When life gives our premier lemons… Crowing about having toughest pandemic restrictions ignores catastrophic reality By: Dan Lett Posted: 7:00 PM CST Monday, Nov. 16, 2020 Last Modified: 8:27 AM CST Tuesday, Nov. 17, 2020 Updates

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 16/11/2020 (1805 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

All of us, at one time or another, have allowed ourselves a visit to the state of denial.

When faced with a bad situation, we refuse to acknowledge the magnitude of trouble and avoid any hint that we had anything to do with what is happening.

I didn’t do it. I wasn’t there. The dog ate my homework.

However, what Premier Brian Pallister did Monday at a media availability goes well beyond your garden-variety sojourn to denial.

In response to a question about whether he is doing everything he can to control what is, right now, arguably the worst COVID-19 outbreak in any province, the premier actually congratulated himself for bringing in the most stringent pandemic restrictions in the country.

But Pallister should have known that having the harshest virus-control measures is not an accomplishment worthy of applause; it is evidence Manitoba is now teetering on the edge of a public-health disaster.

Outside the “Atlantic bubble,” Pallister crowed, Manitoba is now “leading the country” in pandemic restrictions.

Pallister made this perverse claim citing a story by award-winning Globe and Mail columnist André Picard from last weekend that did, in fact, note that Manitoba currently has among the “toughest restrictions” in the country.

But Pallister should have known that having the harshest virus-control measures is not an accomplishment worthy of applause; it is evidence Manitoba is now teetering on the edge of a public-health disaster.

Bragging about having the toughest pandemic restrictions in the country is like standing over the smouldering remains of a house that just burned down and bragging about how your firefighters have trucks with the best water pressure in the country.

Pallister also seemed unaware that Picard has been, at times, extremely critical of the Manitoba government’s pandemic response. In a Nov. 2 column, Picard wrote that Manitoba went from being a “poster child for how to control the pandemic” to having “the worst outbreak in the country” and one of the highest test-positivity rates in the world.

“Manitoba is a striking example of the price that is to be paid for smugness,” he wrote.

Unfortunately for all of us who live here, being smug is what Manitoba’s premier does best. In fact, even when it’s clear that his province is currently paying a steep karmic price for all of the boasting and crowing Pallister did over the summer months, he cannot stop trying to find reasons to congratulate himself.

As case numbers increase expeditiously and the body count rises alarmingly, he has drifted further away from any suggestion that he or his government played any part in the current mess.

When he’s not overstating his province’s restrictions, he’s claiming (without any hard evidence) that Manitoba is the most generous province in terms of economic supports for businesses. And, after that, he lectures Manitobans on “not being the weak link” in the battle to control the novel coronavirus.

When Pallister is encouraging people to limit their contacts with people outside their households and to wear masks in all public places, he’s certainly not wrong. He’s just the wrong guy to be delivering the message, because he simply doesn’t seem capable of admitting that his government has miscalculated badly on both the magnitude and timing of public-health orders.

Pallister is not alone among premiers in this regard, but he certainly cannot claim to be any better than anyone else. Even those who have been unable to achieve his league-leading level of pandemic restrictions.

Increasingly, it appears that Pallister is drifting further and further away from the reality here in Manitoba. As case numbers increase expeditiously and the body count rises alarmingly, he has drifted further away from any suggestion that he or his government played any part in the current mess.

Once again Monday, Pallister used thinly veiled words to try shifting responsibility for the government response to chief public health officer Dr. Brent Roussin and other medical experts who advise the province on public health orders. He referred to “medical leaders” making the decisions, while “elected officials” merely followed that advice.

As has been noted repeatedly in this newspaper, that is a dangerous misrepresentation bordering on a lie.

As per provincial legislation, Roussin and other health-care professionals serve in an advisory capacity to Health Minister Cameron Friesen and, by implication, the premier. Friesen and Pallister legally and morally are in charge of all final decisions about when to lock things down and when to open them back up again.

They are also fully in charge of decisions about how much money to spend on testing and contact-tracing capacity, hiring additional health-care workers to staff overburdened hospitals and how and where to acquire essential PPE to protect people on the front lines.

And here’s the rub: on almost every major metric we can use to assess Manitoba’s response, we’ve come up short. Our low case numbers and deaths in the spring and early summer were clearly more a result of luck than competency. Now that we’re in a real pandemic crisis — one that registers on an international scale of severity — smugness and hubris should be set aside in favour of more decisive responses.

Pallister is quick to rage against any allegation that he or his government are to blame — even partly — for our current predicament. However, before he indulges in another grand mal bout of self-congratulation, he should close his eyes and try to visualize how that plays among the families of all those Manitobans who have died in the current outbreak.

If that image doesn’t extinguish all desire to pat himself on the back, nothing will.

dan.lett@freepress.mb.ca