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Kevin Flynn muses on 2022's provincial, municipal election campaigns

Oakville political veteran looks at politics through pandemic-coloured glasses; offers advice for hopeful candidates
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As we face 2022, still up to our eyes in Covid and variants, losing faith daily in leaders and institutions we used to respect and trying to remember what “normal” life was like, it’s timely to remember that 2022 is a scheduled election year at both the local and provincial level.

A quick review of the federal political scene might be helpful for anyone considering a run themselves.

For a few months in 2020, when the first wave of Covid hit, I and many other Canadians felt proud of our federal Covid response compared to the debacle south of the border. However, in hindsight, one could suppose anything would look better than the Trump-led gong show that engaged our journalistic fascination with just how weird things could get in America.

The ever-so-polite Canadian public did as was asked, locking ourselves up, closing schools, working from home or shutting down businesses and waiting for instructions as casualties climbed in our senior’s homes and overburdened hospitals. Accurate instructions were very slow in coming, as were the vaccine supply and flight bans from heavily infected countries.

No serious attempt at timely domestic vaccine production was considered and undertaken as in other countries like the UK.

Suddenly, our southern neighbours didn’t seem so unresponsive after all.

The vaccine take-up in the USA moved ahead, and a downward spiral of confidence in our leadership and public health system replaced that initial feeling of Canadian optimism. Opposition parties were all but non-existent as leaders fought unsuccessfully to get some traction in a media cycle totally consumed with Covid.

To say the Canadian public has felt isolated during the pandemic would be an understatement.

A well-spoken rep from the World Health Organization said very early in the pandemic that speed trumps everything. To categorize the federal response today, words like ponderous, political, ineffective and perhaps “too little - too late” come to mind.

Watching the vaccine supply dwindle as seniors in our community wait nine months plus for a booster shot clearly indicates how far off the rails our Covid response has become.

Illogical travel bans preventing fully vaccinated people from travelling to places dealing with the pandemic better than Canada simply frustrate knowledgeable Canadians. People are now doing their own homework and coming to their own conclusions as to how best protect their families and community. To his credit, the president and CEO of WestJet spoke openly against the recent travel restrictions and challenged the federal government to produce data to support the policy.

Canadians are starting to feel their government is making this up as they go along and that’s hard to dispute.

The “Groundhog Day” federal election of 2021 is behind us, and people are still scratching their heads as to why we needed an election at all, but as polite Canadians, we all trotted off to the polls and voted. Maybe we were thinking of all the important things that Canadian families needed the feds to do to combat Covid; holding an election perhaps wasn’t one of them.

Ordinary people should not be faulted for feeling the political interests of the federal parties perhaps was given precedence over the health and safety of their own families. Spanked and put back into a minority government, the electorate simply told them to get back to work and do better.

A more contagious variant of Covid is upon us; the feds mysteriously seem surprised and unprepared by that fact. They appear startled into another kneejerk reaction and again ask Canadians to trust and follow their advice. This time around, however, the response from the public is decidedly different from 2020.

There is a growing sense that the federal government and public health have simply lost the plot. Advice often seems illogical and contradictory from all levels of government: “We’re going to keep the airplanes flying … but don’t you even think about getting on one,” and “You can’t have 11 people over for Christmas dinner, but feel free to enjoy a Leafs' game with 8,000+ of your closest friends, sorry I actually meant to say 1,000 people,”  or “You don’t need to prove you’re vaccinated to shop with hundreds of others at Costco, but you do to visit your little neighbourhood restaurant,” and the list goes on.

So, in an election year, what can a prospective candidate at either the provincial or local level learn from the federal actions and record to date?

A quick review of the provincial political landscape might also be a good place to start. Premier Ford won a healthy, populist majority in 2018 against a terribly run campaign from the Liberals and a New Democratic Party who ably reinforced the notion that nobody is better at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory than they.

However, the bloom soon came off Ford’s political rose. A lack of caucus experience, cronyism and a large number of embarrassingly poorly prepared members emerged. Low-quality and self-serving policies were rammed through the legislature. As in the federal example, opposition parties fell over themselves to reach unknown depths of ineffectiveness. The NDP just disappeared; the Green Party was game but simply too small. Broke, demoralized and seriously in debt, the Liberals limped along through a timid leadership campaign that nobody really cared about and drifted through a period of resignations that made a small party even smaller.

One bright morning, the people of Ontario woke up to find themselves in the middle of the deadliest pandemic in generations and, with horror and much trepidation, remembered that Doug Ford was premier and unpopular as he was, he had a majority.

Then 'my friend Doug' surprised everyone. The brash, my-way-or-the-highway, false bravado character was replaced on our tv screens and social media with a person who looked empathetic, concerned, possibly capable of real leadership and uncharacteristically, truly scared. With admittedly low expectations of Ford, Ontarians responded favourably to this transmigration, and people talked openly in positive terms about his transformation. All that said, if we hear another “we’re all in this together” speech from any politician in the next ten years, it will be too soon.

First responders, especially our nurses, responded well to the crisis. To some extent, so did public health officials, whom we’d always hoped would be up to the task should a pandemic land on our shores. Traditionally underappreciated, nurses are the heroes of our health care system. As we watched America get vaccinated, better late than never, our vaccines finally arrived, and local public health and hospitals did an excellent job in distributing them.

Like corks on the ocean, local government simply bobbed along, subject to the whims of the province and feds. They managed to keep local government going. They did what they could in terms of online education, recycling and garbage pick-up, transit, sewage, water, recreation and hydro. They kept a sense of normalcy in place and essential services on track. Nothing spectacular didn’t get in the way, no grandstanding, just went about doing their jobs well in difficult times.

Presumably, those submitting their name for elected office want to attract voter support. To do that, they should understand what voters have been through, what they expected and what they got instead, how they are feeling today and what they expect newly elected leaders to do. They should understand how Covid has eroded trust in many public institutions, including our governments.

To be fair, politicians are very ordinary people from many walks of life, many of whom I know and many of whom I like very much. Normally, good ordinary people from all walks of life are exactly what we want in our councils, legislatures and commons. In a pandemic, however, ordinary is not good enough. We need extraordinary leaders doing extraordinary things.

Extraordinary leaders would do some of the following;

  • Convene the Covid version of a war cabinet. If the Allies needed it to defeat Hitler and win World War 2, which took 45,000 Canadian lives, then we need it for a pandemic that has already killed over 30,000 Canadians. Bring the opposition, business, labour, science and medicine into real decision-making roles. Trying to restore trust in our government’s ability to protect us will be tough. Instead of telling us how smart you are, perhaps tell us how you would be part of a new way of making smarter decisions than we’ve seen to date.
  • Stop telling Canadians what “they” should do, start telling Canadians what “you” as a politician will do and then go and do it.
  • Stop telling Canadians how to think; start telling Canadians what some of the greatest minds in science are thinking and how you as a leader are paying attention to them. Sometimes that might mean getting out of the way.
  • Back up your policies with real scientific facts. Platitudes have always been ineffective and are now becoming offensive.
  • Resolve to be properly prepared for where this pandemic is going. While Omicron may have caught the public by surprise, it should not have caught our elected leaders and public health by surprise; yet it did. Ask how and why we’ve run out of vaccines and testing capabilities and give the electorate a real plan to ensure it will not happen again.
  • Leave the medical advice to the medical professionals. The electorate doesn’t want a prime minister, premier or any other elected official giving medical advice on vaccines. Leave that to trained people with expertise. The daily news is becoming filled with doctors finally deciding to speak out on what they’re dealing with on a daily basis, and a lot of it is not good.
  • Finally, trust the people you’ve asked to vote for you. Canadians have always been selective in their voting patterns and reasonable in supporting leaders whether they voted for them or not, especially in times as dangerous as these. They do, however, have a limit and what I’ve heard over the holidays is that they’ve reached it. They’re tired, frightened, and don’t feel well served by either senior level of government. They don’t want any more long speeches or photo-ops, and they don’t want ineffective action that only gives the illusion of good public health policy.