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Where’s Theresa Tam?

It’s kind of like that popular Where’s Waldo book series, isn’t it? Someone is supposed to be somewhere, except you can’t find them. They’re hiding.

Theresa Tam, as is very well known, is the Chief Public Health Officer of Canada. But where she has gone? That’s not so well known.

Because Tam has been ubiquitous throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, hasn’t she? Every single day, just about, she has appeared in the media, providing information.

Often, the information has been dramatically, wildly wrong. A sampling:

• At the start of the COVID-19 crisis, Tam said, “There has been no evidence to date that this illness, whatever it’s caused by, is spread easily from person to person.”
• Shortly thereafter, Tam said there existed “no reason to be overly concerned” about the spreading virus.
• In the week Canadians started to get infected, Tam said: “There is no clear evidence that this virus is spread easily from person to person. The risk to Canadians remains low.”
• Even as the virus was killing Canadians, Tam said masks had “potential negative aspects” and added that “it can sometimes make it worse.”
• Much later, Tam said that people should wear the aforementioned masks when having sex, and avoid kissing.

Seriously, she said all those things. And, yes, she’s a doctor and all that.

Now, you might wondering — and no one would blame you for doing so — if it’s possibly a good thing that Dr. Theresa Tam has gone Bermuda Triangle on us.

I mean, with the stuff she’s said, it’s probably better to get medical advice from one of the many epidemiological Nobel laureates found on Twitter, all of whom have pictures of kittens instead of their faces.

But, no. Tam has a job to do. It’s even in legislation. And, you know, the pandemic. It’s still going on. (It’s getting worse again, in fact.)

The statute that governs Tam’s shop is unimaginatively called the Public Health Agency of Canada Act. It has a couple interesting parts to it.

Here’s one, from the preamble: “The Government of Canada considers that the creation of a public health agency for Canada and the appointment of a Chief Public Health Officer will contribute to federal efforts to identify and reduce public health risk factors and to support national readiness for public health threats.”

See that? No less than the government itself says that Tam’s job is to “identify and reduce public health risk factors” and ensure there is “national readiness” for things like COVID-19.

There’s more. Section 7 of the Act says Tam is expected to “communicate with the public … for the purpose of providing information about public health issues.”

That’s Tam’s job. That’s what she was hired to do. But since the election began, Dr. Theresa Tam hasn’t really been doing her job, has she?

Oh, sure, she has a Twitter account, almost certainly maintained by a minion, in both official languages. But during the election? Press conference? Answering questions about the surge in infections?

Poof. She’s gone. Vanished.

People have noticed. The Conservative Party has written to the head of Canada’s public service, demanding an investigation — a search party, sort of — into Tam’s whereabouts.

And Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole — who now has a better shot at becoming Tam’s boss than any of us expected — says this: “Has (Justin Trudeau) silenced the public health authority from giving public updates? That’s a question for Mr. Trudeau.”

It sure is. NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh was much more direct, and said this to another newspaper: “I mean, if we needed another reminder why this was a bad decision of Justin Trudeau to call the election, there’s another example. We’re still dealing with this pandemic, still dealing with a crisis. And we’re not able to get briefings of that nature because we’re in a caretaker mode.”

Actually, we’re in Where’s Waldo mode. So what does Trudeau say?

Typically, nothing. Bureaucrats like Tam, Trudeau insists, “work every single day,” election or no election, blah blah blah.

If all of this reminds you of what Donald Trump did to Dr. Anthony Fauci, silencing America’s Chief Medical Advisor during the early days of the pandemic, you’re not alone. Lots of us have thought the same thing.

Like Trump, Trudeau doesn’t want his sunny days clouded with unhelpful talk about the rampaging Delta variant or Canadians gasping for air in ICUs. So, Tam — like Fauci — disappears. Poof.

With one critical difference. Fauci didn’t want to be silenced. Tam? We’re not so sure.

Here’s the thing, Dr. Tam: You were hired to do one job. You’re paid a quarter of a million dollars, annually, to — as the law says — “communicate with the public.” The law doesn’t give you time off for elections.

So, do your job, Dr. Tam, or quit.

You work for us, not the Liberal Party.

— Warren Kinsella was the chief of staff to a federal Liberal Minister of Health

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The stench of death.

That’s the colourful phrase some politicos use — uncharitably, but not inaccurately — to describe a campaign in its death throes.

Justin Trudeau’s campaign? It’s not in the proverbial morgue, yet. But it’s definitely lingering near the Intensive Care Unit.

The Last Rites no longer seem impossible.

How can you tell if a political party’s election campaign is dying?

Well, there’s the big things, like when a Trudeau cabinet minister calls the Taliban — who literally killed 158 Canadians — “our brothers.”

You know, the Taliban: the actual terrorist organization that subjugates, enslaves and rapes women.

Trudeau’s minister for “women and gender equality,” Maryam Monsef, called them “our brothers” yesterday.

She did that.

For the Trudeau Liberals, that represented a really, really bad day on the campaign trail.

Whatever else they wanted to announce was blown up by Monsef’s outrageous, disgusting statement.

But that’s kind of how the Trudeau campaign has gone, this time. Something has gone wrong every single day. To wit:

• Pre-election: On August 12, Theresa Tam announced Canada was in a 4th wave of the pandemic. Trudeau went ahead with the election call anyway.
https://globalnews.ca/news/8107100/fourth-wave-covid-19-canada-dr-theresa-tam/  

• August 15: Trudeau calls election just  as Kabul falls to the Taliban. Any other Prime Minister would’ve waited. Not Trudeau: he wants his majority, and to Hell with the consequences.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/world/trudeau-announces-withdrawal-of-canadian-diplomats-from-afghanistan/2021/08/15/9f2cdad5-f648-44a0-823d-db35d0276dc0_video.html 

• August 16: Trudeau and Global Affairs minister Marc Garneau refuses to say if Canada will recognize the Taliban as a government.  Wouldn’t that have been the, um, brotherly thing to do?
https://torontosun.com/opinion/columnists/lilley-otoole-wont-recognize-taliban-government-trudeau-says-lets-wait-and-see 

• August 16: The federal Public Service Union opposes Trudeau’s vaccine mandate for federal employees. Trudeau can’t say if or how it would be enforced.  Oops.
https://calgaryherald.com/opinion/columnists/corbella-trudeau-falls-into-his-own-forced-vaccination-trap-that-he-set-for-otoole 

• August 18: Maryam “Taliban Brothers” Monsef posts a Twitter thread accusing O’Toole of being anti-abortion. He isn’t.  But the Trudeau campaign won’t ever let the facts get in the way of the daily smear. Onward and downward.
https://twitter.com/MaryamMonsef/status/1428121957308981249?s=20  

• August 19: Tweets surface of a star Liberal candidate from Calgary telling Albertans to “Fit in or f— off.”  Albertans look ready to return the favour.
https://twitter.com/MariekeWalsh/status/1428526176549625856?s=20 

• August 19: Trudeau says he doesn’t think about monetary policy – just as StatsCan reports 3.7% inflation in July.
https://financialpost.com/news/election-2021/trudeau-puts-families-ahead-of-monetary-policy-on-priority-list  

• August 20: Canada evacuates 198 people from Afghanistan — while the Americans evacuate 823 on the same kind of plane. Canadian officials fret about seatbelts. Seriously.
https://twitter.com/MercedesGlobal/status/1428750432533368842?s=20  

• August 20: A photo circulates of the Liberal plane in front of “Air Elite” sign. Life imitates art, etc.
https://twitter.com/MVLibertas/status/1428645354048733185?s=20 

• August 20: Trudeau blames Afghan refugees for being unable to get to the Kabul airport. That’s right: he blames The very people he had previously promised to help.
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/rupa-subramanya-trudeau-blames-afghans-for-not-getting-to-the-airport-fast-enough https://www.youtube.com/embed/u9SBTcejXNA?embed_config={%27relatedChannels%27:%20[],%27autonav%27:true}&autoplay=0&playsinline=1&enablejsapi=1

• August 21: Trudeau does not campaign. A grateful nation rests.
https://twitter.com/AndrewLawton/status/1428883990757380100?s=20 

• August 21: Trudeau minister Mary Ng releases a letter asking O’Toole if he will prohibit his caucus from proposing legislation which bans mandatory vaccinations — when Trudeau himself said for months that he was against mandating vaccinations.
https://twitter.com/mary_ng/status/1429118478192087049?s=20  

• August 22: Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland releases a video of O’Toole  which Twitter says has been manipulated.  Like they used to do for Donald Trump.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/twitter-labels-freeland-tweet-manipulated-media-1.6149734  

• August 22: Video emerges of the aforementioned Freeland at campaign headquarters looking decidedly un-Deputy Prime Ministerial about the fictionalized Conservative healthcare plan.
https://twitter.com/JIMrichards1010/status/1429541022732886021?s=20 

• Same day, August 22: Mr. Health Care, Justin Trudeau, won’t say if he’ll match O’Toole’s healthcare transfers to the provinces.
https://twitter.com/glen_mcgregor/status/1429557179560992777?s=20  

• August 24: Trudeau threatens a clawback of Saskatchewan health transfers – despite the fact that Quebec has the very same health care approach as Saskatchewan.
https://twitter.com/punditclass/status/1430197147303956482?s=20 

• August 25: The Liberal candidate for Vancouver Granville is found to have engaged in speculative home buying – a day after a big Trudeau announcement…against speculative home buying.
https://www.citynews1130.com/2021/08/25/vancouver-liberal-flipping-homes/

Which brings us to Wednesday, the day the Trudeau government declared that the Taliban terrorist organization were “our brothers.“

Is the Trudeau campaign dead? Not yet, but based upon all available evidence, rumours of its impending death are not exaggerated.

— Warren Kinsella was chair of the federal Liberal war room in 1993 and 2000

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