If You Want a Scandal, Go For One That May Have Cost Lives.

When Pierre Poilievre and Warren Kinsella are chewing on the same bone it's time to look for something more engaging.  Is "We" the best they can come up with? Besides, we've got the making of a much bigger scandal, a true "life and death" screw up.

We know that Donald Trump stupidly dismantled his predecessor's pandemic response programme. Then, when Covid-19 arrived on America's shores, Trump let his "gut instincts" steer the US government's response and several tens of thousands of Americans paid for that with their lives.

Canada's auditor general is now exploring whether Justin Trudeau did much the same thing. Did the prime minister drop Canada's guard?

Sources close to the matter said the Auditor-General is planning to probe the government’s handling of the Global Public Health Intelligence Network, or GPHIN, which was a central part of the country’s advance surveillance, early detection and risk-assessment capacity for outbreaks.

The Globe and Mail reported on Saturday that a key part of GPHIN’s function was effectively shut down last spring, amid changing government priorities that shifted analysts to other work. According to 10 years of documents obtained by The Globe, the system went silent on May 24 last year, after issuing more than 1,500 alerts over the past decade about potential outbreaks including MERS, H1N1, avian flu and Ebola.

... 

Several past and present employees told The Globe that the government had grown wary of GPHIN’s mandate in recent years, believing it was too internationally focused, given that pandemic events were rare. Analysts were given domestic projects to focus on that didn’t involve global surveillance, and the operation’s early-warning capacity soon suffered. Over the past decade, doctors inside Public Health also began to fear their messages weren’t being heard, or understood, on important topics, the employees said, which affected Canada’s readiness for the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Auditor-General is also planning to look at Canada’s risk assessments during the pandemic, which may have affected the speed and urgency of mitigation measures, such as border closings, airport shutdowns and the use of protective masks. Throughout January, February and into March, the government maintained the risk the virus posed to Canada was “Low,” even as evidence of human-to-human spread became increasingly evident around the world. Canada didn’t elevate its risk rating to “High” until March 16, nearly seven weeks after the WHO declared the global risk was high and urged countries to start preparing.

If you're hankering for a scandal, there's a dandy. A government that was unprepared, that left the country undefended, that was slow off the mark to respond. A government derelict in its most fundamental duty, its obligation to secure the lives of its people.