Migrant workers from Mexico maintain social distancing as they wait to be transported to Quebec farms after arriving at Trudeau Airport in Montreal in April, 2020.Ryan Remiorz/The Canadian Press
Adrian Levy is a professor in the Department of Community Health and Epidemiology at Dalhousie University.
More than a week after a potential death from the plague in Russia made the news, the Public Health Agency of Canada said “at this time, no risk to Canada has been identified” and that it was “closely monitoring the situation.”
But as we wait for more information about a potential health emergency, it’s worth noting that more than six years after COVID-19 was declared a pandemic, there is still no national accounting of what transpired in Canada.
In July of this year, a largely unnoticed order from the Government of Canada required most federal public servants to go to the office at least four days a week. It may prove to be the removal of the last bureaucratic vestige of COVID-19 – the closing of the chapter that began on March 18, 2020, when Canada imposed border measures and restrictions on international travel.
We all remember what came next. Provinces and territories then imposed social distancing, masking, shutdowns of non-essential services and stay-at-home orders. We reorganized our lives around the virus. We learned to fear a cough, to greet one another through Plexiglas, to attend funerals on Zoom. Then, remarkably quickly, we stopped talking about it, which is curious, because governments promised they would learn from the experience. While two federal health ministers committed to an inquiry into Canada’s response to COVID-19, neither the Trudeau nor the Carney governments have taken steps to fulfill that promise.
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Britain has taken a different approach. Its COVID-19 inquiry into the country’s handling of the pandemic has been running for more than four years and has cost more than £200-million. That country decided that a national trauma deserved a national accounting.
For Canada, the case for an inquiry reaches further back than the decisions made once COVID-19 arrived.
After SARS in 2003, Ottawa created the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) while Ontario and British Columbia rapidly strengthened their public-health legislation. After the H1N1 influenza pandemic in 2009, the Agency published its “lessons learned review” within 18 months.
Then came COVID-19.
In early 2020, governments relied on PHAC to assess the threat posed by the new coronavirus. The Global Public Health Intelligence Network, the early-warning system for detecting emerging biological health threats, detected the danger.
The agency faced the question: How serious was the threat to Canadians?
The answer, repeatedly, was: not very serious.
Between detecting the novel coronavirus and introducing federal border controls over three months later, and while COVID-19 caseloads grew exponentially in Asia and Europe, PHAC’s risk-assessment process rated the threat to Canada as “low” multiple times. The Auditor-General of Canada identified the failure in March, 2021. Remarkably, the agency’s methodology remained in a pilot stage as of January, 2020, and focused primarily on pandemic influenza; it was not designed to assess the likelihood of future spread or the potential impact in Canada of a respiratory disease such as COVID-19.
Over those crucial weeks after the virus was identified, when risk assessments should have tracked upward, they did not budge.
That is precisely the kind of failure a Royal Commission is designed to uncover and prevent from recurring. Yet by its own calendar, PHAC is already late. It has missed its two-year deadline to brief Parliament on the changes made responding to the Auditor-General’s report. It has also failed to comment publicly on the 36 recommendations made by an independent panel reviewing the Global Public Health Intelligence Network.
Today, PHAC offers no description of the risk assessment process it intends to deploy when facing the next pandemic threat. Instead, it frames risk assessment for biological threats within an all-hazards approach – along with chemical, radiological and nuclear threats – even though mitigating a fast-spreading emerging infectious disease with pandemic potential requires a far more rapid response.
Though plague is unlikely, there will be a next pandemic. When that day comes, we will all depend critically on how quickly authorities notice and respond.
COVID-19 exposed weaknesses in the structures and processes Canadians rely on to detect and respond to rapidly emerging biological threats. Some of those weaknesses were identified during the crisis itself.
The bill was enormous, tabulated in lives, livelihoods, disrupted education, public money and public trust. Canadians are owed an accounting. Parliamentarians should demand one. The end of an emergency should not mean the end of government’s obligation to explain what happened and fix obvious shortcomings.
The next pandemic will begin, as this last one did, before we are ready. Whether we recognize it in time may depend on whether we are willing, now, to understand what went wrong last time.