COVID-19
Our dumb country: an update
Belated welcome to Canada, Sir. We’re like this sometimes
Posted with permission from Paul Wells
Here at the Paul Wells newsletter, we get results. It just always seems to take more work than it should. Today we have an update on Sir Mark Walport FRS FRCP FRCPath FMedSci FRSE, who was asked last summer by the government of Canada to look into Canada’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.
I have known this since several days after Sir Mark’s work began. (Sir Mark is one of the UK’s leading medical research administrators. Over ’ome, I learn, if somebody is both a physician and a knight you address them as Sir Or Lady Firstname, followed by the appropriate abbreviations for their credentials, not as Dr.) I waited until November for the government to announce it, and was surprised when this didn’t happen. In fact I assumed my source was mistaken. (My source didn’t even want to be a source, they were just somebody who knew stuff and was chatting with me.) I have a longstanding interest in the notion that governments, being the creature of fallen humans, can benefit from introspection. So I thought some outside eyes-on the COVID response might help reduce the casualty count of some future catastrophe. The most recent of several posts I wrote to that effect is here.
My source kept assuring me that the Sir Mark thing was a real thing, and the government kept keeping schtum, so in November I finally gathered up my courage and wrote to the health ministry to ask whether this thing that I knew was happening was, you know, happening. The finest modern communications strategists have now perfected the government’s communications to the point where if you ask the government any question at all about anything at all, a process begins whereby dozens of people Working From Home figure out a way to suck your brains out through your nose using a ceremonial ceramic straw, and indeed this is what happened here.
Twelve days and two follow-up emails after I sent my query, a process I detailed with a kind of heartsick fascination in this post from November, I received this response:
The COVID-19 pandemic has had significant and complex health, social and economic impacts on our society.
As the Government of Canada continues its transition out of the COVID-19 pandemic response phase, internal and external partners are undertaking reviews of their role in the government’s response to COVID-19 and are identifying strategies to strengthen Canada’s preparedness for future health emergencies.
This reply was a thing of terrible maddening beauty, like the planet-smashing robot in the second-season Star Trek episode The Doomsday Machine, and I stared at it helplessly, the way William Windom did when the whale-shaped automaton finally turned in space and descended on him with its immense glowing orifice. This response, built up layer after layer by nameless armies of the powerless like the Pyramids themselves, managed to acknowledge the accuracy of my request while providing no actual information. It was the sound of one hand clapping, performed by committee.
Well, that was it for me. I tapped out. I was done. But Cathay Wagantall, whom I don’t believe I’ve met, picked up the baton from my shattered grasp. Wagantall is the Conservative MP for the riding of Yorkton — Melville, in Saskatchewan. Members of Parliament are allowed to send written questions to the government, which is required to reply. At the end of Nov., as I noted at the time, Wagantall put the following question on the Order Paper:
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You can click on that to read it in full, but essentially she asked: What’s Sir Mark doing, when will we hear more, what’s it cost and why haven’t you said so?
The thing about the House of Commons is, it does have some powers, and thus cornered by one of its members, the government finally relented. On Monday the government tabled Sessional Paper 8555-441-2022 in response to Wagantall’s question. Here it is!
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In this reply we learn real things, without quite learning the answer to everything Wagantall asked. In August Health Canada, PHAC and the Chief Science Advisor (that’s Mona Nemer) asked for an “independent expert panel” to “conduct a review of the federal approach to pandemic science advice and research coordination.” Sir Mark is indeed the panel’s chair.
Note that his mandate is narrow. He hasn’t been asked to look at medical supply, pharmaceutical production capacity, quarantine practice, stay-at-home orders, curfews, the wisdom of in-person vs. virtual schooling, or all the myriad of other issues that are worth looking at. This is neither proper nor improper, it just is what it is. Did you hear much about the advice Dr. Nemer provided the government during COVID, in her capacity as Chief Science Advisor? I bet you didn’t, though she wasn’t secretive about it, it just didn’t get much attention amid everything else that was going on. Sir Mark will apparently mostly be looking into how to make this little-noticed corner of the pandemic response work better. As for all the other stuff a government could look at — maybe they’ll leave it in the hands of a future generation of political staffers who are, for the moment, baristas! Maybe there’s some other after-action process going on, but we asked for the wrong one! One never knows, do one!
Sir Mark isn’t getting paid much, and, mirabile dictu, his report will be made public within two months. I’ve got a hunch that wasn’t the original plan.
The response to Wagantall’s Order Paper question is signed by Mark Holland, the Minister of Health. I notice that, like many ministers who were moved in 2023, Holland inherited his mandate letter from his predecessor, Jean-Yves Duclos. I also notice that mandate letters no longer contain this paragraph, which appeared in every mandate letter to the original 2015 cabinet:
We have also committed to set a higher bar for openness and transparency in government. It is time to shine more light on government to ensure it remains focused on the people it serves. Government and its information should be open by default. If we want Canadians to trust their government, we need a government that trusts Canadians. It is important that we acknowledge mistakes when we make them. Canadians do not expect us to be perfect – they expect us to be honest, open, and sincere in our efforts to serve the public interest.
I guess that was then.
From LifeSiteNews
As reported first by True North, according to Access to Information correspondence, from December 2020 to December 2022 Health Canada got over a million serious adverse event reports regarding the COVID vaccines.
Newly uncovered records have revealed that during the so-called pandemic thousands of serious adverse event reports related to the mRNA COVID jabs were reported to Health Canada each day, at the same time public health officials and the media claimed the experimental vaccines were safe.
As reported first by True North, according to Access to Information (ATIP) correspondence, from December 2020 to December 2022 Health Canada got over a million serious adverse events (SAE) reports regarding the COVID vaccines from Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Moderna and Janssen. Broken down, some 600,000 of the reports related to the Pfizer jab, 220,000 to AstraZeneca, 160,000 to Moderna and 22,000 to Janssen. Of note is that the Pfizer jab was the most widely distributed in Canada.
As per regulations, pharmaceutical companies must report SAE that happen anywhere in the world to Canada’s public health minister within “15 days after receiving or becoming aware of the information.”
The access to information coordinator noted that a “broader interpretation (of your request) could encompass millions of records,” adding that as they had a “processing capacity of about 500 pages per month,” handling such a large volume would “require a significant amount of time to complete.”
Broken down, if one serious adverse event report totals just a page each, at the given processing speed, it would take 167 years before all the SAEs would be processed.
The first COVID jab to be approved for use in Canada was Pfizer’s BioNTech mRNA injection, which became available on December 9, 2020. Moderna’s mRNA jab soon followed a couple of weeks later. Of important note is the launch of the jabs came after the government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau gave vaccine makers a shield from liability regarding jab-related injuries.
Health minister would have seen SAE submissions
By June of 2021, the SAE submissions just for the Pfizer shot totaled over 100,000 reports worldwide, with some 820 in Canada alone. Canada’s then-Minister of Health Patty Hadju would have had information at this time from the various drug jab makers showing how many SAEs there were both domestically and worldwide.
It is estimated that overall Health Canada was getting about 10,000 SAE reports from worldwide sources every week.
All levels of Canadian government heavily promoted the COVID shots, regularly touting them as both “safe and effective.”
However, LifeSiteNews has published an extensive amount of research on the dangers of the experimental COVID mRNA jabs, which include heart damage and blood clots.
The mRNA shots have also been linked to a multitude of negative and often severe side effects in children and all have connections to cell lines derived from aborted babies.
From the Fraser Institute
By: Jake Fuss and Tegan Hill
Two federal cabinet ministers criticized the report because it “fails to properly acknowledge that CEBA was designed and delivered during a global pandemic.” Translation—taxpayer money can be mismanaged so long as it’s delivered quickly, and we can use an emergency as an excuse for wasteful spending
According to a new report by Canada’s auditor general, in another of example of mismanagement and waste during the COVID pandemic, nearly 10 per cent—or $3.5 billion—of the federal government’s Canada Emergency Business Account (CEBA) loans went to ineligible businesses.
The report said “the program was not managed with due regard for value for money” and the government “did not effectively oversee the CEBA program.”
In response, two federal cabinet ministers criticized the report because it “fails to properly acknowledge that CEBA was designed and delivered during a global pandemic.”
Translation—taxpayer money can be mismanaged so long as it’s delivered quickly, and we can use an emergency as an excuse for wasteful spending. Accountability to the public is evidently an afterthought.
Of course, this is only the latest revelation of Trudeau government mismanagement during COVID. The government spent huge sums of taxpayer money on expensive programs such as the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy (CEWS) and Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB). But a substantial share of this spending was simply wasted.
For example, an earlier report in 2022 by the auditor general found that ineligible individuals received $4.6 billion in CERB payments and other benefits. Ineligible recipients included 1,522 prisoners, 391 dead people and 434 children too young to be eligible. And 51,049 employers incorrectly received $9.9 billion in wage subsidies even though they did not have a sufficient drop in revenue to be eligible for the subsidies.
The federal government also spent billions on Canadians who probably didn’t need the money. An analysis published in 2020 by the Fraser Institute estimated that $11.8 billion in CERB payments went to eligible young people (ages 15 to 24) living with their parents in households with at least $100,000 in income. And an estimated $7.0 billion in CERB payments went to spouses in families with at least $100,000 in household income.
COVID-related programs were not only poorly targeted, but many payments surpassed the level required to restore the regular income of many recipients. According to the auditor general, the lowest-income Canada Recovery Benefit (CRB) recipients could take in more money from government benefits than from working, and the program “represented a disincentive to work, which impacted some labour markets at a crucial time when the need for employees was trending upwards.”
The total costs of fiscal waste during COVID are difficult to nail down. But our 2023 study estimated that one in four dollars of federal pandemic spending was wasted. That amounts to at least $89.9 billion in total fiscal waste. For context, that’s roughly what the British Columbia government spends annually in its entire budget for health care, education, social services, infrastructure, etc.
Finally, because the Trudeau government borrowed money to finance its excessive and wasteful COVID spending, Canadians will pay an estimated $21.1 billion in debt interest costs (over a 10-year period) that are directly attributable to this fiscal waste.
The new report by the auditor general is the latest proof of mismanagement by Ottawa during COVID, to the tune of billions of dollars in waste. Unfortunately, the government continues to scoff at the bill it’s handed to taxpayers for the waste it produced.
Jake Fuss
Tegan Hill
Director, Alberta Policy, Fraser Institute
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