Sorry, sometimes I don't check this thread for a while.
Honestly, I don't disagree that we pulled it together on vaccines and landed in the top ten or so of somewhat comparable nations, which I think is definitely great and ultimately, the fact that people stepped up and made it happen is pretty impressive. I've always thought, and said, that I think really highly of Bonnie Henry and I think she and this province really slugged it out, and to me this looks like success at the ground game level, following failures at a leadership level.
The fact that we threw money at a country that we should literally view as an enemy is dumb, and that's not pandering to whatever, Canadian FOX viewers, that was seriously stupid and it did delay things, and it made everything cost more, which is a metric I don't see anyone looking at. It would be interesting to see our cost per capita on vaccinations; you throw enough money at a late purchase you might still get it on time, but that doesn't mean there was no cost associated with the initial mistakes.
In fact it's easy to show that there were early failures:
That's a LONG delay to get rolling. How many people died in that phase when we couldn't start on the most vulnerable people? I don't know, I haven't checked into it. But I'd guess quite a few.
So yes, I'm really impressed with the ability of our people to make this happen. I fully congratulate our health care workers and everyone working on the administrative and logistics side of this who have really done the near-impossible, and although I haven't really been following the actions of the other provinces I think BC really came through in a pretty spectacular way and again as someone who's always really thought highly of Bonnie Henry I think we can be particularly happy about the fact that we managed to keep our mortality rate really low, without ever enacting really strict lockdowns or some of the stuff other provinces had to endure. I don't know if anyone can truly say that the performance of this province is purely the result of stuff we did, rather than stuff we can't control like the weather and the amount of time people can spend outside, but personally I find it hard not to look at BC's numbers and say boy, relative to almost anywhere else I think it's hard not to say that Dr. Henry's approach was really bang-on. I have always said I think she's walking a tough tightrope between difficult alternatives and while variants are coming and who knows what the future brings, I just can't avoid saying that I think her approach to this has just been extremely successful and we should all feel lucky to have had that direction.
But what do I have to say about the federal involvement?
They insisted closing the borders was racist and wouldn't help. They lagged on procurement - not on making agreements but the timeline is totally clear, they were really slow to actually put shots in arms. They sucked up to China and sent supplies we needed overseas. I don't fault them for some things; there was stuff like the masks that had expired but you know, I genuinely don't blame them for letting inventory run out when chances are, everyone would have done that. I don't fault them for spending a ton of money on respirators that ultimately didn't help because at that moment, it looked like they would be necessary. I have never faulted the federal government for doing anything that I personally thought was reasonable at the time, and only looks bad in hindsight. I hate Trudeau and everything he stands for but I don't blame him for everything that goes wrong; some stuff you're going to get wrong no matter who you are.
I just refuse to let the guy skate on the mistakes he made which were obviously terrible decisions in that moment, and I hate the fact that he has such blanket support from the media in this country that all that stuff just gets tossed off as a non-problem. Would a different prime minister have done better? Nobody knows. I think potentially, yes. But for sure they would have been held to a MUCH higher standard, and that is the reason for much of my criticism of the way this crisis has been handled.
