A YEAR AGO, CANADA WORRIED ABOUT VAPES
AS COVID-19 CLOSED IN, OUR LEADERS’ ATTENTION WAS ELSEWHERE
On March 11, 2020, the very first day that the World Health Organization officially declared COVID-19 a pandemic, a senior official within the Canadian public health establishment went on TV to tell everyone not to “overreact.”
Steven Hoffman had spent his entire career in the top echelons of public health: The UN, the WHO, Harvard University and the Canadian Institute for Health Research. He remains director of the Global Strategy Lab, a Toronto institute charged with investigating “transnational health threats.” And at a time when all but one of Canada’s 22,000 COVID-19 fatalities were still alive, Hoffman told TVO host Steve Paikin that “what we are seeing in many countries around the world is overreaction.”
He added, “I can’t find another country that has handled this outbreak better than Canada.”
Next week will mark the first anniversary of Canada being subject to major restrictions as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. After 12 months of mask mandates, lockdowns and enforced quarantine, it’s easy for Canadians to forget just how unwilling their leaders had been to put this country on a pandemic footing. At the precise moment when public health authorities needed to be bracing the nation against the largest infectious disease threat in a century, they were often at the forefront of telling Canadians the exact opposite.
In December, 2019, when the city of Wuhan, China, was noticing its first cases of a new Sars-like respiratory virus, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau penned a mandate letter to incoming Minister of Health Patty Hajdu. It made not a single mention of the word “pandemic,” “outbreak” or even “infectious disease.” Instead, Hajdu’s 22-point priority list included orders to “promote healthy eating,” “address the rapid rise in youth vaping” and earmark new money for “studies on race, diversity and gender.”
In her official 2019 report on the state of public health in Canada, Chief Public Health Officer Theresa Tam also avoided any mention of
“pandemic,” “outbreak” or “virus.” The entire report was about the issue of “stigma” in Canadian health care, and how it was driven by factors such as “cultural injustice” and “structural discrimination.”
On the eve of COVID-19, Canadian public health had become the victim of its own success. Health Canada is the direct descendant of an agency founded in 1919 as a direct response to the Spanish Flu.
Naturally, a country that had just sent 61,000 of its young men to die on European battlefields did not approach public health with kid gloves: Syphilis, polio, cholera and Third World rates of child and maternal mortality were tackled with military efficiency that, in the words of Canadian scholar John Last, occasionally earned public health an association with “heavy-handed authoritarianism.”
But after decades without so much as a typhoid outbreak, by the 21st century Health Canada had largely turned its attention toward more ethereal issues, like anti-bullying.
“We lost the ‘hard bastards’ who are the people who need to lead in times of pandemics,” said Amir Attaran, a public health researcher at the University of Ottawa. “We instead gained the world of gentle social scientists, and they are just constitutionally unfit for some of the decisions required in a crisis.”
A December Globe and Mail investigation also uncovered a winnowing of scientific expertise at the Public Health Agency, which was pulled together to guard against the arrival of the next SARS. A process that had begun under Prime Minister Stephen Harper and continued under Trudeau, saw decision-making increasingly in the hands of bureaucrats rather than scientists.
Just a few days after Canada recorded its first COVID-19 case, on Jan. 29, Tam told a House of Commons committee that the country could do well to improve the “social media literacy” of its citizens who were becoming overly panicked by the coronavirus. “As I have always said, the epidemic of fear could be more difficult to control than the epidemic itself,” she said.
A month later, at a time when COVID-19 had already spread to 60 countries and killed 3,000 people worldwide, Tam issued a March 1 tweet celebrating Zero Discrimination Day and re-upping her report warning against the health consequences of stigma. On March 5, Trudeau resisted calls to close Canada’s borders or even require self-isolation for arriving travellers, saying “there is a lot of knee-jerk reaction that isn’t keeping people safe.”
No such hesitancy was occurring in other Pacific Rim countries. Only three days after reports of a mysterious pneumonia emerged from Wuhan, South Korea began screening incoming travellers from the city. Taiwan was even faster: Enacting stringent measures on inbound Wuhan flights within hours of the first official reports of what would become COVID-19.
Last March, Canada was refusing to take similar measures, even in the face of clear evidence of what the virus could do. It had been weeks since the very public spectacle of the Diamond Princess cruise ship being quarantined off Japan as COVID-19 swept through its staterooms, infecting hundreds and killing 14.
Epidemiologists had also determined that this was a disease that disproportionately targeted the elderly. A key February report from the Chinese Centre for Disease Control found that COVID-19 killed up to onesixth of patients that were more than 80 years old, but spared basically everyone under 30. By mid-march, this was playing out in horrifying detail in Italy and Washington state.
Even this critical detail of COVID-19 preparedness would largely be ignored. Long-term care homes were denied first priority for Canada’s scarce stocks of PPE, and it was not until April that provincial health officers in Ontario and Quebec would mandate specific measures to protect senior’s homes, including ending the particularly deadly practice of allowing staff to work at multiple facilities.
Meanwhile, at virtually every turn, Canadian officialdom was quick to assure the country they could keep COVID-19 at bay.
When Toronto confirmed its third case of COVID-19 on Feb. 23, Mayor John Tory said in a statement that the infection “showed that the system is working to keep people safe.” Throughout February and March, messaging from federal agencies almost always contained the refrain that “the risk to Canada is low.”
One of the only corners of Canada that seemed to appreciate the coming storm, in fact, was the City of Richmond, B.C. As early as January, the community was seeing mass-masking and the near-disappearance of crowds from local retailers and restaurants — a phenomenon best documented by Ian Young, the Vancouver correspondent for the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post.
Not only did many of its Chinese residents have a direct memory of the 2003 SARS pandemic, but they had a healthy skepticism of messaging from the People’s Republic of China, which in early 2020 was consistently downplaying the danger of the virus. It’s almost certainly these early precautions that gave Richmond one of the country’s lowest rates of infection in the first wave of the pandemic, and likely insulated the wider province from experiencing the unbridled carnage felt in Central Canada during the spring of 2020.
Regardless, the reaction of B.C. politicians to these first glimmers of pandemic preparedness was to accuse Vancouverites of avoiding Richmond restaurants out of xenophobia. “We are fighting a virus, not people,” said B.C. Premier John Horgan in late February.
As Ian Young countered on Feb. 24, “the idea that Chinese restaurants and malls are empty because they’ve been abandoned by their regular crowds of anti-chinese racists is the whitest damn thing I’ve ever heard.”