Saturday, April 17, 2021

You had one job Mr. Ford

And if you would have done it well you would have been able to skate to a comfortable majority government in 2022.

You will probably still win. I believe you still have the inside track but your decision making during the pandemic, particularly now that the 3rd wave has taken hold in the Province and is really taking off, is going to make you work alot harder for that victory.

If you would like to know when the wheels began to come off I would point to the Fall of 2020. The second wave was predicted and expected and many were saying it could be prevented or at least mitigated if certain actions were taken when cases began to climb. You did not take those actions and you let the 2nd wave take hold. You finally did act but in a half-assed way, which did cause the slope of the curve to turn downwards as hoped. However, that is when you made your next mistake. Instead of keeping the measures that were working in place you took the slight downward trend as a sign that you could reopen Ontario again. The result was predictable. The slope reverted to the upward angle and the new variants of concern caused that angle to increase until it was essentially a straight line going up. Now here we are with cases climbing at an extremely alarming rate and you have now been forced to take extraordinary measures to flatten that curve once again, measures that could have been prevented if you acted earlier. Incidentally, I am not saying this, doctors and scientists are saying this. And now even some of your allies in the media are not bothering to attempt to put lipstick on this particular porker.

Your attempts to shift blame for this situation to the Federal government is falling on deaf ears and they have been doing so for some time. There is one thing Canadians understand and that is how our health care system works. We all know that the provinces are the political jurisdictions that provide us with our health care. Hell, my health card has the Ontario government logo embossed on it in a most conspicuous way. Further, the message that your government has had over a million doses sitting in freezers for over a week is getting through. You have been stating that your government has been doing that because you are afraid of running out but no one is really buying that. I noticed today that you stated that Ontario had the capacity to vaccinate 300,000 people per day, which is double what you have been saying for months. That is convenient because instead of having almost a ten day supply in freezers you can now claim to have only a four day supply. The only problem Mr. Ford is people are wary of what politicians tell them. In order for them to actually believe you Ontario actually has to meet or come very close to that number. So far, the average has not reached a third of the 300,000. 

By the way, I realize the logistical challenges a mass vaccination program in Ontario presents to your government. You had almost a year to plan but still hiccups are to be expected. In that situation all we could ask of you and your government is to learn from the challenges, improve the vaccination effort and take the necessary public health measures to backstop the vaccination efforts until they are running smoothly. Unfortunately, you have done none of that.

The problems you have caused yourself are taking a toll. I can see it on your face when you have media availabilities. I am certain much of that concern is for the plight of the people of Ontario. I am not going claim that you are a sociopath who does not care about the welfare of the people of Ontario but I would also bet that a fair amount of that concern is the melting away of your support among the voters. I have always stated that if you want to see the state of politics in a given jurisdiction look at what the political parties are doing and what I see is a political party desperately grasping at anything they can think of to stem the political bleeding.

I have stated, in this space, many times that the pandemic has changed politics in this country. Any political party that does not realize that and continues to play pre-pandemic politics will only cause itself a great deal of trouble. You are one of those and I believe you are now seeing the results. There is still alot of time between now and the next election, for you to recover, but that is by no means certain and I doubt that you will recover enough in any case to make the next election anything but a crap shoot. 

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