Minnetonka

You make a good point. The profit motive has no place in health care.

There were legitimate reasons for both closing borders and leaving them open that made it a balancing act for the government and they had to navigate it by the seat of their pants without a handbook. I'm not going to crucify them in hindsight if they made a wrong move here and there, especially when overall they're making an honest effort of responding to the worst catastrophe in history. One negative consequence of closing borders is that it foments suspicion and hate against immigrants among the low lifes of any population (including Canada's as we're seeing). I'm not going to judge Trump for blocking travel to the U.S. when he did, not in and of itself, but encouraging hate of China in conjunction with it just made him a repugnant piece of crap. Period. As for the WHO, I'm not expert enough on pandemics to sneeringly pass judgement on them from the lazy comfort of my ass-molded couch. I'm sure you'd agree that would be grossly insulting to a group of people dedicated to saving our lives. Including Donald Trump's, it needs to be pointed out.

This account of a plague that struck Marseille in 1620 strikes a familiar chord with the U.S. today... https://theconversation.com/medieval-europes-waves-of-plague-also-required-an-economic-action-plan-136084 We can only guess that the local leaders pointed their fingers at others instead of taking responsibility for mishandling the disease. Perhaps they even diverted attention from themselves by blaming China.

@ ironstone: First things first. Do you acknowledge that H1N1 did not originate in China? Then I'll answer.

H1N1 did not originate in China but in Mexico. The probable source of the 1918 flu pandemic was Kansas or perhaps France. The factory farms of North America and elsewhere in the world are just as likely sources of future viral pandemics and bacterial superbugs as Chinese wet markets. Billions have been spent and millions of animals have been destroyed containing outbreaks among pigs and poultry in, besides Asia, Scotland (1959), South Africa (1961), England (1963), Ontario (1966), Australia and New Jersey (1976), Ireland (1983), Virginia (2002), Texas (2004), Romania (2005), The Netherlands (2016), France, Nigeria, and Zimbabwe (2017), and Saudi Arabia this year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_influenza Pandemics are a global problem, not any one country's. Assigning blame to one in particular while doing nothing about the problem in your own backyard is pointless and dishonest.

If you're not a knee-jerk Conservative, or anything else for that matter, good for you. I only question it because of your remarks about Trudeau's spending (pre-crisis). I'm not getting any cheques either from the government, but you and I both are getting a more stable society when we come out of this crisis. For me, that's well worth all the money that's being spent and I'm willing to pay for that in the future. Nothing comes free. If Trudeau has no alternative but to cut costs as well, as he'll probably have to, I don't see why he wouldn't. He strikes me as being quite savvy economically. If you'll recall the first year of his leadership, he travelled the world signing or promoting trade deals. I got the impression that the economy was at the top of his agenda, and for good reason. If the economy is in the tank, there isn't much of anything else that can be done. I saw a news clip tonight of a Western farmer ripping into Trudeau for the agriculture aid package that was announced today. "It's just a pittance. Trudeau ignores us in the West," he had the utter gall to say, as if no one in the West is getting CERB cheques, and no Western students are getting help, no businesses getting federal aid. Two months ago he was no doubt whining about Trudeau bankrupting the country and intruding on his life. Another empty-headed dupe of Conservative propaganda. There aren't enough f****** pejoratives to throw at that kind of blind ignorance.

To repeat, "fiscal responsibility" in the minds of Conservatives implies cutting taxes and reducing spending, period, which isn't automatically a good idea. To repeat my example, Grant Devine was thought to be fiscally responsible by cutting taxes and spending, and it drove Saskatchewan close to bankruptcy. The ensuing NDP government turned out to actually be much more fiscally responsible. To also repeat, we're already hearing complaints from Conservatives about the taxes they'll have to pay for the spending on the pandemic as if they're getting nothing from it. If you want to comment on those points before going off on other tangents, I'm listening.

There are policies on both the left and right that I agree with, and both have policies I don't like. That doesn't put me on one side to the exclusion of the other. This thread asks what I don't like about Conservatives so that's what I'm posting. If it was about the Left, then I'd post about that, okay? Yet again, I said nothing of the sort. Knee-jerk complaints about taxes just because they're taxes is what I object to, like for instance, the way you blame provincial debt solely on "Leftist" overspending and ignore mismanagement by Conservative governments. For one example, Peter Lougheed's Heritage Fund in Alberta was something I could get behind because it's a fiscally responsible thing to do, but successive Conservative governments squandered it so that it's a mere shadow of what it could have been. For another, Saskatchewan suffered ten years of tax cuts and giveaways to corporations, and to voters at election time, by the Grant Devine Conservatives in the 1980s. When it was over, the province was $15 billion in debt (one and a half million dollars for each man, woman, child, and baby), and 14 Conservatives were convicted of fraud, eight of whom went to prison, and one committed suicide. To get out of that Marianas Trench of debt, the succeeding NDP government raised taxes and cut services (gasp!), and in three years the budget was balanced, as it was for the next seven years. Eventually, it even cut taxes (double gasp!!), not from blind ideology but because the province could afford to. Now tell me which government was fiscally responsible. It has nothing to do with political affiliation. So law and order, a good education, and a solid health care infrastructure, to name just a few benefits of taxes, are precious little to get in return? You need to be a little more appreciative of what you were born into. Whatever your bias tells you, don't apply it to me. I have no problem with my tax dollars being able to help out people who haven't had the same advantages I've had. In fact, I'd love to pay out a hundred thousand at tax time because that would mean I have five hundred thousand in the bank. I'm not greedy and selfish, and I appreciate what I get in return for the taxes I pay. They've been the best investment I've ever made

First, I'm not on the Left. And I didn't say anything about getting free handouts in perpetuity. What that spending demonstrates is that Canada was in a strong position fiscally to begin with, so the country was nowhere near being driven to ruin by Liberal policies. That's just a hackneyed Conservative talking point. Please don't create a fallacy to suggest I hate my children. I want my kids to grow up in a more equitable society, and instead of borrowing money so they'll have to pay for it, I'm willing to pay more taxes now to make that happen. If that idea makes you boil over, can you explain why? A Conservative friend of my wife's is already whining about the taxes she'll have to pay after all this government spending on the virus, as if she's receiving nothing in return from it, like, you know, a civil society in which to live. And get this--she's collecting the $2,000 a month CERB benefit after being laid off from her half-time job because of the virus. She didn't even need the job or the benefit. Her husband makes a shitload of money and she only took the job because she was bored, yet she has the utter gall to take the benefit and complain about taxes. Now that's a true blue Conservative.

For one thing, the Conservative Opposition has claimed that the Trudeau Liberals were driving the country to ruin with their overspending. Enter COVID-19, and we learned that Canada is fiscally among the strongest of the G7 nations and is able to spend tens of billions to fight the disease and its economic fallout. So I call bullshit on the federal Conservatives and any Conservative in the future who drags out that tired old line.

Answer to the OP: You'd have to believe that the federal, provincial and civic governments across the entire country are acting in unison with the rest of the world for global domination (a logically impossible scenario). Liberal, Conservative, NDP, and Green politicians at all levels of government would be working together as one united entity not because there's a common foe to fight, but to take over the world. Is that what you're suggesting?