Reader TTS

Save for later A year into the pandemic, its legacy appears mixed. On the one hand, you have the millions of dead, the tens of millions sickened, the worldwide paralysis of social and

economic life around the planet, and all that. On the other hand, it has helped make the world safe for big government. As the Prime Minister and other members of his government are fond of

noting, the pandemic presents a historic “opportunity” – to use the surge in public support for activist government, of a kind often observed in a crisis, to carve out a greatly expanded

role for the state long after the crisis is over; to “build back better,” to “reimagine economic systems,” and yes, to “reset.” Sometimes this is justified in the name of the many social

ills the pandemic has allegedly “laid bare,” most of them Liberal agenda items going back several decades. More often it is the response to the pandemic itself that is supposed to usher in

this new golden age of big government. If you like what government did for you during the pandemic, the Liberals are already telling the public, can we interest you in universal national

pharmacare, home care, dental care, child care and everything-else care? This is remarkable, as the record of government during the pandemic has for the most part been a catalogue of

eye-bleeding failure. From the shuttering of Canada’s Global Public Health Intelligence Network shortly before the outbreak; to the failure to follow the advice of not one but two expert

panels set up in the aftermath of the SARS epidemic two decades ago; to the refusal to close the borders until long after it was too late; to the confusing and contradictory public

advisories on everything from risk levels to mask wearing; to the manifest bollixing of vaccine procurement, the failures of government throughout this crisis have been many and profound.

And that’s just the federal government. The provinces have contributed their own litany of failure, from the fitful and inadequate lockdowns, to the utter absence of any serious effort at

testing and tracing, to what we can already anticipate will be the next comprehensive cockup: actually injecting the vaccines into people’s arms. That’s the point. This isn’t a failure of

one party, or one level of government. It isn’t even a uniquely Canadian failure: only a very few governments around the world have had much success at containing the virus’s spread, and

only a few have done well at vaccination (none are on both lists). This is a failure of government. It is a failure, what is more, not at some tentative new experiment in government, but at

one of its most basic and widely acknowledged responsibilities: the protection of public health. But then, so is national defence, and we know what a blazing tire-fire that has been. If the

pandemic response is an advertisement for big government, then so is the National Shipbuilding Strategy. But wait a minute: weren’t the programs of emergency economic support, intended to

compensate people for the costs of the lockdown, a success? All those acronymically-named benefits, CERB and CEWS and the rest, designed and implemented in a matter of weeks? Yes, they were.

Lots of firms were kept running that might otherwise have shut down; lots of people were kept employed that might otherwise have been laid off; nobody starved. When the objective is to get

as much money out the door to as many people as fast as possible, governments can deliver, and did. The pandemic, then, though unprecedented in many ways, has not really taught us anything

new. Governments are not so good at lockdowns or mass vaccination campaigns because they are not good generally at handling complex issues with lots of moving parts or delivering services in

a timely way that meet the particular needs of individual human beings: at central planning, in other words. If the slowness of governments to deliver vaccines has you frustrated, recall

that this was the experience for just about anything in the planned economies. That hardly makes the case for, say, government-run daycare. But governments are relatively good at cutting

cheques to people. Again, we knew this long before the pandemic. Poverty among the elderly was cut to near zero by the simple expedient of sending them all a cheque: Old Age Security, plus

the Guaranteed Income Supplement. The Canada Child Benefit is on the way to doing the same for child poverty. By contrast, the dozens of programs, federal and provincial, aimed at giving

working-age Canadians the “tools” to stay out of poverty have been rather less successful. Perhaps it would be better to just send them a cheque as well. What we need is not big government

or small government, but government that sticks to what it’s good at. Less planning, more cheque-writing, please. _Keep your Opinions sharp and informed. Get the Opinion newsletter. __Sign

up today__._