‘Without early warning you can’t have early response’: How Canada’s world-class pandemic alert system failed

2020/07/27 Leave a comment

This has to be considered a significant fail: disbanding the PHAC Global Public Health Intelligence Network, or GPHIN a few years before COVID-19.

Kudos to the Globe for good investigative reporting and analysis.

Given that resource reductions and reallocations are normally executed at the bureaucratic level (with political sign-off), one would hope that PHAC is revisiting this decision and the relative importance within PHAC of senior bureaucratic decision-makers vs scientific advice and expertise. Savoie’s comments on senior public servants as courtiers comes to mind when reading about these differences so well captured in the Globe report.

Some form of enquiry (preferably external) is needed  to assess how this short-sighted decision took place and the related accountabilities.

While there is no excuse for the ethical violations of the PM and Finance Minister regarding WE, it would be a far better use of Parliament to investigate this decision and its impact, given that it contributed to Canada’s missing the opportunity for an early and thus likely more effective response, with fewer deaths of Canadians:

On the morning of Dec. 31, as word of a troubling new outbreak in China began to reverberate around the world, in news reports and on social media, a group of analysts inside the federal government and their bosses were caught completely off guard.

The virus had been festering in China for weeks, possibly months, but the Public Health Agency of Canada appeared to know nothing about it – which was unusual because the government had a team of highly specialized doctors and epidemiologists whose job was to scour the world for advance warning of major health threats. And their track record was impressive.

Some of the earliest signs of past international outbreaks, including H1N1, MERS and Ebola, were detected by this Canadian early warning system, which helped countries around the world prepare.

Known as the Global Public Health Intelligence Network, or GPHIN, the unit was among Canada’s contributions to the World Health Organization, and it operated as a kind of medical Amber Alert system. Its job was to gather intelligence and spot pandemics early, before they began, giving the government and other countries a head start to respond and – hopefully – prevent a catastrophe. And the results often spoke for themselves.

Russia once accused Canada of spying, after GPHIN analysts determined that a rash of strange illnesses in Chechnya were the result of a chemical release the Kremlin tried to keep quiet. Impressed by GPHIN’s data-mining capabilities, Google offered to buy it from the federal government in 2008. And two years ago, the WHO praised the operation as “the foundation” of a global pandemic early warning system.

So, when it came to the outbreak in Wuhan, the Canadian government had a team of experts capable of spotting the hidden signs of a problem, even at its most nascent stages.

But last year, a key part of that function was effectively switched off.

In May, 2019, less than seven months before COVID-19 would begin wreaking havoc on the world, Canada’s pandemic alert system effectively went dark.

Amid shifting priorities inside Public Health, GPHIN’s analysts were assigned other tasks within the department, which pulled them away from their international surveillance duties.

With no pandemic scares in recent memory, the government felt GPHIN was too internationally focused, and therefore not a good use of funding. The doctors and epidemiologists were told to focus on domestic matters that were deemed a higher priority.

The analysts’ capacity to issue alerts about international health threats was halted. All such warnings now required approval from senior government officials. Soon, with no green light to sound an alarm, those alerts stopped altogether.

So, on May 24 last year, after issuing an international warning of an unexplained outbreak in Uganda that left two people dead, the system went silent.

And in the months leading up to the emergence of COVID-19, as one of the biggest pandemics in a century lurked, Canada’s early warning system was no longer watching closely.

When the novel coronavirus finally emerged on the international radar, amid evidence the Chinese government had been withholding information about the severity of the outbreak, Canada was conspicuously unaware and ultimately ill-prepared.

But according to current and former staff, it was just one of several problems brewing inside Public Health when the virus struck. Experienced scientists say their voices were no longer being heard within the bureaucracy as department priorities changed, while critical information gathered in the first few weeks of the outbreak never made it up the chain of command in Ottawa.

‘WE NEED EARLY DETECTION’

The Globe and Mail obtained 10 years of internal GPHIN records showing how abruptly Canada’s pandemic alert system went silent last spring.

Between 2009 and 2019, the team of roughly 12 doctors and epidemiologists, fluent in multiple languages, were a prolific operation. During that span, GPHIN issued 1,587 international alerts about potential outbreak threats around the world, from South America to Siberia.

Those alerts were sent to top officials in the Canadian government and throughout the international medical community, including the WHO. Countries across Europe, Latin America, Asia and Africa also relied on the system.

On average, GPHIN issued more than a dozen international alerts a month, according to the records. But its purpose wasn’t to cry wolf. Only special situations that required monitoring, closer inspection or frank discussions with a foreign government were flagged.

GPHIN’s role was reconnaissance – detect an outbreak early so that the government could prepare. Could the virus be contained before it got to Canada? Should hospitals brace for a crisis? Was there enough personal protective equipment on hand? Should surveillance at airports be increased, flights stopped, or borders closed?

This need for early detection sprang from a climate of distrust in the 1990s, when it was believed some countries were increasingly reluctant to disclose major health problems, fearing economic or reputational damage. This left everyone at a disadvantage.

For Canada, the wake-up call came in 1994 when a sudden outbreak of pneumonic plague in Surat, India, sparked panic. Official information was sparse, but rumours promulgated faster. As citizens fled the city of millions, many on foot, others boarded planes.

Public Health officials in Ottawa were soon alerted to an urgent problem: Staff at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport, fearing exposure to the plague, threatened to walk off the job if a plane arriving from India was allowed to land. The government scrambled to put quarantine measures in place.

“We were caught flat-footed,” said Ronald St. John, who headed up the federal Centre for Emergency Preparedness at the time. The panic demonstrated the need for advance warning and better planning.

“We said, we’ve got to have early alerts. So how do we get early alerts?”

Waiting for official word from governments was often slow – and unreliable. Dr. St. John and his team of epidemiologists didn’t want to wait. They began building computer systems that could scan the internet – still in its infancy back then – at lightning speed, aggregating local news, health data, discussion boards, independent blogs and whatever else they could find. They looked for anything unusual, which would then be investigated by trained doctors who were experts in spotting diseases.

It was a mix of science and detective work. A report of dead birds in one country, or a sudden outbreak of flu symptoms at the wrong time of year in another, could be clues to something worse – what the analysts call indirect signals.

Find those signals early enough, and you can contain the outbreak before it becomes a global pandemic.

“We wanted to detect an event, we didn’t want a full epidemiological analysis,” Dr. St. John said. “We just wanted to know if there was an outbreak.” …

Source for remainder: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-without-early-warning-you-cant-have-early-response-how-canadas/

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Lang: Missing – public servants who could warn Trudeau about WE conflict

2020/07/18 Leave a comment

Good commentary by Lang who worked under Herb Gray when he was deputy PM (I worked in PCO at the time and interacted with him time-to-time):

“Mandarin” is another word sometimes associated with such powerful bureaucrats, who were occasionally resented – but often valued – by politicians for their knowledge, wisdom and willingness to stand up to ministers to ensure the basic integrity of the ministry.

As the government has lurched from the SNC-Lavalin scandal of a year or so ago to the WE charity controversy of today – both of which centre on questions of prime ministerial and ministerial ethics and judgment – one question that isn’t asked enough is “Where are the mandarins in all this?”

When Justin Trudeau’s government came to office nearly five years ago, its chief hallmark was inexperience. The few ministers from previous Liberal administrations in its ranks at the beginning had little power. From its inception, power in the Trudeau government has been highly concentrated in the Prime Minister’s Office and among a few trusted ministers — notably Chrystia Freeland and Bill Morneau — none of whom had any prior government experience.

The feeling among some Ottawa watchers in the early days was that this inexperience would be managed and shaped by the mandarins. They would help ensure the government remained stable, competent and exhibited good judgment most of the time. This expectation was re-enforced by the prime minister himself, who stated early on that his government would rely much more heavily on the advice and counsel of the professional public service than his predecessor, Stephen Harper, had.

It doesn’t seem to have worked out that way. Or, perhaps there are no “old school” deputy ministers left in the government of Canada.

Take the SNC-Lavalin scandal. The issue boiled down to a big company allegedly threatening to cut jobs and investment in Canada if it was not given a specific legal concession from the government that would enable the firm to continue to bid on federal contracts.

Any decent mandarin should have known at the outset that corporations routinely tell the federal government job losses will result if they do not get X, Y or Z. This kind of thing used to be greeted with skepticism by the public service, justifiably so. But if the SNC threat was judged a serious risk, there was also a time when a few senior deputy ministers would have sprung into action and developed options for the government to manage its way of out of the issue, such that it might never even have come to public attention, much less have led to two ministerial resignations and threatened the viability of the government.

Today, we have the controversy surrounding WE, a charity that the prime minister and his wife have had a longstanding and very public association with, and to which the government intended to direct a contract worth some $19 million. The Clerk of the Privy Council, the prime minister’s deputy minister, must have known about Trudeau’s general relationship with WE.  He must have seen a conflict of interest here, or at least an appearance of conflict. An “old school” Clerk would have insisted on the prime minister recusing himself from any cabinet decision-making on this issue to protect the prime minister and the government. Instead, if we are to take Trudeau at his word, the public service more or less boxed him and his ministers in to an inevitable appearance of conflict of interest by recommending that only WE could do the job and offering no alternatives, something very rare in government.

None of this is to say that public servants are responsible for either the SNC-Lavalin scandal or the WE mess. Responsibility for both rests on the shoulders of the prime minister and his cabinet.  There is no legal, or even ethical, obligation on deputy ministers to stop ministers from exercising terrible judgment. Yet there was a time, not that long ago, when the expectation was that some wise, “old school” deputies had the government’s back.

Source: Lang: Missing – public servants who could warn Trudeau about WE conflict

Andrew MacDougall’s take is also worthy of note:

The thing you have to understand about the federal public service is that it isn’t geared toward excitement; it’s a “safety first” kind of place.

Pick a policy, any policy. If there’s a Flashy Option A and a Boring Option B, the public service opts for boring every day of the week and twice on Sunday. And that goes treble if Flashy Option A is, to pick a random example out of thin air, a sole-source contract worth nearly $1 billion to an organization with no track record of delivery of federal programming.

The other thing to understand about public servants is they’re big fans of their work. They believe in themselves and in their experience. Indeed, it’s rather the point of them. And so a federal bureaucracy telling its political master it’s not equipped to deliver a government program – or that somebody else is better placed to do it – is about as rare as a turkey voting for Christmas.

So let us please, then, drop the polite fiction that it was the public service that was the driving force behind Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s decision to ship his long-time collaborators at the WE Charity approximately $20 million to manage the $912-million Canada Student Service Grant program. The story defies experience, practice and belief.

Put differently, the only way the public service recommended WE for the CSSG is if the political wing of the government gave it such narrow specifications that it could return only one answer. You can bet there exists, somewhere, an exquisitely crafted memo from the public service to cabinet saying, in effect: “If you really want to go forward with this completely brain-dead approach to federal programming, then you go right ahead, ministry.” The job of the opposition and the press is to now surface that memo.

Because thankfully for Trudeau, the federal bureaucracy is also rather polite, which explains why the prime minister is being allowed to hide behind his version of events. The public service is used to being human shields for politicians and will keep quiet.

Which isn’t to say the prime minister’s story is surviving contact with reality. Every day brings another WE tale of woe.

In this (still-surfacing) version of events, a charity with a long association with the prime minister, his family and his advisers, one that pays hundreds of thousands of dollars to Trudeau’s family members and puts together slick, campaign-style videos promoting the prime minister while simultaneously receiving millions of dollars of government grants and contributions and other sole-source contracts, is being laid low by the pernicious effects of the coronavirus. There is massive churn on the board of directors and large numbers of staff are being laid off as Canada enters lockdown. All looks lost. Until, that is, the Trudeau government comes to the rescue with an offer to administer a pandemic-related program.

According to the charity, the Prime Minister’s Office rang up the day after the program was announced in April to say it needed help from WE to deliver the program. All with the blessing of the federal public service of course, which already, by the way, runs the Canada Summer Jobs program targeted at much the same audience as the new Canada Student Service Grant. What are the odds?

Not that WE had ever delivered a similar program, mind you. Not that WE even have the staff to deliver the program (the charity had to hire back hundreds of laid-off staff in anticipation of getting the work before the program was formally announced in June). Not that WE even have any particularly good ideas to pull students into the program, other than throwing money at other groups to do it for them. And we’re meant to believe this group was the “only” one capable of delivering the program?

A sure sign Trudeau’s version of the story isn’t true is the fact he won’t release any evidence to support it. The government won’t even say which other groups were considered to deliver the grant.

In other words, this contract was friends, not safety, first.

Source: https://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/macdougall-trudeau-ducks-for-cover-behind-the-non-partisan-public-service/wcm/0748db2c-65e8-4ddd-999d-b5bb87c16067/

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Quebec stops publishing daily COVID-19 data despite leading country in number of cases UPDATED: Quebec reversal

2020/06/27 Leave a comment

Update: Quebec announced that it will continue publishing the data on a daily basis following an outcry (Québec recule: les données sur l’évolution de la pandémie seront publiées sur une base quotidienne). Still curious about the rational behind the original decision.

——-

Not sure this strategy will address the “communications” issue as weekly reporting will likely continue to highlight Quebec’s relatively poor performance both domestically and internationally.

Not a great example of transparency and accountability.

Will change my weekly update to accommodate their Thursday release schedule:

Quebec’s Health Ministry says it will only provide weekly reports about COVID-19, rather than providing a daily rundown of the situation.

The province’s public health institute, INSPQ, had also been publishing daily updates, including the number of cases and hospitalizations in Quebec, the number of tests conducted and how many people have died.

The data was also broken down by age and region and showed how many long-term care homes have outbreaks.

The move from daily to weekly updates appears to mean Quebec is providing data less frequently than any other Canadian province, despite leading the country in number of cases. Ontario, which has the second-highest number of cases, continues to provide daily numbers.

As of Thursday, Yukon’s Emergency Measures Organization is providing a public update once per week — but the territory has only 11 confirmed cases.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau addressed the change in his daily news conference on COVID-19 Thursday, saying it’s up to each province to decide how transparent it needs to be.

He also said that Quebec still has a “significant number of cases” and deaths every day.

“I certainly hope that Premier [François] Legault would continue to be transparent and open with Quebecers and indeed with all Canadians as he has been from the very beginning,” Trudeau said.

The Health Ministry and INSPQ will only publish the data on their respective websites every Thursday, the first of them beginning July 2. The ministry will also be sending out a news release with the figures on that day every week.

The decision was first announced in a news release on Fête nationale, the province’s annual holiday.Dr. Horacio Arruda, the province’s public health director, said Thursday that the decision was made in order to provide the public with “more stable numbers,” as fewer confirmed cases each day will make any day-to-day increase appear more significant than it is.

He said this would also allow the province to provide a more accurate portrait of how the virus is spreading, as reporting delays have often prompted a revision of the daily numbers.

“As soon as there is some important data to share with the population, we will do that.” Arruda said, suggesting that the daily updates could return in the event of a second wave of infections.

The government announcement appeared to take the INSPQ by surprise. A notice on its website Tuesday said it would begin limiting its updates to weekdays only, rather than seven days a week.

But on Thursday, following the Health Ministry’s announcement, it said it too would only provide a weekly update. A spokesperson referred any questions to the Health Ministry.

The number of daily cases and deaths in Quebec has declined in recent weeks.As of Thursday, 55,079 people in Quebec have tested positive for the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. That’s an increase of 142 new cases since Wednesday.

There are 487 people in hospital and 5,448 have died. A total of 520,227 tests have come back negative.

The Quebec government has allowed most businesses to reopen, including restaurants, bars, gyms and shopping malls, with physical-distancing restrictions in place.

Source: Quebec stops publishing daily COVID-19 data despite leading country in number of cases

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Five years on, Trudeau’s vow to build a diverse public service still unfulfilled

2020/06/13 Leave a comment

I find this report unbalanced and does not reflect that the government largely met its commitment to increase diversity in appointments as I wrote in 2019 (Taking stock of Ottawa’s diversity promises) while public service diversity continues to increase for women and visible minorities for both employees and executives albeit at a slow but steady pace.

The main issue is with respect to Black Canadians at senior levels and I will be looking at data to take this concern from the anecdotal and symbolic (only one Black DM) to quantify the occupational groups and levels where this is most prevalent, as well as looking at other relatively under-represented particular visible minority groups.

I agree with Michael Wernick that while the employment equity act is ripe for a review, opening it up would indeed be a hornet’s nest. And looking back over the over 30 years of EE data, hard to argue that it has not been a success in improving representation given its focus on representation:

When they took power in 2015, the Trudeau Liberals promised to “build a government that looks like Canada.”

But their government, now in its second mandate, still hasn’t hired enough minority senior staff members to truly reflect the country’s diverse makeup.

Only four chiefs of staff to 37 ministers are people of colour — roughly 11 per cent of the total — while they constitute more than 22 per cent of the national population, according to the last census in 2016.

As protests against anti-black racism — triggered by George Floyd’s police custody killing in Minneapolis — have grown in size and spread around the globe, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has been talking more about “systemic” racism in Canadian institutions. The prime minister also kneeled in a crowd of anti-racism protesters in Ottawa last Friday as a symbolic gesture of support for their calls for change.

“Systemic racism is an issue right across the country, in all our institutions, including in all our police forces, including in the RCMP. That’s what systemic racism is,” Trudeau said Thursday morning.

“Here are the facts in Canada. Anti-black racism is real, unconscious bias is real, systemic discrimination is real,” the prime minister said in a speech in the House of Commons last week, vowing that his government is committed to breaking down barriers and providing opportunities for marginalized communities.

The lack of diversity among Liberal staffers was keenly felt by Omer Aziz, who worked briefly as an adviser to Chrystia Freeland when she was foreign affairs minister.

“I would go into meetings and I’m the only non-white person there. I felt that when I would raise my voice and give my advice, that it wasn’t taken seriously,” Aziz told CBC.

“That is eventually why I left what was my dream job.”

Getting better … slowly

Other senior staffers told CBC that while being one of just a few people of colour around the table may not be an ideal job situation, diversity in the higher ranks of the federal public service has come a long way in the past decade.

The government is also responsible for appointing people to hundreds of bodies outside the core public service, such as agency boards, foreign missions and Crown corporations.

The Trudeau Liberals reformed that hiring process early in its first mandate to serve its goal of attracting diverse applicants. The result: a dramatically improved ratio of people of colour to other hires, from 4.3 per cent when the Liberals were elected in 2015 to 8.2 per cent as of June 2020.

As for the most senior civil servants (deputy and associate deputy ministers), the number coming from diverse backgrounds is still less than 10 per cent of the total — so low that the Privy Council Office won’t release the figure, arguing it would compromise privacy rights because it would be easy to work out who these senior civil servants are.

‘You have to represent’

“We are in 2020. How come it took so long? It shouldn’t have,” said Caroline Xavier, the only Black person serving as an associate deputy minister in the federal government. She was appointed to the post at Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada back in February.

“Sometimes the burden is heavy because you have to represent. It’s a burden I’m prepared to take on because it’s my job to open more doors for others.”

Xavier said there’s no easy solution, but conversations about breaking down barriers “are happening” within government.”There is a recognition at the most senior levels that this has got to be rectified.”The federal government fares far better when it comes to appointing women; the ranks of deputy ministers and other high-level positions are close to gender parity now.

The Trudeau government isn’t the first to pursue greater diversity in the upper ranks of the public service.

In 2000, a task force struck to look into the participation of people of colour in the federal public service cited an “urgent imperative to shape a federal public service that is representative of its citizenry.”

Seven years later, the Senate published a report on employment equity in the public service with the title: “Not There Yet.” Ten years after that, in 2017, a Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat task force reported that “many gaps in representation persist in the executive category … the very leaders who shape and influence the culture of federal organizations are not sufficiently diverse.”

‘People don’t want to admit that’s going on’

Since 2000, there has been a slow but steady increase in the number of Canadians of colour in the public service — from just under six per cent of the total then, to more than 16 per cent today.

But annual employment equity reports and the census show that Black civil servants, along with Filipinos and Latinos, are still grouped at the lower end of the salary ladder.

Liberal MP Greg Fergus, chair of the parliamentary Black caucus, told CBC News this week that he wants to see the government address that disparity.

“It doesn’t make sense that there’s been no Black deputy ministers — you can’t convince me that there aren’t Black people who are competent,” he said. “But there’s something that went into the calculation over time, that that person didn’t make the right fit, or didn’t get that promotion. We can justify any individual decision, but when you aggregate all these decisions, you end up with a biased result.

“Those are the things that we’ve got to take a look at. But it’s hard to do the things which are hard to do. And it’s hard to see bias. People don’t want to admit that’s going on.”

Trudeau has tasked his parliamentary secretary, Ontario MP Omar Alghabra, with looking at public service renewal. While the Black Lives Matter protests have given the file more urgency, the government has no clear plan yet.

Sharon DeSousa has suggestions. A regional executive vice president with the Public Service Alliance of Canada, she served on the 2017 task force on diversity in the public service. She points out that only one recommendation out of 43 was implemented.”We keep having committees and reports and, to be honest, we’re coming up with the same data,” DeSousa said.”We’ve got systemic barriers and we need to address them,” she said, adding that if the Liberals were serious about going after unconscious bias, they would take a hard look at how data on hiring are being collected, and the problems baked into legislation like the Employment Equity Act.

A ‘hornet’s nest’

The Employment Equity Act hasn’t been updated in nearly two decades and still uses the broad term “visible minorities” — a phrase the United Nations has called discriminatory because it lacks nuance and assumes the experience of a Black employee is the same as that of a South Asian one.

Former head of the privy council Michael Wernick said he believes now is the time to look at changing legislation.

“I think to get at issues in the 2020s, you’re going to want to dig down into each of those communities and have more precise strategies for them,” Wernick said, adding that employment equity laws are still an important tool for promoting diversity.

Still, he said, opening the act up for debate could be like turning over a “hornet’s nest” and coming to a consensus won’t be easy.The Liberals also have flirted with the concept of “name blind” recruitment for the public service — the practice of concealing a candidate’s name to protect those with more ethnic-sounding names from conscious or unconscious bias in the hiring process.A pilot project in 2017 produced a report suggesting name blind recruitment made no difference to outcomes, which prompted former Treasury Board president Scott Brison to declare that “the project did not uncover bias.”

But it turned out the methodology was flawed. Departments had volunteered to take part in the pilot and knew their hiring decisions would be evaluated.

The Public Service Commission is still examining other random recruitment processes.

Some factors that serve to prevent people of colour from being hired by the federal government — the country’s largest single employer — are harder to work around, said Andrew Griffith, a former director-general with Citizenship and Immigration Canada who has written extensively about the issue.

“There’s a preference in the public service to hire Canadian citizens and not all visible minorities have become citizens yet,” Griffith said. He said he believes that factor narrows the gap between the diversity of the general population and that of the federal public service.

Other factors that could be frustrating the push for a more diverse public service, he said, are language requirements and a need for regional representation in parts of Canada that are not so diverse.

That second factor could be less of a problem in the longer term, with a pandemic crisis forcing many civil servants to work from home. But Griffith said getting into government work is “just a long convoluted process.”

Source: Five years on, Trudeau’s vow to build a diverse public service still unfulfilled

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‘Non-advertising’ hiring up due to feds’ new appointments policy, data shows

2020/06/03 2 Comments

My latest – links below:

The new appointments policy allowing for greater flexibility in the hiring of federal public servants came into effect in April 2016, resulting in a greater number of “non-advertised” hiring compared to formal publicly advertised hiring processes and competitions.

The Public Service Commission has reported on an overall increase in non-advertised appointments to 34 per cent of hires in 2017-18 compared to 25 per cent in the previous fiscal year, reflecting the attractiveness of this easier way to staff. 2018-19 data shows a further increase to 35 per cent. Greater use of non-advertised staffing raises the potential risk of the “who you know” factor playing a greater role in hiring and this analysis aims to assess this potential risk.

Source: ‘Non-advertising’ hiring up due to feds’ new appointments policy, data shows (Hill Times)

pdf: TBS New Appointments Policy Impact, New Appointments Policy: Annex A Departmental Comparisons (clearer table than in the HT piece)

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BLIZZARD: Canada’s potential first lady, Nazanin MacKay, is a born fighter

2020/05/26 Leave a comment

Interesting comment “even had people suggest they won’t vote for her husband because she’s Muslim. In fact, MacKay was raised Catholic and still practises that faith.” Likely reflects some parts of the Conservative base.

I knew her professionally when she was a board member of the Canadian Race Relations Foundation and I was DG – Citizenship and Multiculturalism. My mini-review of The Tale of Two Nazanins can be found here):

In some ways, she is the daughter of a revolution.

Born in Tehran in 1979, the same year Ayatollah Khomeini and Iran’s Revolutionary Guard came to power, Nazanin Afshin-Jam MacKay has a fierce passion for defending democracy and human rights — especially those of women and children.

Her father was the manager of a western hotel in Tehran at the time of the revolution. Unaware of the changes the takeover would make, he conducted business as usual, allowing men and women to mingle and allowing alcohol to be served in the hotel — all forbidden by the Islamist regime.

One day, the Revolutionary Guard broke in and arrested him. He was imprisoned and tortured, but was saved from summary execution by a fluke.

Freed as soon as his wounds healed, he fled to Spain and was joined by his family two months later. They moved to Canada shortly after.

MacKay, wife of Conservative Party of Canada leadership front-runner Peter MacKay, was a baby at the time. Still, her family history instilled in her a passion for human rights. She is co-founder of the group Stop Child Executions. [Inactive since January 2016]

In 2006, MacKay heard of another Nazanin in Iran. Nazanin Fatehi was about be executed after she fought off three men attempting to rape her and her niece. One of the men died. Fatehi was charged with murder.

After that campaign, other families got in touch with MacKay, asking for help saving their children in similar situations.

“I realized there were a lot of children condemned to execution,” she said.

The organization counted more than 160 children on death row in Iran, along with a handful in other countries who needed help. She estimates they were able to save 12 children.

MacKay has an impressive resume. The mother of three small children, she is a former Miss World Canada and runner-up in the global Miss World. She has a pilot’s licence and was once a recording artist. But her main focus is her fight for human rights of oppressed people.

Her favourite song from her recording days is Someday.

“It’s a revolution song, encouraging the people in Iran to rise up and one day, this regime that shackled the people will be gone and we’ll see a free and democratic country that takes into account the voices of the people,” she said.

She used the Miss World competition as a platform to shine a light on the rights of women and children.

One discouraging aspect of the ongoing leadership campaign is how her Mideast background has been misrepresented on social media. She has been falsely accused of supporting Omar Khadr’s $10.5-million payout, and even had people suggest they won’t vote for her husband because she’s Muslim. In fact, MacKay was raised Catholic and still practises that faith.

The accusations that she supported Khadr’s payout are nonsense.

“There’s nothing further from the truth,” she said.

At the time, she made it clear that Canada had national and international obligations to its citizens.

“Whether we like it or not, he’s a Canadian citizen. It’s horrible what he did and he definitely should not have been compensated with that money,” she said.

“But we’re a country that follows the rule of law and we have our own obligations. I didn’t agree necessarily that we repatriate him back to Canada and that he be set free like any other citizen. I said we have to wait and see what the courts order.”

She believes Khadr should redeem himself by giving the money to the family of his victim.

If her husband wins the leadership, don’t expect Nazanin to sit on the sidelines. She speaks her mind.

“He’ll definitely hear from me, whether he likes it or not,” she said with a laugh.

With degrees in international relations, political science and diplomacy, she has a lot to contribute.

Her story is quintessentially Canadian: like so many others. She came here for a better life, found it, and now gives back to her new country.

Source: BLIZZARD: Canada’s potential first lady, Nazanin MacKay, is a born fighter

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Klassen: When the bureaucrat is the boss, democracy starts to suffer

2020/05/16 Leave a comment

While many written upon the relationship between elected representatives and the un-elected public service, seems like an odd time to express this concern where governments that have relied on public health expertise have responded much better to COVID-19 than those who have not.

In the end, elected representatives are accountable through the ballot box for the decisions that they take. At a time of a pandemic, going against public health expertise is a high-risk approach as the US and UK approaches illustrate:

The government response to COVID-19 in Canada has made explicit how much power bureaucrats have amassed. Civil servants are more influential now than ever, not because they make decisions but because they are the keepers of the specialized knowledge necessary to govern the country.

Politicians enact laws and decide on budgets but have little, if any, expertise in a policy area. For example, how can one person, such as a prime minister or minister, understand the complexities of the Income Tax Act with its more than 3,200 pages? The expert knowledge of a particular field such as public health resides with permanent officials, such as Dr. Theresa Tam, Chief Public Health Officer and her 2,400 staff at the Public Health Agency of Canada.

Sometimes politicians have the luxury of time before reaching a policy decision, which minimizes the influence of government bureaucrats in shaping the outcome. Typically, a new program or trade agreement is implemented after years of proposals, consultations, hearings and opportunities for politicians to gain a deeper understanding and appreciation of the implications and trade-offs.

In contrast, the COVID-19 pandemic demands the enactment of new programs and laws in a matter of weeks, if not days. Canadian politicians have relied exclusively on the advice of bureaucrats in designing responses at the federal, provincial or municipal level. Politicians of every stripe have adhered to the instructions of public health bureaucrats. All speeches by politicians and government statements highlight that “the government is acting on the best advice of public health officials.”

U.S. politicians have been less keen to follow the advice of bureaucrats. Donald Trump makes comments that are at odds with his public health advisers. He places blame on the public health officials at the World Health Organization. Democratic and Republication governors pursue strategies on public health guided in some significant measure by ideology. The populist streak in the U.S. and the enshrined right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration of Independence produces a politically diverse response to COV-19.

“Peace, order and good government,” enshrined in Canada’s constitution, has guided the relationship between elected politicians and appointed civil servants since before 1867. Peace and order require stability and continuity, which is what permanent public servants provide regardless of the party in power. Good government requires specialized knowledge, which the public service also provides. Unlike the U.S., Canada’s politicians do not disagree with their senior civil servants on key policy matters.

A century ago, Canada’s federal public service was small, with more than half of its employees working for the post office, and in transportation and customs-related jobs. Income taxes, as a temporary measure, had just been introduced in 1917. At that time, the responsibilities of Cabinet ministers were considerably simpler than today, decision times much slower, and the news cycle much longer.

Starting in the 1940s, when the role of government expanded dramatically as the welfare state grew, power began to seep from elected officials to bureaucrats. The depth of knowledge required to understand public policy decisions is no longer available to ministers, who remain in portfolios for two years on average, during which time they must also fulfil their constituency and parliamentary duties.

One outcome of the COVID-19 pandemic is that bureaucrats will be even more influential, at least in matters related to public safety. This may seem an appealing prospect but is not in the best interests of Canadians.

Allowing public health experts, military planners, transportation engineers, educators and other unaccountable government officials to determine policy is undemocratic. Democracy means accepting the messy business of politics with its partisan rivalries, compromises, tradeoffs, U-turns and inconsistencies. Democracy also demands that politicians have the fortitude to set aside – at times – the specialized and rational calculations and recommendations of their officials.

Thomas Klassen is a professor in the School of Public Policy and Administration at York University in Toronto.

Source: Klassen: When the bureaucrat is the boss, democracy starts to suffer

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Peter Russell: Ottawa’s fragile, halting journey away from political patronage

2020/05/16 Leave a comment

Of note regarding judicial appointments:

In the 21st century, Canadians have raised their expectations of how important public positions are filled by our governments. And rightly so: Under the patronage model, these positions are handed to those who are known to be supporters of the governing party as a reward for political service, whereas merit-based appointment means finding the best-qualified person for the job. Our diminishing tolerance of favouritism is an appropriate raising of standards for a well-educated population.

Canadian governments appear to be getting it, enacting reforms that move the dial toward merit-based appointments and away from ones based on patronage. In 2010, Stephen Harper’s Conservative government established a committee-based process to advise the Queen as to who should serve as governor-general. This committee, chaired by the Queen’s Canadian secretary, two senior public servants familiar with the governor-general’s role and responsibilities and two individuals from different parts of the country with an understanding of the requirements of the office, would land on David Johnston. Two years after that, Mr. Harper established the Advisory Committee on Vice-Regal Appointments, which used a similar process to search for promising lieutenant-governor candidates by soliciting names from a broad range of candidates and creating a short list for the prime minister to choose from. This was an important step along the road of moving from patronage to merit-based appointments.

Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government, too, has made its own efforts with two reforms: an independent advisory board for appointments to the Senate and another one for the Supreme Court of Canada. The one for the Senate has three permanent Ottawa appointees, plus ad hoc appointees from the province or territory where a vacancy is being filled. The one for filling Supreme Court vacancies comprises judges, lawyers, and legal academics, plus at least two laypeople. The mandate of each board is to seek out outstanding candidates, encourage them to apply, then produce a short list from which the prime minister makes his selection.

But The Globe and Mail’s reporting about Justice Colleen Suche – who was rebuked by the Canadian Judicial Council last week for inappropriately giving advice on judicial appointments to her husband, Liberal MP and former cabinet secretary Jim Carr, as well as to the Justice Minister – exposes the halfway house the Trudeau government has built for itself on the road from patronage to merit.

Mr. Trudeau’s vice-regal selections seem pretty good. Over the five years he has been Prime Minister, he has appointed one governor-general in Julie Payette, as well as six lieutenant-governors, and only one of these appointments – former Liberal MP and cabinet minister Judy May Foote, as Lieutenant-Governor of Newfoundland and Labrador – has the appearance of being based on political patronage. The appointees include five women, a person of Cree background and an Acadian, part of the government’s policy of treating the representational quality of an appointment as part of what constitutes merit. And the appointments resulting from the new Senate and Supreme Court procedures have been impressive, even if there may well be ways to improve the process.

But if that all sounds familiar, that’s part of the problem. When Mr. Trudeau took over as Prime Minister in 2015, he did not use the Harper-era Advisory Committee on Vice-Regal Appointments. He did not make any announcement about this, nor give any explanation. We cannot know which names the committee would have put forward, but one thing is certain: Creating an institutional legacy for that process would have made it more difficult for a potentially reactionary prime minister to bring back the patronage system. And for all his efforts so far, wouldn’t it be a shame if they were discarded by a non-Liberal government simply because they were introduced by the Liberals?

This is particularly unnerving when it comes to the appointment of judges. Our judicial system has three basic strands. At the top is the Supreme Court of Canada, the highest court of appeal for disputes about every kind of law. At the bottom are the provincial and territorial courts, which is where most cases first go to trial. And in the middle are courts to which the federal government appoints the judges. Some of these are federal courts, maintained and administered by the federal government, and many more are courts maintained and administered by the provinces and territories, their courts of appeal and ones that conduct trials involving the most serious criminal matters and the most serious civil matters. These middle courts comprise the strata for which Justice Suche was sending lists of names to the Justice Minister.

And while the provinces and territories have adopted patronage-to-merit measures to reform appointments to their courts, and the system for appointing Supreme Court justices has been similarly reformed by the Trudeau government, appointments to this middle layer of courts remain all too vulnerable to patronage.

Efforts to reform the system of making appointments to these middle-strata courts go back to the 1980s, when judicial advisory committees (at least one for each province and territory) were introduced to make recommendations for appointments to vacancies on these courts. Candidates could be “recommended,” “highly recommended” or “not recommended.” The Harper government removed the “highly recommended” option. The Liberals restored it, but – and here’s the rub – they will not commit to appointing only candidates that are “highly recommended.”

And why is that? Well, the lists of the merely “recommended” are very long – a lawyer practically has to be disbarred to not make that list. The government can always find the names of its political friends on the lists of recommended candidates. Jurists such as Justice Suche should confine their advice to the Justice Minister to candidates highly recommended by independent advisory committees.

Now, with a minority government, is the time for parliamentarians to take a close look at the halfway house the Trudeau Liberals are content in live in, to make sure important positions go to the most qualified people – and to lay out a path that ensures the journey to merit-based appointments can be completed, regardless of which government is in power.

Source: Ottawa’s fragile, halting journey away from political patronage: Peter H. Russell

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Appreciating the politics of the pandemic

2020/05/09 Leave a comment

Good discussion of the interface between public health science and politics:

The pandemic is political. While COVID-19 is essentially a public health crisis with massive economic effects, political decisions facilitated the spread of the virus, and politics guides how governments are working to keep it at bay. Appreciating the politics of the pandemic is vital to understanding how we got here, what we are doing about it and what the post-pandemic world may look like.

While there has been some analysis on the political aspects of the pandemic, it merits further attention. Contemporary political science is a strange creature in many ways. It is quite derivative, drawing on other fields such as psychology, economics and sociology. Although this borrowing can be viewed as a weakness, it also can be a seen as a significant strength because it gives the field the ability to analyse the individual, societal, governmental and international aspects of events.

In that spirit, we offer a political science perspective on events and debates surrounding the pandemic and potential considerations for moving forward as Canada ponders an end to confinement and scenarios for recovery.

The novel coronavirus originated in China, and that country’s handling of COVID-19 has been the subject of significant debate. The Chinese government began by silencing whistleblowers in the early days of the epidemic and then took drastic measures to control the spread of the virus. China has now reinvented itself as a global champion in the fight against the pandemic through generous public and private transfers of personal protection equipment abroad.

China deceived and used coercive measures initially to control information and distort COVID-19 statistics, on which we relied for modelling other countries’ pandemic trajectories. With questions raised about its handling of the virus, China also tried to demonstrate international leadership and benevolence to compensate.

This is the contradictory universe of authoritarianism, where the projection of power and influence at home and abroad is built on image. Authoritarian states have always relied on their image as an essential part of how they govern and legitimate themselves. At home, image management is not just about the dictator masquerading as the enlightened despot, it is also often a reminder of what the state stands for and expects from its citizens.

Image management in foreign affairs is just as important, particularly for a burgeoning regional hegemon such as China. Authoritarian states regularly mask the ugly to promote their shiny brand. In China’s case, early signals that hinted at failings, including the failure to anticipate the danger of COVID-19 and to react, were replaced by stories of its effective responses and its ability to prove itself as a global leader in the fight against the pandemic.

China’s handling of the crisis has also led to a series of questions about the World Health Organization (WHO). The organization’s approach to COVID-19 highlights the pressures and limits that international organizations face. While these organizations are essential for fostering global cooperation, providing guidance and leading international initiatives, they remain subordinate to states and the contentious nature of international politics.

Notably, international organizations are not only dependent on states for financial contributions, but for information, access and goodwill. In the absence of these, international organizations can achieve only so much, and their ability to perform their advising and coordinating functions is hampered.

In the context of the current pandemic, the twin pressures of information denial from China in the early months and the upcoming financial punishment from the United States will weaken the WHO. It will complicate efforts to build back a reputation that has arguably been tarnished, whether justified or not, by its handling of the pandemic. For all their internal flaws, international organizations like the WHO are only as effective as states and the international environment allow them to be.

On the other hand, Canada’s relationship with the WHO since the first months of 2020 reminds us that certain states are heavily invested in international organizations, not only for the coordination and guidance they offer, but also for what they represent and provide as hallmarks of the liberal international order. The Canadian government’s determination to follow WHOguidance was in part a reflection of the fact that no one state has the capacity to handle the pandemic alone.

Multilateralism involves the sharing of information and pooling efforts together to do more while enjoying economies of scale, giving groups of states far greater reach with more effectiveness than they could achieve alone. Other smaller countries chose to follow a more independent and prudent approach regarding WHO advice when the first signs of a possible pandemic emerged. In theory, Ottawa might have been able to do the same. But Canada’s determination to follow WHO guidance equally reflects a larger commitment to multilateralism and the global order that the country helped build after the Second World War.

An interesting aspect of the Canadian response has been the placing of public health expertise at the forefront of decision-making.

Working with the WHO, rather than going it alone, is a form of good international citizenship for Canada and an expression of the fact that global problems require global solutions. While this has led to questions about the efficacy of Canada’s initial response to the pandemic, appreciating the multilateral dimension of the Canadian approach sheds light on why Ottawa stuck by the WHO and why it likely will continue to do so.

Within Canada, the debate is turning toward decisions made by governments, federal and provincial, and the information and advice they have been providing citizens. An interesting aspect of the Canadian response has been the placing of public health expertise at the forefront of decision-making.

Public health officials have been providing daily briefings and ministers have been steadfast in assuring citizens that the measures and policies that have been put in place reflect expert advice and the best available evidence. This approach has been met by expressions of significant trust in government, as observed by various polls.

As Canada begins to contemplate a loosening of restrictions, experts in public finance will likely join their public health counterparts in providing critical advice to ministers. This expert advice has been vital to Canada’s response and will be as important for the country’s recovery.

Yet expertise will not be enough. Political decisions will still need to be made, as studies of evidence-based policy tell us. This will involve weighing the evidence provided to ministers from different competing sources, managing the uncertainty that necessarily accompanies advice about the future and balancing trade-offs between public health considerations, economic concerns and citizens’ tolerance for restrictions over the long-term.

No one field of expertise can provide complete advice on these trade-offs. But these decisions will require political judgment, an attribute that belongs with politicians and their political advisors.

Finally, when political judgement begins to take on greater importance, the risks associated with having experts as the public face of the government’s response will increase. Canada’s Chief Public Health Officer Theresa Tam has already become a political and media target, including in the form of inexcusable racist attacks on her loyalty to Canada. This is no fault of Tam’s. It is an unfortunate consequence of her public profile. If decision-making around the lifting of restrictions becomes more contentious, ministers will need to increasingly emphasize that they are responsible for the government’s actions.

Indeed, as the field of policy studies indicates, giving expert officials visibility increases trust, but it can also create confusion about who is accountable for decisions. Although they may have an interest in fostering this confusion, responsible ministers should leave no doubt that “the buck stops with them.” Politics must come back to the forefront, where it belongs.

Source: Appreciating the politics of the pandemic

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Pandemic pretext: More delays in long-awaited access to information answers

2020/04/30 2 Comments

ATIP is far too often late and, as the examples below indicate, sometimes very late, in responding, with COVID-19 providing further excuses for delay:

Federal departments that have stalled access to information requests for three years or more are now citing the pandemic as the reason for further delays.

Emails are going out to people who make access to information requests, notifying them the requests are now “on hold.”

“We cannot send consultations out because most third parties, other government departments (municipal, provincial, territorial and federal) are closed or reduced to minimum employee capacity,” the department now says.

“So until we are given the green light to start processing consultations again, we won’t be able to process any of the records for your request. But in the meantime, we would like to know if you still wish to proceed with your request or if you wish to abandon.”

Rubin says Health Canada owes him answers to about a dozen requests dating back for years — one from 2014 about adverse pharmaceutical reactions including some deaths, one on drug licensing from 2015, others from 2016 and 2017. They now warn him of “possible delays in treating your request,” due to the pandemic.

“Openness, transparency and accountability are guiding principles of the Government of Canada. However, our ability to respond to requests within the timelines mandated by the Access to Information Act and the Privacy Act may be affected” by the pandemic, the department says.

The Finance Department wrote him using the the exact same words.

National Defence says it has reduced staff in the access office and hasn’t enough secure lines to handle his requests remotely. They asked for Rubin’s consent to put the request on hold. Rubin said no.

“You have to push back,” he said. “A lot of people don’t consider this a human right. But it’s not just administrative.”

Public Service and Procurement Canada (PSPC) has several aging Rubin files, and he hadn’t heard about them either, until this month’s message that “PSPC’s network is currently limited to essential and critical services such as pay, pension and procurement. While we are committed to respecting your right of access and are actively looking for solutions to maintain operations, we have little to no capacity at this time.”

One department told him: “despite all our efforts, we will not be able to respond to your ATIP request within the legislated timelines.” The legislated timeline ended years ago.

“Our access to information legislation is so flawed that it’s possible for access to information requests to be delayed and delayed and delayed, which turns the whole purpose of the legislation into a joke,” said James Turk, director of the Centre for Free Expression at Ryerson University.

“The fact that people who haven’t heard for a year or two years are now getting a notice that it’s been delayed because of COVID reveals how badly flawed” it is.

“I like Ken’s remark that oh, it’s good to hear from you.”

He also noted that the lockdown shows the unevenness of government services, as some are cut off from paper documents while others shift to digital documents.

This newspaper asked Environment Canada more than a year ago for internal emails involved in sending out a single news release on climate change. This month, after our request passed its first anniversary, we asked how long it would take.
The answer: They were just about to send us the information, and then the lockdown hit.
The department promises a speedy answer once its office reopens.

Source: Pandemic pretext: More delays in long-awaited access to information answers

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