Remember when the federal government promised to plant two billion trees a couple of years back?

It was part of the Liberals鈥� ambitious plans to fight climate change. All those new trees would soak up carbon dioxide, slow the greenhouse effect, and buy us some time to wean ourselves off oil, gas, and coal.

As of last summer, guess how many trees had been planted?

It was just 29 million.

That is 1.45 per cent of 2 billion.

Canada seems to have developed a problem 鈥� we still think of ourselves as a potent nation, a place where things happen. We learn in school that we built trans-continental railroads, about our health-care system, and about how the CN Tower was the world鈥檚 tallest freestanding building (emphasis on was, since it鈥檚 been surpassed now).

But the PR of social studies textbooks aside, it鈥檚 hard not to notice that our governments don鈥檛 do鈥� much of anything, actually.

Our health-care system is taking a beating from multiple factors 鈥� COVID-19, obviously, but also a steadily aging population, an inability to train enough new nurses and doctors, a lack of resources to certify foreign-trained medical staff, and general burnout.

And our leaders note these problems, promise to fix them, and then they don鈥檛.

You can find headlines about doctor shortages going back years. It鈥檚 always basically the same story, over and over. Even if it鈥檚 a hard problem to solve, there鈥檚 been plenty of time to try multiple possible solutions, hasn鈥檛 there?

I also sat in on a press conference recently hosted by members of Canadian Senate committee that looked into the response to floods. The senators noted that, shockingly, 87 per cent of B.C. dikes are in 鈥渓ess than fair condition鈥� and that 71 per cent are expected to fail in a bad flood simply by being overtopped 鈥� in other words, they鈥檙e just not high enough.

Are we going to fix the dikes? Soon?

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I mean, we had these catastrophic floods 11 months ago, which caused more than a quarter billion dollars in damages to local agriculture, washed out bridges and highways, cut off small communities, and killed several people.

If the federal and provincial governments put their heads together, they could launch a major dike upgrade project that would fix all or most of them by this time next year.

Will they? Bet you $10 they don鈥檛, and we鈥檙e just seeing more headlines about shoddy flood protection.

I genuinely have no idea what is happening.

Some people are worried about overbearing government. I鈥檓 worried about a government that has no bear at all! Every once in a while, in the teeth of a real emergency, like the pandemic, a Canadian government will actually do things. Sometimes the wrong things! But mostly, they鈥檙e moving in the right direction.

But as soon as the alarms stop ringing, and the immediate crisis is at bay, they just stop. They don鈥檛 act at all, and that inaction keeps proving costly 鈥揵oth in terms of dollars and lives.

鈥� Matthew Claxton is a senior reporter with the 91原创 Advance Times

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