Sorry, but Trudeau, and we, are not alone in this. The fact is, the scientists and those who support their work like Bill Gates have been predicting a pandemic for years, maybe even decades. After all, history is full of them. And, yet, country after country got caught with its collective pants down. The cuts that left us vulnerable predate Trudeau in many cases and the lack of any effort to prepare for the next one after SARS and H1N1 is as much on the Conservatives heads as the Liberals. Yes, he made some critical tactical errors like relying too much on the vaccine joint venture with China and not trying harder to leverage existing domestic infrastructure. But many strategic errors were made that long predate him, like letting our pharmaceutical industry languish into a bunch of generic manufacturers with no real capacity for R&D for original work. Not setting up and maintaining a national stockpile of PPE and other emergency health supplies and resources was another that was recommended after SARS (ie. long before Trudeau) and did not happen under Harper or Trudeau.
Frankly, I don't think any Canadian party would have handled this well. Our political culture is too focussed on the short term, the 4 years until the next election, to take long-range threats like the next pandemic seriously. And our societal culture is too focussed on being individualistic narcissists to make the sacrifices necessary to prepare society for the next threat, like a quarantine law with actual teeth or actually paying more in taxes to fund things like a national PPE stockpile and a national pandemic monitoring system.
In 20 or 30 years, a new pandemic virus will appear and the cycle will repeat regardless of who is power UNLESS we actually learn from this and make some serious, necessary changes, not just to our laws but to how we view things. We need to look past the next election and, indeed, past our own lifetimes.
So while I think Trudeau is a terrible PM overall and am glad I did not vote Liberal in either election, that's not really about COVID and a lot of the problems people find with his handling of it would have been made by Scheer, O'Toole, Singh, and even May. Our political culture is not really geared to handling this kind of crisis, which means we are probably screwed because the effects of climate change are going to make this look like a walk in the park, and are going to play out over decades, not 4 years. We need someone who takes the long view and we may need to accept things like longer political terms and more centralization of power to deal with it because the current short-sighted, short term outlook is not working.
/RANT
Footnote: Oh, and Gates and those others who predicted the pandemic have, of course, been rewarded with accusations of causing the pandemic for self-benefit. That right there gives me very little confidence in our society's ability to be ready for the next global catastrophe.