What is 'accountability'?

In today's National Post, letter writer Allan Garneau asks many excellent questions about the COVID response thus far in Canada - questions such as, "Who botched the vaccine deal with China?", and "Who is accountable for the extending the date of the second vaccination?", and "Who decided that border closures were not effective or needed?" He believes that "authorities will have to be held accountable".

Letter writer Donald Cangiano suggests that "now is not the time to see who is at fault for Canada's mediocre attempts to curb the spread of COVID but accountability must be reckoned with" sometime in the future.
My question is much more simple - What does "accountability" actually look like? Let's say, for argument's sake, that Justin Trudeau admits that he personally screwed up the deal with the Chinese. Or Patty Hajdu says that she is responsible for extending the time between doses and that it causes many hospitalizations and/or deaths.

So what? Outside of (possibly but not necessarily) losing an election, how can they be held "accountable"? They would still receive lifetime pensions courtesy of you and me and they would still be able to go back to whatever life they had before politics. Big deal! Other than (possibly) a little bit of shame (I find it hard to believe that either of them know what shame even means), what "penalty or accountability" would there be, or could there be? Absolutely none!

But the dead would still be dead, the bankrupt businesses would still be bankrupt, and the trillion dollar (+) debt would still need to be paid by someone else - not by Trudeau or Hajdu or Tam. They get off unscathed. Seems to me, no matter who is to "blame", it's the citizens and taxpayers who will be responsible to mourn the dead, to clean up the mess, and to pay the tab. Same old, same old. Politicians are always long gone when the time comes to pay the piper. Nothing new there. No sense wasting even more money on an inquiry - just more good money after bad. We had inquiries after SARS and H1N1 and what good did it do us?

Lloyd Vinish