We have nothing to feel smug about

Canada just as slow, chaotic as U.K. on COVID

Dominic Cummings is an odd duck. Boris Johnson’s former chief adviser is portrayed in the Spitting Image political satire puppet show as an alien from the planet Zargon, who feeds ideas into the British prime minister’s empty head. It’s funny because there is something unearthly about him.

Cummings may find future employment hard to come by, after the casual way he betrayed Johnson and his cabinet before a parliamentary committee this week. One psychologist judged him “an enemy few would want to encounter.”

But none of that detracts from the public service he performed by revealing just how slow and disorganized the U.K. government was when the pandemic hit. Cummings said failure to shut the borders and lack of testing capacity was “a disaster.”

He said that in mid-march last year, he was working on “Plan B,” scrawling on a white board with a red pen, when Helen Macnamara, the second most senior public servant in Britain, came into the prime minister’s study. She said she’d been talking to an official in the department of health who said he’d been led to believe for years that there was a pandemic plan — but it turned out there was no plan.

“I think we are absolutely f---ed. I think this country is heading for disaster. I think we are going to kill thousands of people,” she said.

Canadians watching this psycho-drama play out may view it with a sense of hubris. But it is far from clear that Canada has anything to feel smug about.

The U.K. death rate was horrendous — almost three times as high as Canada’s 67 per 100,000 of population.

But the peek we have had behind the curtains of officialdom reveals things were likely as slow and chaotic as Cummings says they were in Britain.

Auditor General Karen Hogan released a report this week that said the national emergency strategic stockpile was ill-prepared to deal with the pandemic due to “long-standing, unaddressed problems.” Media reports have already recounted the millions of masks that were tossed in the trash before the pandemic, and the shortages of personal protective equipment as the virus hit, which forced the federal government to work around a problem that had been warned about by internal audits for at least 10 years.

Hogan’s previous report earlier this spring detailed how the Public Health Agency underestimated the impact of the virus because its advanced warning system — the Global Public Health Intelligence Network — did not communicate the seriousness of the crisis effectively.

It failed to do so because its forward-looking statements looked ahead only to the next day — and all bar one of those 24-hour assessments ranked the virus’s impact as low. As late as March 12, 2020, the Public Health Agency’s pandemic response committee did not consider aggressive public health measures, such as mandatory quarantine for international travellers, to be necessary.

Governments are generally disinclined to look too closely into anything they don’t have to, lest they reveal the inevitable multitude of mistakes made by bumbling politicians. But in this case, a full public inquiry is necessary to solve more systemic problems.

An interview I conducted last month with a senior public servant, who had a bird’s-eye view of Canada’s pandemic preparedness (and spoke on condition of anonymity), suggests this country’s approach to emergency management needs a complete overhaul if we are to be better prepared next time.

Superficially, Canada is equipped to handle major incidents, he said — it has an Emergency Management Act that requires ministers to come up with emergency plans. It produced “after action reviews” following SARS and the avian flu scare in 2009. The problem is those reports were shelved and never looked at, never mind acted upon.

Departmental plans, in theory, should be coordinated across government by the Government Operations Centre, part of the department of Public Safety.

But those emergency plans were held in a filing cabinet and were of limited use when COVID hit, the source said. “Departments are equipped to manage routine activity but they only know how to play five-on-five hockey,” he said.

The federal government does have an impressive looking pandemic preparedness plan online. But its stated objective of ensuring “a coordinated and consistent public health sector approach to pandemic preparedness” fell at the first hurdle. The appearance of a novel virus with human transmission somewhere in the world was meant to trigger a series of accompanying actions, from enhanced surveillance to confirmation of vaccine arrangements with manufacturers.

But the public service source said there were no established procedures to put any plans into action. “It was like a hockey team jumping onto the ice without a coach,” he said.

Those early mistakes were compounded when it came to vaccine procurement, border policy, rapid testing, quarantine hotels and contact tracing. In each instance, Ottawa was lethargic and/or misguided.

Dominic Cummings offered an alarming insight into a state woefully unprepared for such a devastating virus.

But Canada’s officials probably had felt just as “absolutely f **** d” as Helen Macnamara, when they realized their much-vaunted pandemic plan wasn’t worth the paper it was written on.