Don Newman

December 17, 2021

The bear came back out of the woods this week. Just when we thought that he was at least hibernating, and hopefully leaving for good, the COVID-19 bear turned around and came out of the woods at breakneck speed.

True, he has a new name. No longer is he named Delta. Now he goes by the name Omicron. But he is still just as vicious, just as dangerous and with the potential to create as much damage as he has before.

The Omicron variant of COVID was first identified in South Africa. Just over a week ago, we learned it had been detected in Canada. This past week, it has spread so quickly that the daily count of new cases of COVID in a number of provinces is the highest it has been since the original virus first showed up in March of 2020. And this is with 80 percent of Canadians having at least one dose of anti-COVID vaccine, and a high number of people designated as “fully vaccinated” with at least two doses.

This sudden turn of events has hit like a thunderclap. After a year of gradually reducing restrictions across the country as more people received vaccine and new case counts dropped, suddenly restrictions on activities and peoples’ behaviour are starting to be rolled out again.

This is particularly true in Quebec, where new Omicron cases are at pandemic highs. On two-hours’ notice the Quebec government decreed that the sell-out crowd of 21,000 for the Montreal Canadiens game with the Philadelphia Flyers on Thursday night would not be able to use their tickets. The game was played in an empty Bell Centre.

In Ottawa, it is not lost on the political community that this new COVID threat has emerged the same week the government was releasing an economic update and cabinet ministers finally received their mandate letters from the prime minister listing the areas each is to concentrate on going forward.

The economic update presented by Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland did acknowledge Omicron will be a problem. In fact, the government has already allocated more than $7 billion dollars to combat it. Now, just days after that announcement and after the House of Commons passed legislation offering financial assistance to workers in sectors of the economy that have been slow to recover from the pandemic, there is concern that the money being allocated won’t be enough if the new strain of the virus spreads as quickly as it has so far.

As the ministers’ new mandate letters are studied for the Trudeau government’s priorities, some are beginning to seem dated already. The government’s operating premise is that the pandemic is in its final throes. Ministers are instructed to develop and implement programs designed for a post-COVID world. As with the Economic Statement earlier in the week, there is a premise that large spending programs that were needed to support businesses and people are now either finished or soon will be, freeing up at least some of that money for other spending.

For the moment, that continues to be the operating hypotheses in Ottawa. But if some or most of the provinces have to bring back lockdowns, even for a limited time, federal spending will again have to be diverted to temporary support programs, revenues from taxes will go down and the declining deficit Freeland was lauding in the fiscal update will go back up again.

The House of Commons has risen for the Christmas break and won’t be back until January 31st. For the next month and a half everyone will be watching very closely. If the bear is still out of the woods when Parliament returns, then clearly the rest of us won’t be.

Contributing Writer and Columnist Don Newman, an Officer of the Order of Canada and lifetime member of the Parliamentary Press Gallery, is Executive Vice President of Rubicon Strategy, based in Ottawa.