DON’T GIVE UP ON MARKETS YET. WATSON,

Now, with the virus about to hit us full strength, is not the time to start pointing fingers about how we might have prepared differently or better. Our preparations are being completed. Our strategy is in place. We have chosen a comprehensive lockdown. The vast majority of Canadians are complying. Maybe history will decide another strategy would have been better. But we have chosen our strategy and we need to carry through with it. The landing-craft are on their way. Godspeed!

There will be time enough for hindsight. As a country, we have a comparative advantage in commissions. There are many questions a COVID-19 commission will have to consider. Were we spending the right amounts, and spending them the right ways, preparing for new diseases? Do our processes for approving drugs, vaccines and treatments need rethinking? Do our public health agencies have the right balance between hard and soft investments? Were we right to keep our borders open at COVID-19’s onset? When we did tighten up, were we right not to screen people medically as they entered, as many Asian countries did? Why were we so understocked, as we seem to have been, in supplies and equipment? Have price controls for patented medicines stunted our capacity to produce new drugs and vaccines quickly? Has it been wise to run our health care so consistently close to capacity? How do we build in overload capacity without still having people sleep in emergency-room corridors while overload beds lie empty? (If they are reserved for pandemics, do they have to stay empty until there’s a pandemic?) What’s the best way to encourage flexibility and responsiveness in health care and public health? Is government monopoly the root problem, as Gwyn Morgan suggested here earlier this week?

THERE WILL BE TIME ENOUGH FOR HINDSIGHT ... THERE ARE MANY QUESTIONS A COVID-19 COMMISSION WILL HAVE TO CONSIDER.

We all have our hunches and prior beliefs on these questions. A challenge will be to staff any such commission with strong-minded independent thinkers, rather than, as is the custom, representatives of various stakeholder groups. The U.S. managed to find such people for its 9/11 report. It’s not impossible we will find similarly straight arrows in this country.

Having just said we should keep open minds until all the facts are in, not to mention until the crisis has passed, I obviously shouldn’t prejudge the conclusions. But it seems at least possible there will be evidence of short-sightedness and bad judgment on the part of the people who have been running our health care and public health, all the way up to provincial and federal cabinets, where the salary contracts, labour practices and budget constraints that in recent decades have imposed queuing and shortages are decided.

If so, it seems a strange time to conclude that what we really need to do now is give these very same governments most of the rest of the economy to manage, as well. But that would be the effect of implementing proposals that because of our COVID-19 experience, which is not yet complete, we ditch our long-standing preference for open markets, competitive investment and relatively free enterprise and give ourselves over to a top-down industrial strategy.

Such strategy usually starts with government consulting interested parties — who are in fact precisely the wrong people to consult: you want disinterested parties to be making these choices if you make them at all. After the consultations it then decides we want more of this kind of industrial activity and less of that. It never actually says it wants less of anything, because “anything” has its constituents and lobbyists, too. But the effect of diverting capital, regulations and ministerial attention toward the currently favoured industries — stress “currently” as there are fads in these things — is to divert them away from all others. In a world of limited resources, i.e., Planet Earth, it can’t be otherwise.

The argument against top-down economic strategy is not mainly ideological. It is practical and empirical. How smart and prescient are we? Anybody out there who on New Year’s Day thought West Texas Intermediate would fall from above US$60 to below US$20 a barrel in just 80 days raise your hand! And that was just a two-month call.

How incorruptible are we? Not in the sense of cash changing hands in brown-paper bags, though that’s not unknown, but in the sense of bowing to regional and political pressures to make sure capital, research investments and jobs are spread across the country in ways that may make little economic sense but meet the needs of the political class.

How much do we like oligarchy and inequality? If you designate local champions and protect them from foreign competition, you alter your social structure. We used to have the Family Compact in this country and the Château Clique. Several of our currently well-protected oligopolies have become centres of undue influence and wealth. Do we really want this for the whole economy?

We are an open society. We should always be debating these things. And the post-COVID-19 will be different, albeit in ways we don’t yet understand. But my instinct is that, virus or no virus, we’re better off if corporations and elites have to duke it out, even at the risk of losing to powerful foreigners, than if everything is a lobbied, managed, inside job.