Mandryk: Moe faces the crisis he wasn’t expecting

By Murray Mandryk
Political Columnist

While we all want COVID-19 to be over, it’s likely safe to say no in Saskatchewan wants it to be over more than Premier Scott Moe.

And, like virtually all of us, he did think it would be over now.

He clearly didn’t think he would now still be dealing with the deep impact of a global pandemic a year ago this week when daily case counts were in the low double digits and his Saskatchewan Party had just been given an overwhelming mandate for a fourth-term majority government.

He didn’t anticipate still dealing with COVID-19 nine months when the province was just come out what was thought to be the historical peak of daily case counts in the third wave. New miracle vaccines would soon rid of this plague, he and most everyone else thought.

And he surely didn’t think we would be here three months ago when we close to 70 per cent of the eligible 12-years-and-older population had receive at least a first dose and the decision was made to end all masking and gathering restrictions for the summer.

At that time, it did seem as if we were on the road to recovery — both with COVID-19 and the economy.

At that time, there were about 25,000 more jobs in Saskatchewan than a year early in 2020. The gradual removal of capacity restrictions in bars and restaurants looked like it was paying off.

And Moe bluntly made it known his government no longer had any interest in the restriction business.

“After 485 days of government telling you how to live your life, those restrictions are coming to and end,” Moe said, equating the restrictions lifted on July 11th to wartime measures.

And the numbers three months did look good.

The first week after the July 11th re-opening saw just 197 COVID-19 cases in Saskatchewan _ half the cases we now get in a single day.

Certainly, there were medical professionals warning him that 70-per-cent, first-dose would not be nearly enough to ward off the coming Delta variant in the fourth wave.

And, certainly, Moe was encouraging people to get vaccinated, even suggesting that a simple prick in the arm was hardly the equivalent of storming the beaches at Normandy.

But with a coming federal election and the seeming interest in Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party of Canada that shunned required vaccine passports or any other added restrictions, staunch conservatives like Moe really had no interest in going any further with restrictions than they already had.

In short, while Moe encourage vaccination, he had no interest in vaccine passport requirements that have since resulted in the vaccine-hesitant getting vaccinated.

“We almost certainly don’t have the ability then to demand proof of vaccination for whether or not they attend any large event here in the province,” Moe said in early July in response to why he wasn’t asking for vaccine passports at large gatherings like Roughrider games like the Manitoba government was for Winnipeg Blue Bomber games.

Unfortunately for Moe and all of us, warnings came fruition. We haven’t been below 197 cases in a single day since mid-August.

And while there were only 53 people in hospital (the lowest total since Dec. 1) today, there are now around 350 people in Saskatchewan hospitals with COVID-19 and 84 in ICUs _ so many that the government last week had to start shipping them out-of-province because we cannot no longer properly care for our sickest people.

Harping on bad COVID-19 numbers does sound like a broken record. My apologies.

But the reality is we are in a health care crisis right now because we didn’t prepare for the reality that the numbers would rise after the July 11th reopening.

Hoping this would all be over hasn’t been enough.