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Now More Than Ever: Why Canada Needs a Unity Government on COVID
It’s time to take the politics out of our pandemic policy.
In the spring of 1940, following the fall of continental Europe to Nazi aggression, Winston Churchill’s UK found itself standing all but alone in the face of Hitler’s apparently overwhelming military force.
For all its disadvantages, there was one thing the British did not need to worry about: party politics. For the better part of a decade, stretching back to the election of Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour party in 1931 the country had been ruled by unity governments — cabinets which drew in MPs from multiple parties — originally to fight the Great Depression.
This was far from unprecedented. Fifteen years earlier, Liberal leader H.H. Asquith had formed a unity government to focus Parliament on winning World War 1. A century before that, William Pitt the Younger had formed the country’s first “Ministry of All Talents” to stand up to Napoleon.
None of these governments was perfect. No government is. Debate continue to rage over the facts on the ground and strategies to respond. Prime ministers continued to take questions from the Commons. But the most acute divisions were now removed from the public sphere into the relative privacy of cabinet meetings — where the focus…
