They got it right by being aggressive, determined and unified. Canadians were timid and self-serving. All levels of government politicized our response, so we got it wrong. https://twitter.com/KarlBelanger/status/1338473566929645570

You could feel the oxygen sucked out of the federal response in the late spring when opportunistic opposition MPs and a reckless, desperate media drummed up the bogus "WE Charity scandal".

At the same time, Trump-mimicking provincial leaders in Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta literally killed their constituents rather than use the machinery of government to beat back the pandemic. Many of these supposed leaders embraced cognitive dissidence.

They told themselves and their followers that Covid was "Wuhan Flu" that only killed old people, as ICUs filled with people. They said the economy -- or, more precisely, the cost of intervention to cover the economic cost of fighting covid -- was worth more than 1000s of lives.

And, more important to them, they simply could not abandon the shibboleths that they have believed all their lives, and sold to their gullible followers: that science is just opinion, that governments should stay out of the economy, that God should decide who lives and dies.

You'll notice as more people die, the more extreme the rhetoric, as US neo-fascists try to shout down death itself. We have seen this year that they don't believe in democracy unless they win, they don't believe leadership involves public service, and that winning is everything.

The border between Canada and the United States is quite porous, and our conservative parties are really branch-plants of the GOP. They get their rhetoric from Fox, their strategists from PACs in Washington, their ideology pre-packed from America.

So, if the vaccine roll-out happens efficiently (despite the loud attempts by conservative politicians and their media stooges to undermine faith in the process), we'll likely still end up with 15,000 dead and thousands with reduced quality of life. That's the real scandal.