Trudeau's mistake in trusting China has put Canada in a desperate position—the Novavax deal doesn't change that

The announcement that Novavax will be producing a vaccine in Canada is good news. Full stop.

All Canadians can be happy to see some domestic vaccine production taking place, and the more we can do to help Canadians get vaccinated and move our country out of this crisis the better.

Here’s what Trudeau said about it: “Since the beginning of the pandemic, our top priority has been the health and safety of all Canadians. We are investing in our biomanufacturing capacity so that we have the made-in-Canada vaccines and treatments we need to protect Canadians.”

That said, it is important that the Trudeau Liberals not try to pretend that this deal is a substitute for the situation Canada finds ourselves in at the present moment.

To start with, the Novavax vaccine has yet to be approved by Health Canada.

Further, there won’t be production at the facility until much later in the year, with Francois-Philippe Champagne saying "At the end of the year we will be a position to be producing vaccine."

Notably, that is after the government says everyone who wants to be vaccinated will get a vaccine, meaning the Novavax deal is more about future production for future problems, not the current pandemic.

Again, this is still a good thing. It is good for us to be more prepared, and it is good for us to have domestic production.

While the free market is the true driver of wealth, and while government should almost always stay out of the economy, there are certain things that (related to national security & health) that must be produced within our borders.

We are seeing further consequences due to our lack of production capacity, with Europe now mulling export controls.

Since the vaccines we are purchasing are made in Europe, this means our already abysmal vaccination rate (far below our peer countries), could get even worse.

And here is where we must consider the root of the situation Canada finds ourselves in.

Justin Trudeau made the decision to put his trust in China, at a moment when the world was reeling (and continues reeling), due to a virus that spread from China, and spread so widely because the Chinese Communist Party silenced whistleblowers and suppressed information at the beginning when the virus could have been stopped.

China had already repeatedly issued threatening statements against Canada at that point, and had kidnapped two innocent Canadian Citizens.

China had already shown that Canada couldn’t trust the CCP.

Yet, Trudeau (a noted admirer of China’s basic dictatorship), still decided to partner with China on a vaccine, rather than partnering with the United States, or the United Kingdom, or France, or Germany, or any other democratic nation that is an ally of Canada.

That "partnership" quickly ended, thought the government denied to tell Canadians for sometime, and in that time other countries jumped ahead of us in terms of either producing or ordering vaccines.

And, while the Liberal government talks about how "many" vaccines they’ve ordered, it increasingly looks like that was a ‘worst of both worlds’ situation, where the government waited too long and got Canada pushed further to the back of the line, and then just ordered a whole bunch of vaccines to try and look like they were proactive.

Yet, as Canadians are seeing, "ordering" vaccines and "having" vaccines are two entirely different things.

Because of Trudeau’s immensely poor judgement, Canada has been put in a desperate situation.