Experts question why Canada has no national strategy

An unsmiling Prime Minister Justin Trudeau this week urged provincial premiers to “do the right thing,” to “do more to fight” COVID-19. But some say Canada is in the COVID situation it is in because of a patchwork, “whack-a-mole” response to the pandemic and no clear national strategy to protect the country.

COVID-19’s second wave is eclipsing its first. Manitoba, facing bleak COVID-19 trends, entered a month-long shutdown Thursday that forbids people from socializing with anyone outside their households and shutters noncritical businesses. In Alberta, doctors are pleading for a “circuit breaker,” a short, sharp shutdown to avoid “catastrophic” consequences, while in Toronto, the city’s top doctor, Eileen deVilla warned Tuesday the country’s biggest metropolis is seeing “spread and risk like we’ve never seen before.”

Across Canada, there were more than 41,000 known active cases as of Wednesday morning; 1,556 people were in hospital, and 294 in intensive care. Canada reported 68 more COVID-19 related deaths Tuesday, bringing the total recorded fatalities to 10,632. Ontario and Quebec account for most cases (75 per cent) and deaths (92 per cent). Given that hospitalizations and deaths tend to lag infections by three weeks, it’s likely we have yet to see the “severe impacts” associated with the virus’s resurgence, Dr. Theresa Tam, Canada’s chief public health officer, said this week.

Now, as COVID-19 smoulders in multiple regions, several experts are calling for some long-term vision for sustained resilience against mounting case counts.

“Canada is 11 months into the deadliest peacetime crisis in a century at the highest level of infection ever. How many times has Justin Trudeau used emergency federal powers since COVID began? ZERO,” Amir Attaran, a biologist and professor of law and medicine at the University of Ottawa tweeted this week.

“We’re in this mess because our federal government has been AWOL. They have never placed any mandatory federal measures on a province, of any kind,” Attaran said in an interview with Postmedia.

The skill of politics is to mediate between competing stakeholders, Attaran said, “to cut deals, to negotiate, to bargain an outcome that’s acceptable enough to multiple stakeholders that you get reelected. But it depends on the stakeholders being thinking beings.”

Viruses don’t have brains; they don’t think. They have no agency, Attaran said. “If you try to manage them politically you will fail every single time.”

Provinces have responded with a rollercoaster of economic restrictions, a batten-down, lift, battendown again, shock-therapy approach that’s missing any long-term vision, said University of Ottawa epidemiologist Raywat Deonandan.