Lack of personal judgment a pattern for top health official
Compared to his cerebral and milquetoast counterparts in the rest of Canada, Dr. Horacio Arruda, Quebec’s director of public health, is a flamboyant fellow.
Mostly his joke-cracking and recipe-sharing have endeared him to Quebecers. But his big personality has tripped him up several times.
He had to return a custom figurine made in his image because it contravened ethics guidelines on public officials accepting gifts. He also had to tearfully apologize for participating in a viral video by a rapper who wrote a song about him because it seemed in such poor taste while so many Quebecers were dying.
Perhaps these were innocent enough mistakes for someone unaccustomed to the intensity of the spotlight. But the latest indiscretion to be made public is the most serious yet.
It turns out Arruda was out of the country on a working vacation from Feb. 26 to March 8, on the eve of the pandemic hitting Quebec full force. While public health officials elsewhere were stockpiling personal protective equipment and plotting strategy, Arruda spoke at a conference for
African pharmacists in Morocco about marijuana legalization, among other pressing issues.
Arruda told TVA he has no regrets and that his absence didn’t hurt Quebec’s preparedness because he was in constant contact with officials back home. Nevertheless, it’s troubling that the main person in charge of marshalling Quebec’s pandemic response was gallivanting at the absolute worst possible moment.
Quebec has the most COVID -19 cases in Canada, with 53,666 as of Friday, and our death toll — 5,148 — is higher than all other provinces combined. Each time he’s been asked why, Arruda’s response has been the same: it was a matter of bad timing.
Quebec’s Spring Break happened earlier than anywhere else. Quebecers fanned out across the globe at a time when few travel restrictions were in place. A lot changed in the brief spell they were away. And holidayers ended up bringing the coronavirus back from Europe, the Caribbean, the United States and other places that weren’t considered hotspots.
Now it seems like the bad timing explanation applies to Arruda himself. It’s one thing for ordinary Quebecers to be caught off-guard by a rapidly evolving global contagion, it’s quite another for the person in charge of the fight not to have seen it coming.
Arruda’s globetrotting might help explain Quebec’s flat-footedness in the critical days between scores of voyagers returning from spring break and the government’s hasty decision to start closing schools and cancelling major events. Upon landing, Arruda met with Health Minister Danielle Mccann on Monday, March 9 and Premier François Legault shortly after to create a crisis cell. But by the time authorities started shutting down Quebec at the end of that week, travellers had been back home, milling about for days, while confusion reigned about who should quarantine.
Who knows what those lost days cost in terms of prevention?
If all this weren’t questionable enough, some of the jokes Arruda cracked at the Morocco conference are raising eyebrows. Video footage uncovered by Le Journal de Montréal features him jesting about reprimanding local public health directors because the first COVID -19 case surfaced while he was away.
This attempt at humour may seem more inappropriate in retrospect, a minor transgression easily forgiven — except that we’ve actually seen the dark side of Arruda’s temper before.
He angrily dismissed Canada’s top scientist Mona Nemer as “that lady” when she dared question his ability to ramp up coronavirus testing in Quebec. And he threw Montreal’s director of public health, Mylène Drouin, under the bus when she rightfully called him out for being absent from the city at the epicentre of COVID -19 infections in Quebec for two months.
It’s not that we should fault Arruda for his flair. He’s allowed to be flashy as long as he’s managing the crisis competently. But his personal judgment has been lacking on an alarming number of occasions.
What Quebecers need is solid science and a steady hand, not ego, insolence or needless controversy.