Justin Trudeau, the liberal Canadian Prime Minister who always has had a sweet spot for anti-India establishments and extremists seems to now be willing to put the lives of ordinary Canadians on the line just because he does not have the ability to keep anti-India politics aside and ask India for help. According to news reports, the Canadian officials had remarked last month that the country won’t be getting any Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for the last week of January and will be getting a reduced 50 percent consignment for the month of February. With such drastic reductions, the vaccine program of Canada of vaccinating every single citizen by September has fallen way behind.
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However, when Conservative party leader Michelle Rempel Garner questioned Anita Anand, the ruling party MP, about whether “the honorable MP or PM Trudeau had called PM Narendra Modi asking Canada could get vaccines from India”, the Minister of Public Services and Procurement used all her diplomacy to dodge the question by giving a carefully vetted yet nonsense answer.
“I am in regular contact with organisations and countries around the world to secure doses of additional vaccines,” said Anita. The opposition leader prodded her further and asked “Have you phoned PM Narendra Modi?”
“I personally haven’t phoned PM Modi and I cannot speak for anybody in our government,” said Anita with a straight face who also added that she didn’t know if Trudeau had called PM Modi or not.
In a nutshell, it appears that the Canadian government was willing to compromise with the lives of Canadians just because the leader of the country and his colleagues holds some grudges against the Union government of India. Instead, the Canadian government is acquiring vaccine doses from COVAX, a vaccine sharing scheme meant to help poor nations, sparking controversy.
The USA under Donald trump and now under Joe Biden has already made clear that Canada won’t be getting any vaccines in the short term as transition officials have stated they are uncertain of the current supply of vaccines available in the US.
Canada’s vaccine program has been embroiled in controversy from the beginning. In an attempt to create a portfolio of vaccines that could be used on the public, the liberal regime of Trudeau went ahead and signed a pact with the Chinese to test the vaccine for the phase-1/2 trials. However, that partnership did not last long as Canada’s National Research Council (NRC) announced the dissolution of the partnership last year.
What motivated Canada to enter into such an unstable partnership, given the dire state of Canada-China relations and the scandalous history of China’s vaccine industry is a question that only Trudeau can answer. But his refusal to ask India for help, a country that was the fastest to complete the inoculation of 5 million people, and has been transporting its indigenously developed, reliable vaccine to countries around the globe without any fuss has left the subject experts as well as the opposition in shock.
Trudeau does not want to shed his Khalistani credentials as the survival of his government depends on the support of such Khalistani elements. Thus, if Trudeau takes the highly-improbable call of taking the help of India, then he will be on a sticky wicket with the extremists. In the quest of setting up his political equations and rivalries, Trudeau is willing to purge the Canadian population to the pandemic which has already taken the lives of over two million across the planet.