This post is not based on comprehensive research or particular
expertise on my part. Rather it is more what we would have called
“common sense” before Mike Harris completely destroyed the
meaning of the phrase.
We start off with the most obvious. We need a public health care
system that is not overloaded to begin with. We can solve two
problems here, provide pandemic readiness and provide timely life
enhancing health care. We currently provide timely care for life
threatening situations like cancer, heart surgery and emergency
trauma but have created an artificial class of so called “elective
surgery” we consider to be of lesser importance. This includes
things like hip and knee surgery and replacements and many other
types of health care that are necessary to allow people to live
fulfilling lives. Health care is much more than preventing premature
deaths. If we provided the necessary resources to provide all
necessary health care without unreasonable wait times we would have
the capacity to deal with a pandemic without putting peoples lives at
risk.
Equally obvious is the need to bring long term care into the public
health care system. Before the pandemic the horror stories of private
long term care were well known even if the body counts were not as
inexcusable as they became with the pandemic meeting the profit
motive.
And still looking at the health care system, why did doctors offices
shut down or become virtual during the pandemic when they should have
been part of the response to it. Family physicians provide the first
source of diagnosis for many serious illnesses like heart disease and
cancer where early detection can be a matter of life and death. The
system may respond quickly when these diseases are diagnosed but it
does not respond at all when they are not detected. And why was the
network of family physicians not used for pandemic testing and
vaccinations.
And what of government policies. The big thing we got right was
vaccines. In comparison to some jurisdictions to the south of us, all
jurisdictions understand the importance and effectiveness of
vaccines. The federal government did an admirable job of making
vaccines available to the provinces and the provinces did a decent
job in administering them. The main things Ontario could have done
better was utilizing doctors offices and the school system to more
efficiently get vaccines to the public.
As to the timely and appropriate response to the threat that is where
we could have done better. We knew it was coming but we didn’t know
what it would be like so it was a learning process. There is lots to
criticize in hindsight but more importantly is learning going
forward.
The biggest lesson was that internationally jurisdictions that put
public health first and took strong, even drastic, measures quickly
were able to get out of it faster than those that took half measures
being more concerned with protecting the so-called economy than the
public’s health. Having a provincial leader that considered himself
a “businessman first” and by implication a Premier second did not
help. We are still stumbling through in Ontario.
What is saving us is our sense of community. This works on two
levels. On the personal level, it means in our personal behaviour,
such as distancing, mask wearing and getting vaccinated, we base our
decisions not just on what will keep us safe but also on what will
keep our neighbours safe. This has made the big difference on how
Canada has fared, compared to the United States, who arguably had
better resources available to fight the pandemic.
The other level is the collective level, our collective actions taken
together through our governments.
Here we are talking about three levels of government, federal,
provincial and local, sometimes with differing philosophies and
priorities. We really need to find a way to make federalism work
better in these sorts of, not just national but international
emergencies, climate change being another example.
If the pandemic has shown us anything is that individual action
cannot replace collective action, and some things are just done
better by acting collectively rather than acting individually. This
is where we need to do better, particularly by strengthening our
health care system and providing social supports. We are not
financially prepared for the next pandemic because the political
parties in power have chosen to go down the populist road of
under-taxation thinking that would buy them votes. This is perhaps
the most disastrous public policy position of the last half century.
Fortunately, because of that trend, there is substantial room to
increase taxes to fill the void, particularly on that portion of the
population that are excessively wealthy and under-taxed. This is a
group in society that actually stands to gain more from collective
spending by government than they can from individual spending by
themselves. There is only so much you can spend on a wealthy
lifestyle and the benefits of a better society far outweigh the
benefits of people who have everything buying more everything for
themselves.
We can be better prepared next time, and there will be a next time,
but only if we choose to.
And the fantasy part – the belief that those in power will actually
choose to learn these lessons and implement the necessary measures.
