National Post (National Edition)
We need Minister of Get It Done
The tragedy of Canada, as author John Robert Colombo noted, is that it could have enjoyed British government, French culture and American know-how. Instead, it ended up with British know-how, French government and American culture.
The public's tolerance for the current round of political miscalculations and bureaucratic inertia is being tested to the limit.
There may be cases of Canada's COVID response going according to plan. But they are being drowned out by stories about over-officious government departments, led by risk-averse ministers.
Where are the people prepared to take responsibility and make things happen?
The case of Visby Medical, a Silicon Valley spinoff from Stanford University, offers just one example of bureaucratic bungling that may cost Canada dearly.
Visby has developed a single-use, disposable PCR COVID test that has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration in the U.S., under its emergency use authorization. It needs further approvals from the FDA before it is available over the counter and Visby has yet to apply for Health Canada authorization.
But this is a real company that has raised $300 million in capital and is producing portable medical diagnostic quality tests at its facility in San Jose, primarily for the U.S. Department of Defence.
Visby thinks it is on to a winner, particularly when it comes to screening air travellers before they step onboard a plane.
The company entered discussions with Canada's department of Innovation, Science and Economic Development about the prospect of opening a production facility north of the border, and was invited by a Canadian airline to provide a demonstration of its pre-flight PCR test. (Canada accepts only a negative PCR test as proof of good health on entering the country).
Visby sought a travel exemption to enable board director Ajit Singh and other company representatives to visit Canada on a regular basis, without having to enter mandatory quarantine.
It reasoned that Canada is already offering that exemption to professional sports teams, so surely it would be available for a company keen to expand into the country with a product that might make reliable rapid testing a reality.
That assessment proved too optimistic.
The office of the minister of Innovation was keen but was powerless to grant an exemption. The matter was referred to the office of the minister of health, Patty Hajdu, where a staff member promised to get an accelerated response from the Public Health Agency. A spokesperson in Hajdu's office said it was not involved in the subsequent decision.
Two days later, in mid-December, the Public Health Agency of Canada replied, saying it was of the opinion that Singh's entry to Canada was permissible but he would not be exempt from quarantine — effectively blocking his visit.
This is not an agency that has covered itself in glory of late. Blacklock's Reporter reported on Tuesday that PHAC turned down an offer by Honeywell International to devote an entire production line at its Mexican factory to supply Canada with N95 masks. “Right now, N95 masks are not a top priority,” said a PHAC official last March. In the fall, the federal government invested hundreds of millions of dollars to refit a plant owned by Honeywell rival, 3M, so it could supply N95 masks.
Back to the Visby case. After PHAC turned down Singh's visit, the minister's office at Innovation suggested appealing to the minister of Foreign Affairs, on the grounds the visit was in the national interest.
But Visby said it received no reply to repeated requests for help to the Canadian consulate in Palo Alta.
“It was like a game of ring around the rosie, with each government department pointing fingers at one another,” said David Robinson, a lawyer trying to help Visby navigate Canada's bureaucratic maze.
Robinson suggested the government should appoint a senior figure, like minister without portfolio Jim Carr, as the “minister of make-ithappen,” to revive air travel, the visitor economy and workplace production by pushing through effective rapid tests.
The inflexible nature of decision-making in some government departments is illustrated by another example. Peter Edmonson is a former director of research at Canadian tech pioneer Research in Motion, inventor of the Blackberry.
In recent years, he has been working on breathbased diagnostic tests, initially investigating the detection of early onset sepsis. When the pandemic hit, he started to apply it to COVID. The test involves putting a sensor in a face mask to provide real-time results on a phone or monitoring device.
He answered a federal government call for proposals in early April — a time when the government was not encouraging mask use and airborne transmission was being debated.
He judged his prototype to be at technology readiness level 6, or “near desired configuration.”
However, the call for proposals stipulated funding was only available for levels 7-9 — prototypes at operation level or in the pre-commercialization stage.
Edmonson said it was unrealistic to call for an “off the shelf ” solution to a problem that didn't exist just three months prior.
Was Edmonson's detection system more promising than others on offer? That's impossible to know. The department of Innovation, Science and Economic Development said it received 560 responses to the call for proposals, with 319 in the level 7-9 category. In the event, 28 contracts were awarded, with a value of $21.4 million, of which the program has spent $2.5 million so far.
But while Edmonson's diagnostic solution was rejected by the Canadian government, its worth has since been recognized by a major U.S. defence contractor, which is developing the detection system for airborne transmission in the air ducts of ships and military installations. “This is not the first time I've seen this happen,” Edmonson said. “In 1994 at RIM, we were told that only large companies, well-established in the field, could develop game-changing technology. Well guess what?”
This is not to say that either Visby's PCR test or Edmonson's detection system are the greatest things since bread came sliced. Both may prove to be complete busts.
The point is Canada will not benefit from either because its federal government departments operate in riskaverse silos.
It is no coincidence that both products have been embraced by the U.S. military, which has a mandate to sponsor high risk/high reward initiatives.
Some Canadian academics like former Liberal adviser Robert Asselin have advocated this country stimulate demand for leading-edge innovations through strategic use of public procurement, creating an equivalent to the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to help boost commercialization.
Edmonson said his experience reminded him of the phrase: “It's the second mouse that gets the cheese.”
“Government in Canada has that mentality — `never be first, walk in second because it's safer'.”
The need has never been greater for a minister who can make it happen.
REASON THEY CAN’T VACCINATE IS THEY CAN’T DO MUCH OF ANYTHING. — ROBSON
As the polar vortex tightens its grip, the temperature isn't the only thing dropping across the country. So is faith in the federal government's management of the COVID-19 vaccine rollout. According to the latest poll by Abacus Research, the number of Canadians who think the federal government has done a good to excellent job on ordering vaccines has declined by 15 per cent since early January. Meanwhile, Nanos Research found that one in two Canadians do not believe Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's promise that we'll be vaccinated by September.
Not surprisingly, this has put a chill on Liberal party fortunes, with the party now polling neck-and-neck with the Conservatives for voter intention at 32 and 31 per cent, respectively.
So, is it time for a change of government? Will the opposition smell enough blood to trigger an election this spring, possibly in the form of a budget non-confidence vote?
Conservative Leader Erin O'Toole was asked the question earlier this week, and he dismissed the idea. “I don't think (the election) should be held as we're trying to deal with the second wave of pandemic, when there's curfews not far from me at night in Quebec. We need the vaccines.” He added that the next election “should be at a time when the country is not in this acute state of crisis.”
Of course, if the vaccines fail to materialize as promised — or, worse, don't adequately protect Canadians against the new variants now circulating in the population — that acute state of crisis will persist. Canada could still be grappling with outbreaks, closures and lockdowns well into 2022.
At some point, it will be impossible for the opposition to say that things are better left in the hands of the current management. In a minority Parliament, the opposition has the duty to call the government to account when it has lost the confidence of the House. And with the growing number of screw-ups on the Liberal record, it's hard to see how the government can maintain confidence much longer. Currently, its worst failing is not even the vaccine delay. It's having not taken measures to keep out variants of the COVID-19 virus that could spike a third wave of the disease. Already three variants — the British, South African and now Brazilian — have been detected. They all arrived via international travel, an area where the federal government could have — and should have — been far more aggressive from day one.
Instead, for almost a year Ottawa did not require COVID-19 testing for persons boarding inbound flights and relied on an honour system of self-monitored home quarantine for returning travellers. And only this month has the federal government enacted limited travel bans and announced mandatory supervised quarantine, though we still don't know when the latter rule will take effect.
Paradoxically, that may be why O'Toole does not want to go to the polls right now. When asked by CTV's Power Play whether Canada's new travel restrictions went far enough or were enacted soon enough, he declined to answer, talking instead about “rapid tests to give flexibility on period of quarantine.” He went on to talk about the possibility of shorter quarantines, in some cases of five to seven days instead of 14.
It's not hard to read between the lines here. O'Toole likely doesn't want to run afoul of a subset of the Conservative base that deems such restrictions on personal liberties unacceptable, even when fighting a global pandemic.
Of course this ignores the fact that countries that have returned to a semblance of normality, such as New Zealand, Singapore, Australia and Taiwan, have all imposed mandatory hotel quarantines.
Before naysayers trot out the “island advantage” argument, they should note that other island nations such as Britain that aren't faring nearly as well are now waking up and adopting similar measures. And with a Conservative government, no less.
O'Toole may not want to talk about an election. The Liberals are understandably wary, too. But something is going to have to give. A year in, Canadians deserve the chance to pronounce themselves on their government's performance and choose a direction for the future. Crisis, Part Two, is only beginning.