Budgets balance themselves and so forth:
Recovery of millions in subsidies sunk into a failed vaccine factory is not an immediate priority, says Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne. Cabinet had approved $173 million for construction of a Medicago Inc. plant in the health minister’s Québec City riding: “We need to move on.”
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The Lobbying Act permits corporations to secretly negotiate sole-sourced federal contracts without disclosing the fact, the Commons ethics committee has learned. MPs questioned the practice in cases like Baylis Medical Co., a firm run by former Liberal MP Frank Baylis that subcontracted a $237.3 million order for pandemic ventilators: “There was a lot of money.”
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A federal government department charged with doling out COVID-19 financial benefits has fired 49 of its employees who received the Canada Emergency Response Benefit while they were still employed.
The head of Employment and Social Development Canada’s integrity services told a Commons committee Thursday that it had conducted internal investigations into some COVID-19 benefit applications, namely the $2,000-per-month CERB, and discovered that some of its own staff had applied and received the payment.
(Sidebar: why does this sound familiar?)
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Last week, a report by the Council of Canadian Academies (CCA) made the brash claim that misinformation killed 2,800 Canadians during nine months of the COVID-19 pandemic. The model behind this figure assumed that belief in misinformation caused most cases of non-vaccination. It was too simplistic to be useful, but that didn’t really matter — the feds produced yet another expert-backed report that connected the word “misinformation” with death and fear that would stoke hysteria in the press.
The CCA itself is a federally registered non-profit, but works like a government entity. It’s governed by a board of directors, one-third of which is appointed by the Minister of Innovation, Science, and Economic Development. Its research agenda is largely driven by the federal government — the feds give the CCA’s board a list of research proposals, from which the board chooses five to pursue. The board also picks which experts to convene for each project.
The science department serves as the CCA’s financial backbone, giving grants that average $3 million per year (these grants form the bulk of the organization’s annual revenue). These federal grants come with substantial annual reporting to the responsible minister — financial plans, work schedules, and even policies for diversity, equity, and inclusion all must be disclosed. The CCA might not be a crown corporation, but it walks and talks like one.
The independent report used a methodology that would pin actual deaths on “misinformation” — the regulation of which is a key goal of the current government. The authors drew their model’s assumptions on Canadian misinformation beliefs from an Abacus Data poll conducted in August 2021. The poll examined the beliefs of people who were vaccine hesitant as well outright refusers. Participants selected any number of reasons from a list of 17 to explain their stances on vaccines.
Only two of the 17 reasons in the poll were categorized as misinformed beliefs by the CAA: that vaccines caused many problems that were covered up and that COVID was either a hoax or exaggerated. (Even this is a bit too broad to be useful: grand theories of hoaxes and coverups are far-fetched, but some might reasonably argue that the severity of the pandemic was exaggerated.) Of the vaccine-hesitant, 34 per cent believed that COVID was a “hoax/exaggerated” and 66 per cent believed that vaccines caused covered-up problems. Of the refusers, 73 per cent believed former, while 85 per cent believed the latter.
Assuming that misinformation caused vaccine hesitancy, the report authors modelled what COVID vaccination rates would look like if no one believed in either types of misinformation. The “no misinformation” models contained a smaller number of unvaccinated individuals, so fewer people were at risk of dying of COVID. The authors concluded that misinformation kills.
It’s not fair to assume that eliminating all misinformed beliefs would have caused that much more vaccination, though. Abacus’ data showed that the biggest reason given for remaining unvaccinated was hating being told by the government what to do. Others included those “reluctant to take any vaccines,” lack of trust in government, preference to avoid prescriptions, unease with the COVID vaccine’s speedy development and hatred of needles. Finally, apathy — less prominent during covid, but a large factor in Canada’s historical flu vaccine coverage of 30 per cent.
Applying the CAA report’s reasoning to other snippets of Abacus’ data, I could argue that having an untrustworthy government caused 2,800 deaths. With the right assumptions, any model is possible.
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The union representing more than 10,400 federal public servants who operate government buildings and services is asking for a 47-per-cent increase in total compensation over three years, a demand that is “far beyond” reasonable, according to an independent commission.
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Taxpayers lost a half million on contractors’ cancellation fees paid by federal department and agencies, records show. The figure did not include estimates from the Department of Public Works that declined to release all numbers: “This information is not systematically available.”
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A federal bank, Farm Credit Canada of Regina, paid bonuses to every senior manager through three years of pandemic, records show. The bank was one of nine federal agencies to pay 100 percent of executives a bonus year after year: “The government pays these people a lot of money.”**
Federal departments and agencies spent almost $16 million investigating their own employees, records show. Expenses for private investigators followed introduction of a new law curbing workplace harassment: “What are the details?”
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Inflation is caused by the government, not by the company that received special favours from the government, or even the regulatory boards that fix prices and restrict an open market.
Not that Mr. Thousands of Dollars For a Rocking Chair would know:
NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh also called out Loblaws on Twitter for controlling grocery store prices.
"The Loblaws price freeze shows that the grocery stores control the price you pay. Left on their own, CEOs won't help you out with the cost of living. Neither will their friends in Liberal/Conservative govts. Let's make wealthy CEOs pay what they owe. So Cdns stop paying the price," he wrote on Twitter.
For the price of a rocking chair, YOU can feed a Canadian family for a month, Jag.
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