in the form of columns attacking renewable energy or highlighting the supposed hypocrisy of climate activists. He may well have cared deeply about what fellow Postmedia columnist Terry Glavin describes as “ordinary people and how they were getting on,” but he did them a tremendous disservice by covering climate change as dismissively and adversarially as he did.
As I wrote back in 2021, “A good friend doesn’t always tell you what you want to hear, and they don’t send you into fights unprepared for what’s about to happen. Instead, a good friend gives it to you straight — and helps you overcome the challenges that stand in your way.”
That he chose not to do that is, to me, a defining part of his legacy. He, more than any other conservative pundit, could have told them the uncomfortable truth. And he, more than any other conservative pundit, would have gotten a hearing of it. Instead, he fed them comfortable deceptions and distractions — and helped turn an unavoidable economic reality into an endless culture war. Ordinary people, and especially those in Fort McMurray, will be the ones who pay the highest price for that.
Once more unto the breach (with electoral reform)
Back in early April, I wrote a column mooting the possibility of a merger between the federal Liberals and NDP. Last week, Canada’s National Observer published a response from Fair Vote Canada’s Anita Nickerson and Gisela Ruckert. In it, they make the entirely reasonable case that fewer political parties would be bad for democracy — and that meaningful electoral reform would be very, very good for it.
“If the Liberals and NDP truly want to avoid getting stuck in this same doom loop again and again,” they wrote, “they should show the courage and conviction to act on the lesson they are offered every time they find themselves heading for electoral disaster: Canadians would be better served by legitimate improvements that will benefit not only progressives but all voters. There is an obvious solution ― but it involves compromise.”
I agree. The challenge here, one revealed most recently by the Liberal government’s own failed attempts at electoral reform, is that ditching our first-past-the-post system always looks less appealing once it’s just handed you a four-year majority. The Liberals didn’t win a majority of the votes in 2015, of course — indeed, they didn’t even cross the 40 per cent threshold nationally — but the system gave them 184 out of 338 potential seats. No wonder they suddenly got cold feet about replacing said system with a more proportional one.
The necessary conditions to get meaningful electoral reform done, it seems to me, is an election that produces a plurality (but not a majority) of either Liberal or NDP seats, with the other party’s support required to form government and hold the confidence of the House of Commons. Here’s the key part: said other party must then insist on electoral reform — not its discussion or study but immediate implementation — as a necessary and non-negotiable precondition for its support.
To the best of my knowledge, the federal NDP didn’t do this in 2019 or 2021, although that might be because the Liberals could have theoretically worked with the Bloc Québécois as well to maintain the confidence of the House (in both Parliaments, the combined Liberal and BQ representation exceeded the 170-seat threshold). It’s highly unlikely that the next election will produce these sorts of winning conditions for electoral reform. But if and when they arrive, its proponents have to be ready to make their case — and have the ear of the parties who would sign off on it.
Recommended Reading
On Tuesday, there was a report that BC United leader Kevin Falcon was in discussions with his counterparts in the Conservative Party of BC over a potential merger. You might think this would worry Premier David Eby and the BC NDP, whose support clearly trails the combined conservative vote. But as Evan Scrimshaw noted in a column he spun up on the subject, the math isn’t nearly that clean given the divided loyalties at the federal level of the remaining BC United supporters.
“Of the 13 per cent who say they’ll vote for BC United in this poll, 49 per cent say that they’d vote for the federal Conservatives if a federal election was tomorrow against 46 per cent who would vote for the federal Liberals. In other words, far from BC United being a source for conservatives who just don’t realize they’re Conservatives yet, they’re a group that’s split.”
If anything, Scrimshaw writes, the BC Conservatives would be better served having BC United continue stumbling towards the election. “In BC’s current context, BC United serves as a deterrent of a conservative government only in theory. In reality, the idea that the BC Conservatives would get a meaningful flow of preferences from a merger is nonsensical, and with BC United’s vote focused on the Lower Mainland (17 per cent compared to five per cent on [Vancouver] Island and 11 per cent in the rest of the province), it’s not at all clear a merger is worth it. It’s arguable, and frankly I’d argue it, that it’s more valuable to have BC United stealing votes in Vancouver from the NDP than it is to ensure the BCU vote collapses in (to pick a place at random) Kamloops or Peace River.”
Interesting stuff. I’ll be writing more about the B.C. election as we get closer to it, but I’ll say this much for now: anyone writing Eby’s political epitaph right now is getting way, way ahead of themselves.
That’s all for this week. If you haven’t subscribed to Canada’s National Observer yet, I’d strongly encourage you to consider it. And if you already have, well, tell a friend or relative. As the broader media environment continues to collapse, we need reputable sources of reliable information more than ever.