
MEXICO CITY (January 10, 2023) Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas participates in the 2023 North American Leaders’ Summit held in Mexico City, Mexico alongside U.S. President Joe Biden. They met with President Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada and others to promote a common vision for North America. (DHS photo by Sydney Phoenix)
In The Spectator, Toby Young highlights the failure of the lockdown-era politicians he calls “tyrants.” He writes:
So farewell then, Justin Trudeau, last of the lockdown tyrants. Or should that be the last of the democratically elected lockdown tyrants? After all, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin are still in office. But setting aside those authoritarians, it’s difficult to think of a single democratic leader apart from Emmanuel Macron who was in power during the pandemic who has survived — and Macron will be gone soon. Their decision to lock down their countries, with all the collateral damage that entailed, is surely a factor in their demise.
Time and time again, these highly educated technocrats have proved spectacularly inept at navigating global crises
In Trudeau’s case, inflation is the proximate cause, which rose to 8.1 percent in 2022. Canada’s furlough program played a part, as did the disruption to supply chains — not helped by Trudeau’s insistence in January 2022 that all truckers entering the country had to be fully vaccinated. Inflation is now back under control, but public expenditure hasn’t returned to pre-pandemic levels and the finance minister, Chrystia Freeland, resigned last month, partly because Canada’s fiscal deficit for 2023-24 was 50 percent higher than expected. In short, Trudeau’s decision to shut down businesses and order people to remain in their homes in 2020-21 set the country on a path to ruin. Sound familiar?
In Britain, their economic woes, themselves due to its government’s pandemic response, weren’t a major factor in Boris Johnson’s defenestration — although the lockdown policy was. But they were responsible for the failures of his two successors and ultimately doomed the party that was in charge when the crisis struck. Jacinda Ardern fell on her sword for similar reasons to Trudeau in January 2023, having more or less bankrupted New Zealand with her prolonged lockdown. Nicola Sturgeon went because her high-handed behavior during the pandemic exhausted any goodwill towards her in the Scottish National Party. And so on.
The irony is that all these leaders thought quarantining the healthy as well as the sick was the politically expedient thing to do. Better to be seen to be taking steps to protect people from an unknown virus than to risk being blamed for not doing enough at the next election. Politicians were terrified of having preventable Covid deaths hung round their necks by their opponents.
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