Understaffed and Unprepared

 

Canada's pandemic early warning system was not ready to meet the threat when Covid-19 hit our shores early last year.  Canada's Global Public Health Information System languished during the Liberals' first majority government.

The final report on what went wrong at that key moment with the Global Public Health Intelligence Network (GPHIN) — a multilingual monitoring system that scours the internet for reports of infectious diseases — was released today.

The report says that, among other things, surveillance was not well co-ordinated in the four years leading up to the arrival of the novel coronavirus, a problem the report says was partly due to the fact that a key position — chief health surveillance officer — had been left vacant since 2017 and was due to be eliminated.

The three-person panel — former national security adviser Margaret Bloodworth and health experts Dr. Paul Gully and Dr. Mylaine Breton — found that while PHAC had drafted a strategic surveillance plan in 2016 for detecting pandemics, "the plan never received formal approval."

The report says the Internet-based GPHIN surveillance system had experienced a turnover in critical staff and the network had never regained the positions cut in the course of the former Conservative government's deficit-reduction action plan.

Last spring, Auditor General Karen Hogan issued a highly critical report on the Liberal government's handling of GPHIN.

In 2019, the federal government ordered the once-world class intelligence network to focus its attention more on domestic surveillance than on international outbreaks, the auditor reported.

Comments

  1. Northern PoVJuly 13, 2021 at 8:25 AM

    Alas, Canada is not the outlier when it comes to head-in-the-sand.

    Which (if any) countries were more prepared and did better in the January to April period?
    Perhaps NZ, Vietnam (after a bad start in Wuhan in December 2019) and China? Were they better prepared or just reacted quickly when the crap hit the fan?

    The best news from the G7 (along with the overdue global-tax discussion) was the pledge to create a real pandemic alert/reaction system.

    Will these aspirations become real achievable goals?

    ReplyDelete
  2. The Disaffected LibJuly 13, 2021 at 9:00 AM

    I can't speak of other countries. What I know is that, in my country, our government had chosen to leave us unprepared. "Chosen" is the operative word, NPoV. Like Trump, the government failed us and had done this for most of its years in office.

    We dodged a bullet because a number of vaccines were quickly brought to market. So we inked a few orders and wrote a few cheques.

    Oddly enough there was a Canadian company that identified the spread of the Covid-19 virus from the outset. Of course we didn't have a subscription to their service and, in any case, our government is hesitant. It doesn't do proactive. We see that daily in the billions it squanders on pipelines and the paltry sums it provides for climate change adaptation.

    This summer has erased any doubt of the pace and degree of onset of the climate emergency. The Liberal caucus supports an NDP motion declaring a climate emergency and then does next to nothing about it.

    We've all read (or should have read) the latest report from this government's own departments about the abject lack of preparation for this climate emergency. You should have read Trudeau's remarks in his recent Globe interview. He spoke of a slow-turning ship and how this transition will take "decades." He patted himself on the back for some non-binding initiative to prohibit the sale of internal combustion powered vehicles come 1935. Oh, wow. 1935, eh? In the meantime he's proceeding apace to flood world markets with the filthiest, high-carbon fuels - bitumen and coal.

    Trudeau could drop the writ this week and he has one thing and, to me, only one thing going for him. He's not O'Toole.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Owen GrayJuly 13, 2021 at 9:24 AM

    It's pretty clear that, although plans were made, no one implemented them until the virus raged. It seems we're always late to the fire.

    ReplyDelete
  4. John B.July 13, 2021 at 9:30 PM

    We knew we were screwed when the last of the serious candidates dropped out to pave the way for Justin's coronation. The party seems to be quite pleased with things. Unless there's a pandering dividend involved, they're saying, "Who gives a shit?"

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The Disaffected LibJuly 14, 2021 at 8:59 AM

      Politics in Canada is not about the state. It's not about the people. It's about gaining and holding power and how that's done and at what cost to the nation matters not in the slightest. It's a betrayal and we pay for that in endless and often unnoticed ways. It's no wonder politics no longer attracts great talent. Scheer, O'Toole, Trudeau are pretty thin gruel.

      Delete

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