PANDEMIC: ONE YEAR LATER
Ottawa mounted a massive response to the COVID-19 crisis and the economic damage it has caused. Was it good enough?
OTTAWA—It was Easter Sunday morning and Anita Anand was in her office, talking about nasal swabs.
The World Health Organization (WHO) had declared COVID-19 a pandemic one month earlier. Thousands of people were already dead. Millions of Canadians were out of work from lockdowns that shook the global economy. And Ottawa, which was blitzing to create major new support programs, saw the country running out of swabs needed to test and contain the deadly coronavirus.
For Anand, it was an early crisis within an ongoing national emergency that was — and remains — all-consuming.
“Easter weekend happened to be my daughter’s birthday. And I basically was in the four walls of this office, because we heard from the provinces, they were running out of swabs,” said Anand, who is responsible for government purchases as minister of public services and procurement.
“I’m calling the head of the National Microbiology Lab, apologizing to him for interrupting Easter Sunday and talking to him about … the different types of heads on swabs, what we have and what we need, and what are some potential suppliers,” she said. “I was all hands on deck all the time. And I still am.”
One year into the COVID-19 pandemic, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s minority government has quarterbacked an unprecedented campaign against the threat of the virus and the economic damage it has inflicted. Ottawa has spent hundreds of billions of dollars to save businesses and provide people with enough money to eat and pay the bills. It co-ordinated a massive drive to buy almost 3 billion items of personal protective equipment and medical gear and is now trying to supply the entire country with vaccines amid a global race for shots that didn’t exist mere months ago.
But for all the hard work that Anand and others inside the government describe, critics question whether the federal response has been enough. Countries like the United States have seen more deaths, but the virus has killed more than 22,000 Canadians so far — with an especially grievous impact on people in long-termcare facilities. Women, youth and racialized people have been hit especially hard, with hundreds of thousands fewer people working at the start of 2021 than before the pandemic.
And the end could still be beyond the horizon, with more contagious and deadly variants of the virus spreading across Canada as dozens of other countries vaccinate their populations faster than we do.
How well did Ottawa help contain the spread of COVID-19, use its massive spending power and purchase the gear and vaccines to protect Canadians? Those questions contain the burden of life-and-death decisions the government has made over the past year; the answers could determine its political fate.
“People have tried really, really hard to do the right thing — myself included, you know? These are very, very difficult decisions that leaders are being presented with every single day,” said Patty Hajdu, the federal health minister.
“Every decision, I agonize over, because I know that there are consequences for groups of Canadians… That’s why I think that there are no easy answers.”
i. “The big one”
Years before the global pandemic, Hajdu worked on drug strategy in the Thunder Bay District Health Unit. She recalls people there paid attention when contagious diseases flared up in far-flung places. There was a fair bit of doomsaying about “the big one.”
That’s where Hajdu’s mind went on Jan. 10, 2020, when she met with some of the federal government’s top experts to talk about this new “pneumonia” from the Chinese metropolis of Wuhan.
There wasn’t much solid information at the time. That same day, the WHO reported early evidence suggested “no significant” person-to-person transmission of the virus.
But Hajdu couldn’t help thinking: “Is this the one?”
The weeks to come were coloured by a “growing sense of dread,” she said. Images of health workers in haz-mat suits, reports of Italian doctors without enough ventilators deciding who can live or die, and stricken cruise ships bobbing at sea in search of a port to accept them — all of it evidence that this was, indeed, “the one.”
For critics, it was in those early weeks — even before the WHO declared a global pandemic on March 11 — when the federal government response started to falter.
Michelle Rempel Garner, the Conservative health critic, argues the government was too trusting of advice from the international health body and should have restricted travel and told people to wear masks sooner than it did.
While Ottawa had imposed screening measures on incoming flights from China, it did not bar foreign tourists until March 16 — weeks after the U.S. and Australia had shut their borders to visitors from China. The federal government also questioned the necessity of nonmedical masks in public, and Canada’s chief public health officer Theresa Tam did not recognize they can help control the spread of COVID-19 until early April.
The government’s explanation for this has always been that it was following the evolving scientific evidence of a new disease. But Rempel Garner dismisses that, stating Ottawa had a “moral obligation” to err on the side of caution.
“I don’t think they took it seriously,” she told the Star in a recent interview.
“The government just could not tell the public what was going on. And I think that’s because they didn’t have a handle on it. And I think we’ll be measuring the implications of that for a long time to come.”
Srinivas Murthy is an infectious diseases expert and doctor who works in the intensive care unit at the B.C. Children’s Hospital. He agreed that shifting evidence about the novel coronavirus has made the response more complicated but said that is simply the reality of science.
“I wish science was easy and we were able to have very blackand-white answers for everything,” Murthy said. “Every decision that’s made, and all of these policies come with nuance, and come with interpretation and so on, and different people can look at the same data and come out with different interpretations of that data.”
What’s more straightforward, in Murthy’s mind, is that Canada was not prepared for the COVID-19 pandemic. For him, the big mistakes predate the crisis.
Canada did not have testing capabilities and a workforce trained and ready to trace contacts, he said. The government also shuttered its global pandemic early warning centre in 2019. And — as the government’s failed attempts to get leading vaccine manufacturers to make doses in Canada shows — the country was hampered by limited biomedical capacity.
“This has been decades in the making, and you would think that Canada — having written reports after SARS — would have been better prepared,” Murthy said.
Another significant consideration is the unavoidable fact of Canada’s political federation, which separates powers between provincial governments and Ottawa. In the early days of the pandemic, Trudeau was routinely questioned about whether he would invoke the Emergencies Act so Ottawa could co-ordinate a more aggressive national response.
The government chose not to after all premiers told Ottawa it wasn’t necessary, Hajdu said, adding that provinces were best prepared to tackle the immediate health crisis because “they are responsible for delivering health care, their systems are deeply integrated across the communities. They do have the local expertise.”
But Hajdu acknowledged provinces needed a “massive amount of support” from Ottawa. This has included spending on COVID-19 research, use of the national microbiology lab, provision of supplies and equipment for testing, she said.
Yet as each province managed its own local pandemic with federal support, Ontario and Quebec experienced catastrophe in their long-term-care facilities that saw specialists from the Canadian Armed Forces sent in as thousands of those most vulnerable to the virus died.
Rempel Garner said the situation makes it clear that the federal government could have done more, even if it did not use special powers under the Emergencies Act.
“I’m going out on a limb by saying all of that because it’s politically uncomfortable for a variety of reasons. But we have to talk about that as we go forward,” she said.
“I don’t think any other jurisdiction in the world had quite the same set of problems that we did for that reason.”
ii. “Whatever it takes”
Mollie Jacques got into the food business because of SARS. Then she lost her job because of COVID-19.
The Toronto chef was abruptly unemployed last year when the restaurant where she worked near Yonge and St. Clair closed permanently during the first lockdown in March. It was an unwelcome bit of déjà vu, since the impact of the 2003 SARS scare on the city’s film sector pushed her out of her job as a stage manager.
“I looked at SARS and went, ‘Wow, my industry got devastated … I need to go back into an industry that won’t be devastated by this. People always need food. So I’m going to go back into food,’ ” she said.
“I did not expect this industry would have been devastated like it has been.”
Jacques, now 50, was among millions of Canadians who lost their jobs or saw hours reduced in the early weeks of the pandemic last year, which saw the sharpest collapse in jobs since the Great Depression.
To bureaucrats inside the federal government, it was soon clear the normal system of unemployment insurance couldn’t handle the situation. Cliff Groen, assistant deputy minister of benefits delivery at Services Canada, told the Star last April that the government typically got about 7,500 applications per day before the pandemic. Then, over the course of three days last March, requests skyrocketed to new daily records: 71,000 on March 16, 88,000 on the 17th, and then 130,000 on the 18th.
It was around this time that Trudeau and key figures in the Liberal government started making the promise that Canadians have heard ad nauseam over the past year: when it comes to supporting you through the pandemic, “we will do whatever it takes.”
While provinces have been heavily involved in the health response to COVID-19, the economic response really has been “a federal show,” said David Macdonald, a senior economist with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.
The Liberal government has been keen to highlight that, too. Last fall, cabinet ministers started touting statistics to show Ottawa had paid for more than 80 per cent of the national COVID-19 response. According to the Parliamentary Budget Office, the government’s independent spending watchdog, Ottawa has spent almost $200 billion on support programs for individuals and businesses.
One of the biggest items in that list is the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB), the special program with an application system that was constructed in a matter of weeks last spring and paid out more than $76.5 billion to almost 9 million people before it was rolled into a series of ongoing emergency benefits last September.
Hajdu said CERB was her idea. “I can say that the origin of the CERB is me going to the cabinet table and saying, ‘We’re going to have to ask people to stay home to flatten the curve,’” she said.
She said she then spoke about it with Bill Morneau, who was then finance minister, suggesting he was taken with the potential cost of the program but took little convincing that it was needed.
“Listen, any finance minister presented with a very expensive proposition like that is going to have a hard gulp. But he knew right away what I was trying to do and he knew right away that it was necessary,” she said.
(Morneau declined to comment through a representative when contacted by the Star last week.)
The NDP has also sought to take credit for the CERB, as well as other pandemic support programs that party leader Jagmeet Singh says would have been less generous without New Democrats pushing the government in the minority parliament. Singh is ready with a list of NDP “wins” for people during the pandemic that includes pushing the Liberals to double CERB payments to $2,000 per month and give the same amount to students; increase the emergency wage subsidy for businesses from 10 per cent to 75 per cent; and — in exchange for supporting the Liberal throne speech last fall — expand federal emergency sickness benefits.
“The initial response on every support to people, they kind of were trying to do the minimum and we were always pushing for the maximum,” Singh told the Star by phone last week.
“Millions of Canadians are better off because we were there. But … it wasn’t easy. It took fights. We had to go to the wall a couple times.”
Dan Kelly has also been pushing the government for more and agreed with the NDP leader that it has taken effort. As president of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, Kelly has lobbied Ottawa to fix shortcomings in their support programs for small businesses.
This included initially designing the rent subsidy so that landlords had to allow tenants to apply, which Kelly described as “disastrous” for retail shops and restaurants forced to shut down under health restrictions.
Kelly argued Ottawa also took too long to roll out the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy (CEWS), which was available weeks after the CERB was paying people who lost their jobs $2,000 per month. Like Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole, Kelly said this delay likely drove more people onto unemployment, since the subsidy could have supported businesses to keep workers on their payrolls.
“The government, understandably, was focused on this as a health-care emergency. And it took quite some time for them to recognize that there was an economic emergency that was coming along with the pandemic. And so they reacted too slowly,” Kelly said.
Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland, who replaced Morneau after he resigned last summer, was not available for an interview over the last week, according to her office. But she responded to questions by email, where she did not directly address the criticism about slow benefits for businesses.
“Our government understood that the lockdowns would almost instantly deprive millions of Canadians of their jobs, and we knew we needed to act immediately to support them. That’s why, with unprecedented speed, we acted, and put the CERB in place,” she wrote.
She also defended the sheer amount of money Ottawa has spent to confront the crisis, comparing the economic impact of COVID-19 to a “natural disaster like a flood or a wildfire.
“We knew that our job was to provide the support necessary to keep Canadian families and Canadian business afloat until the natural disaster was over — the fire had been put out, the floodwaters had abated — and we could all get back to work,” Freeland said.
But many people are still reeling. Data from Statistics Canada shows racialized people still have significantly higher unemployment — 12 per cent, compared with 8.9 per cent for nonvisible minorities — and that women in most age groups were slower to return to work between April and January.
Lower wage earners also bore the brunt of the economic hit: the bottom 10 per cent of wage earners lost 39 per cent of their paid hours last year, while the top 10 per cent gained 16 per cent, according to Statistics Canada .
“Every decision, I agonize over, because I know that there are consequences for groups of Canadians.” PATTY HAJDU FEDERAL HEALTH MINISTER