Spinning Our Wheels

If you thought that 2021 was going to be a year of radical change, Susan Delacourt writes that you must be disappointed:

It has become a cliché to call 2021 the “Groundhog Day” year in Canadian politics, after the 1993 movie in which Bill Murray is condemned to live the same day over and over again. Actually, though, this year also appears inspired by another, earlier Murray appearance: a 1978 “Saturday Night Live” sketch called “The Thing That Wouldn’t Leave.”

A mock trailer for a horror movie, the piece featured a house guest (John Belushi) impossible to eject, no matter how many hints were dropped by Murray and a terror-struck Jane Curtin. Last year was kind of like that, beset with exit-averse things.

The big house guest who refused to leave was, of course, COVID. But several other issues are still front and centre as we enter 2022:

Then there were the various climate catastrophes; the fires in B.C. that burned for far too long, only to be replaced later in the year by torrential rains and floods that wouldn’t stop.

Politically, 2021 was the year that Trudeau couldn’t shake off minority government and none of the opposition leaders could trade their standings for better ones. Even Donald Trump is proving difficult to eject from American politics, not to mention the memory of the Jan. 6 rampage his supporters inflicted on the Capitol building in Washington. The lines from that SNL skit come to mind again: “A creature so rude, so inconsiderate, they thought it would never leave.”

Was it only two years ago that all the political parties embraced the word “forward,” inserting it in all their slogans and talking points? Thanks to all these things that won’t leave, however, much of politics has felt stuck in neutral, or even in reverse, in 2021.

Still, there have been a few big changes. The biggest is the vaccines:

When the year first kicked off, all of the talk around Parliament Hill revolved around access and availability of vaccines. Would Canada get enough doses, quickly enough to fight back the third wave?

"What are the Liberals doing to fix their deadly screw-ups and get us vaccines?” Conservative MP Michelle Rempel asked in the Commons in January 2021, in a very typical question for her party at the time. Only a month or so earlier, Rempel had floated the possibility that Canadians wouldn’t be fully vaccinated until 2030.

Eleven months and millions of vaccinated Canadians later — not to mention one federal election as well — it’s remarkable to see how that tune has changed on the opposition benches. The party that was crying out for more vaccinations at the beginning of 2021 has morphed into the party standing up for the liberty to be unvaccinated. For many, many weeks after the election, mystery surrounded how many Conservative MPs were vaccinated and who had opted out.

Officially, Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole says he is staunchly in favour of vaccinations as the best way out of COVID. But whether O’Toole liked it or not, his own caucus is sprinkled with MPs who have been kicking up a fuss over mandatory vaccinations in Parliament and the right to keep their own vaccination status private.

Blame it on Mad Max, Delacourt writes. He's Erin O'Toole's real enemy.

That said, we can't spin our wheels forever. While Mother Nature is giving us a hard time, we need to remember that she abhors a vacuum.

Image: Edutopia