On Tuesday, Conservative Party leadership candidate Derek Sloan — an also-ran candidate even compared to undistinguished frontrunners Peter MacKay and Erin O’Toole, in a race that was belatedly suspended for the coronavirus pandemic — posted a video. Even in normal times, not many people would care.

“One of the issues with Justin Trudeau’s handling of this situation has been his reliance on the advice of Dr. Theresa Tam,” said Sloan, the MP for Hastings-Lennox and Addington. “We sent an email out today saying, does she work for Canada, or does she work for China?”

Sloan charged that Tam “parroted” World Health Organization advice, and that the WHO “parroted” China’s statements. The email involved stopping the UN Migration Compact, which is a non-binding agreement; defunding the WHO; stopping abortion; and revoking Canada’s commitment to the Paris Accords. You know, for Earth Day.

A lot of that is garden-variety anti-globalist conservatism, which is ironically at least partly an American import. But the smear against Tam was truly ugly stuff: tarring a Chinese Canadian as a double agent.

The alt-right chop shop at The Rebel, run by the disgraced Ezra Levant, had already pushed it. On April 16 Levant started a petition to fire Tam, and wrote, in part, “whose side is she on, Canada’s or China’s WHO?” Sloan wasn’t even original. If anything, he was late.

So of course CPC Leader Andrew Scheer would be asked to disavow the remarks. In some ways, it was a softball.

What reasonable party doesn’t discipline or at least repudiate a member of the caucus who smears the country’s leading health official during a pandemic with a dog-whistle racial taunt? At least say something like, “This party believes that despite our differences, Dr. Tam is a proud Canadian doing what she believes will keep Canadians safe. We may disagree with her decisions, but would never impugn her patriotism.”

Conservative MPs Eric Duncan and Eric Melillo tweeted something like that, as did former leadership candidate Michael Chong and a few others. It’s not hard.

That soft, low-hanging fruit was out of Scheer’s grasp. He was asked if he agreed with Sloan. He was told the comments had been called racist. It was pointed out he was still leader of the party. He was asked if he still welcomes Sloan in his caucus.

“As a rule, I don’t comment on leadership candidates, or on policy announcements or positions that leadership candidates have taken,” he said, over and over, until he ignored the last question and ended the press conference. “I’ve said that this government needs to be held accountable for the decisions it has made.”

It was moral vacuity, but it was also understandable. Sloan was merely parroting the line set by The Rebel, but it wasn’t like that line came from nowhere. Jason Kenney, the premier of Alberta, field-tested a version in a CBC Interview on April 13, when he said, “You know, this is the same Dr. Tam who was telling us that we shouldn’t close our borders to countries with high levels of infection, and who in January was repeating talking points out of the (People’s Republic of China) about no evidence of human-to-human transmission.”

The purely partisan conservative media apparatus has pushed similar lines.

Never mind that if you actually examine Dr. Tam’s decision-making, most experts say she has done a good job of following the science as it evolved. She hasn’t done everything right. Neither has the WHO, though as Dr. Andrew Morris, a Harvard-trained epidemiologist who is a professor at the University of Toronto, and the medical director of the Antimicrobial Stewardship Program at Sinai-UHN, said: “I believe that (the WHO has) largely been scapegoated. They’re not innocent in this, but they’ve been scapegoated.”

Meanwhile, there has been plenty of grandstanding on China. To be very clear: China not only deserves criticism for early obfuscation of the virus, but for its anti-democracy repression in Hong Kong, its concentration camps full of Muslim Uyghurs, and its history of human rights violations.

The two Canadians that China imprisoned over the arrest of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou — Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor — have been incarcerated for 500 days. China wants this to be its century, and that would be bad for the world.

But Canada currently gets 80 per cent of its protective personal equipment, or PPE, from China. That means that any public official with actual responsibilities to keep health-care workers alive can’t grandstand. Not now.

“They have no history of alliances,” said Guy Saint-Jacques, Canada’s ambassador to China from 2012-16, and a senior fellow at the University of Alberta’s China Institute. “This dependence of a country that can play hardball ... we have paid a high price.”

But a caucus member smears Tam with Rebel-level slime and gets no rebuke from the leader of Canada’s Conservative party, or from the two men in the lead to replace him? Sloan is a crank on the fringe, but if he isn’t repudiated by leadership, where is the fringe?

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

Often, politicians play to their audience. In 2019, EKOS polling found 69 per cent of Conservative supporters thought that regardless of total immigration levels, too many immigrants to Canada were visible minorities. That number was 53 per cent in 2015. It’s not a long drive from Kenney saying the Chinese-Canadian repeated People’s Republic of China talking points to “does she work for Canada, or does she work for China?”

Tam responded with dignity: she said, “My singular focus is to work with all of my colleagues to get this epidemic wave under control. I don’t let noise detract me from doing that, and that’s how I work.

“And I think as I took on this job, I know that the population is my patient, and this is how I look at the Canadian population … I only represent a very small aspect of the public health response in Canada, and I’m really proud that I’m part of it.”

The pandemic is a generational challenge, and beyond it, parts of Canada could be healthier. But those parts, no doctor can fix.

Read more about: