There was an interesting article published by theGlobe and Mail this week. It was about federal politics and on a topic mostly unrelated to what we’re going to talk about today, but bear with me just a moment. The Globe article is on foreign interference, the latest in a long series of articles by duo Robert Fife and Steven Chase, and they report that the federal cabinet has gone back on a pledge to make documents available to Justice Marie-Josée Hogue, who is heading the Foreign Interference Commission. Hogue is reportedly pushing back against the federal cabinet’s decision to redact some sensitive documents she’d been originally been told she’d be able to see in full (even if they could not be publicly reported on). And, contrary to government pledges, some documents are being withheld from Hogue entirely.
The Globe article struck me as relevant because it was just a few days ago, as I was jotting down some notes for what I’d like to write about in the coming weeks, that I wrote, “No COVID after-action.” Expanding on my own columnist’s shorthand there, what I specifically meant was that, four years after COVID-19 hit here, neither Canada nor Ontario has done a comprehensive after-action report on that disaster. We haven’t looked at what went well, what went poorly, and what we should do differently if, God forbid, it all happens again.
And it might! No one likes to think about this. I don’t like to think about this. I think a big reason that we haven’t had some sort of comprehensive after-action review of our pandemic performance is precisely because most people — politicians, infectious-disease experts, front-line health-care workers, the public at large — do not want to think about the pandemic.
But we have to. We just do. At least some of us do. The public at large doesn’t need to be deeply involved, but we absolutely need a whole suite of reviews. Look at the news out of the United States, where Type A H5N1 bird flu has been spreading among dairy herds and has infected at least two humans. I do not expect a disaster, but the prospect of one exists, and it would be extremely useful if we took the time, in a formal, neutral way, to look at COVID so that we could apply those lessons learned, at the cost of almost 60,000 Canadian dead. In the event that the bird flu does turn nasty this year (or something else does in the future), we’d be better prepared. This is pretty basic Government 101 stuff that we are just not doing.
I’m not the first to notice this or to comment. An article in the Toronto Star by Dr. Thomas Piggott, Peterborough’s medical officer of health and an assistant professor at McMaster University, made much the same argument last fall. Also in the Star, columnist Andrew Phillips documented his recent bout with COVID-19 and observed how little seemed to have been learned in the years since it first arrived. Rapid tests are no longer available. Neither is Paxlovid. Ontario’s supplies seem to have expired without replacement, Phillips found. He, too, raised the need for a full inquiry and noted that other organizations had done the same.
When I read Phillips’s article, I thought about how odd it is that we have had two full public inquiries in Canada in recent years: the Public Order Emergency Commission and the ongoing Foreign Interference Commission. Both provided real value to Canadians trying to understand major, dangerous events that our country experienced. Yet the existence of those commissions and their generally successful outcomes (thus far, at least, in the case of Foreign Interference) just makes it all the more absurd that we haven’t had some similar process for COVID-19.
Because that’s what it is. Absurd. I don’t want to downplay the importance of the POEC proceedings or Hogue’s ongoing work. But, all things considered, if we were to explain to some neutral and uninformed observer what the hell happened in Canada over the past five years and then explained that the country responded with full public inquiries to two of those issues, I’d bet good money that our observer would not pick COVID-19 as the issue that had gone unscrutinized.
What I would explain to our baffled observer is that the convoy crisis and foreign interference got inquiries because they couldn’t be escaped, no matter how hard the government tried. POEC happened because the Emergencies Act requires it. Hogue’s work is possible because the federal Liberals hold only a minority; after the fiasco of the Johnston Report, the opposition parties joined forces to insist on it, and the Liberals bowed to reality.
There is no similar external force compelling a comparable result here. No law compels a pandemic review. No political forces seem able or willing to align and insist that our various governments launch one. And since the likely outcome of any such process would be a whole lot of blame to go around, there isn’t an incentive for those in a position of authority to call one.
There’s a broader problem underlying all of this, too, of course, and it’s a common theme in my columns. It’s not enough to observe that Canada does not have a culture of proactive government transparency. That undersells the problem. Canada, in fact, has an active culture of government anti-transparency. The feds couldn’t escape POEC. They seem to be sandbagging Hogue and hoping no one cares enough to demand they co-operate, as they’d rather not do so. And no one in Ottawa or in the provincial capitals wants a COVID review like the one the British launched with little fuss or debate.
So we almost certainly won’t get one. And sooner or later — hopefully extremely later — when the next crisis hits, we’ll probably wonder what the hell we were doing right now. And I won’t have a good answer for that, except to shrug and say, “Hey, it’s Canada. We don’t do transparency and accountability here.”
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