Canada’s data gaps hampered pandemic response, hurting vaccination tracking: report

2021/06/18 Leave a comment

An area that governments need to address:

The pandemic has exposed significant problems with how Canada gathers and processes data on everything from case numbers to vaccinations, which has hurt the country’s response to COVID-19, a new report conducted for the federal government says.

Canada could not track the spread of the virus as effectively as it needed to last year, according to a report prepared by the Pan-Canadian Health Data Strategy Expert Advisory Group that will be made public Thursday. The country is now struggling to keep tabs on vaccine effectiveness because of flaws in the system, including how different jurisdictions record and share information.

These data gaps, created by a patchwork of health systems that don’t always work together and often code data in different ways, need to be addressed with a national approach, the report warns.

“There is no doubt that our response to the pandemic has been severely limited as a result,” says an advance copy of the report, which was reviewed by The Globe and Mail.

The report was ordered by Ottawa last year to examine data problems exposed by COVID-19. The group will put together a list of recommendations to the Public Health Agency of Canada and other departments on how to fix these weaknesses, said Vivek Goel, who chaired the review.

When the COVID-19 outbreak hit, problems in reporting new cases, symptoms and other crucial data became apparent in Canada’s patchwork system. Since provincial and territorial jurisdictions don’t necessarily use the same standards for collecting or codifying information, pooling crucial data on a national level became difficult.

“Early on it was challenging to get a full national picture, even of basic case counts,” Dr. Goel said, noting that crucial information such as the sites of the outbreaks, or the occupations of those who became ill, weren’t always collected, codified, or shared between health jurisdictions. This prevented policy makers from knowing where and how hot spots were developing, and where the next crisis might be lurking.

“That [information] is something that is collected on the front lines of public health as people do their interviews, or it is collected at the time someone goes for testing. But if it’s not collected in a consistent way in every place and then coded and loaded into the system, we don’t wind up with a good picture,” Dr. Goel said.

“I would say if we had some of that information in a more timely manner, we might have had some decisions [by the government] being made sooner,” Dr. Goel said.

The country got better at processing information as the pandemic progressed, but “Canada had had some pretty significant challenges early on in even getting some of that basic data shared and uploaded,” he said.

These data gaps have become magnified as the country tries to mount a rapid immunization campaign across those same varied jurisdictions. Lacking the ability to quickly and effectively pool data from around the country, Canada is struggling to track, in real time, how effectively the vaccines are working in the broader population.

“Probably the most important question around vaccination in Canada is around the effectiveness of the vaccines in the real world with the dosing schedules and approaches that we’ve taken in Canada, because we’re the country that’s taken the longest dose interval,” Dr. Goel said.

“We’ve got reports that have started to come out, but they’re coming out at the provincial level,” he said. “We don’t have a national report, and every province’s systems are slightly different. So we wind up with slightly different estimates. They’re not going to be comparable.”

More detailed data on vaccine uptake is also difficult to compile, he said. “We need to have data coming together around how many people have been immunized by age group, occupation codes, all sorts of information. For example, people want to know how many teachers have had [the vaccine]. But we don’t have systems that really allow us to easily bring that kind of data together,” Dr. Goel said.

Questions specific to Canada, such as the effectiveness of mixing vaccines, are also hard to answer without properly collecting and analyzing data from across the country, he said. “We’ve got more of this mixing and matching coming up, so we need to be generating real-world evidence on how well it’s working,” Dr. Goel said.

The findings echo a report by the Auditor-General of Canada in March that said the government lacked proper data procedures to accurately track the spread of the virus. Dr. Goel said the issues are due to a number of causes, from lack of investment and concerns over privacy breaches to provinces simply wanting to oversee their own systems.

He also noted that various reports and governments have tried to address these issues in the past, but the problems were never fixed. After the 2003 SARS outbreak, Ottawa oversaw the creation of a database system known as Panorama, intended to improve infectious-disease surveillance and immunization tracking on a national level. However, the project struggled to gain support, ran into numerous roadblocks and was never effective.

“Despite all these good intentions, we don’t seem to make the progress we’d like to see,” said Dr. Goel, a professor at the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health who is leaving to become president of the University of Waterloo next month.

The report calls for Ottawa to work with provinces and territories, as well as First Nations, Inuit and Métis organizations, to build a system where health data, including information on outbreaks and immunization, can be pooled effectively, and governments can act faster. Overcoming privacy concerns is a key challenge, and any such initiative must ensure that personalized information is protected, the report says.

“We need to tackle the root causes of the problems that have plagued our ability to make progress toward a common aim for all Canadians,” the report says. “Put simply, our systems, processes and policies are geared towards an analog world, while we live in a digital age.”

Dr. Goel said there are several examples of countries that collect, share and process data better than Canada, while still protecting privacy and respecting regional autonomy. Several Scandinavian countries have systems Canada should seek to emulate, he said, while the British, despite having data challenges of their own, have a more effective surveillance system implemented across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

“There are models for how we could approach that in Canada, but until we get to the point where we work together on these things, we wind up with these siloed sorts of approaches across the country,” Dr. Goel said.

“These issues have been underscored through Canada’s response to COVID-19,” the report says. The challenges include “timely collection and use of testing, case and vaccination data; assessing impacts of the pandemic in specific populations; sharing genomic data for management of variants; and the persistent challenges of long-term care.”

Source: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-canadas-data-gaps-hampered-pandemic-response-hurting-vaccination/

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Government’s failure to keep stock of PPE reserves hurt us when we needed it most

2021/05/29 Leave a comment

Good commentary on the long history of government data management and use issues, brought to prominence during COVID-19, along with systemic accountability issues.

And yes, the default option for government data would be public (and to be fair, the open government initiative has resulted in more availability of data):

Seventeen years ago, there was a cabinet minister named Reg Alcock, the President of the Treasury Board, who invited people to his office for lectures about data.

The late Mr. Alcock was a hefty, 6-foot-8 mountain of a man with two main interests: Liberal Party organizing in Manitoba and dragging the government into the digital age. Part of the lecture he gave in 2004 was a question: Why is it that corporate executives have computers that can tell them, for example, how many trucks their company owns, but a prime minister would need a year to get the same answer from government?

On Wednesday, Auditor-General Karen Hogan issued a report on the government’s handling of stockpiles of PPE that let it be known that Mr. Alcock’s question is still hanging in the air, nearly two decades later.

Ms. Hogan’s team reported that the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) had a stockpile of personal protective equipment and medical devices, but it didn’t have a policy about what should be in it, or what was in it, or whether the equipment had expired.

When the biggest public-health crisis of modern times hit and provinces needed N95 masks and ventilators from the National Emergency Strategic Stockpile, well, there wasn’t enough useful stuff there. The data were so unreliable the auditors couldn’t tell how badly it fell short.

The haphazard management of the stockpile wasn’t a new thing. Internal audits in 2010 and 2013 raised those issues.

Citizens might think a decade of disregarded warnings is a scandal that will shake the halls of power in Ottawa. But for a politician, it is cause for relief. The best kind of failure is one that was going on long before you took office. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s advisers will be happy enough that the Auditor-General credited the government for responding after the crisis hit.

But note that PHAC did draft a proposal to develop a better inventory management system in January, 2020 – just as COVID-19 was spreading – but agency officials told auditors “it was put on hold because of budget constraints.”

Mr. Alcock, back in the day, didn’t just want government to get computer systems – they have a lot – but to manage data, to make more information available and usable, so that government knows better what is happening within government.

But politicians in charge aren’t good at driving change in long-term, systemic issues that voters don’t even see. Mr. Alcock, for example, was preaching for IT in a Paul Martin government busy with Liberal scandals and non-confidence votes in Parliament.

Two PMs later, and governments still have a hard time seeing what government is doing. The National Emergency Strategic Stockpile wasn’t much use in a crisis because it didn’t do the kind of information management that that happens at a grocery store: figuring out what you will need, buying it, tracking what goes in and out and what is going bad.

By now we know that bad data management, not knowing what you don’t know, raises risk in a crisis. And there’s something else: Most of that data can and should be made public.

Why not let the public see the running tally of N95 masks in inventory, or ventilators on the web? Most people won’t look at it, but perhaps a few experts in universities and elsewhere will analyze the policies, crunch the data and, we can hope, point out when they’re messed up. Or just missing. That applies to other kinds of data, too.

In Britain, this week’s remarkable testimony of Dominic Cummings, a former aide to Prime Minister Boris Johnson, about the chaotic initial response to the pandemic made it pretty clear that it’s no longer necessary, or wise, to leave the data inside government.

Mr. Cummings testified to a parliamentary committee that false assumptions, bad analysis, and groupthink inside government led Mr. Johnson’s government to a disastrous notion that it should try to reach herd immunity rather than slowing the spread of COVID-19. Scientists outside government, notably a mathematician, helped convince him that was “catastrophically wrong,” he said. He and the government’s top science adviser later agreed data should have been released earlier, to get input.

That’s not the same thing as PHAC’s failure to keep track of a stockpile. But then, if we want to encourage the government to keep tabs on the data, one good way is to demand to see it.

Source: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-governments-failure-to-keep-stock-of-ppe-reserves-hurt-us-when-we/

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Is it time to move Ottawa out of Ottawa?

2021/05/26 Leave a comment

Valid question given experience over more than a year with remote work. Some colleagues who are still working have indicated much easier to engage the regions given everyone on the same platform, rather than the Ottawa folks meeting in person and regional staff being on a telephone conference call.

And of course, the broader question of what percent of public servants, or what percentage of their time, requires physical presence compared to working remotely, along with the associated (but often overstated) management challenges:

The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in much of the federal public service shifting to remote work. Ottawa invested in telecommunications and found new ways for employees to work effectively from far-flung locations.

The transition was sufficiently successful that the federal government is considering continuing some remote work, possibly reducing its office rental spaces.

This raises the question — if work doesn’t need to be done in Ottawa-area offices, does it need to be done in Ottawa at all?

The centralization of federal jobs

Canada has more than 300,000 federal employees, with over 230,000 in core public administration (CPA) and just under 70,000 employed in separate agencies like the Canada Revenue Agency. 

The proportion of agency jobs concentrated in the National Capital Region, which includes Ottawa-Gatineau and surrounding areas, has declined since 2016. The opposite is seen with CPA jobs. The concentration of CPA employees was only 33 per cent in 1995, but was up to 46 per cent in 2020. 

graph shows the number of federal public service jobs in the capital region
The number of federal public service jobs in the Ottawa region, according to the Government of Canada Open Data Portal. Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, 2020

Most CPA workers are skilled knowledge workers. These are good jobs. It is time for more federal jobs, including CPA jobs, to decentralize.

The case for decentralization

Research suggests decentralizing public service jobs reduces costs, strengthens national security by spreading government functions across the country and reduces cynicism toward government. 

Decentralization also distributes the economic benefits of the public sector across the country. According to one 2019 British study, “the arrival of 10 civil service jobs in an area spurs the creation of about 11 jobs in the private sector,” including professional service jobs like law and consulting.

Most importantly, it gives federal governments more ability to directly engage with communities. Regional voices within government increase as career opportunities are more accessible to qualified people nationally. Advocacy and community groups across the country enjoy a more level playing field to engage in the policy process. 

This increased geographic diversity of voices working within and connecting with government can result in improved strategic policy advice. 

Creating a national strategy

Now is the perfect time to make a serious effort to decentralize Canada’s federal jobs.

The COVID-19 remote work experience demonstrates the remarkable potential of technology to overcome distance. We have learned how efficiently we can use technology to reduce unnecessary travel and connect easily across the country. We must use the disruption of the pandemic to rethink what jobs and services need to be in Ottawa at all.

We can expect growing calls for this in Canada’s economic recovery, particularly from Alberta. Just before the COVID-19 shutdown, four MPs identified the centralization of federal headquarters as an example of systemic unfairness towards Alberta. A few months later, Alberta’s Fair Deal Panel recommended western premiers request “a distribution map of federal civil servants across Canada and a list of federal government agencies and decision-making bodies that can be recommended for relocation to Western Canada.” 

Recent surveys find decentralizing jobs may be publicly popular. The 2021 Viewpoint Alberta survey, which included over 800 respondents in Alberta and Saskatchewan, found strong support for increasing federal jobs in each province.

Similarly, the 2021 Confederation of Tomorrow survey of more than 5,800 Canadians found almost three-quarters (73.5 per cent) support “moving more government offices from Ottawa to other cities in the country so that more Canadians would have access to jobs in the federal public service.” 

A graph shows support for moving federal public service jobs out of the Ottawa area.
Support for moving federal public service jobs out of the Ottawa area. Confederation of Tomorrow 2021 Survey, Author provided

The time for action is now. In fact, Canada faces an immediate decision regarding the location of the new Canada Water Agency. While the decision process has yet to be announced, Regina and Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., are already vying for the agency headquarters. Other cities may also be planning to do so.

Canada already has experience in decentralizing federal jobs, including moving the National Energy Board headquarters from Ottawa to Calgary and creating regional Canada Revenue Agency tax centres. These serve as precedents for a bold new strategy.

Moving forward on a national strategy

To be sure, decentralization faces political challenges. As the benefits of job decentralization are long-term and the challenges are immediate, politicians more focused on the next election might be disinclined to take up the task.

Vested interests are loud. Strategies are needed to address relocation costs, including staff turnover and the associated loss of experience, though remote work options can reduce these.

A national strategy is required. The United Kingdom’s Places for Growth program will move thousands of London jobs, including policy advisory roles, to 13 regional hubs over the next decade and could provide ideas or a blueprint. 

Canada might also consider efforts to shift civil service work out of national capitals in Mexico, Norway, South Korea, Denmark and Malaysia. 

The COVID-19 remote work experience suggests that distance is not insurmountable for federal government work. No one is suggesting that public servants work from home forever, but the public’s business does not always have to be done in Ottawa. Let’s use this as an opportunity to rethink how we distribute federal work across Canada.

Source: https://theconversationcanada.cmail20.com/t/r-l-tlidhrg-kyldjlthkt-o/

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Delacourt: Justin Trudeau isn’t fighting his father’s battles in Quebec. But maybe we should

2021/05/22 Leave a comment

Of note:

Justin Trudeau issued no statements on Thursday to mark the 41st anniversary of Quebec’s first referendum on sovereignty.

So the prime minister’s comments from earlier this week — on Quebec’s bid to unilaterally declare itself a nation in the Constitution — will have to stand as his remarks on how far Canada has travelled from that fateful moment on May 20, 1980.

“Our initial analysis …. (is) that it is perfectly legitimate for a province to modify the section of the Constitution that applies specifically to them and that that is something that they can do,” Trudeau told reporters on Tuesday.

There is no way to view those remarks in isolation from the signature battle of his father’s career, much as the current prime minister tends to resist the historical comparisons.

Forty-one years ago this week, Pierre Trudeau was soberly, cautiously celebrating the victory of federalism against the forces that wanted to make Quebec a separate nation, with words such as these:

“To those who may wish to recreate in this land those old nationalistic barriers between peoples — barriers of which the world has been trying to rid itself — I say, we Canadians do not have to repeat the mistakes of the past,” Pierre Trudeau said in a statement after 59.5 per cent of Quebec voted “no” to a bid to embark on separation from Canada.

“All of us have the opportunity to show the whole world that we are not the last colonials on earth, but rather among the first people to free themselves from the old world of nation-states.”

That old world has re-emerged in 2021 with a twist in the form of Quebec’s new language law, which has been presented — and disturbingly accepted by Trudeau and other political leaders — as a none-of-your-business bit of provincial housekeeping. Just keeping the French language alive, drive on, nothing to see here.

I’ve mentioned already how Justin Trudeau bristles at constant comparisons to his father (as many sons would, to be fair).

Back in the summer of 2019, Trudeau was sitting on a patio in Ottawa during a pre-election social event for MPs and candidates. He was repeating a line he was fond of uttering back then: “Unlike my father, I like campaigning.”

I could not resist. I said we knew how unlike his father he was, but how was he similar? Trudeau gave it some thought, then talked about how he felt his father’s influence when provoked to fight. He mimicked the posture of a boxer, chin up, ready to pounce. “Like my dad, I just want to get in there,” he said.

No such impulse emerged with Quebec’s latest language gambit, which Trudeau apparently sees not as a provocation but “perfectly legitimate.”

Nor has this Trudeau assumed the ready-to-pounce stance over the far more egregious Bill 21, which has placed outrageous limits on the rights of religious expression for minorities in Quebec. “It’s before the courts,” Trudeau says whenever asked, while assuring Canadians, as he did again on Tuesday, that his government is mindful of protecting minorities.

Bill 21 is what Quebec does with loopholes and escape clauses in the Constitution. It used the notwithstanding clause to pull off that legal feat of discrimination against minorities. So what plans does it have for the unilateral declaration of nationhood? Is this Trudeau not curious? Provoked?

This is not a column about Trudeau failing to be his father’s son, which he himself wants us to know. The pandemic, not tension with Quebec separatism, will be the signature moment of this Trudeau’s career. When separatism is mentioned in the current context, it’s as likely to come from the West, where this idea of unilateral nationhood declarations might well be seen as a good idea on some bad day in the future.

It was fascinating to go back on Thursday and look at the video of Pierre Trudeau reacting to the federalists’ victory 41 years ago. There was no triumphalism; barely a smile, even. He talked of how he couldn’t stop thinking about the roughly 40 per cent who said “yes” to separation, and what they needed to make them feel more inclined toward Canada.

A new constitution was his proposal — this would be the same one that Quebec has refused to sign but now wants to amend. Trudeau’s old friend and adviser, Gerald Butts, saw the irony in that on Twitter this week, asking whether the plan to amend the Constitution means that it’s now accepted in the province.

The current prime minister is definitely not seeing Quebec’s latest gambit through the long lens of history. Not the same thing, his advisers are saying. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t. We owe it to our Constitution’s rich history to read the fine print of what Quebec is proposing.

Source: Justin Trudeau isn’t fighting his father’s battles in Quebec. But maybe we should

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Public servants say they work better from home, despite stress: survey

2021/05/20 Leave a comment

Interesting (on my to do list, look at the survey’s disaggregated data):

During the pandemic, employees of local, provincial, and federal governments from coast to coast to coast have provided essential services while working from home.

And it would appear that federal employees are happier now about their workplace than they were before the pandemic, according to the 2020 Public Service Employee Survey released by the Treasury Board Secretariat last week.

While we don’t know the full story of the “big pivot” over a single weekend in March 2020 — when public servants started working from home — we do know many have been working over weekends and statutory holidays and forgoing annual leave.

This isn’t sustainable over the long term. If not attended to, such behaviour could result in a crash or organizational failure.

Stress has increased since 2019. A third of employees said they felt emotionally drained after their workday, up from 29 per cent in 2019. Just over a quarter said their workload was heavier, up slightly from 24 per cent in 2019.

However, new questions in the 2020 survey about work-life balance during the pandemic revealed some silver linings:

  • 39 per cent of employees had requested flexible work hours since the start of the pandemic; and
  • 83 per cent said their immediate supervisor allowed them.

Employees said the quality of their work improved, too. For example:

  • only 23 per cent of employees said their work quality suffered because their department or agency lacked stability, which was down from 30 per cent in 2019; and
  • just 24 per cent of employees said their work suffered because of high staff turnover, down from 32 per cent in 2019.

Employees’ perceptions of change management also improved in 2020, with 59 per cent saying change was managed well in their department or agency, compared to 50 per cent in 2019.

They also reported better feedback from their supervisors in 2020, compared to 2019:

  • 69 per cent said they received meaningful recognition for work well done, up from 65 per cent in 2019; and
  • 77 per cent said they got useful feedback from their immediate supervisor about their job performance, up from 74 per cent in 2019.

Overall job satisfaction improved in 2020, too:

  • 83 per cent of employees said they liked their job, up from 81 per cent in 2019;
  • 78 per cent reported getting a sense of satisfaction from their work, up from 76 per cent in 2019;
  • 75 per cent said they were satisfied with their department or agency, up from 71 per cent in 2019;
  • 75 per cent said they would recommend their department or agency as a great place to work, up from 70 per cent in 2019; and
  • 71 per cent of employees said they felt valued at work, up from 68 per cent in 2019.

Respondents also felt their workplace was “psychologically” healthier. For example:

  • 68 per cent said their workplace was psychologically healthy, up from 61 per cent in 2019; and
  • 81 per cent said their department or agency was doing a good job of raising awareness of mental health in the workplace, up from 73 per cent in 2019.

In response to a new question in 2020, 69 per cent of employees said they’d feel comfortable sharing concerns about their mental health with their immediate supervisor.

The survey included new questions about working during the pandemic:

  • 70 per cent said senior managers were taking adequate steps to support their mental health during the pandemic;
  • 84 per cent felt their department or agency was effectively communicating the mental-health services and resources available to them; and
  • 81 per cent said they were satisfied with the measures their department or agency was taking to protect their physical health and safety during the pandemic.

Employees were also asked about the information they received from their department or agency about the pandemic:

  • 78 per cent said it was clear and easy to understand;
  • 81 per cent said it was consistent with the information they got from their immediate supervisor; and
  • 92 per cent said the information was available in both official languages.

And finally, instances of harassment also fell. In 2020, 11 per cent of employees said they’d been harassed on the job in the previous 12 months, down from 14 per cent in 2019. In addition, 71 per cent said their department or agency worked hard to create a workplace that prevents harassment, up from 69 per cent in 2019.

So while the pandemic isn’t over, public servants remain engaged. It would appear that working from home and away from the office has improved their view of the workplace and of their senior managers.

Stephen Van Dine is the senior vice-president of public governance at the Institute on Governance.

Source: Public servants say they work better from home, despite stress: survey

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Sunshine lists have helped narrow the gender pay gap, but Ottawa won’t commit to one

2021/05/18 Leave a comment

While I understand the attractiveness of sunshine lists, I find this places too much emphasis on the individuals rather than systemic trends and gaps.

There is a wealth of government employment equity data for the four groups – women, visible minorities, Indigenous peoples and PwD – that can be disaggregated by occupational level. For example, an earlier analysis I did with TBS data:

While situations are different in universities, crown corporations and the like, where individual salary differences can be greater, in the federal public service it is the group and level that determine salaries, not individual negotiations. It would however, be useful for someone to request anonymized EX performance pay data to see if any significant gender and other differences:

The federal government does not release an annual “sunshine list” – a document outlining the name, compensation and often job title of its high-earning employees – unlike almost every province. And the Trudeau government has no plans to change this practice.

The Globe and Mail asked Treasury Board President Jean-Yves Duclos if the Liberals, who ran on a platform of government transparency and gender equity in 2015, would consider passing legislation on public-sector salary disclosure. Spokesman Martin Potvin replied that the board is “not currently working on any changes to how it reports” employee compensation.

This is despite years of feedback from equity advocates and researchers, who say sunshine laws have helped narrow the gender wage gap, as well as pressure from stakeholder groups concerned about a lack of transparency.

Beyond the issue of taxpayer accountability, sunshine laws around the country have revealed inequities in hiring practices, promotion and compensation.

For example, Anita Kozyrskyj, a professor in the department of pediatrics at the University of Alberta, was part of a group of female professors who used the university’s disclosure list to expose pay inequities within the faculty of medicine and dentistry. The academics found a $5,000 gender wage gap after accounting for factors such as rank and years of experience.

“[It] would not have been possible had we not had the sunshine list,” said Prof. Kozyrskyj, who learned she personally was making about $20,000 less than her equivalent male peers. (A similar report by academics at the University of Alberta used the sunshine list to reveal pay and representation gaps between men and women professors, as well as white and racialized faculty.)

Other research, such as a study from economists at the University of Toronto that examined the impact of sunshine laws on gender pay imbalances in academia, suggests disclosure leads to reduced inequities.

“The gender pay gap, in general, has been shrinking over time, and these laws have accounted for about 30 to 40 per cent of the closure since these laws were passed,” said one of the authors, Yosh Halberstam.

Universities that were unionized showed the clearest improvement, he added, suggesting progress requires both a mechanism to expose inequities, as well as a framework for staff to advocate for themselves.

Since January, The Globe has been publishing a series called the Power Gap, which looks at gender imbalances in the modern work force. By collecting sunshine lists from hundreds of employers across the country, the project produced an unprecedented look at where women stand within vital public institutions.

The data revealed how women’s careers are stalling out in mid-level management and how, on average, women made less than comparable male colleagues. But The Globe could not analyze federal employees, includingthose who work for the RCMP, public health, the Canada Revenue Agency or for federal Crown corporations – such as the Bank of Canada or Via Rail Canada – because the information is not available.

The Canadian Taxpayers Federation has been calling for Ottawa to introduce sunshine legislation for many years. “I think it’s a very simple transparency argument. There’s no reason that – if [almost] all the provinces are doing it, the federal government shouldn’t follow suit,” said Aaron Wudrick, the federal director of the organization.

The federation’s interest in the issue is centred around taxpayer accountability, which was then-premier Mike Harris’s motivation when his Progressive Conservative government passed Ontario’s sunshine law in 1996.

Other provinces followed suit over the past quarter century. Sunshine laws require government-owned or funded entities – such as schools and universities, Crown corporations, hospitals, the core public service and usually municipalities – to release data for all employees who earn more than a certain threshold, usually six figures. Today, every Canadian jurisdiction except Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, the territories and the federal government requires some form of disclosure for top earners. (In Quebec, only senior managers are subject to compensation disclosure.)

These lists are not without controversy. Politically, they have been used to shame well-compensated civil servants. But in daily practice, they are a vital tool of information for women and other equity-seeking groups.

Lorna Turnbull, a feminist legal scholar and law professor at the University of Manitoba, has spent decades studying and writing about the legislative attempts from government to narrow the economic inequality between men and women. A common thread in her research has been that laws alone are not enough to protect against discrimination. For example, it’s been illegal for decades to pay equally qualified men and women different salaries for the same job because of their gender, but it still happens.

In 2011, she encountered her own real-life example. Prof. Turnbull competed for – and won – the position of dean in the faculty of law. She was to be the first woman to hold that position in the school’s nearly 100-year history. But when discussions turned to salary, Prof. Turnbull realized she was being offered less than her male predecessors.

“I was able to discover this because Manitoba has a sunshine list,” she said. Prof. Turnbull used intel from the disclosure list to negotiate a higher salary. She served as the university’s dean of law until 2016.

Prof. Turnbull said modern-day discrimination is very rarely the kind of overt, easy-to-spot bias that was typical decades ago when governments began passing anti-discrimination laws. Without access to the hard numbers, women and other marginalized groups might never know they’re not being properly paid.

Sarah Kaplan, director of the Institute for Gender and the Economy at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, said sunshine lists are not without drawbacks, but on the whole they are useful.

“The downside is that if you are on the sunshine list and you can see that others of your peers are paid more than you, it can be very demotivating. Often, there is little possibility to negotiate pay adjustments once you are in the job,” she said. “But over all, the transparency can increase pressure for long-term change, such as promoting more women to the higher-paying roles and paying women more fairly when they are hired.”

The most recent province to pass sunshine legislation is Newfoundland and Labrador, after efforts from former St. John’s Telegram reporter James McLeod.

In 2015, the Progressive Conservative government promised to introduce salary-disclosure legislation, but after it lost power, the Liberals were indecisive about doing the same, Mr. McLeod says.

“I thought, if the government won’t do a sunshine list, I’ll do it myself.”

Mr. McLeod filed freedom of information requests with large public agencies and the issue ultimately ended up in court. With public pressure building, the government passed sunshine legislation on its own in 2016. (Also, Mr. McLeod’s case won on appeal.)

Gordon Scott Campbell, an information and privacy lawyer at Aubry Campbell MacLean, said one advantage that Mr. McLeod’s case had is Newfoundland’s freedom of information legislation actually states the public is entitled to know a civil servant’s salary. The federal act, on the other hand, states the public is only entitled to a salary range. As a result, it would almost certainly require a legislative change to release specific salary amounts.

Mr. Campbell said there is always tension between access and privacy.

“Privacy legislation seeks to strongly protect Canadian privacy … access-to-information legislation seeks to broadly free government information,” he said. “I think most Canadians would support [both]. So it’s a balance.”

Source: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-sunshine-lists-have-helped-narrow-the-gender-pay-gap-but-ottawa-wont/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=Morning%20Update&utm_content=2021-5-17_5&utm_term=Morning%20Update:%20Israel%20vows%20to%20continue%20attacks%20as%20ceasefire%20negotiations%20falter&utm_campaign=newsletter&cu_id=%2BTx9qGuxCF9REU6kNldjGJtpVUGIVB3Y

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National security threats are changing, but Canada is mired in conventional thinking

2021/05/01 Leave a comment

Valid arguments:

An invisible virus borne on the air and reaching across continents and oceans, moving freely among people, disrespecting borders and ideas of state sovereignty, will mark the most profound shake-up of thinking about national security since the beginning of the atomic age in 1945.

We have entered an era in which national security is not just about protecting the state against adversaries, but also against dangers that have a direct impact on the daily lives of people.

The vectors of these threats are new and different — they don’t present the menacing face of armies and war, the shadowy artifice of the traditional spy, or the low-tech threat of terrorism. The new threats come at us straight out of our digital environment and are unleashed out of the natural world.

Digitally enabled threats take aim at precious resources — our data, our economy, our research — and the fundamentals of our democracy. They rob us and bend the truth, and as more of our economy is digitally enabled it is capable of being digitally disabled.

Natural hazards from climate change and the globalized spread of serious infectious diseases threaten livelihoods and lives across the country.

Thinking about national security in Canada has long been the preserve of small cadres of federal government officials and even smaller elements of civil society, each profoundly disconnected from the other. It’s not a subject taught much at our colleges and universities, from which future generations of leaders emerge as innocents. National security has rarely penetrated public debate, hardly ever featured in election campaigns, and only spasmodically seized the headlines — usually in moments of scandal.

In the new environment in which we live, that must change.

Government, political parties, and civil society must all pivot to a new understanding of what national security means and how threats are expected to be met.

We have, in Canada, a long way to go to embrace this new and disquieting understanding of national security, yet our collective future depends on it.

The distance we have to go was on display recently in two reports tabled in Parliament.

One was presented by the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (NSICOP), a cornerstone of the Liberal government’s efforts to create a much stronger system of review for our security agencies. NSICOP devoted the entirety of its 2020 annual report to an analysis of the national security threats facing Canada.

This was a laudable endeavour, but one mired in conventional thinking. It failed to be sufficiently forward looking, and the committee limited itself to a discussion of five threats:

  1. Terrorism
  2. Espionage and foreign interference
  3. Malicious cyber activities
  4. Major organized crime
  5. Weapons of mass destruction

All of these are undoubtedly threats, but look hard at this list and you see the conceptual problems.

To give priority of place to terrorism threats is legacy thinking. Espionage and foreign interference are distinct problems, not to be mashed together. Organized crime comes into the national security picture only in very specific manifestations.

More problematic by far is what is missing: pandemic and biosecurity threats, climate change security impacts, and economic security. Precisely the issues that matter most to Canadians, the ones that have the greatest impact on their daily lives, were absent from the frame.

The Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), in its annual public report for 2020, did better. It is clear from the report that CSIS is seized by threats to Canada’s economic security, including those that emerged to the bio-pharma sector during the early months of COVID-19.

Likewise, troubling state-sponsored disinformation campaigns are now on the CSIS radar. Counterintelligence, long a pillar of CSIS operations, is now focused beyond espionage on foreign interference operations.

The CSIS mandate places it squarely in the fight against violent extremism, but unlike the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians, CSIS does not make this the top item in its picture of the threat environment.

And CSIS is working alongside the Communications Security Establishment in trying to understand and counter cyber threats.

However, the CSIS picture of the threat environment is necessarily geared to its lawful mandate. It doesn’t have a pandemic security mission writ large, or a climate change security mandate.

To embrace those missions properly will require new thinking and new ways of organizing our national security apparatus.

When it comes to national security, the past is not prologue. The present is moving fast and the future is hard to get a grip on. But here is a prediction: the comfortable and time-honoured habit of treating national security as far-removed from the general public discourse, of erasing it from politics, is over.

The 2015 federal election in which the Conservatives stumbled over opposition to their anti-terrorism legislation was but a small foreshadowing of a much larger debate over how to live safely, prosperously and democratically in a new age.

The next federal election campaign will be one in which all parties will have to prepare coherent and plausible visions of national security, and argue them in public in the interests of all Canadians.

Source: National security threats are changing, but Canada is mired in conventional thinking

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How one federal agency broke free of outdated IT infrastructure

2021/04/30 Leave a comment

While written a bit too much as a puff piece, an interesting and relevant example of modernization (some of these remind me of my time in the early days of Service Canada and IT infrastructure renewal, where of course the issues were on a much larger scale and higher risk for CPP and EI):

The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare the need for modern, agile IT systems as both the public and private sectors grapple with a suddenly remote workforce. Cloud platforms are the backbone of modern IT infrastructure, providing scalability, speed, and remote access, and are secure without the expense of physical infrastructure. Yet less than 10 per cent of federal departments have transferred some of their operations to a cloud platform. Part of this is because the pandemic diverted focus, but it is also due to fear of the unknown and uncertainty over security benefits and procurement rules.

Had the pandemic struck five years earlier, Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) would have been crippled by its lagging IT infrastructure. Instead, CMHC’s operations continued without missing a step – even supporting the government’s pandemic response by rolling out critical economic support with record speed, such as the Canada Emergency Commercial Rent Assistance for small businesses and the Insured Mortgage Purchase Program to support the financial system.

CMHC’s partnership approach to transforming its IT infrastructure can serve as a model for other federal departments. CMHC and Accenture, a global professional services company, came together five years ago to move CMHC’s outdated and siloed systems to a robust digital service platform.

Back in 2016, CMHC relied on close to 1,000 separate software applications, many of which were customized and hard to maintain. From operations and insurance underwriting to applications for program funding and accounting, every structure had its own siloed system.

Technology was a source of frustration. Twenty-three per cent of CMHC employees rated it their number one barrier, and one in six employees spent their time trying to find data.

Today, those systems have been replaced with enterprise platforms that have automated manual tasks, sped up processing times and offer real-time data to support better decision-making. This endeavour was no small feat. Finding the right partner and doing a thorough analysis of the scope of the challenge took over a year.

Together as CMHC’s deputy chief information officer and Accenture’s federal government practice lead, we helped execute a project that took place over several years and involved hundreds of employees from both organizations. Ultimately, we found that how we implemented the technology was just as important as the technologies we invested in. Sometimes it was even more important.

Here are five key lessons learned that we believe can help other departments successfully approach digital innovation:

1. Leadership buy-in is crucial

The journey for the project – called CMHC in Motion – began under CMHC’s president and leadership team with the goal of becoming a more agile, focused and efficient company with a culture of accountability.

CMHC modernized its organizational structure and focused on communication and training to manage risk, change and execution and to encourage innovation. Fixing technology was the next step.

The leadership team ensured the building blocks were in place for technology and business transformation. Program funding and resources were made available to drive this three-year transformation and its evolution for years to come.

The CIO role was elevated. Now the CIO sits on CMHC’s executive committee and is positioned to influence decisions that affect all parts of the company. Digital and technological thinking need to be able to influence business strategy rather than being made to fit into strategy that is already set. The two need to evolve hand-in-hand.

2. Innovative solutions require innovative approaches

It was clear from the start that the traditional procurement route of a complicated and time-consuming request-for-proposal process would be an obstacle for the project. Inviting potential partners to analyze the scale of the problem was critical to finding not only the right partner but also the right solutions. For three months, two potential partners were given access to CMHC’s infrastructure and systems to fully assess the scale of the situation they would face. More importantly, it allowed CMHC to leverage the experience of external experts in defining the solution. Incorporating this into the proposal process allowed for a broader, more robust and feasible path forward.

When CMHC and Accenture came together there was already an understanding of the challenges and potential solutions, and the project team was able to move straight to planning implementation.

3. A true partnership and governance structure is vital

From day one, CMHC wanted a partner. The vision was an arrangement where both parties shared in the benefits and risks and would collaborate on challenges. Given the complexity and timelines of the project, it was impossible to predict where the work would lead, what outcomes and technologies would be needed or even be available. A risk-sharing fund positioned both parties to carefully consider potential project variances and cost overruns, and both parties came together to solve emerging needs and to consider any potential changes to the scope of work.

Agreeing up front to share in the financial risk is not the norm for public sector transformation projects, but it eliminated years of delay as we avoided time-consuming project scoping, trying to describe the perfect solution. It meant that CMHC was not dictating a solution, but rather defining the problem and getting fresh outside perspectives on how to address it through a cohesive joint team.

Managing outsourcing relationships isn’t easy, so CMHC created a partner relationship management team. Three levels of governance are used at CMHC. It starts at the highest level, with the executive team, then flows to the management and operational governance structures. On a bi-weekly basis CMHC and Accenture Canada’s CEOs met to discuss program performance, relationship status and planning. Five years after the contract was signed, these meetings still take place.

4. Commit to an uncharted path

A multi-year transformation will not follow a straight path. Innovative, agile organizations need to be open to imperfection and experimentation. Innovation requires an acceptance that not all ideas work, and that getting out of planning mode and into testing mode happens so we can learn, adapt and move forward. Progress over perfection and timeliness was important, and we made risk-based decisions to move quickly.

For CMHC, technology was also used to help drive a change in culture around risk-taking, speed and being ok with failure. For CMHC and Accenture, there was an understanding that immediate answers would not always be available, especially with rapid advances in technology. This enabled the delivery team to take risks and push forward at a quicker pace, knowing that it was ok to fail fast to avoid the lengthy detours of searching for the “perfect” solution.

Along the journey, unforeseen events – like the introduction of the National Housing Strategy in 2017 and the COVID-19 pandemic – required significant changes to plans and priorities. CMHC was able to adapt, demonstrating that with the right culture and committed senior leadership, organizations can become resilient and better equipped to respond to unexpected changes in their business environment.

5. Create a feedback loop to guide the pace of change

Engaged and enabled employees can make or break transformative IT projects. Change management is often the first thing to cut when an organization is trying to save its resources, yet it is one of the areas we found to be critical. Continuous dialogue and check-ins through surveys and consultations ensured employees believed in the transformation and had the skills and confidence to adopt transformed business approaches. It is essential to communicate early and often to employees in a transparent and simple way.

To get early buy-in from employees and to show our commitment to making this transformation work, the first project we tackled was the one with the biggest positive impact for our employees – moving off Lotus Notes email to Outlook and Skype. The success of this implementation was instrumental in gaining buy-in from employees and made the transformation real for them.

We were cognizant of the massive cultural shift we were asking employees to make. Their entire technological world was being altered, from a new email platform and filing systems, to a client relationship management system, invoicing and how they manage client requests. We developed a “heat map” to identify which areas of CMHC were undergoing the most change. With the map and employee feedback, we were able to adjust our approach and ease up where the pace of change was too intense. We worked alongside senior management and human resources to continuously evaluate progress and identify areas that needed more training or support.

Moving forward

We find ourselves at an exciting time, where rapid innovation in technology has the potential to drastically change the way we develop and deliver public programs and policy. Over the past few years, technology companies have improved the ease of use, security, scale and interoperability of their offerings. The flexibility and cost-effectiveness of cloud services are undeniable.

The pandemic has highlighted the need for agility in our IT infrastructure. As Canadians look to all levels of government to lead them through these unprecedented times, they have seen the tangible results of government in action to keep them safe, provide them with financial support and navigate the road to economic recovery. Now is the time to build a better, more resilient IT environment for our public sector, one that will allow us to weather storms and continue to provide Canadians with world-class government services.

Source: How one federal agency broke free of outdated IT infrastructure

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For Vaccine Passports, Less Tech Is Best

2021/04/22 Leave a comment

Of interest given that discussion has already started in the Canadian context:

I have been reluctant to write about whether and how Americans might provide proof of vaccination against the coronavirus. It’s a political, cultural, ethical and legal minefield. Technology is not the point at all.

But if some workplaces, schools, public gathering spots and travel companies start requiring a “vaccine passport,” it makes sense for them to do so in ways that preserve people’s privacy, are simple to use, win people’s trust and don’t cost a fortune.

Let me tell you about an intriguing proposal from PathCheck Foundation, a health technology nonprofit. The central premise is that technology related to our health should be as minimal as possible. That philosophy should be our North Star.

Here is one problem with some early technology approaches to digital vaccine credential systems: They create too many middlemen that tap into your health records, said Ramesh Raskar, an associate professor at the M.I.T. Media Lab who also founded PathCheck.

In the United States, states are mostly the ones maintaining records of which residents are vaccinated. Early efforts to create vaccine credentials, like the Excelsior Pass in New York, essentially create a replica of those state databases with information including your name, date of birth, address, the batch numbers of your shots and so on. And that’s what businesses and others access when they check whether people walking in the door are vaccinated, Dr. Raskar said.

When you add multiple layers of technology into any system, it increases the possibility of your sensitive data leaking out. It’s also expensive and complicated for everyone involved. “It’s completely unnecessary,” Dr. Raskar told me.YOUR CORONAVIRUS TRACKER: We’ll send you the latest data for places you care about each day.Sign Up

PathCheck’s idea is to create simple software code that anyone — workplaces, schools or airlines — can incorporate into apps, without the need to replicate health records.

When you need to show a vaccination credential, a one-time code would transmit two pieces of information: your identity, and that you’re vaccinated. Yes, there’s still a middleman, but the difference is that the apps would do as little as possible to access your sensitive information. The relevant data is communicated more directly between your phone and the state health records. You might have to show your ID, too.

He compared this proposal to paying for a sandwich with cash instead of a credit card. There is no need for a complicated paper trail to buy lunch. The metaphor isn’t perfect, but it’s useful.

Some of the organizations pitching vaccination credential technology, including IBM and the airport screening company Clear, are making a similar pitch that their technologies are as minimal as possible.

Dr. Raskar says that they’re often not, because tech companies, states and others have tried to throw a lot of smarts at the problem. If you hear the word “blockchain” with vaccine credentials, know that something has gone off the rails. The risk is that we get complicated, potentially incompatible technology for people to provide proof of vaccination.

What we really need is dumb technology that does as little as possible and knows as little about us as possible. “How can we make it simple, simple, simple as opposed to what technology companies are doing, which is to add more?” Dr. Raskar said.

PathCheck is just one of multiple companies and nonprofit groupsthat are developing fraud-proof vaccination credentials. It’s going to be confusing for awhile as these technologies are evaluated and tested.

But PathCheck deserves credit for turning the approach to vaccination credentials on its head. Less and dumber technology is usually the best.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/20/technology/covid-passports-vaccine-technology.html

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Justin Ling: How Ontario’s health advisors handled the ‘darkest day’ of the pandemic

2021/04/21 2 Comments

Case study of speaking truth to power:

There are plenty of tough jobs in Ontario right now: From those moving parcels at Amazon warehouses to those guiding i-beams at a condo construction site, workers are facing the grim of reality of the pandemic.

Workers are going to the job site everyday without the guarantee of sick pay if they fall ill, need to get tested or snag a much-coveted vaccination spot.

There is one particular job that might not carry the same risks, but which still isn’t inspiring much envy these days: Being a member of the Ontario COVID-19 Science Table.

The Table, composed of some 100 doctors, researchers and specialists, is the independent body that furnishes advice to Premier Doug Ford and his cabinet on how best to beat back the deadly pandemic. It is their modelling that shows Ontario careening towards 30,000 news cases per day.

But it was their advice—to shut truly non-essential workplaces, pause construction where possible, and prioritize more vaccines for front-line workers—that was summarily ignored.

Instead, they dispatched officers to police a pandemic: As a pre-teen in Gravenhurst recently found out. They promised more inspectors, but that means very little if the provincial regulations allow employees to remove their masks on the job—a recent outbreak at a provincial testing laboratory shows that nowhere is truly safe from the virus.

The whole Table is in an impossibly awkward spot. Ford continues to tout their work, insisting it has informed his own approach to the pandemic. But, in practise, his actions have consistently been directly at odds with the advice from the Table.

Last week, as the divergence between advice and action grew wider, talk around the Table turned to mass resignation. A protest, in essence, of being used by a government that appears to have little interest in a science-based approach to fighting the pandemic.

But the majority of the Table opted, instead, for a softer approach: One that retains cautious optimism that the Ford government may yet see the light, and pursue measures that may actually avert a worst-case scenario in the province.

To underscore their position, the Science Table drafted a letter to the government with pointed advice on what to do next. It’s a letter that lays out the choice the Ford government faces. Whether or not he will make the right decision is, ultimately, up to him.

***

On Friday afternoon Dr. Adalsteinn Brown, the co-chair of the Science Table, appeared alongside Dr. David Williams, the province’s Chief Medical Officer of Health to present new modelling on the risks facing the province.

“Without stronger system-level measures and immediate support for essential workers and high-risk communities, high case rates will persist through the summer,” the presentation warned.

Brown said financial support for workers and strict measures for workplaces were desperately needed: “We need to stop infection coming into our central workplaces,” he said.

Vaccines, he added, were a central part of the strategy but wouldn’t solve this problem on their own.

The lines on the graph were three colours: Green, which rose slightly, then bent towards the X-axis. Yellow, which wobbled upwards so slightly—hovering right above 10,000 cases per day. And, finally, the red line: A line that sloped menacingly upwards, past the 30,000 marker.

Ontario is currently trending along the yellow line.

Red, yellow, and green dotted lines shadowed each of the solid lines: They represented what case counts would look like if Ontario managed to ramp up from the status quo, 100,000 vaccines administered per day, to an arbitrary number of 300,000 shots per day.

“Under every scenario, more vaccines mean a faster resolution in the long-run,” the presentation explained.

The Table communicated the crisis looming, and provided clear advice on how to avert disaster—both publicly and privately.

Hours later, after prolonged cabinet discussions, Ford appeared in front of television cameras to announce his decision: Playgrounds and outdoor sports would be banned. Outdoor gatherings forbidden, for members outside our household. Police would be dispatched to enforce the orders, with nearly-limitless authority to stop and question anyone in public. More inspectors would be dispatched to workplaces, but there would be no meaningful change to what constituted an ‘essential’ workplace. The number of vaccines reserved for frontline workers in hotspot zones would be set at 25 per cent.

The premier waved a sheet from Brown’s presentation: The chart showing the case projections. He seized on the idea that 300,000 vaccines could blunt this punishing third wave. “Would we be in this position if we were getting 300,000 doses a day back in February? Like the rest of the world? The answer is absolutely not,” Ford said.

The province looked on in alarm. The premier was, effectively, announcing a police state. Meanwhile, he was ranting at the federal government for not sending enough vaccines. When asked directly why he couldn’t shut more businesses, Ford explained how “deep” the supply chains were—light switches wouldn’t be made, he explained.

Reaction from the public was swift, and horrified. But the members of the Science Table, in particular, were beside themselves. Brown and fellow co-chair Brian Schwartz sent an email to dozens of his colleagues on the Science Table.

“We know that many of you are frustrated and angry after today’s announcements,” Brown and Schwartz wrote.

“We did the right thing,” they wrote of their early afternoon briefing, which set the stakes for Ford’s 4 pm announcement. The research and data, furnished by members of the table, they wrote: “Made it possible for us to be firm in saying what we know should be done to fight the pandemic.”

Several members of the Table took to Twitter to blast the decision. One member, Dr. Andrew Morris—who is a University of Toronto professor of medicine, a medical director in the Sinai Health System, and who co-chairs the Table’s working group on drugs and biologics—called the decision “criminal.”

Many of their blistering repudiations of the government’s decision were splashed on the frontpage of the Toronto Star on Saturday morning.

Brown and Schwartz didn’t discourage the comments. “The only thing we would ask is that you speak truth to power in the same way you would conduct any other discussion,” they wrote.

They summed up, in bullet points, the recommendations and analysis they had been providing for weeks: More vaccines for high-risk communities, close businesses that are not absolutely necessary, do more to protect workplaces that must remain open, create dedicated sick leave benefits, reduce mobility within the province, and encourage people to meet outside safely.

“Unfortunately, our advice does not align with what the cabinet announced this afternoon,” they wrote. “That requires serious discussion.”

Brown and Schwartz signed off the email, recognizing that many of the members were actually on the front-lines of this deadly fight. For those still on clinical duty, they wrote, “we wish you and your patients the very best through this exceptionally challenging weekend, and that you get a few moments of rest too.”

They arranged a 10 am Sunday morning meeting to discuss next steps.

In the outside world, pressure was mounting. Registered Nurses Association of Ontario CEO Doris Grinspun called for the Science Table to “resign en-masse.”

***

On Saturday afternoon, the Ford government appeared to walk back its enforcement measures, which would have given police nearly unfettered power to stop and interrogate people out for a walk, or driving, and ask their home address and purpose for being out in public.

The retreat came after nearly every police force in the province said they would refuse to conduct the arbitrary stops—journalist Andrew Lawton found that only the Ontario Provincial Police said they would enforce the measures.

Yet the supposedly walked-back regulations still allow police to stop anyone on the suspicion that “an individual may be participating in a gathering that is prohibited.” Of course, provincial regulations now ban any outdoor gathering, except for those in the same household. The new regulations allow police to demand the individual provide “information for the purpose of determining whether they are in compliance with that clause.”

Lawyers pointed out that the new, supposedly “refocused,” measures actually gave police more power to interrogate Ontarians on flimsy grounds. A group of young skateboarders in Gravenhurst would learn that reality pretty quickly on Sunday morning. Leanne Bonnekamp’s 12 year old son was out skateboarding with friends—in a park near the YMCA, as the skate parks were closed by provincial order. That’s when a cop approached.

“Two officers showed up, yelled at these kids—that they weren’t wearing masks, and weren’t socially distanced,” the boy’s mother, Bonnekamp, told me. One of the Ontario Provincial Police officers demanded the kids’ ID, and was running it in his cruiser as his partner stayed with the other youth.

Bonnekamp’s son was giving the officers attitude for the arbitrary stop—though no profanity, she says—as the cop gripped his scooter. In the video, the officer can be seen reaching over the scooter and shoving the pre-teen, who falls on the ground. When another youth asks just what in the hell the officers are doing, the cop yells “he’s failing to identify.”

The OPP says they are investigating the officer’s actions.

The same weekend, an outbreak in Toronto put into sharp focus the inadequacy of the government’s workplace measures. An outbreak of cases in a Toronto lab, run by Public Health Ontario to analyze COVID-19 tests, infected 16 employees.

The agency’s president Colleen Geiger sent an email to staff, which was forwarded to Maclean’s, indicating an investigation into the outbreak was ongoing and that they would identify “areas that require improvement.” Close contacts of those who tested positive, Geiger wrote, were already isolating. Other staff would be tested onsite.

One employee, who contacted Maclean’s with details of the outbreak but asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to speak to media, said the outbreak was just waiting to happen. Social distancing in the lab is nearly impossible and good public health measures aren’t being enforced, they wrote. Masks are often worn improperly and limits posted by the lunch tables and elevators aren’t respected.

This outbreak isn’t even the first. Previous instances where employees of the lab caught COVID-19 are “posted on bulletin boards that are tucked away in corners of hallways.”

The employee, quite correctly, argued that “Public Health of Ontario should hold a higher standard than the rest of Ontario residents and I find it shameful that this outbreak could have been avoided.”

Public Health Ontario confirmed to Maclean’s that 16 staff fell ill. “Diagnostic testing for COVID-19 as well as other infectious diseases are continuing as normal and there is no impact on laboratory services at this time,” they wrote.

If the provincial lab responsible for processing COVID-19 tests can’t even keep safe, how much trust can we put in other workplaces?

***

Sunday morning, Dr. David Fisman—professor of epidemiology at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto, and a member of the Science Table—wrote to the other members: “My concern is that the science and modeling tables are being used as cover.”

“What we saw on Friday was exactly the sort of thing I’ve been concerned about: Meaningful guidance from this group was disregarded,” he continued. “But the premier took the time to hold up a graph in which a hypothetical 300,000 vaccines per day scenario was plotted, and indicated that this would be the way forward.”

“As I have said at our meetings, at some point this starts to feel like aiding and abetting a government that has prosecuted a pandemic response that frankly feels negligent, or even criminal,” Fisman wrote.

“I don’t think I am on the same team as this government.”

That intense frustration was shared by many of his colleagues.

In an interview with Maclean’s, Morris said he was “dumbfounded” by the Friday announcement. At the same time, he called it an “apex” of a trend that has been growing over the course of the pandemic.

“When we get to Friday, they come out with these measures that are absolutely antithetical to the beliefs and advice of the Science Table — en masse, and individual members,” Morris says. “I don’t think there’s a single member who would have recommended those things.”

He phrases it as a consistent and repeated “gaslighting” by the government.

“Friday, for me, was probably my darkest day in my professional career,” says Dr. Peter Jüni, the scientific director for the Science Table—who is also a world-renowned researcher and a professor at the University of Toronto.

Jüni told me he found himself asking: “Were we not clear enough?”

“It’s pretty clear that there is a gulf between what the Science Table has recommended and what the policy announced in the province was. That’s clear,” says Dr. Isaac Bogoch who sits on the Table’s modelling working group, teaches at the University of Toronto, and who consults on infectious disease outbreaks at the Toronto General Hospital.

When the entire Table joined a Zoom call on Sunday morning, there were divergent views on what to do. Some wanted them all to resign, as a show of force that the government couldn’t use their modelling but ignore their advice.

But, as Bogoch notes, the public outcry about the measures actually prompted a retreat. The Ford government, perhaps more than the average government, is intensely sensitive to criticism. The Table’s advice—enabled by their independence, both from government and from any kind of particular hierarchy—no doubt enabled that public backlash.

There was also some pessimism about whether resigning would have much impact.

“I’m not sure, personally, what resignation would do,” Morris confesses. Bogoch agrees: They still have a job to do, he says. Being ignored “doesn’t mean you fold up your tent.”

Jüni, who publicly mused about resigning, came to a similar conclusion. “I could make a point, not a difference,” he says.

One feeling is particularly stark: The Science Table fears what, if anything, will replace their advice and modelling if they leave.

“There’s no question there are times, it has felt to many people, like we’ve been played,” Morris says. With resignation off the table, his mind turned to: “How can we avoid being played like that?”

***

What, exactly, the Ford government is going to do next is an open question. On Monday, after a brutal weekend for the Ford government, I got on the phone with someone in the Premier’s office. We agreed on anonymity so they could speak freely.

They certainly acknowledged the blowback that came from Friday’s announcement, and recognized more action would be necessary to stem the transmission of the virus. And they were quick to highlight the areas where they did, general speaking, follow the Science Table’s advice. Chiefly, Ford announced his government would dedicate 25 per cent of the vaccine supply for frontline workers in hotspot neighbourhoods.

The Science Table, I pointed out, recommended allocating 50 per cent of the vaccine supply. The government source said: Well, if we had done 50 per cent, they would have called for 75 per cent.

At another point, I noted that the Science Table was apoplectic about how virtually nothing was being done to shut truly not crucial construction projects. Yes, the source said, but the construction industry was furious.

(Indeed, the Ontario Construction Consortium attacked the government’s order barring non-essential construction, bizarrely insisting that “a recent snapshot of 10,000 Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB) claims related to COVID-19 since the pandemic began showed that fewer than 200 of those cases originated in the construction industry.” Provincial data shows that, since the start of the pandemic, some 10,000 cases were a direct result of outbreaks at offices, warehouses, and construction sites.)

But the balancing act this government is striving for is exactly the problem: Splitting the difference, or trying to strike a balance between rigorous scientific advice and the construction lobby is not a wise or successful move.

“How does a cabinet—that has even a rudimentary understanding of what’s going on—how do they deliberate over numerous hours over two days and come up with this?” Morris asked me.

“If you do half measures, you hurt everybody,” Jüni says. “Including the economy.”

The province has dedicated more inspectors for these workplaces, but its own advice is faulty: The Government of Ontario’s official policy on masks in the workplace holds that “you do not need to wear a face covering when you are working in an area that allows you to maintain a distance of at least 2 metres from anyone else while you are indoors.” (The provincial regulations state that workers may be maskless if they can maintain social distancing and are in an area inaccessible to the public—a construction site, for example.)

That is a fundamentally backwards policy that ignores the strong likelihood of airborne transmission. If workplace inspectors are continuing to enforce that standard, the inspections are going to be largely ineffective.

Things that the science table believes are going to be helpful is more support for workers, essential workers, to access support—primarily financial support so that they can get vaccinated, tested or stay away from work if they’re unwell.

When asked directly whether the government would finally retreat, and ensure sick leave for workers in the province, the government source said they were waiting to see whether Monday’s federal budget would do the job for them. Even though labour law, including sick leave, is explicitly provincial domain, they said, they wanted Ottawa to act.

The federal budget did, in fact, expand the Employment Insurance sickness benefit—but that support is claims-based, meaning it isn’t automatic nor does it mean much for an employee who suddenly falls ill. Those employees, clearly, need sick leave: Something many employers still refuse to provide, but which the provincial government can mandate.

The government source said, despite the Ford government’s dogmatic opposition to date, the government would give “serious consideration” to sick leave. But it would be unlikely any decision would be made anytime in the near future.

Part of the Ford government’s commitment to the status quo seems to stem from their belief that things are heading in the right direction. The government source said that, while things may change fast—and new ICU admissions could force their hand—they do not anticipate announcing new measures this week.

Asked where this optimism was coming from, the source pointed to the mobility data found in the Science Table’s modelling showing that, in recent weeks, fewer people have been travelling outside their home. If mobility trends downward, they think, case counts will flatten.

But that, too, runs contrary to the advice from the Science Table. “Mobility is a surrogate for contact,” Jüni says. “It’s a marker. It isn’t causal.”

As Jüni points out, declining mobility could be a sign that, through general anxiety or enforcement measures, people are staying indoors—a good sign, if social gatherings are driving transmission.

Provincial data shows that a significant number, likely the majority, of COVID-19 cases in the province are coming from workplaces and schools. I asked for data to prove that private gatherings were driving significant caseloads, but have yet to receive it.

On the flipside, however, mobility trends might not mean much if Ontarians are leaving home to engage in low-risk activity, like meeting friends in a park, or going for a walk.

The more I cited the Science Table’s work, the more the government source suggested the advice was at odds with itself. Or unclear. Or, for example, that the Table couldn’t agree on advice about the safety of gathering outdoors.

The Table doesn’t see it that way. Jüni himself presented before cabinet. “Outdoors is safe,” he told them. It can be made more safe, he added, but he says he was abundantly clear. “I do not know what more I could do,” he says.

Morris echoes the sentiment: He says it is “essential” that the province provide clear advice, encouraging outdoor activity.

***

On Tuesday afternoon, the Science Table issued a letter to the Ford government, entitled: The Way Forward.

“Ontario is now facing the most challenging health crisis of our time,” the Table wrote. “Our case counts are at an all-time high. Our hospitals are buckling. Younger people are getting sicker. The disease is ripping through whole families. The Variants of Concern that now dominate COVID in Ontario are, in many ways, a new pandemic. And Ontario needs stronger measures to control the pandemic.”

The letter put to paper, publicly, what the Table has been telling the Ford government emphatically since the third wave began swelling.

It proposed clear strategies—things the Ford government is pointedly not doing:

  • Reducing the list of essential workplaces allowed to remain open to be “as short as possible,” and ensuring that those workers wear masks on the job.
  • “Paying essential workers to stay home when they are sick.” And not, they note, the federal Employment Insurance benefit, which is “cumbersome” and inadequate.
  • Allocating as many vaccine doses as possible to hotspot communities and essential workers—and ensuring “on-the-ground community outreach” to connect doses to those workers.
  • Providing “public health guidance that works.” That means communicating a simple message: Indoor gatherings should be strictly forbidden, while underlining that “Ontarians can spend time with each other outdoors” while social distancing. That means allowing small gatherings of people from different households, while also encouraging masks and two metres distance.

The letter warns that “inconsistent policies, with no clear link to scientific evidence, are ineffective in fighting COVID.” That includes, they wrote, policies that “discourage safe outdoor activity.”

The premier isn’t mentioned by name in the letter, but the closing lines offer a stark warning for the government:

“There is no trade-off between economic, social and health priorities in the midst of a pandemic that is out of control.”

Source: How Ontario’s health advisors handled the ‘darkest day’ of the pandemic

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