Canada’s success in fight hinges on Ontario’s battle
It will be another few days, perhaps a week, before Prime Minister Justin Trudeau shares his government’s bestand worst-case projections for the COVID-19 pandemic with Canadians.
But it is not always necessary to assemble all the pieces of a puzzle to get a sense of the big picture.
On that score, the projections made public Friday by Ontario provide insights as to the challenges that still lie ahead. They are significant. The province estimates the pandemic could cause anywhere from 3,000 to 15,000 deaths in Ontario before it has run its full course in 18 to 24 months, with as many as 1,600 potential fatalities projected over the course of this month.
Under any scenario, the peak is very much yet to come.
That matters because Canada will not reach or even see the light at the end of the tunnel without Ontario and the larger provinces leading the way.
Think of the projections coming to light — in B.C., Ontario and soon in a host of other provinces — as you would the provincial breakdown of poll numbers in a federal election.
Last October, the federal vote demonstrated that it is hard to win an election war unless one also wins the big battles in central Canada.
The same is as true when it comes to beating back the pandemic.
When all is said and done, the federal timeline for a return to some degree of normalcy is totally dependent on the yet uncertain outcome of crucial provincial battles.
Based on Ontario’s model, the one being fought in Canada’s most populous province remains a steeply uphill one. It is some significant way to turning the corner on the crisis.
The projections the provinces and Ottawa operate under are no more cast in stone than midcampaign election polling numbers.
By the admission of the Ontario officials who presented them on Friday, the assumptions underlying them remain fairly crude. They will be refined over time. But they do help highlight where serious progress is needed for the national outlook to take a turn for the better.
They also provide the public with essential context for the government-ordered restrictions that have grounded most Canadians at or close to home for the past three weeks.
There is nothing in Friday’s projections that suggests those restrictions could be lifted anytime soon.
All of that being said, any projection or model is only as good as the data that has been fed into it.
That is particularly true when it comes to the production of a reliable federal model. On that score, Trudeau’s government is dependent on what comes its way from the provinces.
As one provincial news conference follows another, Canadians are now being reminded daily that this country does not have a national health-care system, in the central command sense of the word.
What it has is independent systems operated by provincial and territorial governments.
But before lamenting a state of affairs that stands to invite a patchwork of responses along with some uneven reporting, consider the following: A topdown approach might produce more uniformly reliable data in real time, but it does not necessarily follow that it would lead to more efficient outcomes on the ground.
Under the current system, each province has a health team totally devoted to managing the pandemic in a jurisdiction it knows inside out.
Making the health system battle-ready has been job one for the premiers over the past month. They have often led each other by example.
At the same time, the current structure frees the federal government to attend to the myriad of related challenges this crisis has thrown its way as well as to direct its resources to potential hot spots.
As long as Canada’s first ministers continue to sing from the same hymn book, as they have over the past few weeks, having a multiplicity of hands on deck and a wide range of expertise at work should be an asset, not a liability.
It could also act as a deterrent to tunnel vision.
A final word on the politics of the provinces moving ahead of the federal government in sharing their models with the public.
At this juncture, each of the provincial parts of the Canadian pandemic equation matters more than their federal sum.