No time to fly blind: To beat COVID 19, Canada needs better data

2020/04/09 Leave a comment

As we always do! Bit surprised no discussion of what role the Canadian Institute of Health Information (CIHI) could play:

Accurate information is critical to fight a health emergency like the COVID-19 pandemic. Robust data identifies the scale of the problem. It enables the prioritization of human, financial and material resources for an effective and efficient response. It allows for public scrutiny, advocacy and accountability. It builds trust. It provides authorities with tools to counter misinformation. It will enable us to slowly and safely return to economic and social activity.

In short, good data can mean the difference between life and death – or in the case of a pandemic, tens of thousands of deaths. Yet in the face of the greatest international health crisis in a generation, Canada is falling short.

Prime Minister Trudeau promised better data. To deliver on this promise, the Public Health Agency must mandate standardized information reporting for provincial and district public health authorities. These standardized templates would outline the data and information to be reported, how it should be collected and how it should be shared. Moreover, the Agency should urgently provide financial and technical resources to improve information management at all levels of the public health response.

At first glance COVID-19 data appears to be plentiful – case numbers and graphs are splashed across news reports and public health websites. Public health agencies produce epidemiological reports with colourful graphs and charts. Officials quote modelling estimates of projected case numbers and fatalities.

But in reality the value  of this information is limited. Efforts to fill in information gaps with modelling is a short-term and imperfect substitute for real-time data.  The data that does exist is of questionable validity given low testing numbers within the population and delays in receiving test results. Moreover, the data is not gathered, compiled or presented in a consistent manner by health authorities across the country. Different case definitions make comparison within and across provinces difficult. Sex and age disaggregated figures are not always provided. Some areas report hospitalization and intensive care unit numbers, some do not. Warnings of medical equipment and personal protective equipment (PPE) shortages are widespread, yet inventories of PPE stockpiles are frequently not given.

Moreover, public health officials report cases but do not discuss population context. They do not present important statistics about communities including age, sex and socio-economic data and specific vulnerabilities. Authorities rarely provide information on the number of health workers employed in the response, hospital beds available or PPE stockpiles. Officials cite testing numbers with little concrete data on laboratory capacity or efforts to expand it.

It is confusing. Overwhelming. And unhelpful.

Without accurate data and information, authorities cannot identify and manage human, financial and material resources to engage in the fight against COVID-19.  Nor can they monitor the effectiveness of interventions and stop its spread.

We can do better. During humanitarian crises, which often occur in data-scarce contexts, central coordinating bodies prioritize the collection and transparent dissemination of information. They develop standardized “Situation Reports” at multiple levels – the community, the region and the country – to identify need, prioritize interventions and target scarce human, material and financial resources. In the health sector, reports include population size disaggregated by sex, age and vulnerability; the number of health facilities in operation; key causes and rates of illness and mortality; medical procedures and treatment courses. These reports are published openly and disseminated widely. Information is critical for an effective and efficient response in complex and rapidly changing environments. It allows resources to be targeted to save lives.

COVID-19 warrants something similar. We need to understand the progress of the disease and our response – in real time. Proper information management will not only improve the effectiveness of our interventions, but it will also enable the safe resumption of economic and social activity.

A standardized reporting template would include case numbers and hospitalizations (sex and age disaggregated).  But counting the numbers of outbreak cases is only one piece of the information puzzle. Reports should include community baseline data. Important information includes population demographics (age, sex and particular vulnerabilities), neighbourhoods with higher risks, and the number of vulnerable institutions (retirement and nursing homes, corrections facilities). Authorities would identify financial, human and material resources available and required. Reports should document laboratories with COVID-19 testing capacity and provide inventories of PPE.

Better data would allow us to identify critical intervention points to stop the spread of COVID-19 and to slowly get our lives and economy back on track. The lack of prioritization on testing is both a symptom and a consequence of Canada’s failure to prioritize information management. Given testing capacity, public health officials discourage tests for those with mild symptoms. This undermines the validity of most of the numbers used by public officials to track the COVID-19 outbreak. Without the total ‘real’ numbers of individuals infected, we lack an accurate denominator, which undermines the accurate calculation of hospitalization or case fatality rates. Lag times in test results also make accurate contact tracing very difficult.

More critically, without expanded testing, we lack the ability to quickly test health workers and those employed in other essential services (such as retirement homes) to protect them, their co-workers, patients or residents and the public. Nor do we have the ability to test people to gradually and safely scale up economic and social activity. Instead we are told to wait for testing innovations while COVID rates numbers rise. Yet many private labs as well as lab facilities in university and colleges remain unutilized over three weeks into Canada’s full scale COVID-19 response. With better information would come increased accountability for mobilizing such capacity.

COVID-19 has sparked one innovation in information production – the use of outbreak models to guide public health responses to COVID-19, often funded by public health authorities. The federal government recently provided $192 million to BlueDot – a Toronto based digital health firm, not a university research department – to support its modelling activities. After calls to release modelling estimates, some provincial governments have provided projections of case and mortality numbers.

But transparency warrants more. Modelling in general is extremely challenging and COVID-19 modelling is particularly complex. Population demographic characteristics appear to determine the speed of COVID-19 transmission as well as severe illness, hospitalization and fatality rates. While the professionalization of the modellers is not in question, research driving policy decisions should be published openly and subject to scrutiny. The lack of clarity contrasts unfavourably to models published in scientific journals, or those published online by Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College, University of London. If governments release model estimates, they should release the assumptions and data that inform these estimates.

Moreover, modelling is an imperfect and flawed substitute for real data and concrete information about the response. Policy makers urgently need to pay attention to the generation and management of accurate and valid data, mandate standardized reporting from all public health authorities and provide public funds to make it happen.

We are in unprecedented public policy territory. Yet we lack the information needed to effectively navigate the COVID-19 pandemic and get our economy and our lives back on track. Prime Minister Trudeau’s commitment to better data and improved information management provides Canada’s Public Health Agency with the opportunity to exercise leadership. It is time to up our game.

Source: No time to fly blind: To beat COVID 19, Canada needs better data

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Ai Weiwei: The virus in the body politic: We have lost our ability to cherish each other

2020/04/06 Leave a comment

Worth reading and reflecting upon:

I was living in Beijing in 2003 when SARS struck, and I can remember how that felt. It descended as an entirely new thing – a new concept, an unwelcome intruder, an ominous threat. It galvanized a new mindset in society and led the government to impose unprecedented defences. Some of those defences have been used again to combat the coronavirus, but to citizens, the two campaigns have felt different. SARS felt like a battle; coronavirus feels like a war.

With SARS, the government’s first response was to seal off all reports and to deny that a problem existed. The truth only emerged when an elderly military doctor, who had seen the government’s Minister of Public Health lie broadly to the Chinese people on television, wrote a letter to Chinese media that was leaked to the foreign press.

The government then drew on techniques used in the military and in prisons to suppress the outbreak. Ordinary folk, lacking better medical advice, resorted to herbal medicines, antibiotics, or hormones, which were either useless or harmful, and when they were harmful, they added to the death toll.

Sadly, the same thing has happened again. When the coronavirus first appeared in Wuhan last November, doctors who noticed it began passing along the news in text messages – only to be summoned by police, reprimanded and ordered to remain silent.

It took until Jan. 11 for Wuhan’s health commission to report the city’s first known death from this new kind of coronavirus, along with dozens of cases. At the same time, the commission insisted that the virus could not spread from person to person, which we now know to be false. Its purported origin was from a live animal market, but not long after that announcement, alternative theories began to circulate, given oxygen by a lack of transparency on the part of a Chinese government that has a poor record around trust. And just this Wednesday, a U.S. intelligence report declared that Beijing has been intentionally under-reporting the total numbers of cases and deaths there.

With the virus racing and information suppressed, the government eventually decided to abruptly seal off Wuhan and place its more than 11 million citizens under mandatory quarantine. There were strict rules and police enforced them. People could not enter or exit quarantine zones at will, and some people were not allowed to leave home. Some doors were even welded shut. Between mid-January and mid-March, quarantine and detention tactics were deployed across China. The country was in shock.

By late March, the number of new cases in China had slowed. But in the meantime, the virus had spread to more than a hundred other countries, where the total numbers of confirmed cases and deaths have now exceeded China’s. And where once there was only criticism for China’s unique station and particular response, other countries – democratic or otherwise – are now panicking through their own preparations and plans.

What the world needs now – in China, and in the world at large – is sober reflection on what it means to cherish life.

What, exactly, is a virus? About one-thousandth the size of a bacterium, a virus cannot survive or reproduce on its own. To live, it must enter, attach to and parasitize a living cell. Viruses have been doing this for tens of thousands of years – entering living bodies and dying when the host body either kills them with its immune system, or when the body dies itself. This happens because the immune system’s battle with viruses also kills normal cells, and if too much of that happens, the host body can perish, taking the virus with it. In this fight to the death, both sides can lose.

It’s a useful metaphor when considering how various countries have responded to their given outbreaks. The Chinese government is authoritarian, but that gives it huge advantages in combating the virus; it can set aside considerations of human rights and individual freedom, to say nothing of “cherishing life.” Virus control in democratic countries such as Italy, Britain and the United States, where the freedom of individuals is respected, is clearly more difficult and complex.

But there, too, cherishing life can feel impossible. The U.S. does not have a public medical system or universal guarantees of health. Its hospitals, pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies are private, and they operate on the principle of capitalism in the service of individual patients. And the full terror of such a health-care system has been put on display with this latest outbreak, exposing the fantasy of “the land of equal opportunity” for what it really is: a place where those with means are taken care of, while the rest are left to fend for themselves.

The only conclusion a reasonable person can derive from the semi-coherent ramblings of U.S. President Donald Trump and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, when they answer questions about the coronavirus, is that neither man is focused on cherishing life, but only on how well bureaucratic capitalism is operating. One’s only source of cheer in observing the tiny coronavirus is to note its spirit of egalitarianism: You are a religious leader? A famous actor or high official? A politician who either does or does not think I am causing a crisis? Fine – I treat you all the same.

What are we learning from the disaster? Can we learn something about, as former Chinese Communist Party general secretary Hu Jintao once declared, a “community of shared destiny”? If such a phrase were to come from today’s Chinese leaders, who pursue crony capitalism while speaking of Marxism, it could seem like self-satire. In Karl Marx’s original vision, communism is the model of humanity’s ultimate ideals: a community of equals that accords with the basic characteristics of human life. China’s constitution and the charter of the Chinese Communist Party, however, both cite communism as the glorious endpoint of political “struggle.” Also by contrast, the Western capitalist world prioritizes commercial competition while taking democracy and human rights as its ethical base (even though, it must be said, that base has been regularly defiled and now is only a weak answer to the challenges of authoritarianism). With such divergent expressions of ideals in the world, how can we talk about a “community of shared destiny”?

The actual fate of the world today is a freakish amalgam of different systems. For Western capitalism to continue expanding, it has had no choice but to partner with exploitative, authoritarian states such as China, to profit in ways that the West cannot at home. By doing so, despite the seemingly deep ideological differences, Western capitalism has allowed Chinese communism into its structure, virus-like, and the two now share a fate. Indeed, just as how former paramount leader Deng Xiaoping’s guideline to “let some of the people get rich first” became the only fate that mattered to many Chinese people from the 1990s on, this viral hybrid system that resulted has continued to grow. It now threatens civilization’s immune system – just wait and see.

The insertion of an external element into an organism can demonstrate life’s uniformity, but also its fragility. The same key fits into all locks, be they black or white, Christian or Muslim, or a fearless atheist. Can humanity respond? Whether or not wisdom, science, medical expertise and the protection of various gods will be enough to see fragile humanity through this moment – we do not clearly know. At a minimum, a question will remain: If a similar disaster comes in five years, or two, or less, what will happen? Will humanity’s spiritual values and material wealth be able to hold up?

In the interim, we should be thinking about the true value of our fragile little bundle of life, and how it can live in harmony with nature at large. If we can do this, then no sort of political opinion, religion, war, or any other of the various concerns of mankind should be able to block our quest for survival. This is a question of philosophy that goes well beyond medical science or the arguments of politicians. A philosophy is realized only in the details of the joys and pains of human experience.

After death, a corpse cools and interment may follow, regardless of what has died – virus, human being, all of humanity, or all of life. Let’s hope that humanity begins understanding that there are no differences in the end.

When information is hard to access and people are prevented from drawing informed conclusions, hatred, bias, prejudice and violence come rolling out. A shared understanding of life is nearly impossible. The most fundamental humanist understanding is that life and death co-exist, and the attitudes necessary to reach such an understanding are tolerance, empathy, recognition of suffering and willingness to help others. This is so because other people are a part of oneself; protection of oneself calls for protection of human society. To see this point is to identify with the value of common existence, which is the reliable basis for all of our pleasures and happiness. Otherwise we live with nothing but empty illusions that a whiff of breeze can blow away.

To stand in awe of life itself is the best way to see the connections between an individual body and the rest of life. We despise war, we despise the barriers that separate people and we despise the political schemes that divide people into irreconcilable groups. The compensation that the coronavirus affords us is that we can view the world with a bit more wisdom.

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German, French Officials Accuse U.S. Of Diverting Supplies

2020/04/06 Leave a comment

Failure on humanitarian, ethical and institutional levels.

The best comment, with respect to the US, came from Ontario Premier Doug Ford: “We’re the two largest trading partners anywhere in the world. It’s like one of your family members (says), ‘OK you go starve and we’ll go feast on the rest of the meal.’ I’m just so disappointed right now. We have a great relationship with the U.S. and they pull these shenanigans? Unacceptable.”

As the coronavirus rattles the globe, governments and aid organizations everywhere find themselves in a race to acquire scarce medical supplies and protective equipment — but some say the United States isn’t playing fair.

Earlier this week, officials in both Germany and France accused the U.S. of diverting medical supplies meant for their respective countries by outbidding the original buyers.

As of Saturday, there were more than 1 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 worldwide and more than 60,000 deaths from the virus, according to a tally by researchers at Johns Hopkins University. The U.S. has the most cases globally, with Germany and France at the fourth and fifth-highest case count, respectively.

On Friday, officials in Berlin alleged that the U.S. intercepted a shipment of medical equipment in Thailand from American medical supply company 3M and diverted it to the U.S., the German newspaper Der Tagesspiegel reported. Berlin’s interior minister called the alleged interception “modern piracy.”

That same day, French officials accused the U.S. of redirecting a shipment of medical masks from Shanghai originally intended for a hard-hit French region to the U.S. by offering a much higher price for the supplies, The Guardian reported.

The accusations come as demand in the U.S. for facemasks surges, particularly after a new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommendation that all Americans should wear cloth face coverings in public.

The U.S. has flatly denied allegations of diverting supplies from other countries. But President Trump has also tried to force American companies into prioritizing U.S. orders by invoking the Defense Production Act. On Thursday, the president used the DPA to order 3M to stop exporting hospital-grade N95 masks to Canada and Latin America, according to the company.

“We hit 3M hard today after seeing what they were doing with their Masks. ‘P Act’ all the way,” the president said in a tweet Thursday night.

On Friday morning, 3M warned of “significant humanitarian implications” of ending shipments to Canada and Latin America, saying the company is “a critical supplier of respirators.” 3M also said other countries would likely retaliate, reducing the overall number of respirators in the U.S.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau echoed warnings against halting American medical exports to Canada on Friday.

“It would be a mistake to create blockages or reduce the amount of back-and-forth trade of essential goods and services including medical goods,” the Canadian leader said.

3M CEO Mike Roman also pushed back on the president’s threats to the company. “The idea that 3M is not doing all it can to fight price gouging and unauthorized retailing is absurd,” Roman said in a CNBC interview. “The narrative that we are not doing everything we can to maximize deliveries of respirators in our home country — nothing could be further from the truth.”

With no collective global effort to distribute supplies to countries that need them most, little stands in the way of global feuding and price-gouging. The Trump administration has come under criticism for the same issue in domestic markets.

The Washington Post reported earlier this week that states with governors who are allies to the president, including Florida’s Ron DeSantis, have had little trouble getting requests filled with supplies from the national stockpile. Meanwhile, some Democratic governors have struggled to get federal help.

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo have repeatedly complained that trying to get federal supplies is like the “wild west”: states must compete against one another as well as other countries, with essential supplies going to the highest bidder.

Trump blamed New York’s shortage of ventilators on the state itself for not having more respirators before the pandemic broke out.

“They should’ve had more ventilators. They were totally under-serviced,” the president said Friday. “We have a lot of states that have to be taken care of, some much more than others.”

New York state has the highest number of coronavirus cases and deaths in the country, with more than 100,000 cases of COVID-19 as of Saturday. The next closest state is New Jersey with just under 30,000 cases.

Source: German, French Officials Accuse U.S. Of Diverting Supplies

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Saunders: When viruses threaten, the strongest disinfectant is democracy

2020/04/06 Leave a comment

Good reminder by Saunders (although current US administration is testing thesis):

If you want to see bold leadership in the fight against this pandemic, look no further than Turkmenistan, where dictator Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov put his foot down and banned any use, in conversation or print, of the word “coronavirus.”

That ought to take care of the problem.

Mr. Berdymukhamedov may occupy a place on the remote fringes of politics (and of sanity), but he is far from the only politician who would like us to believe that a disease outbreak is best fought by suspending democratic practices and ruling by decree.

There is an unhealthy belief, far too prevalent among otherwise liberal-minded people these days, that democracy is not an effective disinfectant for fighting infection.

It’s not hard to reach this conclusion – after all, citizens are being asked to do things, and sometimes compelled by law, that in normal times would be considered grotesque infringements on personal liberties. A lot of emergency decisions have to be made quickly. Isn’t democracy, with its checks and balances and deliberative processes, just a sluggish hindrance?

That was the case made by Viktor Orban, the far-right president of Hungary, when he persuaded his parliament this week – in which his party already has a two-thirds super-majority – to pass an “emergency” law that suspends all elections and allows him to rule by decree, bypass democratic institutions and courts, and imprison anyone who complains. It has no end date.

It was immediately apparent that these new measures have nothing to do with fighting the virus, which has yet to hit Hungary hard. Mr. Orban included language that made it illegal for people to have a gender different from their biological sex – a hot-button topic on the angry right, but one utterly unrelated to virology.

Mr. Orban already holds extraordinary extralegal powers under another “emergency” law passed in 2015, ostensibly to deal with the European refugee crisis, which barely touched Hungary. It was never repealed.

Democratic leaders have done a better virus-fighting job not by seizing absolute power (like Mr. Orban) or by lying and denying the existence of a pandemic threat for months (like U.S. President Donald Trump or his counterparts in Brazil and the Philippines) but by building their country’s reserves of public trust and co-operation by using transparency, compromise and other democratic values to bring everyone together around this difficult common sacrifice, as we’ve seen in the better moments from Asian and European democracies.

As such, it was welcome to see Canada’s opposition parties fight back against attempts by the governing Liberals, who have an unhealthy preference for governing from the backrooms of the Prime Minister’s Office, to allow economic policy to be passed by emergency decree – and for the Liberals to climb down quickly and open their policies to full parliamentary debate.

Nevertheless, there is an alarming number of otherwise democratic people who have pointed approvingly to China – where opaque authoritarian secrecy allowed the new coronavirus to explode and spread internationally in December and early January, before a harsh crackdown slowed its spread.

There is absolutely nothing to suggest that an epidemic is better fought by non-democratic governments.

In fact, the record shows otherwise. In February, researchers from The Economist used the massive International Disaster Database to examine the death and infection data from all recorded epidemics since 1960 – hundreds of outbreaks in hundreds of countries over six decades. The results are striking: “For any given level of income, democracies appear to experience lower mortality rates for epidemic diseases than their non-democratic counterparts.”

In democracies with average incomes similar to China’s, epidemics have killed a third fewer people than they have in China and other autocratic states with similar incomes. This “democracy gap” has remained consistent in recent years and under all sorts of epidemics.

“Authoritarian regimes,” the authors conclude, “although able to co-ordinate massive construction projects, may be poorly suited to matters that require the free flow of information and open dialogue between citizens and rulers … . Non-democratic societies often restrict the flow of information and persecute perceived critics.”

The most impressive responses to the virus are not those ordered, belatedly, by Beijing – or by other countries that have followed China’s lead in imprisoning critics and silencing dissent, including Thailand, Cambodia, Venezuela, Bangladesh and Turkey.

Far more impressive Asian pandemic-fighting results can be observed in Taiwan, South Korea, Japan and Singapore, where democracy was not suspended but rather used as a tool, and infection curves were flattened even better. I see similar results around me in Germany, where the Chancellor used persuasion and public trust to avoid sending police vans immediately onto the streets.

It is, in many ways, the healthier response – both for democracy and for death rates.

Source:     When viruses threaten, the strongest disinfectant is democracy Doug Saunders 20 hours ago Updated       

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Access-to-information systems across Canada slowed by COVID-19

2020/04/04 Leave a comment

ATIP is not the most responsive at the best of times and my experience suggests a further slowing down. Some of the delays may be legitimate given some of the requested records may be hard to access when working remotely:

An international human rights organization is calling on all levels of government in Canada to continue answering access to information requests — and prioritize ones that relate to government accountability.

As governments across the country move to offer essential services only due to COVID-19, some are warning of delays in processing access to information requests, while others have stopped accepting new requests entirely.

It means the public has one less tool to understand how those in power are making decisions during a public health crisis.

“We’ve got, on the one hand, this incredible need for accountability and on the other hand, the institutions of accountability are operating well below their normal levels,” Toby Mendel, executive director of the Halifax-based Centre for Law and Democracy, said in an interview.”So, it’s a cocktail for lack of accountability and at this time, the importance of access to information is much, much greater than ever.”

The Access to Information Act allows applicants who pay $5 to ask for documents ranging from expense reports to briefing papers from government bodies in Canada.

‘Canadians will expect a comprehensive picture’

Last week, the federal information commissioner urged federal agencies and departments to “take all reasonable measures to limit the impact on individuals’ right to access.”

She followed it up with a statement on Thursday, reminding public bodies about their obligation to document decisions and actions, even with many people working from home.

“When the time comes, and it will, for a full accounting of the measures taken and the vast financial resources committed by the government during this emergency, Canadians will expect a comprehensive picture of the data, deliberations and policy decisions that determined the government’s overall response to COVID-19,” commissioner Caroline Maynard wrote in the statement.

But some institutions in the already-clogged federal system are halting access to information requests indefinitely.

“The Access to Information and Privacy Office has decided to put all access and privacy requests on hold until the situation returns to normal,” Public Services and Procurement Canada wrote in an email to an applicant last week.

The email didn’t say what part of the legislation allows it to put requests on hold indefinitely or how it would define “normal.”

A spokesperson for Public Services and Procurement Canada didn’t answer those questions, but said it “is prioritizing support for the government’s response efforts, as well as critical services, including administering pay and pensions, and maintaining building safety as part of its service continuity.”

Toronto not accepting new requests

The access to information system is not just slowing down at the federal level.

CBC News surveyed five cities — Toronto, Ottawa, Halifax, Vancouver and Calgary — and found their approaches to access to information during COVID-19 vary.

Calgary, Ottawa and Vancouver say they are continuing to answer requests as usual during the pandemic while trying to minimize delays.

Toronto, Canada’s largest city, says it has “temporarily suspended the intake of any new [freedom of information] requests” so staff can “prioritize COVID-19 response activities.”

“It is not currently feasible to deploy staff resources to conduct the searches necessary to locate records in order to respond to new requests,” City of Toronto spokesperson Beth Waldman wrote in an email.

Waldman said transparency and right to information are still a priority, citing the city’s press briefings and “other communications to the public” during the pandemic. She didn’t specify when the city will start accepting new requests again.

After two weeks of mass closures and aggressive physical distancing to prevent the spread of COVID-19, public health experts watch closely to see if Canada is taking steps towards flattening the curve. 3:08

Earlier this week, the Halifax Regional Municipality’s website said it wasn’t accepting new requests for information or routine disclosure requests, where people can request information that’s already been released.

After CBC News asked why that was the case, the website was changed to say the municipality would accept requests, but applicants should expect delays “as municipal staff are working remotely and will not be in a position to search for records responsive to the request.”Provinces are also handling the situation differently.

The New Brunswick Ombud’s Office has granted an extension to public bodies, giving them until May 29 to complete active requests.

But in Newfoundland and Labrador, public bodies are getting indefinite extensions, according to a letter sent to an applicant in March.

“The extension is approved for the time until government returns to normal operations,” the letter says, adding that the extension was approved by the province’s access to information and privacy commissioner.

‘Scrutiny from outside makes things work better’

Mendel said public bodies have been too quick to say they can’t handle processing requests.

“It is not appropriate for bodies to simply say we’re not processing requests anymore,” Mendel said.”We have laws across the country. They set rules for the processing of requests and those rules must either be formally limited by a legal process or they must be obeyed.”

While he said it may be reasonable for public bodies to restrict employees from going into offices and looking for physical files, he believes public institutions should prioritize requests that deal with government accountability, including those from journalists and opposition politicians.

“Scrutiny from outside makes things work better,” said Mendel.

His organization has recently launched a tracker that examines how governments across the globe are handling access to information during a pandemic.

“In Brazil, for example, they sought to suspend the operation of the act and the Supreme Court said, ‘No that’s not legitimate, that is a key accountability institution,'” Mendel said.

“You can see that when the proper rule of law system is being applied to these measures, it doesn’t just allow governments to act as they might wish arbitrarily. ”

Crisis could push access to information to modernize

Organizations that already struggled to respond to access to information requests will likely make access to information “an even lower priority” during a pandemic, according to Jason Woywada, executive director of the British Columbia Freedom of Information and Privacy Association.

“That does lead to concerns because those are the same institutions that likely require the highest degree of oversight to improve their processes and operations,” he said.

But it also could push the country’s access to information systems to modernize.

Woywada supports that, as long as it’s done in a way that doesn’t put privacy at risk.

Nova Scotia learned that the hard way in 2018, after it was forced to shut down its online freedom of information portal after a privacy breach.

More than 7,000 documents, including hundreds with highly personal information, were downloaded in March 2018, but the breach wouldn’t be detected until a month later.

“The key consideration there is making sure that security is maintained and making sure that the privacy is maintained for the information of the individuals that is being used online, that we aren’t seeing a sudden increase in data breaches,” Woywada said.

Source: Access-to-information systems across Canada slowed by COVID-19

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Corak: Ottawa is struggling to be a just-in-time government

2020/04/01 Leave a comment

Good commentary by Miles Corak and the need to rebalance between policy development and service delivery. The initial idea behind Service Canada was precisely to do just that, having policy being service and citizen-centric rather than stove-piped by department and program. Too risky an approach for government, and most DMs and other senior officials make their name and career based upon their role in policy development rather than service delivery, with the inevitable results of some major screw-ups like the Phoenix pay system.

We shall see how the government manages to deliver all of the COVID-19 measures, as I suspect, like Corak, that they will be judged on that basis. Of course, a few years later, evaluations and audits will highlight some of the accountability and integrity issues that arose with the new and expanded programs rushed out the door (given time being of the essence over full due process and safeguards):

Big government rode into town just in time, but alas, when he jumped off his bronco and reached for his six-gun, it became clear he wasn’t just-in-time government.

What is clear from the COVID-19 crisis is that we should always choose our leaders with one thing in mind: character. Character determines how they will stand up to the unexpected. That’s what matters, and whether it is François Legault, Doug Ford, Jason Kenney, John Horgan, Naheed Nenshi, John Tory or Justin Trudeau, Canadians feel they are all passing the test.

Opinion polling shows that strong majorities see their leaders as doing a good job responding to COVID-19. And it’s impressive, their sensibility to consult, their conviction to act. Now, when we need them, they’ve all shown up, just in time.

But we can’t be governed by character alone. Good governance needs an infrastructure that can deliver, and thank goodness Canadians can also count on a professional public service. But at the same time, we fear its muscles can’t flex in real time.

The biggest stumble of the past week was Ottawa’s overreaching ambition in the first draft of Bill C-13 – the COVID-19 Emergency Response Act – an attempt to skirt parliamentary oversight and seize control of taxing and spending for two years. Not immediately tasteful, not in character – and certainly not contributing to the we-are-in-it-together spirit that is crucial for good governance and success.

It was probably driven more by insecurity than partisanship, springing from having to look through the veil of uncertainty that has fallen over Ottawa. Staring into the mirror and seeing no reassuring reflection, Finance Minister Bill Morneau wished for a pot of gold, just in case, you never know, down the road, we may need it.

Insecurity about a fluid situation, and about how quickly programs can be delivered, flows out of clogged government plumbing, a hard constraint on Big Think. For years we’ve neglected, cut, denigrated, and now the public service has a tough time doing just-in-time.

Take, for example, Employment Insurance, that grand social insurance scheme born from the disaster of the Great Depression, intended to offer income support to all in need, to insure against the great social risks we collectively face – risks that would bankrupt private insurers in no time. How is it performing during a collective crisis of the very kind it was intended to address?

It is straining, with computer code written in the 1980s running its servers, processing power and devoted personnel stretched to the limit, service centres now shut down. The public service is doing the best it can with old plumbing.

Ottawa mandarins often muse about an “all of government approach,” a busting across the silos of different ministries to address all aspects of a policy challenge. But the biggest silos of all have never been breached, those between policy development and service delivery. And now the delivery plumbing is conditioning the choices that Big Thinkers can make.

What is also clear from the COVID-19 crisis is that we should always be investing and innovating in public service delivery, something that’s easy to ignore in normal times.

There is no doubt that the income-support programs the federal government moved quickly out of the drawing room and into legislation last week were designed with an eye, not simply to whether they were big enough, but to how they would be delivered. The cheques won’t be in the mail for weeks. In a time of pandemic, that’s a lifetime.

Our governments have to think big, but they can only implement incrementally, a couple of quick steps forward, one back. Events are moving too fast, capacity is too limited, for Canadians to expect otherwise, even if what they really need is both big and just-in-time government.

When Mr. Trudeau’s team first came to power, they were enamoured with the idea of governing with data. Measure outcomes, set targets, recalibrate in the face of results and move forward with a “there’s more to do” attitude. But lags in information and delivery make all that fall short.

There is always a big gap between intention and result, even more so in times of crisis, and that gap has to be filled with the trust that character instills in partners and citizens.

Trust gives us the assurance that the cheque is indeed in the mail, and character, now more than ever, needs to deliver. It can’t stumble too many times before trust rides away.

Source: Ottawa is struggling to be a just-in-time government: Miles Corak

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Chris Selley: Official nonsense on masks, travel bans is killing Ottawa’s COVID-19 credibility

2020/04/01 Leave a comment

From armchair generals to armchair public health officials. Given recent Ekos and Angus Reid polls, most Canadians appear overall pleased with the their federal and provincial government responses despite the delayed in response and the changing risk assessments and thus evolving measures.

As always, hindsight is 2020. And one of the benchmarks is with respect to how other countries have handled the pandemic where Canada lags of course South Korea but it ahead or in tandem with many European countries.

But I do think that Trudeau could be more open about acknowledging delays in hindsight, for both substantive and communications reasons:

On Saturday, the federal government announced passengers with COVID-19 symptoms would be barred from domestic air and train travel, effective noon on Monday. “It will be important for operators of airlines and trains to ensure that people who are exhibiting symptoms do not board,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told reporters.

Does that make sense? It’s a question Canadians seem to be asking more and more about this country’s coronavirus response. And for governments and public health officials, it’s a dangerous one. All too often, the answer is “no.”

“What about buses?” many asked on social media of Saturday’s announcement. Buses are provincial jurisdiction, the feds noted. “What about ferries?” asked the Canadian Ferry Association. Good question. Ferries are Transport Canada’s business. No answer yet. Mind you, transport operators don’t yet have any guidance on how exactly they’re supposed to “ensure” symptomatic people don’t travel. It doesn’t make much sense.

Furthermore, we have been told over and over again that any measures carriers might implement — temperature sensors, for example — simply don’t work. “The positive predictive value of screening is essentially zero,” the authors of a widely cited 2005 study reported, based on Canadian airports’ experience with thermal scanners during the 2003 SARS outbreak.

One of the authors of that study was Theresa Tam, who is now Canada’s Chief Public Health Officer. She’s the one doling out all the science that Trudeau insists underpins every single decision he and his ministers make: “Our focus every step of the way is doing what (is) necessary at every moment based on the recommendations of experts, based on science and doing what we can to keep Canadians safe,” the prime minister said Monday.

It’s more than a bit awkward — but not as awkward as federal Health Minister Patty Hajdu’s immortal March 13th dismissal of travel restrictions: “Canadians think we can stop this at the border, but what we see is a global pandemic, meaning that border measures actually are highly ineffective and in some cases can create harm.” Five days later, the border slammed shut.

We are to believe all of the positions above were supported by the same scientific experts. That doesn’t make sense. Clearly the experts supported the more lenient measures, and then politics intervened.

Clearly the experts supported the more lenient measures, and then politics intervened

Appearing before the Health Committee on January 29, Tam strongly dismissed the notion even of having all travellers from COVID-19 hot zones self-isolate for 14 days. She warned against “stigmatizing” communities. She very nearly suggested we couldn’t implement travel restrictions even if we wanted to. “Right now… (the World Health Organization) does not recommend travel bans,” she warned the committee. “We are a signatory to the International Health Regulations and we’ll be called to account if we do anything different.”

The WHO still recommends against travel restrictions, even to and from especially affected countries. No one seems to be “calling us to account.”

It could well be that by the time Canadians started calling for travel restrictions, it was already too late to implement useful ones. That’s what research generally concludes. But research also acknowledges the political inevitability of travel crackdowns. They just make too much sense to too many people. Federal ministers and public health officials recklessly undermined themselves by so forcefully rejecting measures that made so much sense to so many people.

“Security theatre can be dangerous — but the absence of security theatre can be dangerous too,” Martha Pillinger, an associate at the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University, wrote in Foreign Policy last month. “Apparent inaction (or insufficient action) erodes trust in public health authorities, which undermines response efforts.”

Indeed, Tam is asking a lot of Canadians to set aside a lot of common sense right now. There is ample evidence that face masks — even homemade ones— can provide significant protection to the uninfected. But Tam warns only of the potential pitfalls: Masks can provide “a false sense of security,” lead to more face-touching or make us forget to wash our hands. “Putting a mask on an asymptomatic person is not beneficial,” she said at her Monday press conference.

That makes sense to a lot of medical professionals. A lot of regular people, however, are pretty sure they know how to wash their hands and not touch their faces. When officials say “masks don’t work,” a lot of regular people hear “we have an inexcusable shortage of masks for frontline healthcare workers so please give us your masks.” When officials say “you don’t need to be tested,” they are likely to hear “we have inexcusably few tests available and not enough lab capacity to process the ones we have.”

Officials recklessly undermined themselves by so forcefully rejecting measures that made so much sense to so many people

On Sunday, Tam sternly advised Canadians against retreating to any “rural properties” they might own. “These places have less capacity to manage COVID-19,” she told reporters in Ottawa. That makes sense, as do concerns about straining off-season supply chains. But let’s say you’ve been extremely careful. You’re symptom free. You pack up a week’s worth of groceries, drive 90 minutes or two hours non-stop to your cottage, camp, farm or chalet, and don’t interact with a single other human being. How dangerous, how irresponsible could that really be? If the cottage is good enough for Sophie Grégoire Trudeau and the kids, who beetled off to Harrington Lake on Sunday, some people might conclude it’s good enough for them.

Public health officials want to prevent people from asking such questions, from making excuses for themselves, in hopes the maximum number of people will take the maximum precautions. They need smart people to forsake relatively low-risk things in order to counterbalance all the dumb people who do high-risk things no matter what they’re told. None of the measures will ever make perfect sense in every single situation. They are calls to collective sacrifice for the greater good. But they can’t keep changing on the fly, with no explanation other than “the experts got more worried overnight,” and remain credible.

On Monday, Trudeau declined even to say he regretted not moving quicker on measures he now insists are essential.

Does that make sense? No, that doesn’t make sense.

Source: Chris Selley: Official nonsense on masks, travel bans is killing Ottawa’s COVID-19 credibility

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Delacourt: Are you a good Canadian? Justin Trudeau offers the coronavirus as a lesson in responsible citizenship

2020/03/13 Leave a comment

Good commentary and yes, a lesson in civic responsibility, one that the PM has had to personally demonstrate given his self-quarantine and cancellation of the FPT meeting given his wife having tested positive:

Ask not what the federal government is doing for you about the COVID-19 pandemic, but ask instead what you are doing to keep Canadians healthy.

Justin Trudeau didn’t exactly borrow from John F. Kennedy’s immortal lines about civic responsibility at his news conference on Wednesday, but the prime minister also, very deliberately, cast the virus crisis as a crash course for all of us in good citizenship.

“Often there are global crises or events when the average citizen does not feel particularly powerful to affect the fate of the economy. We are in a situation where the choices our citizens make will have a direct impact on the health of Canada and on the Canadian economy,” Trudeau said in French toward the end of his morning appearance in the National Press Theatre.

It was billed as a high-level update on what the Canadian government is doing for citizens as the novel coronavirus spreads its damage throughout Canada and the world. “We get it and we’re on it,” Trudeau said.

But slipped into all the talk of government having our backs — another new, favourite phrase from Trudeau’s team this year — was a gentle reminder or two that citizenship is a two-way street. The government is in a giving frame of mind, but a taking one too, in terms of what it’s asking of average Canadian citizens to keep the virus contained.

Canada’s chief public health officer, Theresa Tam, spoke at the news conference of how citizens — not the state or even the health-care system — would ultimately determine the trajectory of this virus.

“The advantage of being in the Canadian system is that people will be supported to do what public health has asked them to do but everyone can change the dynamic of that curve,” Dr. Tam said. “That`s such an important message that I don’t want people to lose sight of. Individual physicians can’t do it, public health units on their own can’t do it. Everyone has to contribute.”

The prime minister followed up with reinforcement. “At this point our strongest recommendation is for Canadians to be involved in keeping themselves and their families safe,” Trudeau said.

Asking people to change their behaviour for the sake of the country is a very 20th century concept in North America, when war, duty and sacrifice were part of the political lexicon. In this century, political appeals to people’s selflessness is usually framed as: do it for your kids, or the next generation.

But governments are still keenly interested in what they can do to change individuals’ behaviour to align with national or state goals, especially when it comes to climate change, for instance. Britain set up its famous “nudge unit” within its cabinet office in the early 2000s to study how behavioural-economic insights could be turned into public policy. And Canada, for its part, has something called the “impact and innovation unit” inside government, inspired in part by the British example.

The COVID-19 virus, now a pandemic, could well become a laboratory into how governments nudge their citizens into different behaviour. Certainly that old British unit, now a separate company called the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) has been having thoughts in that direction.

In a recent blog post, BIT laid out some thoughts on “how do we encourage the right behaviours during an epidemic?” It’s not easy, BIT acknowledged: the incentives for changed citizen behaviour are neither clear nor immediate. “People have no way of knowing if taking preventive steps will actually stop them contracting the virus. You’ll never know what didn’t happen.”

The blog post talks about the importance of public-health officials being front and centre to cultivate trust and why governments should be transparent, but also sparing about details,

“In some cases, less rather than more information leads to more accurate judgments,” BIT’s blog post states. “Communicating simple instructions that are easy to remember makes it more likely that people will follow them.”

I don’t know whether anyone inside the government is reading the BIT blog, but Trudeau’s news conference on Wednesday revealed a high degree of interest in the social science — as well as the medical science — of managing a pandemic.

“This is on all of us,” federal Health Minister Patty Hajdu told reporters later on Monday.

Canadian citizens have been asking a lot of their federal government in the past few months — from requests to fix snarled train traffic to the rescue of Canadians in trouble abroad. COVID-19 has turned that equation upside down. As Kennedy might have put it, this pandemic is forcing citizens to ask not what the country can do for them, but what they can do for the country.

Source: Susan DelacourtAre you a good Canadian? Justin Trudeau offers the coronavirus as a lesson in responsible citizenship

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Yakabuski: Trudeau government’s deliverology experiment ends with a whimper

2020/03/11 Leave a comment

While all governments have both bureaucratic and political level tracking systems, deliverology being just one approach, the success or failure is often determined more on the lower priority files than the high profile screwups that Yakabuski highlights.

And execution has been the Achilles heel of many governments:

One of the great ironies of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government is that it has proved so ineffective in the one area where it so emphatically promised to outdo its predecessors.

It was always presumptuous on the part of Mr. Trudeau and his former principal secretary, Gerald Butts, to suggest they would run a more effective government than any of those that came before them. But by dropping the ball so spectacularly on so many key files, Mr. Trudeau’s Prime Minister’s Office set itself up for the failure that has now befallen it.

There were self-satisfied chuckles of schadenfreude across the civil service this week as Mr. Trudeau announced the departure of Matthew Mendelsohn as the deputy secretary to the federal cabinet heading up the government’s “results and delivery” unit. With Mr. Mendelsohn’s return to academia, the Trudeau government’s much-hyped experiment in “deliverology” has ended in a whimper.

Mr. Trudeau thanked Mr. Mendelsohn for his “service to Canadians,” but cited not a single accomplishment made by the results and delivery unit that he and Mr. Butts had so championed. Nor did he name an immediate successor to Mr. Mendelsohn, a top official in former Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty’s government who is joining Ryerson University in Toronto.

Mr. Mendelsohn, in Twitter posts, tried to put a positive spin on his tenure, insisting that the “new governance, processes and routines we established helped the government overcome implementation obstacles and hit most of the key targets it identified four years ago.”

Still, the Prime Minister’s silence on the successes (or lack thereof) of the unit Mr. Mendelsohn headed contrasted sharply with the hubris that spewed out of the Butts-led PMO in 2015, which promised to revolutionize policy making and implementation in the federal capital.

Mr. Trudeau’s government spent at least $200,000 to pick the brain of Sir Michael Barber, flying the British consultant and “deliverology” guru to cabinet retreats at resorts in New Brunswick, Alberta and Ontario. Sir Michael was handed a mandate from the Privy Council Office to “provide ongoing information, recommendations and advice on a tailored program to guide departments to meet commitments and deliver on priorities.”

Unfortunately, Sir Michael’s services did not come with a money-back guarantee. And in the end, they may have bought only grief for Mr. Trudeau and Mr. Butts, who resigned last year in the wake of the scandal involving alleged pressure from the PMO on former attorney-general Jody Wilson-Raybould to offer SNC-Lavalin a deferred prosecution agreement.

To anyone who has worked in government, the whole concept of “deliverology” smacked of warmed-over administration theory repackaged by former bureaucrats-turned-consultants seeking to monetize their insider knowledge of the public service. And career bureaucrats do not take kindly to know-it-all political appointees telling them how to do their jobs.

The Trudeau PMO “imposed another layer of administration on some public servants. Their departments had been abiding by evaluation and performance policies for more than 40 years,” former Ottawa Citizen reporter Kathryn May wrote last year in Policy Options. “With deliverology, the public service still did all that work, and now they also had to report the progress on all the government’s goals to a ‘delivery unit,’ which, along with ministers and the Prime Minister, monitored and tracked these priorities.”

The Trudeau PMO has never seemed clear on its own priorities. So how could it expect the senior bureaucracy to be clear on them? At both the micro-policy level (electoral reform, balancing the budget by 2019) and macro-policy level (reconciliation with Indigenous peoples, supporting economic growth while fighting climate change), the Trudeau government has continually sent mixed signals to the bureaucracy about how seriously it takes its own promises.

When it has sprung into action, the Trudeau PMO has typically made a mess of it. The SNC-Lavalin affair, which started out with a straightforward move to bring Canadian law on deferred prosecution agreements in line with that of other developed countries, nearly destroyed Mr. Trudeau’s government all because the PMO failed to abide by its own deliverology credo.

It is perhaps no coincidence that the Trudeau government’s most notable successes – the implementation of the Canada Child Benefit and medical aid in dying, and the negotiation of new health-care funding agreements with the provinces – were overseen by low-key ministers who kept their eyes on the ball rather than their Twitter feeds. Social Development Minister Jean- Yves Duclos and Jane Philpott, Mr. Trudeau’s first health minister, were focused on results, not retweets.

Overall, however, execution has proved to be the Achilles heel of this government. It has proved inept at buying fighter planes or fixing the Phoenix pay system. It promised a bigger role for Canada in global affairs but has earned a reputation abroad for being fickle and stingy. The Canada Infrastructure Bank extends its record for overpromising and underdelivering.

Indeed, the scariest words in Canadian English may have become: “I’m from the Trudeau government, and I’m here to help.”

Source: Trudeau government’s deliverology experiment ends with a whimper

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Last election marked shift in the type of growth Canadians are seeking

2020/03/09 Leave a comment

More interesting analysis on the recent election by Andrew Parkin of Environics Institute:

There is never any shortage of public opinion polls on the eve of an election. A steady stream of data sets up the electoral contest by gauging who is starting in a leading position and who is lagging at the back of the pack.

The main limitation of this type of “horserace” data is that it doesn’t help us anticipate what might happen next. To get a good sense of how the campaign might unfold, we need to know more about the public’s mood – what citizens are feeling good about, and what is keeping them from getting a good night’s sleep. Not that broader survey data on issues and outlook can foretell the eventual outcome with any degree certainty. Human actions and reactions will always disrupt the expected course of events, especially during election campaigns. But a good understanding of the wider context of public opinion on the eve of an election should minimize the extent of our surprise at what ultimately transpires.

This applies, for example, to the issue of inclusive growth – the notion that economic growth and the equitable distribution of its benefits should be seen as mutually reinforcing rather than mutually exclusive policy objectives. Talk of inclusive growth has animated international forums such as the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development and the World Economic Forum for much of the last decade. In Canada it was a central preoccupation of the federal Liberal government that was elected in 2015.

While the term inclusive growth has only recently moved into the vernacular, we can still ask whether, as the government sought a second mandate in 2019, the public was feeling more or less included in the country’s prosperity, and whether historic fissures in Canadian society seem to be widening or closing.

At first glance, the data suggest that the public should have been fairly receptive in October 2019 to the incumbent Liberal government’s claim to have made growth more inclusive. At that time the proportion of Canadians citing the economy as the country’s most important problem had declined to 14 percent, the lowest level since the onset of the financial crisis in 2008. More Canadians were feeling positive about both the country’s and their own economic situation. The proportion of Canadians saying that it was a good time to find a job in the area where they live had jumped from 36 percent in 2015 to 61 percent in 2018. And the proportion describing their own incomes as inadequate had dropped 10 points (from 39 percent to 28 percent) over the course of the Liberals’ first mandate. As they headed back to the polls, they could hardly have wished for more (figure 1).

All these numbers, however, reflect national trends, and they obscure contrasting regional ones. The modest 5-point increase since 2014 in the proportion of Canadians with a favourable view of the country’s economic situation subsumed the much larger 22-point increase in Quebec, and a counter-acting 22-point drop in Alberta. In fact, over the course of five years (between 2014 and 2019 – a relatively short space of time), Quebec and Alberta had essentially switched places: in 2014 Quebec was the least economically optimistic and Alberta the most optimistic province; the reverse was true in 2019.

In Canada, the issue of inclusive growth is not just about equity across social groups, it is also about equity across regions.  Framed in this way, it was less of a “winning issue” for the incumbent government than they might otherwise have expected (figure 2).

No one who had these Alberta numbers in full view, then, would have been surprised that the Liberals were shut out of the province in terms of seats come election night. But the flip side of the story is also important. Going into the 2019 election campaign, it would have been useful if the opposition parties had thought harder about what they were offering voters in Quebec. This might have prompted them to go beyond a pitch based on the premise of how much harder it was getting to make ends meet. (At the city level, affordable housing and the rising cost of living were top issues for those living in Toronto and Vancouver, but not Montreal.)

A sober review of public opinion data as they pertain to notions of inclusion also helps explain something that didn’t happen during the 2019 election campaign. In the wake of increases in the number of refugees “irregularly” crossing the Canada-US border in Quebec and Manitoba, and the launching of the Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party of Canada, which had an overtly anti-immigration platform, the risk that immigration would emerge as a defining (and divisive) election issue appeared high. But it did not become a defining issue, largely because, in spite of some heated rhetoric on talk radio and social media, Canadians themselves have never felt more positively about immigration than they did on the eve of the 2019 campaign.

The proportion of Canadians who say there is too much immigration in Canada was trending downward, as was the proportion questioning the legitimacy of refugee claimants (figure 3). While in 2018 and the spring of 2019 one in two Canadians agreed that too many immigrants do not adopt Canadian values, this was the lowest figure ever recorded (in 1993, three in four Canadian held this view). Perhaps most importantly, heading into the election, in April 2019, only 3 percent of Canadians felt that immigration was the most important issue facing the country (a proportion that was nine times lower as that in the United States).

Further analysis also reveals that attitudes on immigration in Canada correlate less strongly with economic concerns than they do with general political outlook (that is to say, ideology). So despite the overall brighter mood in 2019, plenty of Canadians were anxious about the economy and their own financial situation as election day approached. But this anxiety propelled them to blame Ottawa insiders, not newly arrived outsiders. In retrospect, then, the table was not set for a heated debate about immigration, and it should have come as no surprise that the more a party pushed this issue to the fore, the worse they did on election night.

Looking back, however, there was one signal in the pre-election polls that might have warranted more attention. While fewer Canadians were expressing concerns about the economy, more were expressing concerns about the environment – and specially about climate change. In fact, by the spring of 2019, climate change had overtaken the economy as the top issue for Canadians for the first time since the onset of the economic crisis in 2008. That said, in spring 2019, the proportion of Canadians singling out climate change as their top issue was only 14 percent – up from 5 percent two years earlier, and tied in order of importance with the similar proportion expressing concern about the quality of government leadership.

At that time, there was no way of knowing whether the share of Canadians preoccupied with climate change was already peaking or just beginning to grow. It took a subsequent survey, conducted during the election campaign, to reveal the answer. We now know that the priorities of Canadians were evolving quickly over the course of 2019; by October, the proportion citing climate change as the country’s top problem had jumped a further 10 points, to reach 24 percent, while the proportion concerned with the either the economy or government leadership continued to fade. This trend was especially pronounced in Quebec, where the proportion preoccupied by climate change doubled from 18 percent to 37 percent between the spring and fall of 2019

So, heading into the 2019 election, Quebecers were less concerned about the economy or the cost of living than other Canadians – a pattern that the pre-election survey data made clear. What could perhaps have been better anticipated was the extent to which this was creating space for climate change to emerge as one of the defining issues of the campaign, in Quebec and beyond.

In retrospect, the election campaign was decided more by the issue of sustainable growth – the question of how to balance economic and environmental imperatives – than by that of inclusive growth, which is perhaps why the opposition parties’ strategy of approaching the carbon tax mostly as a pocket-book issue had limited appeal.

Source: Last election marked shift in the type of growth Canadians are seeking

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