MORE POLICY LABS IS BETTER.

One thing I haven’t understood about some people’s reaction to the emergency is the idea that federalism gets in the way because having multiple sources of authority confuses people about what exactly they should be doing in terms of distancing or masks or heading back to school.

Yes, the education they receive in those schools is sometimes so woeful that many people may not understand that Canada is a federation and has more than one level of government, with responsibility for various things sometimes shared by these levels and sometimes divided among them. And it certainly would please neat freaks and other compulsives if there were just one set of rules, policies and guidelines and just one government with just one leader pronouncing on them. Frankly, in the current context, people wanting that sort of uniformity is scary — especially in view of the default option that the one leader we’d be depending on would be the federal prime minister, our tented intoner-in-chief.

As a factual matter, however, people who have heard that Ontario Premier Doug Ford, Quebec Premier François Legault and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau may have provided conflicting advice on this or that aspect of how to behave are probably also aware of which one is their premier and therefore in charge of public health where they live. Other facts are that the provinces do exist, most premiers have taken charge aggressively and no one is ceding anything to Ottawa. If you were remaking Canada from scratch, you likely would not choose the boundaries or number of provinces that made sense in the 1860s and ‘70s (that means you, Prince Edward Island!) but you would almost certainly still have provinces.

Beyond fact, as a matter of theory political scientists often argue that a key advantage of federalism is that provinces can serve as policy laboratories. One province can try something and if it seems to work — they say “seems to”

IT’S ACTUALLY A GOOD THING TO HAVE DIFFERENT PROVINCES TRYING DIFFERENT APPROACHES.

because of all the difficulties of inference in a real world in which time runs ever forward and an experiment can only be tried once — then other provinces can latch onto it.

In more normal times, I’m not so sure that works. There is widespread policy herding across provinces. One province will try something new in spending or social policy and within a few years most if not all the other provinces have it, too. Maybe that’s because careful consideration of evidence persuades decision-makers that the innovation’s benefits are significantly greater than its costs. But maybe it’s because lobbies mobilize and run with the essentially schoolyard — yet evidently persuasive — argument that, “They have it in Alberta (or Quebec or Nova Scotia)! Why can’t we have it, too? Waaaah!”

But the COVID-19 crisis is a unique event that’s been unfolding in real time. It’s a new disease whose characteristics, even now, are not fully understood. When or if there will be an effective treatment or vaccine no one knows. We’re still all operating very much in the dark — even if we know more than we did in March. If ever there were a time for “bold, persistent experimentation,” to use FDR’s phrase, it’s now. So it’s actually a good thing to have different provinces trying different approaches. To be sure, learning from each other is hard: there’s always lots of noise in the data, maybe even more so now. But as different provinces try different things — and different provincial health administrators take different approaches in their press conferences — we can get feedback on what at least seems to work and what doesn’t.

The adjacent article by Bill Robson and Daniel Schwanen of the C. D. Howe Institute makes this argument implicitly. Ontario’s government, they argue, would serve both Canadians and Ontarians better if it amended its currently notvery-well-mapped-out path to reopening and made it more like New York’s, France’s or Alberta’s. (They might also have mentioned Saskatchewan, which because of its low case rate was out of the gate in late April with a 35-page plan for a phased reopening that went into considerable detail, including specifying tee times 20 minutes apart for golf courses.) The existence of other jurisdictions puts competitive pressure on local officials to up their games, which is good.

That said, provinces do need to be free to depart from what other jurisdictions have done if that seems necessary. Most people who write about reopening, certainly most academics, emphasize that low-risk reopening requires largescale testing — probably even larger-scale than the one per cent of the population per week that France is aiming for. But in spite of politicians’ promises, testing has been slow to materialize. What if it continues to fall well short of our targets? Do we stay in strict lockdown until we’re finally up to the scale of testing that “the science” tells us is optimal? Or, in view of the obvious and increasing costs of lockdown, do we proceed experimentally, open up gradually, and see whether the social distancing that is now socially acceptable lets people get back to work without swamping the healthcare system?

That’s a less sophisticated approach. We in Quebec seem to be trying it. Other provinces, keep watch.