Sorry, Pierre — Trudeau’s pandemic spending was a success

Website editor: Too bad when he cut his beard he also went back to business as usual and austerity for the working classes :(

We would do well to think back to how monumentally uncertain that moment in time felt for everyone. It will surely be tempting for some to point to the government’s shock-and-awe approach to COVID-19 and conclude it somehow failed to anticipate or prevent waste and fraud, or that it’s single-handedly responsible for the inflation we’re dealing with today. But the alternative scenario they were trying to avoid — a massive economic depression and deflationary spiral — would have been far, far worse than anything we’re facing now.

We also shouldn’t let today’s Conservatives put the words of their 2020 counterparts in the memory hole. It was the Conservative Party of Canada, after all, that led the push to increase the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy from the initial level of 10 per cent to 75 per cent that surely contributed to the $15.5 billion in potential overpayments to businesses identified by the auditor general.

As then-leader Andrew Scheer told the House of Commons in a March 2020 emergency debate, “There will be many Canadians who have never looked to government before for assistance who will now be looking to government. We must make sure that we find a way to provide that support to them, and help to keep people in their apartments and homes and able to put food on the table.”

By and large, the government did that — with, it should be said, the full support of their parliamentary colleagues in both the House of Commons and the Senate. As Conservative Senate leader Don Plett said in his own speech to the Red Chamber, “Few of us could have imagined being where we are today, but here we are. We are in this together, and together — with God’s help — we will get through it.”

That sense of togetherness has long since passed, of course. But as Conservative politicians and pundits pick through the AG’s report for ammunition, we ought to at least hold them accountable to the facts of the matter. The federal government’s spending did not, as they’ve repeatedly claimed, cause the inflationary fever that’s overtaken economies across the world. And while their COVID-19 support programs were vulnerable to waste and fraud at the margins, they did a good job of getting the money out the door quickly to the people who needed it.

We should continue to clean up any messes that arose from that sense of urgency. But we should also remember that we averted a far bigger mess in the process — and that it was the government that made that happen. That’s the overarching story of the pandemic, as much as some people will keep trying to pretend otherwise.

[Top photo: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau speaks to reporters outside Rideau Cottage on March 18, 2020. File photo by Kamara Morozuk]