I try not to feel smug about Canada's pandemic response, although it's hard not to when I see the catastrophe happening on the other side of Lake Ontario. Then I see things like
this Globe and Mail article from last week, and I realize that Canada could have done much more.
In May, 2019, less than seven months before COVID-19 would begin wreaking havoc on the world, Canada’s pandemic alert system effectively went dark.
Amid shifting priorities inside Public Health, GPHIN’s analysts were assigned other tasks within the department, which pulled them away from their international surveillance duties.
With no pandemic scares in recent memory, the government felt GPHIN was too internationally focused, and therefore not a good use of funding. The doctors and epidemiologists were told to focus on domestic matters that were deemed a higher priority.
The analysts’ capacity to issue alerts about international health threats was halted. All such warnings now required approval from senior government officials. Soon, with no green light to sound an alarm, those alerts stopped altogether.
So, on May 24 last year, after issuing an international warning of an unexplained outbreak in Uganda that left two people dead, the system went silent.
And in the months leading up to the emergence of COVID-19, as one of the biggest pandemics in a century lurked, Canada’s early warning system was no longer watching closely.
When the novel coronavirus finally emerged on the international radar, amid evidence the Chinese government had been withholding information about the severity of the outbreak, Canada was conspicuously unaware and ultimately ill-prepared.
As the article points out, the decision to hobble the GPHIN was made by the previous Conservative government. Unfortunately for Canada (and the rest of the world), the new Liberal government didn't reverse it, and the projected few millions of dollars in savings turned out to cost Canada hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of lives.
Talk about being penny wise and pound foolish.
Canada’s Auditor-General is planning to investigate what went wrong with the country’s once-vaunted early warning system for pandemics after the unit curtailed its surveillance work and ceased issuing alerts more than a year ago, raising questions about whether it failed when it was needed most.
Sources close to the matter said the Auditor-General is planning to probe the government’s handling of the Global Public Health Intelligence Network, or GPHIN, which was a central part of the country’s advance surveillance, early detection and risk-assessment capacity for outbreaks.
The opposition parties and news media have been obsessed with the "WE scandal", which is basically a minor malfeasance on the part of a government that should have known better, while the important scandal goes almost unnoticed.
Kudos to the Globe and Mail for their reporting. I hope the Auditor-General gets to the bottom of this. We need to know exactly what happened and why, so we can fix it so it doesn't happen again.
