Last week I wrote about what Axios calls a “Can’t-Do” attitude in the United States, and sneered that our southern neighbor barely seems able to govern itself.
You know what they say about glass houses. Tristin Hopper, in the National Post, argues that, in a number of major areas, my own country hardly seems able to get anything done right:
…we wouldn’t be the first to notice that, of late, Canada seems to be entering a bit of a slump. A 2019 Ipsos poll found that 52 per cent of Canadians believed our society was “broken.” By the end of 2020, a report by Edelman determined that nearly half of the country did not trust the government, private sector or non-profits. Our star is even fading among our friends; in 2018, Canada plummeted from its top spot on the Reputation Institute’s list of the world’s most reputable countries.
And now, thanks to a series of cock-ups on procuring COVID-19 vaccines, and tightening its borders to the virus and its infectious variants, Canada’s pandemic is set to last six months longer than virtually every other country of similar wealth and capability. We now rank around 40th place in the world in terms of percentage of the population given a single shot of the two approved vaccines.
COVID-19 has highlighted the fact that not only is Canada racking up new failures in the usual sore spots such as public health, but increasingly we can’t even seem to manage things that should be easy. We’re an energy superpower that can’t build a dam or a pipeline. A champion of reconciliation where Indigenous people are poisoned by their own drinking water. A self-proclaimed “honest broker” in world affairs that can’t get its phone calls returned by foreign leaders.
Hopper has a long list of recent Canadian screw-ups, including infrastructure projects that can’t get finished, continued failure to provide basic services to First Nations communities, and even renovating the Prime Minister’s official residence. (Also our military procurement fiascoes, though in retrospect, deciding not to buy the F-35 might not have been a bad idea.)
But it’s the vaccine fiasco that really stings. We Canadians have felt especially smug keeping our number of COVID-19 infections relatively low, while our American friends seem determined to do everything possible to infect as many people as possible as quickly as possible.
We do have anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers up here - some of them elected politicians - but pandemic conspiracy theories have been largely relegated to the fringes. By contrast, the Americans just got rid of a President in thrall to COVID misinformation, and even after being voted out of office he still has an iron grip on the country’s main right-of-center political party.
And yet…when it comes to getting its people vaccinated against COVID-19, the Americans are way ahead of us:
Going into this pandemic, it was widely assumed that Canada’s 2003 grappling with SARS would give it an upper hand. Instead, the opposite seems to have happened: Canada has failed to score even a moderate win during 11 months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our nursing homes deaths from the disease were the highest in the world. We’ve run up our pandemic debt faster than anyone. And we’ve become one of the deadliest countries for COVID-19 in the Pacific Rim.
Canada’s woes were much easier to take when the situation just across the border was consistently much worse. But now the tables have turned. While the United States is vaccinating 1.6 million people per day, delivery delays have meant that Canada has spent weeks with fewer than three per cent of its citizens having received even one dose of the vaccine. It’s impossible to know what course COVID-19 is going to take over the next 12 months, but it seems reasonable to assume that Canada’s policy failures on this file will end up having a direct toll in increased fatalities and sovereign debt.
As of February 23, 2021, the US had administered four times as many vaccine doses, per capita, as Canada:
That doesn’t mean you Americans should start feeling too smug. The United States still has many problems, including a health-care system that drives many people into bankruptcy and prevalent gun violence, that make Canadians shake their heads in disbelief.
But it does show that when you guys put your minds to it, whether it’s getting a vaccination program up and running or putting a rover on Mars, you can still make things happen. If you can do that, you can do anything if you really want to.
As for Canada, well, if the Americans can get something done, surely we can.
In recent years we’ve learned a lot of disturbing information about beloved historical figures, but the revelation that Benjamin Franklin wanted Jewish people excluded from his young country is especially shocking:
There is a great danger for the United State of America. This great danger is the Jew. Gentlemen, in every land the Jews have settled, they have depressed the moral level and lowered the degree of commercial honesty. They have remained apart and unassimilated; oppressed, they attempt to strangle the nation financially, as in the case of Portugal and Spain.
For more than seventeen hundred years they have lamented their sorrowful fate — namely, that they have been driven out of their mother land; but, gentlemen, if the civilized world today should give them back Palestine and their property, they would immediately find pressing reason for not returning there. Why? Because they are vampires and vampires cannot live on other vampires --they cannot live among themselves. They must live among Christians and others who do not belong to their race.
If they are not expelled from the United States by the Constitution within less than one hundred years, they will stream into this country in such numbers that they will rule and destroy us and change our form of Government for which we Americans shed our blood and sacrificed our life, property and personal freedom. If the Jews are not excluded within two hundred years, our children will be working in the field to feed Jews while they remain in the counting houses, gleefully rubbing their hands.
I warn you, gentlemen, if you do not exclude the Jews forever, your children and your children’s children will curse you in their graves. Their ideas are not those of Americans, even when they lived among us for ten generations. The leopard cannot change his spots. The Jews are a danger to this land, and if they are allowed to enter, they will imperil our institutions. They should be excluded by the Constitution.
This is shocking. Infuriating. Genocidal. And completely made up. Elder of Ziyon points to a 1937 New York Times report pointing out that the “Franklin Prophecy” was started by an American fascist group and enthusiastically spread by - who else? - the Nazis.
In reality, there is absolutely no evidence that Franklin ever said anything remotely like this. In fact, he contributed money toward building Philadelphia’s first synagogue. But the “Franklin Prophecy” still regularly turns up in Middle Eastern media outlets, and was even referenced by Osama bin Laden.
Like every conspiracy theory, it’s all over social media, too. Twitter has a lot more where these came from:
We like to think that things have never been worse, and that misinformation and conspiracy theories - started by political extremists, and spread by hostile foreign governments - is worse than ever before. And you can argue that the internet has indeed made it easier for them to find an audience. But it’s just a more modern version of what’s been going on for a very long time.
As far as Canadian Maoists’ odes to isolated Stalinist totalitarian states go, this 1978 number is pretty catchy.
Nicely done. Second time in a row you got me with the “and this is actually totally fake” thing. Well played.