Tag Archives: Government

The Canadian Federal Budget

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CBC News Network is constantly interrupted by ads telling me that my government health insurance doesn’t cover enough and Kurt Browning telling me that as a homeowner 55 or older (only one of those things is true for me) I should get a reverse mortgage to help pay for things.

A federal budget is always going to be a compromise, but increasing funding for the CBC, keeping on track with moves towards universal dental care and pharmacare, improving the situation of affordable housing, and paying for various things by increasing taxes on the wealthiest 1% seem perfectly sensible to me.

I’m not completely happy with the Liberal government, and it is the NDP that has helped get certain things done. Meanwhile, Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives are being totally disingenuous about addressing affordability. Yes, the carbon tax is a challenging scenario, but please do not let them make that the only election issue. We’ll be very sick of hearing about it long before the fall of 2025.

Vaccines and Politicians

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People with certain pre-existing medical conditions are three or more times as likely as the general public to die from COVID-19 once infected. (Don’t worry: I’m not infected.) All levels of government in Canada are doing terribly at dealing with the vaccines.

I get that seniors need to be the priority after frontline health-care workers and long-term care residents. However, Pfizer and Moderna have flagrantly reneged on signed agreements for delivery schedules, and things are now being delayed by weeks or months, especially for the rest of us.

So, politicians need to do something about the unexpected changes to the vaccine roll-out. I’ve been led to believe that some of them were even trained as lawyers, but I’m now guessing they became politicians because they were actually pretty bad at it.

Follow-up: It took until April 20, 2021 to get a vaccine, which was dose 1 of AstraZeneca.