LILLEY: Trudeau taking reins from premiers would be disastrous

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If you are upset with one government that you think is incompetent, is the best idea to replace them with a government that has proven itself incompetent?

Based on the number of people now calling for the federal government to take power away from provincial governments, it seems some believe that.

“We need the Emergencies Act!”

“Put Justin Trudeau in charge!”

“Ford can’t handle this!”

These calls for the Trudeau government to relieve provinces of their duties – specifically the Ford government in Ontario – aren’t coming from random Twitter trolls but from doctors, lawyers and seasoned political pundits.

“We need the emergencies act. This is wartime and we are leaderless,” wrote Dr. Shady Ashamalla, a surgeon at Toronto’s Sunnybrook Hospital.

Ashamalla pleaded on Twitter for Justin Trudeau to take over.

Given Trudeau’s record, that would be a disaster.

Look, I understand the frustration with the situation we are in right now. I’ve written about my own issues with the Ford government’s response here in Ontario and offered alternative actions they should be taking. That said, Ontario is not alone in facing a third wave and acting like we would be out of this if only Doug Ford were not in charge – or we had paid sick days – amounts to nothing more than partisan rhetoric.

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Let’s look at the federal government’s response to COVID-19 and ask if we really want to put Trudeau and his cabinet in charge of running provincial systems they know nothing about.

Prior to the pandemic, the Trudeau Liberals downgraded Canada’s pandemic early warning system, an international success story that had helped identify previous outbreaks around the world. Instead of having the independent advice of doctors and specialists, the Trudeau government took the official statements of the government of China at face value.

That was quite literally a deadly mistake.

The Trudeau Liberals also failed to properly stock and maintain the National Emergency Strategic Stockpile. In place since the 1950s, the NESS was tasked with keeping adequate backup supplies of personal protective equipment after the SARS crisis.

That wasn’t deemed important to the Trudeau government, so they not only threw away millions of pieces of PPE, they didn’t replace it. When COVID came, we weren’t ready.

Of course, as we have learned from documents released to the House of Commons health committee, the government did have the chance to buy PPE — like N95 masks — at the start of the pandemic but declined. A representative from Honeywell, a major manufacturer of the sought-after masks, approached the government but they were told to fill out an online application like everyone else.

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We didn’t get the masks.

On vaccines, the Trudeau government was slow off the mark. The U.K., a country with less vaccine manufacturing capacity than Canada at the start of this, decided to ensure domestic production.

On May 16, 2020, the British Government announced a vaccine task force to make the U.K. a vaccine leader while on the same day Trudeau announced a deal to develop a vaccine with China. That deal with China fell apart three days later but it would be months before Canadians found out and months before the Trudeau Liberals sought new vaccine deals.

The single biggest contributor to Canada dealing with the third wave is Trudeau’s failure to get an adequate supply of vaccines. Every debate over who gets a vaccine and when can be traced back to the fact we don’t have an adequate supply.

So now premiers are bringing in new restrictions, including travel restrictions between provinces, while Trudeau leaves our international border open. Between April 2 and April 14, more than 100 flights have arrived in Canada with COVID-infected passengers, many from variant hot spots, and there isn’t even additional screening measures.

In every area of the COVID response that the Trudeau government is charged with, they have failed.

Anyone who thinks the answer to provincial woes, to righting Ontario, Alberta or British Columbia is to put Trudeau in charge needs to take off their rose-coloured partisan glasses and face reality.

blilley@postmedia.com