Political leaders trying to manage their country’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic like to say that their governments were caught off-guard by the outbreak. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said just that on Thursday, and pointed out that many other countries were in the same boat.
He also said Canada would learn from this crisis, the way it had from the SARS pandemic of 2003, and be better prepared the next time.
There is no question this country learned valuable lessons from SARS, some of which are helping today. The Public Health Agency of Canada is one result; it was created in 2004 to provide more resources in a pandemic, and to better co-ordinate a national response. In Ontario, hospitals developed new protocols for sharing information and training staff.
But what is debatable is whether Canada’s insufficiently high level of preparedness – better than many other countries; worse than ideal – honestly springs from a lack of experience in the kind of public-health measures and planning needed to stop an outbreak.
In the wake of SARS, the H1N1 pandemic in 2009, and the recent ebola outbreaks in African countries, Canadian governments knew a great deal about how to handle a virus pandemic, and what to prepare for.
As The Globe and Mail reported this week, a federal 2006 influenza pandemic plan precisely laid out the required state of readiness.
The plan predicted the major issues that have arisen during the current crisis: the shortage of equipment such as respirator masks and ventilators; the surges in hospitalizations that could overwhelm the health system of every province; and the way the disease is spread by asymptomatic carriers. It even accurately predicted how much time it would take for a new or mutated virus to appear in Canada once it was discovered elsewhere.
Canada was caught off-guard not just because the novel coronavirus is remarkably tricky, but because federal and provincial governments were not sufficiently prepared for any kind of pandemic at all.
The great symbol of this failure is the infamous Ontario warehouse holding $45-million worth of provincial medical supplies – including 55 million desperately needed N95 respirator masks – that have been allowed to go past their expiry dates. More than 80 per cent of the supplies are unusable.
So while the current outbreak will provide fine-tuning suggestions for national preparedness, its real lesson, if anyone cares to listen, is that this country will not be ready for the next pandemic unless it develops the political will, in Ottawa and the provinces, to spend significant sums of money preparing for something that may never happen.
Right now, there’s a clear national consensus that, in hindsight, we should have purchased a bigger insurance policy. But it may not take long for memories to fade, and for the same politicians now heroically leading their government’s charge to revert, at election time, to demanding that governments spend less, grow smaller and get out of people’s lives.
How to avoid that remission?
First, Ottawa and the provinces need to commit themselves to maintaining updated plans for responding to an international alert about the outbreak of a new disease. They should also agree on who is stockpiling what supplies, and acknowledge that it’s not enough simply to fill a warehouse with stuff. Regular management is essential.
Second, there needs to be a way to remind governments, and voters, to stick with their planning, and not lose interest or cut back when doing so becomes politically convenient. Pandemic preparations are done at multiple levels of government, making it difficult to know who is keeping their end up, and who is letting 55 million respirators get fusty.
This will require annual reporting to Parliament and to the country as a whole, through an auditor-general type office. The Office of Pandemic Preparedness has a nice ring to it. Voters need to be regularly told just how ready Ottawa and the provinces are, or are not.
Without that transparency, governments that enthusiastically embrace pandemic preparation in the years after this crisis will soon enough be replaced by parties that see it as an unnecessary expense, a budget line of “waste” that can be transformed into a tax cut, without much protest from a public kept in the dark.