It’s now less than one week prior to Elections Day in Canada, and if you’re still struggling to decide which party to vote for, I would suggest that you stop going through all your usual top issues such as the economy, healthcare and climate change and comparing the parties’ platforms on various policies that might matter to you. Clear the clutter both on your desk and in your head and ask yourself this question: Do you want the pandemic to drag on indefinitely so that unvaccinated individuals would continue to generate new variants that would lead to more lockdowns and overwhelmed hospitals? Do you want to prolong the pandemic to two, three or four more years after 18 months of hunkering down at home, not seeing and hugging your friends and colleagues, and not having as much fun?
If your answer is No, then there is only one party to vote for. The Liberals announced before the election call that the government would make COVID vaccines mandatory for federal public service employees this fall, as well as some workers in federally-regulated industries, including airlines and railways. Commercial air travellers and passengers on interprovincial trains and large marine vessels with overnight accommodations will also have to be vaccinated.
This announcement immediately prompted many financial institutions, municipalities, airlines, train and transit operators, sports event companies, and large corporations in the private sector to immediately put mandatory vaccination in place for its employees and customers.
The Liberals further promise on their platform to spend $1 billion to help provinces and territories bring in proof-of-vaccination credentials in their jurisdictions for nonessential businesses and public spaces. This announcement might not directly lead to Doug Ford’s about-face launch of a vaccine passport system for the most populous province in Canada, but it certainly helps making it a long overdue reality.
The Conservatives, on the other hand, would not demand that federal civil servants and travellers are vaccinated against COVID. Instead, unvaccinated public servants would need to pass a daily rapid test. Canadian travellers would also need to pass a rapid test or present a recent negative test result before boarding a plane, train, bus or ship.
Unfortunately, the only formidable enemy of the virus is a double-dose vaccination, not constant tests. Rapid tests are useful if vaccines are not readily available, but with the current ample supply and accessibility of effective COVID vaccines throughout the entire country, there’s really no excuse just to do the minimal preventive task of testing. The only offence strategy to permanently eradicate the COVID-19 virus is to have everybody vaccinated – 90 percent of the eligible population if not 100 percent.
The NDP also supports mandatory vaccinations for federal public civil servants and workers in federally-regulated industries. However, during the campaign, they naively set a deadline for a mandatory vaccine policy and domestic vaccine passports to be in place by Labour Day. Labour Day has now come and gone, and very little has changed. Did Jagmeet Singh and his team not realize that for somebody to be fully vaccinated, it will take at least two to three months given the required interval of at least 21 – 28 days between the first and second jabs and the minimum duration of two weeks after each shot for the vaccines to effectively trigger the immune system? So setting a deadline of September 6 when campaigning on August 16 was just not achievable. Promising a federal vaccine passport to be used domestically and internationally if elected is also unrealistic. Healthcare policies fall under provincial jurisdictions and even if the provinces allow the Federal Government to issue a domestic vaccine passport, transferring the provinces’ vaccination data to the Federal Government and combining the domestic vaccine passport with an international one good for out-of-Canada travel will just take far too long a time.
As The Toronto Star pointed out, getting vaccinated was never just about protecting one’s individual health, but protecting everyone else, as well. When it turned out that asking politely wasn’t enough to get the vaccination numbers to that critical level of community immunity, making it harder for people to remain unvaxxed logically follows. This is why The Liberals have doubled down on that position during the campaign. They’ve also said they’ll try to shield businesses that impose vaccine mandates on staff or customers from lawsuits.
Contrast that with the Conservatives, who insist mandatory vaccine requirements are a step too far, and Erin O’Toole says he will “respect personal health decisions.” He won’t even require all his own party’s candidates to follow him and get their shots. And his argument that requiring regular testing is an acceptable substitute for mandating vaccines fails the logic test. All testing does is to confirm whether someone has the disease; only vaccines offer any real protection.
Without mandatory vaccinations, the pandemic will never end – which means the economy will not recover because restaurants and non-essential services cannot fully reopen; schools will be shut down again; the fourth wave will be followed by innumerable waves; hospitals will continue to be overwhelmed and life-saving surgeries postponed as happening currently in Alberta and Saskatchewan; people will continue to drive their cars instead of using public transit, thereby hurting the climate even more; workers cannot return to the offices; arts and cultural activities will not be able to resume on a large scale; and nobody could safely travel very far. Under such circumstances, does it really matter what the various party platforms are proposing to improve the economy, child care, climate change, foreign policy, gun control, healthcare, housing, indigenous services, seniors policy, and job creation? None of these good ideas could ever be implemented so long as the pandemic lingers. We will constantly be in a crisis-management mode. So is it not crystal clear what’s the number-one election issue we should be focusing on now and, therefore, which choice to make on September 20?
For further information on the federal parties’ respective platforms, below is a good summary from the CBC:
https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/elections/federal/2021/party-platforms/
Happy voting!