Opinion | Justin Trudeau and Doug Ford are showing America who the real populists are – Toronto Star

Canada doesnt have its own version of a presidents club, as the U.S. does for its former leaders.

But its highly unlikely that we would ever see former prime ministers getting together in TV ads to promote the COVID-19 vaccination campaign, as all living former U.S. presidents (minus Donald Trump) did this week.

The two spots, released on Thursday, feature Barack Obama, George Bush, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter making the case for COVID-19 immunization. Obama talks about how he wants to hug his mother-in-law and Bush says he dreams of attending a Texas Rangers game.

Here in Canada, current and former politicians would not be the first choice for a get-vaccinated ad campaign. Curiously, on matters of COVID-19 at least, this is a far more populist nation, more likely to put the politicians at the back of the vaccination line.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has said repeatedly that hell get his shot when the turn comes for men in his age group and demographic. Will he make a big deal of it when he does? Its risky.

While President Joe Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris turned their vaccinations into high-profile photo ops earlier this year, thats a bigger public-relations peril for a Canadian prime minister, highly likely to set off a wave of outrage about political privilege.

Premier Doug Ford pushed those buttons himself on Thursday when he accused a New Democrat MPP, Sol Mamakwa, of kind of jumping the line when he received a vaccination in a Northern Ontario community.

In my attempts on Thursday to find already-vaccinated politicians in Canada, I only turned up three prominent ones: Yukon Premier Sandy Silver, Nunavuts Joe Savikataaq and Northwest Territories Premier Caroline Cochrane. All are already twice vaccinated, in fact, but they got their shots in the regular lineups, along with the rest of their populations.

All treated the moment with very Canadian humility. Silvers Twitter post described a profound feeling of gratitude and Cochrane talked of how she booked her own shot online.

There may be more elected people in Canada who have received their shots as part of one or another priority groups. But politician is not one of those groups and I couldnt find any elected representative who had made a big deal of it.

Nor does it appear that any of the parties in Ottawa are keeping track right now of which MPs may have received shots. (That may change when parties need to know whos been vaccinated and who hasnt for purposes of restarting travel and larger meetings.)

Its not just on vaccinations either, though, that the Canadian political class is keeping things very low key and decidedly non-personal on all things COVID-19.

Conservative Leader Erin OToole mentioned only glancingly on Thursday his own brush with a positive COVID-19 test last fall. Many people might have forgotten OToole was COVID-19 positive once. The same is true of Bloc Qubcois Leader Yves Franois Blanchet.

Trudeau, similarly, didnt talk a lot about his wife Sophies early bout with COVID-19, which put the family in isolation a year ago this week. The prime minister did mention in a radio interview this week that his 72-year-old mother, Margaret, had recently received the vaccine in Montreal.

I talked to a thoughtful Liberal MP on Thursday about why Canadian politicians arent keen to speak publicly about how COVID-19 is affecting their own lives. Fittingly, he didnt want to talk on the record, for fear he would sound like a politician boasting about how humble they all are.

But he said that COVID-19 in particular has made politicians very wary of any perception that their lives mattered more than anyone going through real hardship during the pandemic. COVID has touched everyone, he said, and in that way, is a great equalizer. We can always get another prime minister; we cant get another grandma.

He added that this was a Canadian thing, not something that splits along partisan lines. It would be the same if the Conservatives were in power And I like that about Canadians.

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The former U.S. presidents did their TV ads to combat vaccine hesitancy, which is also a slightly bigger problem in that country than here, though recent polls show that Canadians and Americans are increasingly likely to get shots the more they see others getting them.

Who they see getting them is a point of contrast, though. In the U.S., seeing a former president with his sleeves rolled up might just convince someone to do the same. In Canada, wed be asking who the elder statesman shoved out of the way to get that shot. Pandemic populism, on this score, is larger in Canada than it is in the U.S.

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Opinion | Justin Trudeau and Doug Ford are showing America who the real populists are - Toronto Star