Pallister keeps dropping the ball

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 16/02/2021 (1838 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

How desperate is Manitoba Premier Brian Pallister to divert attention away from his own woeful pandemic response? So desperate that he spent a weekend spinning a whopper of a fib in interviews with two national news organizations.

As he does so often when he wants to pick a fight with Ottawa, Pallister made appearances on CTV’s Question Period and The West Block on Global where he claimed the federal Liberal government had forbidden vaccine suppliers from selling direct to provinces.

Federal Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Dominic LeBlanc immediately issued a statement denying that any attempt was made to stop provinces from purchasing vaccine directly. But Pallister would not relent.

“They’ve all told us that they are not going to sell to us because that’s part of the deal they made with the federal government,” Pallister told The West Block on Sunday. “To me, that’s blocking.”

Apparently, Pallister wasn’t aware that officials from some of the vaccine manufacturing companies own televisions.

CTV received an email directly from AstraZeneca, whose vaccine is still awaiting final approval by Ottawa, confirming that its contract with the federal government for 20 million doses “does not preclude provincial contracts.”

Why would Pallister make such an outrageous claim in such a public way and not expect to get called to account?

CTV claims it was shown emails from several vaccine manufacturers in response to Manitoba’s request for separate deals. Those emails, CTV reported, “indicated generally that (the vaccine makers) were opting to deal with the federal government to fulfil Canada’s requests.”

And then, it all starts to make sense. Ottawa started pre-ordering vaccines last summer. Why would any vaccine maker ignore those early contracts to take an order from a cranky provincial first minister with no sense of delayed gratification?

Ottawa didn’t block the provinces from buying vaccine; the vaccine makers told Pallister they couldn’t do a deal with him until Canada’s contracts are fulfilled.

And it should be noted that, notwithstanding recent global shortage of Pfizer vaccines, Canada has pre-ordered 360 million doses of vaccine from an array of manufacturers, the most pre-orders per capita of any country on the planet.

The charitable interpretation here would be that Pallister and his people simply misinterpreted the response from the vaccine makers. Of course, the more obvious explanation is that — once again — the Manitoba premier lied in a desperate bid to get people to forget how badly he has managed the pandemic response.

Manitoba is currently, and thankfully, on the downward slope from one of the worst COVID-19 outbreaks since the beginning of the pandemic. For much of last fall, our total number of cases and deaths per capita were among the highest anywhere in the world.

In fairness, no government or political leader has ever had the power to fully control the novel coronavirus. As well, every jurisdiction on the planet, including Manitoba, was destined to experience a second wave. So, any criticism of the Pallister government is not based on an expectation that somehow he could have prevented the virus from staging a deadly comeback in the fall.

However, Pallister’s woeful misjudgment of the likelihood of a second wave, and wilful mismanagement of the response, made what was always going to be a bad situation much worse.

With criticism peaking both among the general public and inside his own party, Pallister was desperate to find a new object of derision for his citizens. And when Pfizer suspended vaccine shipments to Canada (and many other countries around the world) in January, Pallister seized the opportunity to shift attention and blame to Ottawa.

First, he announced a dubious deal with a Calgary pharmaceutical company that is trying to get approval for the first made-in-Canada COVID-19 vaccine. Pallister claimed Manitoba had purchased two million doses of the vaccine even though the company does not have the money to complete clinical trials and has never brought an approved drug of any kind to market.

Then, Pallister made the rounds of the weekend national news programs trying to drive home the idea that the provinces could solve the vaccine shortage if only they were allowed by Ottawa to buy direct from the manufacturers.

Pallister either doesn’t know or doesn’t care that this is not a Canadian vaccine shortage, it’s a global vaccine shortage.

Pfizer, Canada’s principal vaccine supplier to date, reduced shipments to all countries outside the United States last month to allow it time to renovate a plant in Belgium to expand capacity. Pfizer has promised that, starting this week, it will ramp up supply so that Canada and the other countries that were deprived can still receive all the vaccine they were promised in the first three months of 2021.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has made quite a few lofty promises on the vaccine front, including a pledge that every Canadian that wants a shot will get one by September. If his Liberal government fails to deliver on those promises, he will suffer a swift and much-deserved political death.

However, none of that justifies Pallister’s increasingly bizarre behaviour.

All governments will be held accountable for the good, bad and ugly of their pandemic responses.

But when the post-pandemic reckoning comes, there will be a special place in political hell for leaders who spent less time trying to find solutions and more time trying to blame others.

dan.lett@freepress.mb.ca