Listing the negatives for 2020 is an easy task. Finding the positives is just a bit more difficult!
Thinking about how to change the difficult themes of last year into helpful ones, everything revolves around leadership. Canadian citizens would have benefited last year from a more accountable government. Unfortunately, parliament has allowed a friendly dictatorship to evolve where the prime minister clusters power in his office. Members of parliament just aren’t using their rights of oversight to demand better. The red team always covers for the red team and, in years past, the blue team was just as guilty.
Big and essential issues include failed border control, delayed vaccine purchase and distribution, lack of transparency in budgeting, and corrupt dealings with government contracts (the WE charity comes to mind). All of these could have been fixed by a properly functioning free parliament.
The trouble with the tight handcuffs MPs allow their parties to put on them is that it keeps the leadership always in control and the citizens in the dark.
For a better future for all of us we need to get independent, accountable thinking back into government.
Jim Wiedrick
Nelson