People walk past a vaccine clinic during the COVID-19 pandemic in Mississauga, Ont., April, 2022.Nathan Denette/The Canadian Press
The fault lines of American politics have been on full display over the last couple of weeks, as Republican senators try to eviscerate Anthony Fauci over his supposed missteps and misstatements in the U.S. pandemic response.
Republican Senator Rand Paul led that effort last week to grill Dr. Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, on a longstanding laundry list of questions, most notably the origins of the COVID-19 virus.
For his part, Dr. Fauci declined to provide answers, invoking the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times, despite receiving a pardon from former president Joe Biden that shields him from federal prosecution for any official actions he took between Jan. 1, 2014 and Jan. 19, 2025. But that pardon would not shield him from prosecution for subsequent actions. And the Republican-dominated committee voted Thursday to hold Dr. Fauci in contempt of Congress, which could result in the Justice Department prosecuting him.
U.S. Senate panel votes to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress over refusal to answer questions
There’s no avoiding the tawdriness of Mr. Rand’s drama. That doesn’t excuse Dr. Fauci, a retired public servant, from his failure to provide answers not just to a Republican senator, but to the American people. How did Dr. Fauci’s thinking evolve, for instance, on the question of whether COVID-19 emerged from a wet market in Wuhan, or a laboratory?
The U.S. Senate hearings, in a roundabout way, have also highlighted a core defect in Canadian politics. The American problem is that public inquiry too often devolves into a rancid spectacle. The Canadian problem is that problems are pushed out of public view – there has been no inquiry at all into a public health crisis that was extraordinarily costly in both lives and dollars.
There has been no broad examination of the response by the federal and provincial governments to the massive health, economic and legal challenges of the pandemic (which, for the record, is still ongoing).
Yes, there have been reviews of Canada’s pandemic response, but those efforts have been narrowly focused, and largely limited to public health policies and governance. A broad, non-partisan national effort is needed that would tackle big, unresolved questions – decisions not just by public health officials but also by political leaders.
One pressing area of concern is the stringency of school closures, which varied widely from province to province. Schools in Ontario were closed more than twice as many days as those in British Columbia between March, 2020 and February, 2022, according to the Fraser Institute. The timing of outbreaks might explain some of that difference, but policy choices by B.C. and Ontario were surely also a factor.
So, what was the ultimate effect on students of those prolonged closures? And did B.C. or Ontario make the right call? That is not merely a question for academic journals. If ever there is another pandemic-level threat, it might be helpful to know how to least damage children’s education.
Similarly, a wide-ranging inquiry could cast some needed scrutiny on the messaging from public health and political officials, particularly the proper balance to be struck between the public health concerns and individual health worries about vaccine side effects. And it could be a catalyst for an examination about the increase in vaccine hesitancy.
Then there is the intersection of politics and public health, most notably Ottawa’s decision to end the trucking industry’s exemption in January, 2022 from COVID vaccination requirements. Canadian truckers reentering this country needed to be either fully vaccinated, or else face a 14-day quarantine period. Coupled with similar U.S. rules, the Trudeau government’s policies effectively prohibited unvaccinated drivers from driving to and from the United States.
What was the scientific basis for that change in policy for truckers, who were largely contained in their cabs, and had been performing essential-service work for nine months? That, too, is a question that a public inquiry could address – not just the science, but the political (mis)judgments.
And then there is the biggest question of all: Where did COVID-19 come from? Whatever clarity Canadian officials can bring to that issue would be useful.
It is tempting, of course, to let the trauma of 2020 and 2021 recede into the comforting fog of the past. But that would be a mistake that not only failed to hold governments accountable for the errors they made a half-decade ago, but for those they might repeat the next time around.