OTTAWA -- With 2020— a year like no other—now in the rearview mirror, CTV’s Question Period convened a series of guests to dive into the political year ahead and offer their forecasts for 2021.
From high-profile partisans to a former leader and those with their finger on the pulse of the ongoing health and economic crises, here’s CTV Question Period’s panelists’ assessments of the challenges ahead, and advice to the parties and their leaders.
The vaccine rollout
“I think there's many challenges. I think the first challenge that is pretty obvious is the logistical challenge. The front-runner vaccines right now are still dual dose vaccines, so we're going to require people to be vaccinated at 21 or 28 day intervals. Being able to manage that and having some sort of a tracking system or a registry of some sort I think is a big task when we're looking at potentially millions of Canadians who are going to be getting this vaccine. The other is in clearing up all of the misconceptions and misinformation, or lack of education out there regarding vaccine efficacy and safety… It's going to be a monumental task to make sure that that lingering element of vaccine hesitancy or doubt is removed so that we can look at the prospect of herd immunity as being a tangible reality. We don't want to hold back our society from any more damage and loss than this pandemic has already wreaked upon us,” said CTV News infectious disease specialist, Dr. Abdu Sharkawy.
The economic impact and recovery
“The biggest challenge will be the economic recovery, and that will have big implications obviously for all Canadians as we return or we hope to return to what is like more of a normal life. But it will also have big implications for the government, because it will affect the pace of recovery in the deficit so the pace at which the deficit will return to more normal levels… It will be difficult for the government to sustain a level of deficit of around $400 billion for more than just a few years… We haven't seen a new fiscal anchor by this government, and that's something that I'll be looking forward [to] in this new year,” said Parliamentary Budget Officer Yves Giroux.
The federal-provincial relationship
“We haven’t had a serious discussion amongst Canadians and amongst political leaders about the kind of health care Canadians expect, and the kind of health care that we pay for. There are looming issues on the horizon that are going to be downloaded on to the health-care system. We have an aging population, there's an increase in chronic conditions… I think it's incumbent upon the federal government to really be making that argument to people with respect to the looming challenges that the health-care system is going to be facing in the next, you know, 10, 15, 20 years or so,” said political commentator and former Liberal strategist Supriya Dwivedi.
Improving COVID-19 messaging
“I think we need clear messaging quite frankly, and we need this messaging to be consistent across all levels of government… We can't have a situation where there's a discordance between the type of principle and the degree of emphasis on public health restrictions that are going on in Alberta, or B.C. versus Ontario and Quebec. We saw how quickly the situation changed from one that seemed perfectly manageable, relatively safe in Manitoba to one that was completely dire, seemingly overnight… I think the principles of public safety and public health, need to be maintained across the board. That communication strategy I think really needs to be something that's the responsibility of everyone. There needs to be consistency, we need to get engagement of public health with different marginalized communities, and utilize all public health resources and community engagement through faith and cultural institutions to help tie in a lot of people who feel a little bit disconnected, who feel disenfranchised and maybe not heard. And that I think is going to be, ultimately, the most important thing to determine if we can control this pandemic, while we're waiting for those reinforcements from the vaccine,” said CTV News infectious disease specialist Dr. Abdu Sharkawy.
The Liberal ballot question
“Sustainable prosperity will be the Liberal pitch, versus what they will describe as Conservative austerity. Mr. O'Toole is going to have a hard time getting away from that,” said CTV News commentator and former NDP leader Tom Mulcair.
The Conservatives' ability to break through
“It's really hard for an opposition party to sort of break through, and in a pandemic it's that much more difficult. The issue here is that when there's a crisis, the public seems to turn to government and the polling and data shows that the Canadian public thinks that so far, Justin Trudeau has handled the pandemic response quite well. The challenge for Erin O'Toole and other opposition party leaders is really going to have to be to find a way to take the shine away from him a little bit. If we end up in an election in the spring, and a significant number of Canadians are getting vaccinated, and the sentiment is that Justin Trudeau has managed this pandemic well, it will be very difficult for the Conservatives to break through in the next election and convince the Canadian public that they're an alternative or a good alternative,” said Conservative strategist Semhar Tekeste.
The New Democrats' not being edged out
“I think that we're looking at an election in 2021, if you look at the history of these things, the average length of a minority government in Canada is about 18 months. You have to go back almost 50 years to when Pierre Trudeau lost his majority in ’72, came roaring back in ‘74 and got his majority again, a big one. How did he do that? Well he hugged the NDP like an anaconda… What he did as he headed into the election, he said: ‘Well, we're such good friends with the NDP, why bother voting for them?’ That's one of the biggest challenges Mr. Singh is going to have and I think that Mr. Trudeau and the people around him know that history very well. They're repeating it. Mr. Singh has propped up Mr. Trudeau any number of times,” said CTV News commentator and former NDP leader Tom Mulcair.
