Canada is Reeling Following Trudeau’s Covid-19 Measures
By: Rich Berdan
We all hope Covid measures are relegated to the pages of history. No restrictions, no masks, no vaccinations, and no mandates. Life should be back to normal, except for the distressing economy, collapsing healthcare system, schoolchildren falling forever behind, and the unknown long-term complications to never-ending boosters being injected into human bodies.
We can acknowledge the chilling fact that the vaccine mandates and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s declared Emergencies Act to remove democratic freedoms and the seizing of personal bank accounts has ongoing repercussions and denigrating trends that has now entrenched the nation into an amplified socio-political divide. Canada is no longer the haven once claimed to be the true north, strong and free.
Never letting a crisis go to waste, Trudeau set in motion the direction in Canada when speaking at a United Nations conference in 2020. “This pandemic has provided an opportunity for a reset. This is our chance to accelerate our pre-pandemic efforts, to re-imagine economic systems that actually address global challenges like extreme poverty, inequality and climate change.”
It all sounded admirable; however, Trudeau’s perfect storm is now crushing Canadians; yet there is little to no accountability or realization that the COVID measures taken by his government has cratered the nation. With a supporting news media, most of the medical profession in lockstep, and the opposition Conservative Party unable to make ground beyond its base of supporters, Trudeau avoids criticism by turning to the Biden playbook to obfuscate the economic hardships facing Canadians onto Putin’s Russian invasion into Ukraine.
Like many other countries, Canada’s fiscal and monetary response to the pandemic imparted outsized imbalances to the economy as unlimited printed money was flushed into the market with inadequate oversight. The resurgence in demand for goods and services in conjunction with constrained supply chains caused inflation to spike to multi-decade highs. This has led The Bank of Canada to embark on a rapid pace to raise interest rates to combat inflation. The pandemic policies will see the excessive tightening lead to a recession, job losses, foreclosures on homes, and businesses going bankrupt.
Many Canadians decided government handouts were more lucrative than working. Canada’s auditor general said $27.4 billion in suspicious COVID-19 benefit payments need to be investigated because the government did not manage the aid programs efficiently, and it will likely fail to recover significant amounts in overpayments. That’s in addition to $4.6 billion in confirmed government overpayments solely in double-dipping applications for the various COVID-19 aid programs. Painfully for taxpayers, the government lacks the ability to identify and recoup overpayments.
Aside from the rising costs to live where Canadians are choosing between properly eating or struggling to heat their homes; let’s compare how Canada stacks up with the spending between 2019 to 2021. According to the Fraser Institute, Canada had the second-highest increase in its gross debt-to-GDP ratio out of 33 countries covered by the IMF –swelling from 87.2% (2019) to 112.1% (2021), an increase of 24.9%.
Given the accumulation of debt, the expectation would be that Canada’s economy fared better than our peers during the pandemic. Canada had the 11th lowest real GDP growth (5.2%) in 2020 and the 12th lowest real GDP growth (4.6%) in 2021. Canada also did not outperform its peer group by achieving lower unemployment. In 2020, Canada had the third highest unemployment rate (9.58%) out of 33 industrialized countries, and the 8th highest unemployment rate (7.43%) in 2021.
While all debt is not entirely COVID-related, it had a combined affect during the pandemic where Federal gross debt (total liabilities) projections increased from 54 per cent (as a share of the economy) in 2019 to 72 per cent in 2021. During the height of the pandemic in 2020, the federal per-person debt reached a record height of $48,764 (inflation-adjusted) – that’s higher than per-person debt levels at the peak of the Second World War.
Currently in 2022, the federal government’s per-person debt level of $47,070 is more than 25 per cent higher than in 2019, the last year before the pandemic. Furthermore, and more worrisome was a study by the Fraser Institute that measured the increases in personal income taxes Canadians will have to pay to keep pace with the interest costs on federal debt over their lifetimes. The study finds that 16-year-old individuals will face an additional $29,663 in personal income tax payments over their lifetimes due to federal debt-servicing and pay an additional $10,498 in extra taxes due to federal interest costs. This is a crushing blow that the Trudeau government will leave for the younger generations to pay off.
With no proper clinical studies, we were told to take an emergency approved vaccine that prevents one from getting COVID-19. The pressure imposed was immense with society in lockstep that the pandemic was a pandemic of the unvaccinated. Canadians were inhumanely forced and coerced to inject medicine against their will or be prevented from traveling to see loved ones and lose your job. Canada had a new class of sub-humans.
It is now evident that the shot never prevented infection with more people who are vaccinated now being infected; and yet boosters are still being marketed in perpetuity. People are finally coming around and refusing to get more jabs. Many claim they have suffered minor side effects with some experiencing major complications. Numerous European countries have paused the use of vaccines in young people.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has petitioned a statewide grand jury to investigate wrongdoings linked to the COVID-19 shots and bring accountability to those who have engaged in the misconduct in the development, promotion, and distribution of vaccines purported to prevent COVID-19 infection, symptoms, and transmission. Pfizer and Moderna should be preparing to receive subpoenas.
In Ontario, Canada’s most populous province, Public Health reported 22,195 adverse events following the shot where 1,214 (5.5%) were considered serious in nature where hospitalization is required and reported deaths. Keep in mind, the reporting rate was only 60.7 per 100,000 doses administered (0.06% of all doses administered) and this is only one province of ten in the country.
Adverse effects at these levels in previous vaccines would have resulted in immediate action to halt the use of the drug. Without proper clinical studies beyond mice, one can only hope that long-term effects on a degraded immunity, bleeding, and muscle and neurological problems are nil or minimal at best. In contrast, when the US vaccinated 45 million for the swine flu in 1976, 53 people reportedly died after the shot. The US government immediately halted the vaccination. An independent Canadian inquiry into the vaccine and the government’s role will eventually be called.
Further fallout now has government-run hospitals in Canada on the verge of total collapse as the highest number of pediatric hospitalizations in the past decade have overwhelmed emergency departments. We never seen children at these levels dying across Canada from the flu and respiratory illnesses.
Canada’s Health Ministry recently gave provinces an additional $2 billion as calls grow for government to do more to help hospitals facing unprecedented staffing challenges. In a chilling indictment, The Red Cross, who is normally called into Third World Country disasters, has been beckoned to assist with the shortage of nurses.
This crisis, in part, is a culmination of terminating the employment of healthcare workers who were unwilling to be injected and the longstanding mismanagement of a socialist healthcare system that lacks the will and accountability across all levels of government and unions to change the way things are done. Consequently, the incompetence and aftermath of COVID policies has seen ER Departments close down and we will see Canadians perish from canceled surgeries and treatments.
Another factor requiring an investigation into the spike in children being hospitalized was the inhumane masking of children and closing in-person leaning at schools during the pandemic where children were not dying. Subsequently these actions may have suppressed their immune system.
There is also a noticeable decline in mental health. Could the prevalent rise of suicidal thoughts be tied to government and teacher unions measures stifling students behind a mask with minimal social interaction. The exacerbation of the lockdowns significantly contributed to the occurrence of suicidal thoughts to 4.2 per cent in 2021, which was significantly higher than 2.7 per cent in 2019 pre-pandemic, according to the findings published by Statistics Canada. What we are seeing represents government inflicted chronicity of anxiety, depression, and loneliness associated with prolonged nature of the pandemic.
It’s not getting any better. In a November 2022 Ipso Poll, 71% of Canadians interviewed fear they will not be able to adjust to rising interest rates, while 86% worry about a recession. In the same poll, 61% are concerned about affording gas and 53% now worry about feeding their family. Yet Trudeau, in his elite global posturing, continues to commit hundreds of billions of dollars on UN Climate Agendas and on a never-ending war killing thousands of civilians in Ukraine –all on the backs of struggling Canadians sliding into third world status as they frantically search empty shelves for children’s medicine.
Trudeau’s ability to create an illusion of consensus among Canadians is really an art of diversionary tactics to pit discord between the far right and left in the political arena and then elevate his position that never satisfies the extremes but one that Canadians will accept with minimal accountability. Trudeau, then resets and divisibly makes deep cuts to shave off opposition flanks by the likes of calling out climate change deniers, labeling social conservative positions as extremists, castrates the oil industry, going after firearms, and insinuates the pandemic to be a pandemic of the unvaccinated -all this and somehow, claiming to champion the mantle of democracy and freedom.
Canada’s long-standing heritage, values, and cultural identity that once unified an adorned first-world nation of stability is now conscripted into a globalist malaise of spiraling illusions, confusion, and discontent.
