Vaccine minister doesn’t need supervision
Anita Anand, the minister who holds a lot of Canada’s vaccine future in her hands, would prefer not to be undersold — or underestimated.
In the rising clamour over the offand-on COVID-19 vaccine supply over the past few weeks, one question in particular got under Anand’s skin and it revolved around whether she, as a rookie woman minister in Justin Trudeau’s cabinet, was up to the job.
In a long, freewheeling discussion with the Toronto Star’s editorial board on Tuesday, Anand talked about how she bristled when critics started asking whether Trudeau was also calling the vaccine manufacturers.
“Well, I’m, I’m in charge of this file. It is my file,” Anand said. “Why is it that people found it so important to know if the prime minister has called people I’m in touch with every day?”
Less than a year and a half ago, Anand was an academic, specializing in corporate law and governance at the University of Toronto. One federal election and one pandemic later, she is the MP for Oakville and Canada’s point person for procuring the vaccines this country so desperately wants.
It has become an emotional, even exasperating issue at the outset of 2021, with frustrating stops and starts in the supply chain. Recent polls have shown that Trudeau’s government is taking a hit for its management of the vaccine supply, which puts Anand in an especially precarious position, politically.
Early into the back-and-forth questioning with the Star on Tuesday, Anand presented herself as the cool customer in the international vaccine marketplace. “Anger is not something that is prevalent in my emotional composition,” she said.
But if one were looking for a way to crack through that cold-bargaining demeanour, one might suggest she needs male supervision on the job.
“Part of my reason for entering politics was, as a visible-minority woman, to show other girls and women that it is possible for you to enter public life and to perform at a very high level for your country,” she said.
“So when I had other women actually even asking me that question, I said to myself, ‘Why? Do male cabinet ministers get asked if the prime minister has called their stakeholders every day? Why is it so important? What were they underestimating about me?’”
Had the pandemic not come along, Anand’s initiation into public life might have been a little less high profile and intense. Her cabinet portfolio, public services and procurement, is by no means a walk in the park — the Phoenix payroll debacle plagued previous occupants of the post — but the issues are well suited to someone who is an expert at reading the fine print of contracts, as Anand is.
Canadians, at this point in the pandemic, aren’t all that interested in the fine print of vaccine contracting and most of the political debate currently comes in bold type: Do Something Now.
Or: “Get the Prime Minister on the Phone.”
Anand may well have resented the idea that she needed phone assistance because it seems to be her main task in this new political life of hers.
“I have found, over the course of the vaccine portion of procurements, that it is extremely effective to continue to pick up the phone every day yourself,” she said when asked what lessons she’s learned. “That’s exactly what I do. It’s my modus
operandi.”
Oddly enough, Anand believes her career before politics prepared her for this line of telephone work.
“I’m sure not every supplier enjoys hearing from me on such a regular basis, but I think it stems from my being a legal academic. As a legal academic, you are solely responsible for your own success in terms of what you are publishing, what you are writing, what your ideas are, how are you researching.”
In the nearly 90 minutes Anand spent with the Toronto Star on Tuesday — an extraordinary length of time — she hinted the academic in her has been taking notes and storing away insights for another day. Right now, she said, she is focused only on getting vaccines shipped to this country, but when the time comes to look back on lessons learned, Anand said she’s collected up some views on Canada’s domestic-supply capacity and, interestingly, the power of big pharma companies.
On that latter point, Anand said, “There will be a moment where I will reflect on that question more deeply and perhaps write an op-ed in your paper and we’ll have a wonderful go of it.”
This newspaper, I suspect, will happily publish that opinion piece — and no one will ask whether Anand wants her boss to write it instead.